Charles leapt out from under the staircase. Dinah gasped as he fell to the floor, somersaulting on his rough landing and leaping up into a kicking dance. “Snow on the hat, snow on the hat, black like your Cheshire Cat!”
He gave a high-pitched giggle and Dinah laughed with him. Charles was younger by only two years, but in his madness he was practically ageless. He was a genius, a savant, a helpless infant and naughty child, all mixed into one tiny boy. He had been born mad—a squealing infant who never slept, a silent toddler who would bang his head against the wall, a curious boy who once ate glass and loved nothing more than to look at the stars. Davianna, Dinah’s mother, had loved her crazed son fiercely and was best at dealing with him. When she curled her arms around him, clutching him to her chest as though she could squeeze the madness out, he relaxed and was content, even as he babbled nonsensically. With his mother’s intense love and focus, Charles seemed to be improving, step by tiny step. When she died, he went completely maniacal, and never returned.
He was regularly found wandering around the castle, a dead bird in one hand and a tart in the other. It was as likely that he had taken a bite out of one as he had the other. He once walked off the Great Hall balcony, breaking both legs on the marble steps below. After that, his walk consisted of short steps and a trotting leap—the grotesque gait of the permanently insane.
Then he stopped eating for a while. Not even Dinah, his beloved sister, could get him to eat. Barely more than a child herself at ten years old, she pleaded with him as she tried to pry a tart, soup, quail, anything into his open mouth. He grew weaker, retreating completely into his own wondrous world, and the entire kingdom dressed in black, awaiting the death of the little Prince of Hearts.
On what surely could have been one of his final nights, Dinah brought in a trunk full of their deceased mother’s clothing. She tucked it all around him, her dresses, slips, and socks, so that he might be comforted on his journey to another place. Charles’s fingers had found one of her mother’s bejeweled hats, the one she had worn for All Tea’s Day the year before—a gorgeous plum hat with a tall plume, plump and glittering in his small hand. An absurd smile played across his translucent skin as he turned the hat over and over in his hands, a look of fascination on his face. He then turned to Dinah and simply asked for a biscuit.
“My Dinah,” he had whispered with a smile, his small hand tracing her chin. “Biscuit?”
She saw it in his eyes that day—he had decided to stay, just like that. That was seven years ago. Since then, Charles never left his room. He watched the world from his windows, where he occasionally threw his lavishly made hats down onto adoring townspeople. A hat created by Charles, the so-called Mad Hatter, was worth more than any piece of clothing in Wonderland. His creations were inspired works of skill and insanity. Unapologetically whimsical, rich in every color found in nature and some that weren’t, they were a testament to Charles’s lunacy.
He rarely slept or bathed. His two loyal servants, Lucy and Quintrell, saw to all of his needs. They kept his chambers from falling into disrepair but allowed his mind the freedom to create in the wild lunacy that he fostered. Tapestries and huge rolls of fabric covered the ground and most of the walls. Narrow walkways had been created for the servants, but Charles simply danced over the rainbow floor, his feet barely brushing the patterned fabrics of amethyst, pumpkin, taupe, and lapis.
Charles looked up at Dinah, still standing in the stairway. He giggled and sang, “A ribbon across their necks, one, two, hearts. Check and check!”
She looked down at the tawny head and the mismatched blue and green eyes that stared back at her wildly. “Do you remember my name today?”
“Dinah, rhymes with lima, beans and more beans, growing up and up, over the hills into the pale white, like sugar on a pie, die, die. . . .”
Dinah gave him a proud smile. “That’s right Charles, Dinah. Your sister. I brought you something today.”
His right eye blinked twice. “Something? Something like the sun, inching closer every day. It will burn us, uh-oh, it will.”
“Not quite the sun, but something really special.” Dinah reached into her cloak and pulled out the tiny wooden seahorse. Charles’s eyes widened, and he took it in his slight, feminine hands. Wardley had carved swirls into its curving back and blackened its long nose with smudged charcoal.
“It’s from Wardley. Remember him? What do you say?”
Charles repaid Dinah with a huge smile that showed his misshapen teeth. “Blue horse, swimming on a long field. Tasty shrimp inside his ribs, I can taste it, yes I can!”
“I’m glad you like it.”