The Looking Glass House by Vanessa Tait

behind their white glare. Their need for fresh air, their knowledge of Prussia, their laces being undone.
    ‘Miss Prickett, you are brushing my ears!’ Alice twisted her head away.
    Mary looked down. The tips of the child’s ears were red but she kept on until she could see strands of hair flying up towards the brush and others clinging to Alice’s forehead.
    She couldn’t bring Mr Wilton to mind, not the whole of him, only his shape with its solid middle, and his darkly furred hands. His eyes she could not see; his face was indistinct even though she thought about him, the idea of him, very often. She wondered when he would come.
    Mary released Alice and turned to Ina, tweaked at her lace collar and smoothed down the wiry hair that sprang up from her parting. Ina puffed out her cheeks and stared hard at the floor but said nothing.
    Mary led the children out from the schoolroom, down the narrow stairs and on to the landing. On down the Lexicon staircase (bought with the profits made from the Dean’s Greek Lexicon) with its large wooden panels and lions that stood sentinel on each corner. Through the drawing room, almost stumbling over the skin of a tiger, its head thrust upwards and its teeth bared, shot by one of the Dean’s ancestors. Past the table with the silver enamelled box from India picked up by Mrs Liddell at the Great Exhibition, past the embroidered scenes, done by Mrs Liddell during the long winter evenings, that hung on the wall, until finally they were out on the terrace.
    Mrs Liddell sat talking with a young undergraduate in the spring sunshine, his thin legs stuck out in front of him, leaning back on his chair. The hat he had thrown down beside him had a gold tassel on it. An aristocrat, then.
    ‘My dear Francis, it will be a tragedy if the ball does not go ahead. A tragedy!’ Mrs Liddell leaned towards him.
    ‘It looks like it will not.’
    ‘The naysayers!’ said Mrs Liddell. ‘And led by Mr Dodgson! He who comes over most days to drink our tea. It was the same when we came here. The Dean got all sorts of complaints. He was thought a modernizer, dangerously progressive. And Mr Dodgson was at the forefront of that too, as far as I remember. It certainly didn’t stop him ingratiating himself.’
    In front of her, Alice stood very still. Mary could tell she wanted to speak but held herself back. Her mother had not yet seen them.
    ‘It is not as if curfew will be broken every night.’
    ‘I quite agree, my dear Francis. Quite. To listen to them, you would think we were proposing a night in hell rather than a ball.’
    Mary’s shoes pinched where she had rushed to lace them. She wondered where she ought to stand. But just then Mrs Liddell saw them and beckoned them over. Her fingers were clustered with rings; she looked like an enormous shellfish festooned with diamond limpets.
    ‘I am pleased to introduce my eldest girls, Ina and Alice. Girls, this is Lord Newry. Why don’t you come and sit down?’
    They went, Ina puce.
    ‘Not over there, Ina, here.’ She motioned to a seat near Lord Newry. ‘Where we can all see you.’
    Mary could feel Ina’s embarrassment in the handling of her cup as she brought it to her mouth, in the sweep of her eyelashes as she fixed her gaze on the linen tablecloth, and the clumsy angle her body made with the table. Nobody else seemed to notice. Lord Newry flicked away a fly from the side of his plate. ‘I suppose Nature, in her sphere, must include flies, but I do not know why.’
    ‘For birds, dear Francis, that is why,’ said Mrs Liddell.
    ‘But Mama, birds could survive on worms. They are nicer,’ said Ina.
    ‘Nicer? Worms are nicer?’ Lord Newry put an amused finger up to the corner of his mouth, where he had correctly divined there was a stray crumb. ‘Than flies, you mean. Though perhaps that point is up for debate.’
    Ina pinked again and folded her arms around her waist. Mary, looking down at her, noticed they had a new plumpness.