The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (5 page)

‘Much longer ago than that. Some prints of the old house show it. William’s seen one...’

William said, ‘It’s visible only in two very early sixteenth-century prints. In all later ones it’s gone. It’s hard to see quite how it was or where it was.’

He spun his chair around, niftily avoiding both women.

‘There’s a copy here somewhere.’ He started moving a pile of papers on a long wooden dresser. ‘Its scale is wrong for its depicted position but we’re talking about very old draughtsmanship. It might not have been a maze like ours—it could have been a parterre or a knot garden, of course, so the walker could see where they were going.’

Finally he pulled out a small print and pushed himself back to the table.

As he laid it down, Laurence leaned forward. It was the first time he had ever seen the old Easton Hall. It looked Tudor or earlier, and it was smaller than he’d imagined.

‘Perhaps the old maze was burned down in the house fire?’

‘Possibly, or it simply went out of fashion. Or it was neglected and ran amok. Or the plants caught a disease. Who knows? But I like to think I may be following an old tradition connected with the house.’

‘Did you take your design from this?’

‘No. I liked the idea but when I looked closer, I saw it wasn’t realistic in its proportions and as far as I could see it couldn’t work. It was extraordinarily complicated: all the paths appeared to be dead ends. It was basically an island maze—’

‘An island maze?’

‘One that has several paths to the centre and islands within it. It’s the hardest sort to navigate. I didn’t want visitors to my maze to get lost. I didn’t want anybody to be afraid.’

‘I always found Digby’s stories rather beastly,’ Frances said. ‘Julian pooh-poohs them, says nobody could get truly lost inside a hedge as they could shout and be heard, or break their way out, or, in his case, use a pocket knife. Which he, as a man, carries at all times of course.’

Laurence slid his hand deep in his pocket and felt the small knife he had always kept with him since he had been given it as a boy.

‘When Lydia first came up with the idea,’ Frances was saying, ‘I really wished she wouldn’t. Why not restock the rose garden or build a fountain or something? Heaven knows there’s enough water round here.’ She looked appeasingly at William. ‘Now, of course, I can see the new maze isn’t a trap, it’s just ... a game.’

‘It’s still about disorientation, I think,’ Eleanor said. ‘You change direction so much you become dizzy, your head spins, so although the sky is above you and you aren’t shut in, you get muddled and in some people that leads to panic. And the paths can be quite narrow. And then, finally—escape. Euphoria!’

As she spoke, Laurence was recalling the twists and turns of trenches: some newly dug raw earth, some with explosives set to destroy any intruder, some stinking with the rotting corpses of men and horses, or simply lethally deep in water and mud. He didn’t think anyone would have chosen a maze as a memorial, whatever its long association with Easton Hall, had they served in the infantry.

‘Julian says that nobody’s ever found a skeleton at the centre of a garden maze any more than they’ve found a dead cat up a tree,’ Frances said. ‘Though actually he wasn’t that keen at first. But Lydia had her imagination piqued by the old maze pictures and because Digby had this fancy thered been one. Julian always wants her to be happy.’

‘My maze is a branching maze,’ William said, his eyes on Laurence. He, too, had remembered France, Laurence thought. They had first met when investigating the post-war death of a friend who during the war had been trapped in a collapsed tunnel where the other soldiers had died slowly of suffocation.

‘And that’s why. It’s not like an island maze; you can’t get lost. Well, not if you stick to simple rules.’

Eleanor smiled. Laurence sensed she had heard it all before, but Frances was leaning forward, listening intently.

‘A branching maze would be like a tree if you unrolled its curves,’ William continued. And I like that too—another symbol of new growth. But there’s a simple trick to finding your way in. You put out your right hand and keep it on a maze wall, turning right when paths lead off. That way, you come to the heart of the maze, and you can sit there peacefully—because there’ll be a bench in the shade—knowing you can just do the whole thing in reverse to walk out.’

‘So if you keep a calm head, you can just stroll along, sit in this leafy bower and stroll out again?’ Eleanor said.

William nodded.

Frances said, ‘I feel I have a stake in this maze, anyway. I check my treelets quite often but they aren’t showing much sign of ambition yet.’

