Alice froze in terror as a long line of saliva dripped from one of the dog’s curved incisors.
“Is that you, Alice? Goodness me. It’s me, Colonel Pavlov from the train! Remember? Oh, I do apologise, I’m drooling.” Pavlov was also whispering as though he was afraid someone would overhear him.
Alice was flabbergasted. She had never seen an animal go from being ferocious to timid quite so quickly. And she certainly hadn’t expected a beast that was about to tear her to shreds to suddenly introduce itself. Then she found her tongue.
“Pavlov? How did you end up here? You took a completely different road to me. And why are you whispering?”
“My owners don’t like me to talk. They get angry and beat me if I do. Or worse. Please don’t tell them you heard me talking.” Now cowering, Pavlov looked very different to the bossy bloodhound Alice had met on the train. The Pavlov Alice had met then was clearly used to giving orders rather than taking them. He had even helped get her and other passengers off the train. Not this Pavlov. With whiskers greyer and eyes more bloodshot than before, he was looking his age.
“Of course, I won’t. How horrible for you. But why do they treat you like an animal?” Alice at once realised how silly this question must have sounded.
“They treat all animals badly on this farm.”
“What keeps you here then?”
In answer, Pavlov shook his head and rattled a heavy piece of chain around his neck. The other end of the chain was fastened to a kennel in the middle of the yard, which allowed Pavlov enough freedom to guard the buildings but not to venture off the property. How beastly, thought Alice. Reduced from the rank of Colonel to guard duty.
Alice noticed that Pavlov’s tail was somewhat shorter and had a bandage wrapped around the end.
“Did they do that to you?”
“It’s not so bad. You know what they say,” said Pavlov. “‘What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’.”
He growled quietly but both of them knew he had little spirit left in him.
“You were so distinguished when I met you on the train. And more than a little gruff. You can be quite intimidating, you know, though I know you don’t mean to be.”
Pavlov straightened up with pride for a brief moment, then sank back down on his haunches. “You’re right, of course. It’s mostly show. My bark’s worse than my bite. If truth be known, I haven’t bitten a soul outside conflict. I haven’t the stomach for it.”
“In that case, it’s very brave of you to guard this place.”
“Not really. Although, do you know what the soldiers used to say about me in the war? ‘It’s not the size of the dog in a fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’”
Alice wasn’t sure whether Pavlov could even muster up a friendly argument in his current state. But she knew he liked talking about his time in the army.
“What war did you fight in?”
“Oh lots. The Furry Years War … the Pawleonic Wars, that was where we tore a bone apart … the Battle of Gruffalgar, that was a tough one. And, of course, the Boxer Rebellion.”
“Goodness. That’s a lot. I can’t say I’ve heard of them all.”
“No, you wouldn’t. It was all very secret. They called us the hush puppies.”
“So what happened to you after you ran off? How did you end up like this?”
“It’s a long story, Alice.”
“It can’t be that long, I saw you just a day or so ago?”
“More like a year or two. In dog years that’s about fourteen years, you know. I always wondered what happened to you at Alice Falls.”
Two years? No wonder Pavlov looked older. Alice’s head reeled as her brain tried to come to terms with the fact that two years had passed since their fall at the weir. Then she told herself anything could happen in Wonderland. Perhaps time passed differently for different creatures, or she had slept in the cottage longer than she realised. She asked Pavlov to tell his story.
“Here’s the short version,” said Pavlov in a low voice. “It seems war veterans are not in great demand on the job market so I worked as a security guard for a while. I kept my nose down, if not entirely clean, and also had a string of jobs in debt collection hounding people for money.”
“Poor you. It can’t have been much fun having to badger people.”
“I hounded I didn’t badger.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A couple of stripes. Higher rank, you know. Anyway, out of the blue I got a new lead and became the companion of an old lady called May Hubart. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? At first, it was fine. All I had to do was to keep her company and make sure none of the silverware went missing. She had a few children, quite late in her life – hence people called her Old Mother Hubart - but they had left home young. She gave them all her money in the hope they’d return home but they just squandered her fortune. She had to sell most of her assets, including the big house. We moved into a run-down cottage where we lived hand to paw. One day, she went to the cupboard and there was no more food. I almost died of hunger before she got hold of a loaf or two of bread. She was convinced I was at death’s door and even had a coffin made for me. That was when we fell out and she began to treat me like a pet. Man’s best friend I may be but apparently not woman’s. Not long after she sold me to this farmer who, as she put it, ‘Would knock some sense into me’. It’s hard to forgive that.”
