maid, with her bare shoulders-you know the one I mean?”
“Yes, Miss Eliot. It’s a very famous image.”
“Well, it convinced my mother that Dodgson was a pedophile. She wouldn’t have us looking at a little girl displaying herself that way.”
“Alex was just telling me that story about him,” Mercer said. “I’d never heard it before.”
“What did your mother do?” I asked.
“That was the last we saw of the book, until she lay on her deathbed. She forbade Edith to have it, which created its own stir at the time. Then Mother asked one of the curators in the children’s collection to do some research about Dodgson. What she learned was that Alice Liddell’s mother had a big falling out with him. Tore up all the correspondence that he’d had with Alice. That inflamed my mother even more.”
Mercer tried to frame a question. “Because she thought he’d been…?”
“Inappropriate, sir. That’s as explicit as we got in those days,” Eliot said. “It seems Mrs. Liddell found every letter the man sent to her daughter-mind you, she was only eleven or twelve at the time, and he was a grown man-and she ripped them to shreds. That’s a fact. And then, when Dodgson died, he left thirteen volumes of diaries. A record of his entire life. But someone in his family was worried enough about the contents to destroy the four years-every page of them-that detailed his friendship with Alice.”
“So your mother confiscated the book,” I said.
“First thing she did. Poor Edith-the girl had a tantrum over that. I can still hear her screams. The next thing was, my mother had it in her head to go after the trustee who’d given my sister the book. She found some letters he’d written to Edith after the day he met her, telling her how proud he was of her school grades.”
“How did he know about them?” Mercer asked.
“Some of the trustees-the nice ones-used to ask us questions like that when they came to see Father, or on the holidays. Harmless enough. What books did we like? What subjects were we studying? We were the library’s little family, you see. But Edith kept the notes this man had sent her, offering to take her out in his automobile- nobody had cars in those days-show her parts of the city she hadn’t seen. He didn’t have a daughter, he said. Just a boy. Said he wanted to be her friend.”
“I can understand why that upset your mother,” I said. “Edith was only twelve at the time, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. Just like Alice Liddell. So Mother went on a rampage. I was there the afternoon she came home and told Edith that she had walked all the way up Fifth Avenue to his mansion, the day after a terrible snowstorm. Knocked on the door and demanded to see the man. She wanted to give him back his book. Can you imagine her taking on such a rich and powerful person as a trustee of the New York Public Library?” Eliot asked, proud of her mother’s spirit. “She came back and told Edith there’d be no more presents from him, and no more visits.”
“Miss Eliot,” I said, trying not to get ahead of myself. “Do you know the man’s name? The trustee who gave Edith the book?”
Her slippers scuffed along the linoleum floor.
“Of course I do,” she said. “It was Jasper Hunt. Jasper Hunt. Edith said he called himself the Mad Hatter. Oh, she was very peeved at Mother for ruining her fun.”
Jasper Hunt Jr., the eccentric owner of the rarest map in the world.
“Did Edith ever tell you what she meant by her ‘fun’?” I asked.
“Not what you’re thinking, Alex. No, no. Mr. Hunt never did anything improper, Edith assured me of that. But Mother’s concern was with his intentions. And for Edith, it seemed like she’d been deprived of a great adventure, a chance to be treated like a grown-up. In hindsight, I’d say Mother nipped something in the bud.”
“And the book-how did you come to have the book?”
“Mr. Hunt was very patient with my mother. He brought her inside, had her served tea and pastries, and removed the photographs that had offended her. He told her that she must keep the book. That one day it would be worth a lot of money and she couldn’t deprive Edith of that.”
“So your mother returned home with the book?” Mercer asked.
“Yes, but she had made such a fuss about the whole thing that she never admitted it to us. Not till just before she died. She’d kept it on a shelf in her linen closet all those years. Finally told Edith to take it and have it appraised.”
“But you said Edith didn’t want it.”
“She was stubborn, my sister,” Jane Eliot said. “She felt it had spoiled her birthday. Didn’t want anything to do with it. The whole episode had embarrassed her with the staff and all that. You know how girls that age are.”
“I sure do,” I said. “Did you ever show the book to a dealer?”
“A couple of years ago, after Edith passed on, I called someone at the library. I wouldn’t know how to find a reputable dealer. The president’s assistant gave me the name of a man who worked closely with them, she said. I’ve forgotten it at this point. Anyway,” Jane Eliot said, “by the time I got around to contacting him, my letter was answered by the FBI. They told me the fellow was in jail. Now, that was quite a shock, since it was the library folks who had recommended him to me.”
“It must have been Eddy Forbes,” I said.
“Forbes. That could have been the name.”
“Did you describe the book to him in your letter?”
“Yes. That was the point of speaking with him, wasn’t it? I had left several phone messages, too. After that,” Jane Eliot said, “it just didn’t seem worth bothering, if even the dealers turned out to be thieves. I really wasn’t interested in its dollar value. I don’t want for anything, and my relatives have plenty of other rare books. It wasn’t mine, after all.”
“So you have it still?”
“I did, until just a few months ago,” Jane Eliot said, stopping in her tracks. “I gave it back.”
“Back?” I asked. “To the library?”
“No, no. I did my genealogy, dear. Easy to do with folks as well known as the Hunts. It turns out that old Mr. Hunt had one son, just as he had told my mother. Jasper Hunt the Third, who’s even older than I am. I wasn’t about to give anything to him.”
She squeezed my hand and smiled again.
“But I learned there’s also a granddaughter. A woman named Minerva. So I wrote her a note. I told her about the book, about our family’s connection to the library,” the old woman said, pointing toward the door of her room and directing us toward it. “I left out my mother’s suspicions about Minerva’s grandfather, of course.”
“Did she return your correspondence?”
“She didn’t seem the least bit interested at first. I didn’t get a reply for several weeks. Then I wrote again. My writing isn’t too neat, because of my vision. Of course, I can’t see the detail on the pages of that old book very well anymore, but I tried to describe how beautiful it was. I told her about the map that the Mad Hatter had tucked in that pocket in the back, with the photographs.”
Mercer jumped in before I could open my mouth. “There was a
“When my mother was dying and she told Edith and me about the book, she said that Mr. Hunt had insisted she keep the map. The very first day we had opened the book, we saw the map, of course. George spread it out on the floor at once, but it wasn‘t nearly so interesting to us as the photographs.”
“But why was there a map?” he asked.
“Do you remember that Alice -the one in Wonderland-went to a tea party?”
“Sure, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare were there,” I said. “But what did the map have to do with the tea party?”
Jane Eliot slowly started to move again. “Let me think what Mother said. It was a big old map, folded up several times, as I recall. It was a picture of the island of Ceylon. Mr. Hunt said that’s where the tea came from. The tea for the party.”
Jasper Hunt certainly lived up to his reputation for eccentricity.
“He told Mother to leave the map right where it was. That it would increase the value of the book, in the end. He said he wanted to make up for alarming her, to do right by Edith,” Jane Eliot said. “So Mother saw no harm in keeping it. Like Jasper told her, he loved the library, too, and knew that we did. She had her piece of the Hunt legacy.”
