manniness | Chapter Six: The Island

“Dis iz mi-ko-shi,” Mr. Mutsu explains nodding toward the commotion coming down the narrow street.

“The parade?” Alice inquires. She doesn’t hesitate to ask questions here – here where they treat both her and Tarrant as if they are honored guests of equal importance and not a woman and a man, the latter of which is somehow qualitatively better than the former – and asking questions also helps keep her mind off of the fact that Tarrant’s arm is brushing hers and his thigh is pressed warmly along hers and... She swallows. They’ve spent three months aboard a small clipper together without a single skin-on-skin touch in the entire duration of the voyage. She thinks of nothing else, these days, and fears for the state of the company’s trade agreements. So she asks questions. Questions are preferable to Thoughts.

Their appointed guide, a man not much older than Alice but of obvious aristocratic origins, gives her a puzzled frown.

“The parade, do you mean?” she repeats. He tilts his head slightly to the side in a gesture Alice has come to recognize as one that expresses uncertainty and she tries again, “All of these people?”

She gestures toward the lantern-lit streets. The neighborhood glows golden with rich reddish hues. By day, the town of Nagasaki is a festival of browns: the dirt-packed lanes framed by unpainted, wooden one-story structures. Alice had marveled unrepentantly upon her arrival. She’d been delighted with the shops and the fact that there had been no doors separating goods from customers; during the day, the heavy wooden shutters are removed from the street-facing side of the low buildings. Men in dark robe-like wear recline, their swords (which only vaguely resemble ones she’d glimpsed in Hong Kong) placed aside, as they drink unsweetened, uncreamed tea from cups with no handles or saucers (and even the native people in Hong Kong had made use of saucers!) and they call out to their friends and associates who pass by along the street. It’s a marvel, really, how open the town is. Why, with one step a person might join a friend for tea. Alice had seen just that occur; she’d watched as a man had responded to a friendly hail, had stepped up to the platform where his colleague had been enjoying some sort of soup, had seated himself on the woven bamboo floor – tatami, Mr. Mutsu had called it – and had slid his swords out from his belt and laid them off to the side. From warriors to tea drinkers in a mere step. And never both at the same time.

The simplicity charms her, delights her. Even their clothing illustrates simplicity – but not out of laziness or lack of imagination: no, not at all! The robes the woman and even some of the men wear – kimono – are ingenious! There are no buttons, no laces, no stockings! Although, perhaps there is a corset; the wide belts women wear which cover their entire middles look quite... restrictive. Although, perhaps it would have to be considering the lack of buttons and such holding the garment in place.

She stares as a woman trots past dressed just so, her wooden sandals kicking up dust.

“No, mikoshi not people,” Mr. Mutsu replies, pronouncing the word people as peeporu, pulling her attention back to the summer festival. He points to some sort of structure that... well, it appears to be...

“Is there someone inside that?” Alice leans forward, unthinkingly bracing her hand on whatever is beside her. She squints at the lighted structure that moves closer and closer. It appears as if it is being carried on the shoulders of strong men dressed (delightfully scandalously) in only short, white jackets which cross over their chests, showing a great deal of skin from neck to belly, and very short, tight, white drawers which reveal the lower half of their thighs, knees and calves. Alice wonders why they’d bothered to don ankle-high white socks... but, then again, those straw sandals do not look comfortable... They chant as they come, dancing with this odd little... house being carried as a royal person in a litter might. White rags are twisted into thick bands around their foreheads to catch the sweat from their exertions.

“No,” Mr. Mutsu answers obligingly. “No one inside. God. God’s house. Iz take from jinja – shrine,” he clarifies before Alice can ask. She takes a second look at it and finally notices the lovingly detailed craftsmanship of the little shrine itself. There’s gold and black lacquer and brilliantly hued enamel or perhaps painted wood.

Mr. Mutsu continues his explanation, “Around...” Here he gestures with his hand to indicate a twining route through the streets. “And to shrine again. For...” At this point, the correct word deserts him. He presses his palms together and bows his head over them.

“Prayer?” Alice supplies.

“Yes, yes. Prayer.” The word, wonderfully enough, sounds like puraeyah when he repeats it back to her.