“They do say every dog has its day.”
“I think my days are all in the past.”
Out of nowhere came an angry shout. “Rex! Come here you good-for-nothing cur!”
“I must go. Take care, Alice. I hope to see you again.”
“Rex? Is that what they call you now?”
Pavlov didn’t answer. The look in his big brown bloodshot eyes said it all.
“Who’s there? Who is it? Come into the light.” The cry came from a large, buxom woman, who was standing in the farmhouse doorway.
“My name’s Alice. Sorry if I startled you.”
“I’m more surprised you didn’t startle Rex. He usually barks his head off at anything that moves. Only thing he’s good for, the useless mutt.”
Alice so wanted to help Pavlov. He deserved better, so she spoke up.
“His name is Colonel Pavlov.”
“What? Pavlov? Don’t be silly. He’s always been Rex. At least, that’s what he answers to.”
I’m sure I would answer to Rex too if I were kept on a chain and beaten, thought Alice, but decided against speaking her mind. She was sure Pavlov, as an ex-soldier, would agree that one had to choose one’s battles. And now was probably not the time or the place.
The woman was clearly the farmer’s wife as she had a round, weather-beaten face with rosy cheeks. Over a blue chequered dress she wore a white apron that was spattered with flour and stained red in places. The impression that she had been cooking was reinforced by the fact that she was carrying a rolling pin in one hand and a carving knife in the other.
“Why you’re just a child! Come in and have a slice of plum pie. What on earth are you doing way out here on your lonesome? My name’s Mrs MacDonald, the farmer’s wife. You can call me Mrs. M. Now tell me what you’ve been up to.”
Mrs MacDonald cut Alice a large slice of red plum pie with the carving knife. Its blade dripped red juice onto her apron. Alice had neither the strength nor inclination to tell her host about trains in rivers, talking animals and a magic cottage in the wilderness, so in between mouthfuls of plum pie and gulps of apple juice, she explained that she had become lost while picking wild blackberries and was trying to find her way back to town.
“Well you’re jolly lucky you found us then. The mud flats are home to the Eelers. They hunt for girls like you. Don’t you worry, we’ll look after you and make sure you get home safely.”
Alice had seen those dark, ghoulish fishermen on the moors, but for the life of her she couldn’t work out how she had managed to guess their name right. She was also more than a little surprised that the farmer’s wife was being so kind to her and had not been the monster Alice had expected. After all, how could anyone who mistreated their dog not be a beast themselves? And this pie did taste very good.
“This is exquisite plum pie. You’re a very good cook, Mrs M.”
“Thank you, my dear. Very nice of you to say so. I made a batch of them for my children.”
“Oh, are they here?”
The woman gave Alice a hurt look that melted into an expression of sad forgiveness.
“No, not at the moment, dear. I have two children, Gillian and Jackson. Jackson is one of the town councillors, you know. He’s become a very big figure around town. He’s so busy he doesn’t have time to visit me much. You probably know him if you’re from Banbury. He’d be quite a catch for a girl like you.”
Alice wasn’t at all thrilled at what the farmer’s wife was suggesting. The woman had also put a little too much stress on the word “if”, implying she didn’t believe Alice was from town. The word “Jackson” rang a bell in Alice’s head, but she couldn’t say why. Perhaps she had had a tutor called Jackson and it was a school bell she was hearing.
“Gillian left home around the same time as Jackson. She’s probably married to the town physician, Doctor Foster, by now. Most likely has a family of her own, I wouldn’t wonder. I’m sure she’ll come for a visit soon.”
Alice sensed that the farmer’s wife hadn’t seen her children for a very long time. There was an awkward silence, which Mrs MacDonald eventually broke. “So where are your blackberries?”
