Chapter 6
“This is an outrage! Why is this door still locked?” Alice tugged on the knob, though doing so would have no more effect than the dozens of other times she’d tried. The knob was still faintly sticky under her hand, and she wiped her palm on her skirt without deciding to.
She had lost hope that Marker would snap out of her horrid state.
It seemed this wasn’t an episode, but the true version of Marker.
Sadness now made way for Alice’s anger. Alice and Wendy were going on forty-eight hours of being caged in their room with no access to proper facilities—only the chamber pots, which were nearly full.
Alice eyed the transom above the door. It might have been wide enough for her to fit through, but, unfortunately, it latched from the exterior.
“I should set fire to Thornfield!” she shouted.
Not that that would have any effect, either.
Wendy looked up from her stitching. “What are you going on about now?”
How could she be so calm? “We don’t deserve being locked up!
Wait. You have not read Jane Eyre?” Wendy shook her head, then went back to her work.
Alice had nothing to occupy herself with; she detested the chore of sewing lace.
She thought longingly about the yellowed copy of Jane Eyre in the library beside the fireplace on the second floor of the West Wing, though she was too agitated for a leisure such as reading.
She thought longingly of the relative freedom she’d enjoyed up until two days ago.
She groaned, turning back to the window and the clouds outside. “I think, Wendy, I could get into Molloy’s office and retrieve our files on our way out! If you could distract Marker. I’m sure they kept record of where your daughter was sent.”
“Oh, Alice,” Wendy said. Why would she not even consider taking action? “How are we even going to get out? And distract her how? Wrestle her to the ground when she brings us supper?”
Alice thought seriously about this scenario for a moment before deciding Marker’s stature would make Wendy winning an unlikely outcome.
“And what about Miss Molloy?” Wendy said.
“What would happen if she returned, and we are just gone?” It seemed that the feelings of others always motivated Wendy’s actions, and she did have a point there.
Miss Molloy favored Alice; she always had.
Her affection for Alice was as though Alice was her very own.
The comfort that had brought Alice in her early years at Pastoria House was immeasurable.
Alice hesitated, glancing toward the chamber pots in the corner—just another cruel reminder that this room was not a home, but a cage. She turned back to the door and yanked at the knob once more, her frustration mounting.
“We will have to write her to tell her that we are well, and she will see that we can live outside Pastoria House. But Wendy, we have to get out now!” Wendy’s eyes were cast down. She would not even entertain the notion. Alice returned to the window.
“Oh! Brilliant. She didn’t dismiss him!” Alice had been watching for the young man, because she was certain he would help, if he knew she and Wendy had been imprisoned this way.
This was her first sighting. He was far below, walking across the lawn toward the groundskeeper’s shed.
She tapped loudly on the glass, but he didn’t seem to hear.
“What on earth is he doing?” Alice asked, tapping again, pressing her face to the cold angled glass.
He was fair and had a dutiful manner in even the way he walked, she thought.
“Where?” Coming up beside her, Wendy craned her neck to see, holding her stitching in hand.
“In the groundskeeper shed back there?” Alice pressed her finger to the condensation her breath left where the man emerged from the shed carrying large fireplace hearth buckets.
His overcoat was open. He did not look up toward their room, though Alice tapped and tapped.
She could feel Wendy gazing at her with sadness.
“Alice, he can’t hear you.” Wendy turned her back to the window.
Alice ignored her and tapped harder still, to no avail.
Even at this distance, Alice could see a chain dangling from his waistcoat.
A watch, no doubt. Was it gold or silver?
As he disappeared below her, entering the house again, her thoughts moved from the color of his watch to the dream she’d had of him.
Such a silly thing that she flushed all over just thinking of it: The two of them had been picnicking on a checkerboard blanket, eating her mother’s cucumber sandwiches, while an army of pink toy soldiers paraded about.
Then, as dreams do, the scene changed, and she found herself in an embrace with him that would have made even Bronte blush.
“What is childbirth like?” Alice asked abruptly, though another subject—the precursor to childbirth—was what she more curious about. Since Wendy would not plot with her, might as well indulge this burning curiosity. It would distract from her frustration.
“Oh my,” Wendy said. “I’m not sure that young man is ready for such a commitment.”
“Stop that,” Alice scoffed, though she didn’t dare tell Wendy of her dream.
“Well, let me see…” Wendy folded her hands in her lap and leaned back, sorting through her mind for a memory she kept in a box somewhere.
“And please refrain from the Puritanic version of blessings and joy. I’d very much like the truth,” Alice said.
Wendy looked at her frankly. “The pain is unlike any other,” she confessed, “a searing agony that seems to go on and on. To be frank, it’s as if the pain of menstrual cramps is unleashed from your womb and ravages every part of your body. You feel as though you are ready to accept death.”
“Oh!” Alice said.
Wendy took a breath, looking off into her past. “But to be completely honest, the worst part is the fear that grips your heart that something may go wrong, that the baby may not survive, or that one may not survive oneself.” Wendy took Alice’s hand.
The fear somehow still gripped a part of her, and Alice could see it inside the distance behind her eyes.
“Despite all this, there is a sense of triumph and joy when the baby is finally born. The pain fades away, and all that is left is a sense of wonder and gratitude. It changes you forever. Your heart no longer belongs to you. Mine lives outside my chest somewhere in the world—with her.”
Alice was grateful to see Wendy in this light. Beneath the sweet, almost girlish persona she wore, she was strong and very proud of enduring her child’s birth. As well she should be. It was nothing short of a miracle.
But underneath all that, there was heartbreak in her eyes over her lost child.
At the sight of it, Alice’s curiosity became impulsive.
“Who is your baby’s father, Wendy? Was it Peter?
In Neverland, who you loved? Or…” Alice should have stopped talking, but the fear nagged that good, kind Wendy had been taken advantage of. “Did you willingly… I mean…or…?”
Wendy’s face was turning bright pink.
“Do forgive me!” Alice blurted. “That was horrid and uncouth!”
“I loved him very much,” Wendy said simply, then sighed and looked out the window again.
Alice’s determination to find Wendy’s child was renewed.
But how, when they were locked up in here?
She got up and hurried to the window again, but there was no sign of the young man who might help them, and night was falling. Another night imprisoned, then.