Heartless(132)

“They are both so full of poetry, you see. Darkness and whimsy, nightmares and song.”

“Hatta—”

His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I figured it out, Lady Pinkerton.”

She pressed her lips together and swallowed. “You figured what out?”

“Everything. Peter. The Jabberwock. The Mock Turtle. We are both to blame.”

Catherine gripped the edge of the table, staring at him across the turmoil. The mannequins said nothing.

“You see, many years ago,” said Hatta, as if she’d asked, “I brought a pumpkin back from Chess. It was going to be a pumpkin hat. A toothless, smiling Jack-O’-Lantern that would light up on the inside. Oh, it would have been marvelous.” He sung the word marvelous, letting his head tip back over the side of the chair. “But the pumpkin kept growing and growing. I couldn’t make it stop. It got to be as big as a goat and no longer fit to be a hat, so I cut it up and carved out the seeds. I took them to the nearest pumpkin patch and asked if they wanted them. Ungrateful wretches they were, the man and his sickly wife. Told me something about wanting no charity, slammed the door on my face. So I tossed the seeds away into a corner of their patch.” He smiled wryly. “I thought nothing more of it after that.”

“And then they started to grow,” said Cath.

“So they did. Lady Peter won a pumpkin-eating contest, did you know? She ate twenty-two of them, they say. Twenty-two bloody little pumpkins. And then she turned into a monster.” His lips warbled into a mockery of a smile. Cath could see it now, the hysteria lurking beneath his amethyst eyes.

She thought of the destroyed corner of the pumpkin patch. Peter had tried to kill them all, but one seed had survived and grown and thrived.

“And I made the pumpkin cake,” she said, “and so the Mock Turtle was my doing, and yours, and maybe Peter’s too.”

“Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,” Hatta quoted in a singsong voice, “had a wife but couldn’t keep her.”

Cath shuddered. Her gaze traipsed across the mishmash of ornamentation on the table. “What else? Have you brought any other dangerous things back from Chess that I should know about?”

“Only Jest, love. He was dangerous enough for us both.”

Hearing his name opened a crack in her heart that she hadn’t felt in days. She bit her cheek and waited for the pain to recede and dull again.

She started making her way around the table. “You lied to me. Your hats are dangerous. We can’t trust anything you’ve brought from Chess.” She grabbed the chair to Hatta’s right and made to pull it out from the table, but he whapped the cane over its arms. The cane crushed through a chiffon hat and shattered the skull of the clay mannequin underneath. Catherine jumped back.

“Don’t be rude, Lady Pinkerton,” Hatta said through his teeth. “Look around. There is no room for you at this table.”

Rejection sliced through her. She sucked in a breath.

“You did not deserve him,” he said. There was a sadistic glint in his eyes. He was watching her, like he was waiting to see which accusations would make her writhe the most. “I’m glad he cannot see you now. I’m glad he’ll never know how quickly you fell into the King’s arms. You couldn’t even wait until the worms had tasted him.”

She clenched her fists. “I made a bargain to avenge him. I did it for him, whatever you might think. I loved him. I still do.”

“If you think you had a monopoly on loving him, then you should be the King’s new fool, not his wife.”

She stared at him. Her thoughts somersaulted, warred with each other—first, a mess of confusion. Then understanding.

She straightened. “Did he know?”

“Does it matter?” With a brusque laugh, Hatta swung his legs off the table and stood. “He came here meaning to take your heart, but it was clear from the night he brought you to the tea party that he was going to lose his, instead.” His voice had a growl to it as he sauntered to the wall and pulled a hat off one of the shelves.

No—not a hat. A crown.

He tossed it onto the table. The tines of the crown were made of Jabberwock teeth, jagged and sharp, and strung together with purple velvet and gemstones in hideous mockery of the real crown she’d left at the castle.

“That’s for you,” he said. “Consider it a wedding gift, from your most humble servant. One mad hatter to his monarch.”

Her eyes stung. “You are not mad yet. You don’t have to be.”

He planted his cane on the ground and leaned into it. “It is in my blood, Lady Pinkerton. My father and his father and his father before him. Don’t you understand? I am always coming and I am always going, but Time is searching for me and he’s getting closer, always closer. You cursed me when you went back through that gate. You cursed us all.”

“You didn’t have to follow me.”

He snarled. “I had to follow him.” He took off strolling down the length of the table. “Did you come here to make a purchase, Your Majesty? A most marvelous hat, and all it will cost you is everything.” He knocked the butt of the cane into the mannequins’ hats as he passed, tipping them onto the table. Many of the heads fell too, their foreheads cracking against the table’s edge. “A hat to give you wisdom, or maybe compassion as you embark on your queenly role? Perhaps a charm of forgetfulness, would you like that? Would you like to forget this entire tragedy ever happened? Or are you so vain, Lady Pinkerton, that you would like eternal youth? Endless beauty? I could make it happen, you know. Anything is possible when you know the way through the Looking Glass!” He started swinging the cane like a battledore, hitting the hats so hard they soared against the room and crashed into the walls.