“I didn’t find any.”
“That’s because there aren’t any blackberries in these parts.” Mrs MacDonald smiled frostily at Alice.
“That must be the reason I lost my way then,” said Alice, “Through walking so far trying to find some.” It was Alice’s turn to look smug.
“Lost your way?” said the farmer’s wife, disbelievingly. “You can’t lose what you never had, my dear.”
There was another long moment when neither spoke.
“Anyway,” said Mrs MacDonald at length, “if you were wandering in the mud flats, it might be good for you to know that breathing in that polluted air takes away your dearest memories. No wonder you can’t find your way back home. The flats will have taken away your most precious memory. People say it’s the toll you have to pay for crossing the home of the Eelers.”
It was true, Alice had temporarily forgotten the urgency to get back home, even her family and everyone she had met and everything she had done in Wonderland. But since she couldn’t think of anything else important that she may have forgotten, she was sure her memory was now intact and that Mrs M’s alleged curse of the moor was just an old wives’ tale. There was another silence, during which the farmer’s wife went to a cot in the corner of the room and gave it a heavy-handed rock.
“Is that your baby? Can I see?”
“Please don’t,” said Mrs MacDonald a little too quickly. “She’s sleeping.” An untanned pelt, once white but now dirty and by the look of things also stained with plum juice, was draped over the cot. The farmer’s wife tucked it in tighter round the edges, humming the lullaby “Hush Little Baby”.
“You won’t believe what we’ve done to stop the baby crying,” said the woman, giving Alice a long sideways stare. Alice didn’t want to hazard a guess what they had had to do but since this was Wonderland, she feared it may have involved white rabbits.
“Is Mr MacDonald around to help?”
“Ha!” The farmer’s wife snorted once out loud angrily, waving the carving knife in the air. “The baby’s father is out. More likely than not clowning around instead of hunting for skins for the cot. You won’t believe how much blood, sweat and tears it needs to stop that baby crying.”
Although the farmer’s wife tried to smile at Alice, she could see the woman’s eyes well up with tears as her jaw set in rage. Alice thought it best not to ask anything about the baby or its father. She also decided that she had outstayed her welcome. She had to get going. However, before she could excuse herself and leave, the farmer’s wife reappeared at Alice’s side, jollier than ever. “Would you like to help me milk the pigs, dear?”
“Don’t you mean the cows?”
“We don’t have any cows. What a funny little girl you are!” And she pinched Alice’s cheek hard.
The farmer’s wife began to lead Alice by the hand to the pig pen.
“Do you really need the carving knife to go milking?” asked Alice.
“Probably not. But better safe than sorry.”
It seemed an interesting interpretation of the word “safe”.
On the way to the pig pen, Alice caught a glimpse of Colonel Pavlov’s paws protruding from his kennel. She wanted to shout ‘hello’ to him but followed her instinct to let sleeping dogs lie.
“Have you milked pigs before?”
“I can’t say I have, no,” said Alice.
“Can you say you haven’t?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you talk about what you can say rather than talk about what you can’t say? You’re the most peculiar, adorable child I’ve met, you know. I could squeeze you to bits.”
The farmer’s wife smiled knowingly at Alice, who tried to keep a healthy distance between them as they crossed the farmyard to a rather smelly pen in the far corner.
“In the beginning, I used to have four piglets, you know. Now I only have the three pigs.”
“What happened to the other one?”
“Other two you mean.”
“Four minus three equals one, I think you’ll find.”
“Not if you add one extra pig. Do keep up, Alice! Now, our first pig we sent to the market in town.”
“To sell the milk?”
“I can’t imagine rashers of bacon being able to sell much of anything, can you? Now ‘sell for much’ is a different kettle of fish entirely. We did very well out of that pig. Anyway, the second pig we kept. Pig number three ran away and opened a steak house in Banbury.”
Alice giggled and tried to turn it into a cough so as not to appear rude.
“Pig number four we ignored totally but she stuck around anyway. I thought about making a silk purse out of her ears but she wouldn’t hear a word of it. Then one day in trotted the ugliest pig you ever did see, squealing like…well, a stuck pig. I felt so sorry for it I decided to add it to my collection. When it arrived, it moaned about everything under the sun – the food, the bedding, being chained to the fence - but I soon put a stop to that. He won’t talk again, I’ll tell you that for nothing!”