Mr. Mutsu is a long way from speaking proper English, but Alice adores it. She has heard her language twisted and flavored by speakers of many different tongues, but she has never heard it this way before.

The boisterous parade dances-trots-bounces past. On certain beats, they lift the mikoshi a bit into the air or tilt it this way or that and Alice chuckles. “I hope God’s enjoying the ride!”

She glances at Tarrant, expecting some sort of comment about being parade-sick rather than seasick and perhaps a giggle. His gaze is not even focused on the happy chaos in the street. He stares at her hand, his own twitching as if debating whether or not to grasp hers, which she had placed unthinkingly and squarely on his knee.

Blushing – and not from the heat and humidity of the late Japanese summer – Alice removes it immediately.

“I beg your pardon,” she murmurs, mortified. It’s one thing to wish to touch him in the privacy of a room empty of people save for the two of them, but it’s quite another to have actually touched him... and on a busy street no less!

Tarrant clears his throat. She can barely hear him over the beating of drums and the clanking of what sounds like pans being beaten with sticks. His eyes flicker nervously from her hand, now behaving itself in her lap, to the parade, which he doesn’t appear to see at all, and then back to her hand again.

He stutters, “I would not have asked for it. Your begging of my pardon. There is nothing to be pardoned. That is, nothing you did requires a pardon. My pardon. It’s fine.”

Is it wrong of her to enjoy seeing him so flustered?

“Thank you,” she answers and curls one hand around the other so that she is not tempted to reach for him, even to pat his shoulder reassuringly.

The festival continues. Men carry drums that are supported by straps slung across the chest and beat out a heart-pumping rhythm with thick wooden sticks. They stop in the street and some of the performers set down their drums, crouch, and launch into a composition Alice is sure is energetic enough to bridge the distance between these dusty streets and above, reaching all the way to heaven!

Dancers join the company: men in those shockingly short pants with intriguingly hideous masks on their faces. Another man plays a simple, wheezing yet harsh tune on a bamboo pipe while others clang their metal pan-like instruments.

Alice keeps her hands fisted in her lap, tries not to remember the heat and tautness of the flesh that she had felt beneath her palm, and strains to hear the rhythm in the clamor over the rushing-pounding-racing of her own heart.

Even after the festivities have moved on to another neighborhood of the city, Alice’s ears are still ringing.

“Have you ever heard such a wonderful racket?” she asks Tarrant as Mr. Mutsu leads them back to their lodgings. (Again, what odd lodgings! Alice has never paid for a room and then been expected to sleep on a pallet on the floor before! But she must admit, the room itself had smelled wonderful. When she’d sniffed appreciatively, Mr. Mutsu had introduced her to the concept of tatami.)

“Yes,” Tarrant answers and she can feel his arm tense beneath her grasp. She hadn’t expected him to offer her his arm – not after she’d groped him in public! – but he had. Just as he always has. Seeing him hold out his elbow had reassured her that things are, indeed, All Right between them. Or rather, half right and half left. In other words, just as they should be!

He continues in a playful tone, “You’ve never caught Thackery at a Witzend Wine Worstment.”

“A Witzend Wine Worstment?” she asks. (How many questions has she asked since their arrival in town this morning? Far, far too many to count. Her curiosity must be getting tired.)

“Yes, yes. The better the wine, the worse the merrymakers. And, I’ll tell you a secret, Alice,” he elaborates with a conspiratorial glance in her direction. “There are no bad cups to be had of Witzend wine.”

She doesn’t imagine the note of longing she hears in his tone. “How long has it been since you’ve indulged?”

Tarrant’s expression turns considering and he looks up at the sky. (It’s so dark here! Even on the open sea the waves had reflected the moonlight and starlight! But here...! Alice marvels at the pitch black silence of the Nagasaki streets.)

“Mayhap... eight years,” he muses finally.

And with three words, Alice also knows how long it has been since Tarrant’s clan had been destroyed by the Jabberwocky. Rather than comment on the duration, she says, “And not even the champagne at London galas, the wine in Paris, or the drink they serve here can compare?”

“Nay,” he answers on a wistful sigh. “None can.”

