Roland had stopped, but she pulled her hand away and ran onward, with Wentworth clinging to her in silent amazement.
“Where are you going?” shouted Roland behind her.
“I really want to keep out of her way!”
“Come back! You’re running right back!”
“No I’m not! I’m running in a straight line!”
“This is a dream!” Roland shouted, but it was louder now because he was catching up to her. “You’re running right around—”
Tiffany burst into a clearing……the clearing.
The Bumblebee women landed on either side of her, and the Queen stepped forward.
“You know,” said the Queen, “I really expected better of you, Tiffany. Now, give me back the boy, and I shall decide what to do next.”
“It’s not a big dream,” mumbled Roland behind her. “If you go too far, you end up coming back—”
“I could make a dream for you that’s even smaller than you are,” said the Queen pleasantly. “That can be quite painful!”
The colors were brighter. And sounds were louder. Tiffany could smell something, too, and what was strange about that was that up until now there had been no smells.
It was a sharp, bitter smell that you never forgot. It was the smell of snow. And underneath the insect buzzings in the grass, she heard the faintest of voices.
“Crivens! I canna find the way oot!”
CHAPTER 11
Awakening
On the other side of the clearing, where the nut-cracking man had been at work, was the last nut, half as high as Tiffany. And it was rocking gently. The cracker took a swipe at it with the hammer, and it rolled out of the way.
See what’s really there, said Tiffany to herself, and laughed.
The Queen gave her a puzzled look. “You find this funny?” she demanded. “What’s funny about this? What is amusing about this situation?”
“I just had a funny thought,” said Tiffany. The Queen glared, as people without a sense of humor do when they’re confronted with a smile.
hat there was about the Queen’s voice was this: It said, in a friendly, understanding way, that she was right and you were wrong. And this wasn’t your fault, exactly. It was probably the fault of your parents, or your food, or something so terrible you’ve completely forgotten about it. It wasn’t your fault, the Queen understood, because you were a nice person. It was just such a terrible thing that all these bad influences had made you make the wrong choices. If only you’d admit that, Tiffany, then the world would be a much happier place—
—this cold place, guarded by monsters, in a world where nothing grows older, or up, said her Second Thoughts. A world with the Queen in charge of everything. Don’t listen.
She managed to take a step backward.
“Am I a monster?” said the Queen. “All I wanted was a little bit of company.”
And Tiffany’s Second Thoughts, quite swamped by the Queen’s wonderful voice, said: Miss Female Infant Robinson…
She’d come to work as a maid at one of the farms many years ago. They said that she’d been brought up in a Home for the Destitute in Yelp. They said she’d been born there after her mother had arrived during a terrible storm and the master had written in his big black diary: “To Miss Robinson, female infant,” and her young mother hadn’t been very bright and was dying in any case and had thought that was the baby’s name. After all, it had been written down in an official book.
Miss Robinson was quite old now, never said much, never ate much, but you never saw her not doing something. No one could scrub a floor like Miss Female Infant Robinson. She had a thin, wispy face with a pointed red nose, and thin, pale hands with red knuckles, which were always busy. Miss Robinson worked hard.
Tiffany hadn’t understood a lot of what was going on when the crime happened. The women talked about it in twos and threes at garden gates, their arms folded, and they’d stop and look indignant if a man walked past.
She picked up bits of conversation, though sometimes they seemed to be in a kind of code, like: “Never really had anyone of her own, poor old soul. Wasn’t her fault she was skinnier’n a rake,” and “They say that when they found her, she was cuddling it and said it was hers,” and “The house was full of baby clothes she’d knitted!” That last one had puzzled Tiffany at the time, because it was said in the same tone of voice that someone’d use to say, “And the house was full of human skulls!”
But they all agreed on one thing: We can’t have this. A crime’s a crime. The Baron’s got to be told.