Alice looked inside the pig pen. Two pink pigs, one fat and one which looked neglected, stared at her in seeming despair. The third pig, which was grey and much hairier, had its hind quarters towards Alice.
“Hoy! Ugly pig! Come here, we have a guest,” shouted the farmer’s wife and hurled a stone at the pig’s rump. The animal turned its head around and Alice saw that it was Chester, the wart-hog from the train. Dirtier, thinner and extremely dejected.
“What did I tell you! The ugliest pig you ever did see. He doesn’t produce much milk either.”
Chester’s eyes opened wider and he stared forlornly at the muddy ground. Alice used a hand to stifle a cry. For all his grumpiness, Chester didn’t deserve this fate. The farmer’s wife took Alice’s reaction as repulsion at Chester’s appearance.
“Disgusting aren’t they? Let’s not milk the pigs. Come and help me look for my cat in the barn.”
“I really should be going. It’s quite a long walk back.”
“I thought you said you were lost?”
“I think I can remember the way back now. I guess the effect of the mud flats has worn off.”
“Honey catches more flies than vinegar with you, doesn’t it, my dear Alice? Well, you can’t leave just yet. You need to work off all that plum pie you ate. Don’t want you getting fat. At least, not too quickly.”
Alice didn’t relish the idea of being shut up in a barn with Mrs M. “How about we take a quick look at your fields?”
“Why? Nothing happening in the fields, I’m afraid. Sadly all our crops burnt.”
“How terrible. Was it a forest fire?” asked Alice, doubting that there was such a thing as a field fire.
“No. We burnt the fields ourselves to get rid of the infestation.”
“Was it an infestation of rats?”
“Ladybirds mainly. Other creatures too; dormice, bees, corn buntings, hares, spiders, wagtails, dragonflies, you name it. But mainly ladybirds. Crawling with the nasty things. Chattering all the time. The idea was that we would burn their homes, they would go back to look for their children, who of course would have fled or would be in hiding, and the parents would get so distraught they would voluntarily relocate. It was the most humane way we could think of. Well it worked a treat. The downside is we have lost half our livelihood but it’s a small price to pay for ending the pestilence.”
Alice decided Mrs M was quite mad. And possibly dangerous.
There was an empty field off to the left with a drinking trough in it and wire fencing around. Alice asked Mrs M what animals she kept there. Instead of a direct answer, the woman gave Alice a long and distrusting look and said, “Have you seen Mary?”
Alice didn’t like lying because she didn’t like other people doing it to her. Even though she counted her story about collecting berries as a white lie, she had made her blackberry bed and now had to lie in it.
“Mary who?” she said unconvincingly.
“Mary Peep. Probably about your height.” The farmer’s wife stared into Alice’s eyes intensely. “People call her ‘Bow Peep’ on account of the bows in her hair.”
“Well I don’t have bows in my hair. And I’m afraid I don’t know any Bow Peep,” said Alice, who didn’t see this as lying as she couldn’t say for sure if the Mary she had met at the cottage was the same one they called Bow Peep.
“Have you seen her?” Alice asked Mrs M.
“No. But apparently she took my sheep to Shepherd’s Bush. She was supposed to bring them back and put them in this pen. Rumour has it that she lost them and is hoping that they’ll find their own way back. Stupid girl! Well if they do come back, I shall probably have to cut off their tails to teach them a lesson. I’ll hang them on the branches of trees as a warning to my other animals.”
Alice thought it was quite awful how Mrs M went around cutting off tails.
“And as for Mary, well there’s a new pillory in the market square that would fit her just nicely,” said Mrs MacDonald, staring at Alice’s neck.
“I do hope you get your sheep back. Have you any other animals on the farm apart from the pigs?”
The farmer’s wife teared up again and stared into the distance. “I used to have horses and cows and sheep and hens. And lizards and elephants. And a pangolin. I trained them all to stop talking and obey me. Animals are so much better than people, you know. Won’t leave you if you show them who’s boss.