It’s on the tip of her tongue to promise him he’ll enjoy Witzend wine again one day, that she’ll laugh with him at Thackery’s antics at the next Worstment. She bursts to make that promise. (Is this how people develop rashes? Alice wonders. From trying to contain one’s own rash impulses? She can feel them writhing beneath her skin. Perhaps she will have a rash on the morrow...)

Despite the desire to do so, Alice says nothing. The words hammer and scream against the back of her teeth, the inside of her cheeks, the seam of her lips. Beside her, Tarrant tenses. His silence changes and expectation is replaced with uncertainty.

Mr. Mutsu ushers them inside the two-story wooden inn, which looks much like any other building of business on this street, only a bit longer, perhaps. He hands them over to one of the ladies of the inn, who sees them upstairs with the aid of a lantern and graceful gestures. They stop at Alice’s room first.

She gives Tarrant’s arm a gentle squeeze as the lady kneels gracefully in her kimono and, with a serene smile, quietly opens the sliding door.

“Good night, Tarrant,” she whispers, mindful of the other guests.

“Good night, Alice.”

She steps inside and their hostess closes the door in whispering silence. She reaches for her jacket buttons and has half of them unfastened before the floorboards in the hallway creak under Tarrant’s boots. Alice turns toward the closed door with a frown. Why had he hesitated there? She can hear him moving further down the hall now, but he had clearly been waiting outside hers for a moment. Why?

She undresses and forgoes her own nightclothes in favor of the nightwear provided by the inn. It takes a bit of doing, but she manages to get the thin, blue-on-white patterned robe to cover her in all the necessary places. And it is comfortable, she admits. Perhaps she’ll have to buy one for herself before they leave...

As her bed had already (thankfully!) been laid out and prepared for her, Alice has no excuse to not crawl into it and go to sleep, but she doesn’t. She wanders to the window and fiddles with the wooden shutter until she manages to open it. Unfortunately, as this side of the inn does not face the festivities tonight, everything is unrelentingly dark beyond as if God had spilled his ink pot over the sprawling settlement.

She sighs, closes the shutter, and scans the room before setting out to investigate it from top to bottom. She hadn’t been permitted time to do so earlier when they had brought their things to the inn before Mr. Mutsu had taken them to dinner and then the festival.

The room is small, simple, and soothing in its subtle earth tones and dark wood. More comforting – less claustrophobic! – than the cabin aboard the ship. She slides her toes over the tatami and considers how delightfully unchanged everything is here. In Hong Kong, Alice had spent most of her time in the British quarter of the city or at the wharf. It had been a little disappointing, arriving in a London neighborhood so far from London itself. She had not expected to travel months on end to merely set foot in familiar surroundings! But here everything is Different! Even now, their permission to be in the country is tentative at best. She has some understanding of the ongoing struggle within the Japanese government over whether or not to open the country to trade, to outsiders, to progress. She had also been informed by the captain of rebellions between states here. He’d reassured her that those conflicts are far removed from their port of call; Alice isn’t worried.

No, she is fascinated. To be one of the first to enter this enchanting land! To see it as it has been for generations, untouched by British greed and colonization!

In that respect, it actually reminds her a bit of Underland.

Underland...

But before her thoughts can lead her back to that magical, mysterious place, the floorboards in the hall creak again. In fact, they creak in a very similar manner to how they had before, under Tarrant’s boots. Her suspicions are confirmed when the creaking stops just outside the door to her room.

She abandons the linen closet she’d just discovered, strides over to the door, cracks it open and peers out...

Yes, Tarrant is there, still fully dressed, glaring down the length of the dark hallway with a hand on the pocket where she knows he keeps his revolver.

“Tarrant!” she hisses and he jumps. He gives her a sheepish look and his brows twitch in apology.

“So sorry, Alice. I thought... That is, should you not be in bed? Asleep, I mean. Should you not be sleeping at this precise moment?” he whispers.

She arcs a brow at him. “Whether I should or shouldn’t is not the point. Yes, it’s dark enough to sleep, but that’s hardly a discerning factor. Many things are done in the dark.”

