The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(126)
“Goodness gracious! Alice Liddell! Why didn’t you say so before?” The young man looked aghast at the girl’s feet. “Hurry, hurry!” He propelled her out of the room. “Run home and ask your mother to smother the soles of your feet in orange marmalade . . . tell her it’s a matter of life or death! I promise I will come to fetch you tomorrow . . .” And closing the door abruptly, he wheeled round, leaning his whole weight against it, as though afraid the little girl might break it down at any moment.
“W-W-Would you like a cup of tea?” he managed to ask. “Or p-p-perhaps some l-lemonade, or even some f-f-f—”
“Anything will do, thank you,” Wells cut in, too impatient to wait to discover what it was that started with “f.” “The journey here was rather long.”
“Er, yes, well . . . please, h-h-have a seat,” the young man said, pointing at the exquisite carved wooden table in the center of the room, accompanied by four Chippendale chairs. “I shall put the kettle on to boil,” he added. Before leaving the room, he rested the tube and the piece of cloth he was still holding on a corner of the table.
“Thank you,” Jane said, taking a seat.
Wells slumped onto the chair next to her, and they both sank into a determined silence, trying hard not to think about the infinite places where the young man could have left the tube and the piece of cloth, until he came back into the room.
“Allow us to introduce ourselves,” Wells said when the young man was standing before him. “My name is Herbert George Wells, and this is my wife, Catherine. As I already mentioned, for our tale to be credible as possible, first you must agree to resolve some of the doubts that are plaguing us, although I ought to warn you that many of our questions might surprise you, and I daresay you will find our own explanations somewhat . . . incredible.”
“Don’t w-worry,” said Dodgson, sitting down on one of the empty chairs opposite them. “Why, sometimes I’ve believed in six impossible things before breakfast.”
Wells smiled hesitantly, then exclaimed, “Oh . . . I see you have taken the chair on the right. Yes, I am almost sure of it . . . Although you might have taken the one on the left. What do you think, Jane?” Wells’s wife nodded, perplexed. “Anyway, let’s drop the subject . . . Where do I begin?”
“It is m-m-most usual to begin at the beginning,” Dodgson said encouragingly, “after which you carry on until you reach the end. And then you stop.”
“And yet,” Wells replied pensively, “an end can also be a beginning—”
“What year are we in? And where are we?” Jane asked abruptly, cutting short her husband’s circumlocutions.
Dodgson looked at her, slightly bemused.
“This is the year of our Lord 1858, and we are in Oxford, England, in the reign of H-H-Her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.”
“And what is your date of birth?” Jane asked again.
“The twenty-seventh of January 1832.”
“And your profession?”
“I apply myself to the thankless t-task of teaching ill-disposed young men who have no appreciation of knowledge: in other words, I am a p-professor of m-mathematics here at Christ Church, Oxford.”
“What mathematical research are you engaged in?”
“I am c-currently working on A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry.”
“I think that is enough, my dear . . . ,” Wells chipped in.
“Do you write poems and children’s books?” she asked, ignoring him.
“Y-Yes, I have been published in several magazines.”
“Do you ever use a pseudonym?”
“My most recent poems in The Train appeared under the name Lewis Carroll . . .”
Jane looked significantly at Wells while Newton, who had decided that the man was not only harmless but also a terminal bore, jumped down off his mistress’s lap and began to explore the room.
“It’s incredible,” Wells whispered to Jane. “This universe is almost identical to ours . . . Dodgson has a twin here, as does Queen Victoria herself . . . I suppose everyone in our world must have a replica on this side. And so must we, of course! However, since we have arrived in 1858, our twins haven’t been born yet. And yet, scientifically speaking, our 1858 was far in advance of this world: this room, Charles’s mathematical studies . . . and have you seen that lens?” He pointed to the tube Dodgson had left on a corner of the table.
Jane nodded.
“Why, it’s positively prehistoric,” she declared.
“P-P-Prehistoric?” Dodgson said, completely taken aback. “But it belongs to the latest Sanderson camera . . .”
“Don’t be offended, Mr. Dodgson,” Wells said reassuringly. “I fear my wife was exaggerating slightly when she referred to it in those terms, though I confess that in our world that way of taking photographs is completely obsolete. You see, my wife and I come from . . . another world. It was 1898 when we left. I admit that I have no idea why we landed here forty years earlier, although I intend to reflect about that as soon as I can; but while I am no expert in history, I can assure you that in 1858 our photographers had long since stopped using the collodion wet plate, nor were they forced to carry out lengthy exposures or arduous developing processes . . . For over a century now we have been capturing images of the world around us using a matrix made up of thousands of tiny photosensitive elements that transform light into an electrical signal, storing it numerically so that . . .” Seeing the young man’s astonished face, Wells paused in midflow. “Never mind, I will tell you all about it when we have a quiet moment. What I am trying to say is that your world is very similar to ours . . .”