“I loved them so much. All gone now. I blame those children of mine. Jackson used to sleep under the haystacks instead of looking after the cows and sheep. He looked so sweet dressed in his blue shirt and trousers and carrying that trumpet of his. He used to try to call the cattle and sheep by playing his trumpet. He played so badly that more often than not, the animals ran away into the meadow and cornfields.” Mrs MacDonald bucked up. “He’s very successful nowadays though, did I tell you? Town official no less. I’ll bet everybody’s terrified of him.”
“I had to flog the horses,” Mrs MacDonald said at length, her mood plunging again.
“Sell them?”
“No, whip them. They wouldn’t clean the lake. They all drowned in the end.”
“How awful.”
“Just shows. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him swim. Well, not for hours on end at any rate. The farmhands were to blame for some of the animals leaving. We hired that dunce, Humphrey Dunfry, the neighbour’s child to mind the hens. Something wrong in his head, that lad. He used to collect the eggs and carry them around in his pockets. You can guess what happened to most of the eggs. The hens were so distraught they flew off first chance they had.”
“I didn’t know hens were good at flying.”
“You’d be surprised what you’re capable of when you’ve been cooped up too long,” said Mrs MacDonald, brandishing the knife. “Even pigs can fly if they’ve the will and wherefore. They wrote a poem about it:
“Inkle oinkle little pig
Why d’you always grow so big.
Soon you won’t fit in your sty,
Spread your trotters, start to fly.”
Mrs MacDonald finished her peculiar poem just as they reached the barn.
“Here we are. Now do be careful not to let the mice out. You know what they say mice do when the cat’s away. Anyway, the mice are not well at the moment.”
They entered and Alice did as she was told by closing the barn door quickly behind her. It was a lovely old barn with haystacks, pitchforks and golden beams of sunlight coming in through cracks in the wooden walls.
“Now, you have a look for my cat,” said Mrs MacDonald. “I’ll just go and get the bread bin to put it in.”
Alice was happy to be left alone but not so happy to hear the farmer’s wife bolt the barn door from the outside. As the woman’s footsteps retreated, Alice tried the door but it wouldn’t budge. She turned to see if there was another way out but there was no second exit and no loose planks. She hoped the cat was indeed somewhere in the barn as Mrs M had mentioned mice and Alice disliked mice intensely.
At the back of the barn were a hundred or so bales of hay stacked willy nilly on top of each other. Gingerly, afraid she might uncover a nest of mice, Alice moved some of the loose bales in the hope of finding Mrs M’s missing cat. Within a few minutes, Alice was hot and bothered and sat down on some straw to rest. In next to no time, she was sound asleep.
As Alice slept, her nightmare about the tiger continued from where it had left off at Halfway House.
The tiger had begun running down the hill towards Alice and the courtiers. Alice turned and headed for a stone chapel she spied in the corner of the Queen’s garden. She reasoned that the tiger was more likely to hunt prey in the open garden before it ventured inside a building.
The chapel turned out to be a large mediaeval banquet room on the inside, empty apart from one long wooden table and some benches. Alice stepped up onto a bench and then the table, just in case the tiger decided to enter the room. By now, a steady stream of terrified people had followed Alice into the chapel. They milled around, trying to comfort one another by agreeing that they had found safe shelter. Not long after, however, the tiger slowly crept into the chapel and fixed Alice with a malicious stare. Though still large and scrawny, the tiger had somehow lost its stripes. Alice knew that this was one reason the tiger was so angry but as to why it should blame her for this, she had no clue. It prowled round and round the table, taking swipes with a huge paw at people unlucky enough to be within reach.
Alice suddenly realised she wasn’t safe as the tiger could easily jump up onto the table. She pinched herself hard in an attempt to wake herself from the dream but to no avail. She tried to shout and scream in a bid to end her nightmare but no sound escaped her lips. The tiger gave an evil smile as if it knew Alice was trapped in her dream. Not long now.
Alice woke with a start and saw Mrs MacDonald standing in front of her with a knife in her hand. Thankfully, she was not facing Alice. Flattened against the far wall of the barn were three large grey mice huddled together. They were frightened out of their lives. Despite them being the size of dogs, Alice felt pity rather than fear.