When his fist clenches at his side and he swallows visibly, Alice realizes how that must have sounded.

“I...” Damn it all! “What I meant was, many people find reasons to stay awake when it’s dark.” That’s not much better, Alice! “Er, galas and so forth. I mean.” Twit!

Before Tarrant can argue with her, she demands, “Why aren’t you asleep?”

“Ye cannae expect mae teh rest kennin’ yer room ‘as nae lock!”

Alice gapes at him. Yes, that must have been what he’d hesitated over earlier; he’d been waiting to hear the lock turn... and then when he’d been shown to his room and had realized that there is none... “So... you’re going to stand guard all night?”

“Aye.”

She shakes her head in disbelief. “I’ll be fine. We’re perfectly safe. The innkeeper...”

“Willnae hear it if’n sommun a-sneaks inteh yer room whilst yer kippin’, puts his grubbin’ hand o’er yer mouth an’... Nae, Alice. I willnae permit it. And –” Alice blinks as his brogue disappears as suddenly as it had come and he continues on a lisp, leaning toward the crack in the door, toward her. “I cannot stop thinking it, Alice. Allow me to remain, for my own peace of mind.”

She considers his confession for a moment and then replies, “No.”

She slides the door open and steps aside before he can articulate the mulish expression forming on his face. “Sleep in here or go back to your room. For my peace of mind.” God knows what the innkeeper would think if she were to find him standing outside Alice’s door, armed, in the middle of the night! Would she call the local guard? Would the captain be notified? No, it’s better to keep this quiet. Although the thought of him in here with her all night is not a thought that makes her feel quiet at all! No, not with her blood screaming through her veins as it is now!

“That would be most—” he begins to protest.

“—generous and the only offer you’re going to get on the matter. Choose.”

He fidgets, looks up the hall then down, and then steps into her room. As is the custom here, he removes his boots just inside the door then pulls it shut behind him.

“I consent under protest,” he informs her gravely. “But as I cannot abide by the second alternative, I submit to the first. I am not, however,” he informs her on a growl, “moving from this spot.”

“Fine, so I’ll just move the bed over here by myself, then.”

She pivots on her heel to do just that.

“What? Alice! No! I do not require a bed!”

“Well, I require that you have one!” she hisses over her shoulder. “Do you think I’m going to be able to sleep with you looming over me?”

He crosses his arms over his chest and glares. “I do not loom. Nor have I seen any machine of the sort on the premises.”

With her back to him, Alice kneels down, grasps the edge of the pallet and, grunting, drags it toward the doorway he refuses to step away from.

“Alice, stop!” he pleads on a desperate breath. “I’ll just sit with my back against the door. ’Tis fine!”

She ignores him. When the pallet is finally within reach of his longer arms, he reaches out and assists. She stands and lets him position it as he likes. When he finishes, he straightens up but does not meet her gaze.

That’s just as well, she muses. She’s feeling rather... confrontational at the moment and who knows what sort of box they might open if their gazes locked.

“Where will you sleep?” he lisps softly.

Not for the first time, Alice is rather proud of the fact that she has an inquisitive nature. She heads for the skilfully hidden closet, the door to which sits flush with the wall and looks like another panel of walling, and – opening it – pulls out another set of bedding. She has to assemble this one herself – bottom pallet, mattress, coverlet – but that’s for the best; by the time she finishes, the flurry of activity has actually helped calm her.

“Here,” she tells him, regarding her new bed under the window. “I’ll sleep here.”

“All right.”

“Good night, Tarrant,” she says, crawling beneath the cotton-filled quilt. She does not look over her shoulder at him. If he is going to insist on keeping things as proper as possible, considering the circumstances, then she must give him whatever privacy she can. She leans up and over her pillow to snuff the lantern.

“Good night, Alice,” he whispers.

And, surprisingly, it is a good night. The soft sounds of his breaths lull her to sleep and Alice dreams she’s taking tea with him in a quiet clearing somewhere in Witzend.

*~*~*~*

When in search of high-profit goods, one often finds oneself in the strangest of situations.