“Poor little things,” exclaimed Alice. “What’s wrong with them?”
“I had to cut off their tails with this knife and they haven’t grown back yet.”
“I very much doubt they will,” said a horrified Alice. “Am I right in assuming these mice are also blind and you cut off their tails with a carving knife because you thought that they were chasing you?”
“They’re not blind in the sense you mean. I mean, I don’t go around mutilating sight-impaired field mice. What kind of monster do you think I am? No, what happened was, they wouldn’t leave the fields even after I’d burnt down their houses. I reasoned with them but they just didn’t see my point of view. So in that sense, they were blind to reason. I just thought that they might not be so attached to the fields if they weren’t attached to their tails. Hasn’t worked though. They just stay huddled there in the corner.”
“Wouldn’t they leave now if you left the barn door open?”
The three mice nodded their heads excitedly and squeaked the word ‘yes’ over and over again.
“Possibly, but I want to nurse them back to full health first before I let them back into the wild. That’s the least I can do for them.” There was a resounding clang as the farmer’s wife slid the thick metal bolt across the inside of the barn doors to lock them all in.
“You’re not trying to talk again, are you?” she asked the mice. They shook their heads violently. “Good, because I wouldn’t want to have to cut off any other parts.” She turned to Alice. “I was wondering Alice, how are you at catching rats, mice and other rodents?”
The three mice looked in panic at Alice.
“Not good at all. I have a cat, Dinah. She is capital at catching mice.”
The mice looked as though their eyes would pop out.
“But she’s not here. And I’m useless at that kind of thing.” Alice was talking more to the mice, who both visibly and audibly gave a collective sigh of relief.
“Shame,” said Mrs MacDonald. “You see my cat’s gone missing. Not the first time. And one can’t run a farm without a cat.”
Or without crops and livestock, Alice almost said, but just managed to swallow the words back down in time. She thought the word “livestock” may have got caught just below her epiglottis, but she was confident it wasn’t going to get out.
“The cat went missing twice before. The first time was right after I clipped its tail for talking. It had apparently travelled all the way to London just to catch sight of royalty. It shouldn’t have done that.”
A cat may look at a king, thought Alice, recalling one of Cheshire’s remarks.
“It got into the palace through an open window but all it saw was a royal mouse under the throne. Complete waste of time if you ask me as there are plenty of mice here.
“The second time it skulked away in mid-winter to this barn to have a litter of kittens. Terrible fuss that was. It was so cold I had to knit gloves and scarves for the three kittens so that they would keep warm and their mother could get back to work, catching my mice. Do you think they were grateful? The stupid kittens were so careless with their new clothes – lost them, found them, soiled them, washed them, lost, found, soil, wash – you get the picture. The mother cat was so busy it didn’t catch any mice for over a month.”
“And now your cat’s gone missing again?”
“Not so much missing as presumed dead. I saw two boys from town in the farmyard the other day. One of them, that tearaway Johnny Thin, was trying to throw my cat down the well just because it was a good mouse-catcher. You see, the boys come here trying to catch mice for themselves. Some townsfolk are so hungry down at the market, they’ll exchange anything for a string of mice.”
Alice screwed up her nose in disgust. “Was the other boy called Tommy Stout?”
“Thomas as I recall, yes. His father, Peter Stout, is one of the town councillors and plays the flute.”
“Then I shouldn’t worry yourself too much. I do believe Thomas Stout may have pulled your cat out of the well.”
“I’m not sure if that’s such good news.”
“Surely it’s good if he saved your cat from drowning?”
“Not when you think that a nice plump cat sells for a barrowful of firewood in the marketplace.”
“He wouldn’t sell your cat would he?”
“He’d sell his grandmother if she were plumper. And alive. Once he stole a tray of fresh piggy doughnuts I’d put on the window sill, the knave! I caught him running down the street eating them and beat the daylights out of him till he saw stars. I also made him come back and play his father’s flute for us all. He could only play one song “O’er the hills and far away”. Trouble is he played it so well, everyone stopped work to listen. Then they felt compelled to dance. Couldn’t stop themselves. My children, the neighbours, the farmhands, even the animals started to dance. People stopped work, broke things and laughed until their sides split. Possessed they were! Rumour has it his father played the flute so well he could make people follow him out into the hills. The man’s working in Germany if I’m not mistaken.”
Alice felt there must be some rhyme or reason to everything she had heard, seen and done in Wonderland. But for the life of her she couldn’t make head or tail of it. Some, if not all of the animals she had met on the train had ended up in appalling conditions. Colonel Pavlov, the dog, and Chester, the wart-hog were older, helpless and vulnerable. Other animals, like the pigs, cat, mice and wildlife didn’t seem much better off. Of one thing she was certain, the farmer’s wife was mistreating the animals here; animals that could talk and had feelings. It was as if the woman were trying to build some strange menagerie. But why? So her children would return home? To keep her company? What did she have in the cot and where was Mr MacDonald? And why was she trying to keep Alice there? Alice realised she must leave at once for her own safety. And if she were ever to find her way back home.
“You have been a marvellous host, Mrs M. So kind. And I don’t know what you put in your plum pie but it’s the best I’ve ever had. But now I simply must be going or my parents shall wonder where I’ve got to.”
“Can’t you wait until Mr MacDonald gets back? He won’t be long now. It would be a little rude of you not to stay and say hello. I’m sure he’s dying to meet the Alice everyone is talking about.”
Alice suspected there was quite a bit of dying whenever the farmer showed up. She reached to unbolt the barn door.
“Very well,” said the farmer’s wife. “One little game before you go. One question about the mud flats. If you answer it correctly, you can return home right away. But if you get it wrong, then you have another piece of plum pie before you leave. Is that a deal?”
Alice knew she should simply decline and go but she didn’t want to be rude to her host. What could be the harm in humouring the woman with her riddle? Surely the worst that could happen is she would have to eat another slice of that delicious pie. Alice might have thought twice had she seen the frantic gestures of the mice behind her. She might have made a dash for the door had she heard them whispering “You can’t have your cake and eat it”. But as she didn’t, she agreed. And the farmer’s wife asked her riddle. It was about the mud flats Alice had just escaped from.
“As I was going to the flats, I met a dog with seven cats.
Each cat had seven rats.
Each rat had seven mice.
Each mouse had seven lice.
Lice, mice, rats and cats,
How many were there going to the flats?”
Alice had heard something like this before and knew there was a catch. The obvious answer was to calculate all the creatures together – something to the power of something, no doubt. The farmer’s wife grinned and waved her carving knife about, presumably preparing to cut another slice of plum pie. Then Alice remembered how to answer the conundrum.
“It depends. If they are all coming the opposite way, from the mud flats, then there was just one going there. Me.”
The farmer’s wife went red in the face and clearly wanted to throttle Alice for ruining her plans, whatever they were.
“Now,” said Alice, “you promised to let me go.”
“Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.” Then a smile slowly spread across Mrs MacDonald’s face and her eyes widened in malice. “Anyway, they weren’t coming the other way. They were going the same way as you? How many were there?” It was a last-ditch attempt to prevent Alice from leaving.
“Then that would be 2,802: one dog, seven cats, forty-nine rats, three hundred and forty-three mice and two thousand four hundred and one lice. Plus me.”
Alice found herself almost able to forgive old Mr Barnett, her maths tutor, for rapping her knuckles every time she got her sums wrong.
“But what I really don’t understand,” she continued, “is why they weren’t fighting amongst themselves because they would, you know. Cats and rats are not friends at the best of times.”
The farmer’s wife let out a yowl and looked up at the rafters as if trying to bring them crashing down on Alice.
Seeing her chance, Alice unbolted the barn door and bolted out. The farmer’s wife gave chase but the three mice dived between the woman’s ankles, causing her to stumble. Alice raced across the courtyard and out of the gate towards the road. The farmer’s wife was in hot pursuit, brandishing her knife. But just as she was gaining on Alice, she tripped over a chain, which had been pulled tight between the kennel and a defiant-looking Colonel Pavlov.