This is a tenant of the trade business and, yet again, Alice experiences its accuracy. She sits beside Tarrant in an old, rickety farm cart that Mr. Mutsu had hired, and they bounce and jerk along the rutted country road. More than once, her eyelids droop. She yawns. On several occasions, she comes awake with start just as her cheek brushes the shoulder seam on Tarrant ’s jacket. They’d had to leave frightfully early in the morning to make this trip in one day and now Alice wholeheartedly wishes she’d agreed to stay overnight in the village they’ll be visiting today.

When Mr. Mutsu had presented her with the option, her only thought had been of Tarrant and his unmanageable and irrepressible protective tendencies: yet, if Alice is to stay in a farmhouse with women, and Tarrant in a separate farmhouse with men, surely that would be all right... But, no: she’d taken one look at his obstinate expression and had had a vision of a Disaster in the making. No doubt he’d spend the night guarding the door to Alice’s residence and instigate all sorts of misunderstandings. No, an overnight stay had been Out Of The Question.

Thus far, Tarrant has had the luck and foresight required to ensure that he hadn’t been caught in her room: although he has spent every single one of the last five nights sleeping across the threshold, every single morning, when she had awakened, he had already picked up and stowed his bedding and disappeared back to his room. This morning had been no different. When the innkeeper had called softly and opened Alice’s door to present her with the morning meal, the space Tarrant and his borrowed bed had occupied had been empty.

Alice hates that. Someday, when she wakes up in the morning, he will still be there. Someday...

Alice sighs. Perhaps it is time to revisit his offer. She cannot deny any longer that she most assuredly does not think of him as her kinsman. Still, simply because she is attracted to the man and yes, she loves him – how could she not? – that does not mean that she is ready for marriage and the things that inevitably follow: motherhood, chief amongst them.

If she were to agree to his suit and – eventually – wed him... that would mean the end of her career on the seas. A thought which panics her; is she not her own person out here? Does she not command her own life and the direction it takes?

And yet, has she not been disenchanted with the life of a trader since that horrid moment in that alley? Is she not tired of serving the pompous and unappreciative rich of London Society?

No, she will not miss the trading, the negotiating, and the disappointment when she returns home, disappointment made all the more painful in stark contrast to the praise Lord Ascot unfailingly showers upon her following each completed voyage.

“I’m not ready to give up discovering new places, new things,” she murmurs, half to herself and half to her traveling companion.

Next to her, Tarrant stiffens. His hands, which had been idle in his lap, begin picking imagined bits of lint and dust and straw off of his trouser pant legs. “I do not wish for you to lose your muchness again, Alice,” he responds quietly.

“That’s what a...” Alice hesitates over the word she ought to use. “... the other option is: A losing of muchness. Of the means to be muchy. Of letting go of the much that’s out there. There’s a reason it’s called ‘settling down’,” she hears herself say.

They speak too softly for Mr. Mutsu and the sailor the captain had assigned them for the duration of this day trip to hear. And, of course, the farmers – father and son by the look of them – that they’d hired are pulling the cart itself, are both well beyond earshot and well behind the language barrier.

Tarrant fidgets, shifts in his seat. She can ’t pretend she hasn’t all but admitted her feelings for him, but she tries.

“I beg to differ,” he responds and something about his inflection alerts her to the fact that he means every word. Literally. “It will be what you wish it to be. It need not be a London... affair. In fact, it may be whatever and wherever you like. I don’t wish to see you unhappy.”

Alice sniffs back the sting of a tear and smiles wryly at the fact that he will go to any lengths to placate her. Even if it means not mentioning the word that causes her so much distress. “You don’t wish,” she repeats. “Very unimaginative, Hatter.”

It’s meant to be a joke, a gentle jest to remind him of simpler times when grammatical inaccuracy and too-literal interpretations had led to harmless, petty misunderstandings.

His fingers twitch before he clasps his always-gloved hands together.

“I am sorry,” he replies on a breath. “I... if neither option appeals to you, Alice, you may, of course, return the hat. We need never speak of this matter again.”

“Is that what you wish?”

“I don’t wish,” he reminds her.

“And you don’t want,” she concludes.

He doesn’t answer. And that, in and of itself, seems to be answer enough.

Follow this link for Chapter 7.