Laurence was wondering how they’d even got started with William scarcely mobile and such precise geometry at stake, when William answered the unspoken question.

‘David was invaluable,’ he said. ‘He’s got an extraordinarily good eye. It would have been impossible without someone like him to be my legs, as it were. The others helped, but he was at the centre of it all. He took my drawings, understood the measurements, then laid the pattern out in string and it worked, with very few adjustments. Maggie tried it out—walking through it. I watched like a stern overseer.’

Laurence glanced down at the design. The path was two feet wide, too narrow for a man to negotiate in a wheelchair. Was this just adhering to conventional measurements or had William no desire to enter his own maze?

‘I first came here last summer,’ William said. ‘I’d done a bit of research on labyrinths and mazes. I knew a couple—Hampton Court, obviously. The Stanhopes’ one at Chevening. Before the war I’d actually seen the wonderful stone labyrinth in Chartres cathedral. I was always fascinated by them but they were completely out of fashion in gardens and rare within architectural design. I spoke to a man at Kew, who said several more mazes may have been destroyed or lost in the war. They need shaping, feeding, upkeep. Manpower.’ He looked around. ‘Frankly, that may be a problem here. We have to hope adult men will eventually live again at Easton Deadall and care for it.’

‘Labyrinth?’ Frances said. ‘Is there a difference between a maze and a labyrinth? What’s at Chartres? Are labyrinths enclosed while mazes are open to the sky?’

‘In churches, usually it’s a labyrinth. Just a pattern on the floor or wall, no raised boundaries,’ Laurence said. ‘Chartres is very old—twelfth century or thereabouts—but there were others in important churches. They must have been quite common once.’

William was nodding. He must have known as much about Chartres as Laurence did.

‘See,’ he said, ‘you’re already earning your keep in matters ecclesiastical.’ He smiled in pleasure.

Laurence waited for William to take over but when his friend remained silent, he said, ‘A labyrinth isn’t meant as a puzzle: it’s a journey, a conduit. You enter it and you move along to its end. Perhaps the idea was to slow the walker down, to allow spiritual reflection, but the outcome is in no doubt.’

‘Patrick will have something to add, I expect,’ Frances said thoughtfully. ‘In Crete they found some kind of maze. It seems to fit the legend of King Minos. It’s possible it’s actually the place where the monstrous Minotaur was fed on young Cretan men and girls.’ She paused, looking ruefully at William. ‘Not that that’s quite the association you’re after, of course.’

‘The very maze of ancient myths,’ Eleanor said drily. ‘How convenient for the archaeologists that it should be right there.’ But she took her friend’s arm and squeezed it. ‘Come on, let’s go and find Nicholas. William, do you want to change for dinner?’

‘I’ll be along in half an hour.’

When the women had gone, William lit his pipe. Laurence had noticed before how Eleanor made William both more relaxed and more alive.

‘I ought to go,’ he said.

‘Of course.’ Laurence started to rise to his feet.

‘But while you’re here, perhaps you’d like to see the design for the window in the church. You’ll need to use your imagination—it relies upon light, and changing light at that. I’m no expert. But I’ve had long exchanges with a man who will actually put it together and I’ve told him to be as critical as he likes. Don’t worry if you can’t see anything in it,’ he said. ‘It’s quite a modern concept.’

Laurence recalled again the pictures, in abstract blocks of colour and line, in William’s rooms in London.

The design for the memorial window lay on a table by the window. It was a surprise, but Laurence had expected to be surprised. Darker lines indicating the lead contained planes and rectangles, with each segment marked ‘yellow’, ‘red’, ‘white’ or ‘gold’. Over it all was a delicate tracery of what would presumably be incised patterns.

‘The fine lines are etched with silver nitrate,’ William said, his finger moving gently across the paper.

In the centre was a lozenge containing entwined initials: Laurence could identify the D of Digby Easton. From the shield, rays shot outwards, shattering into shards of light, with the effect of a starburst. In each corner was incised a fragment of Easton: a meandering stream, a standing stone, a galloping horse and, a master stroke, he thought, a tiny version of William’s new maze. The border was a slender column of flowers, birds and insects, echoing the spirit of the carvings on the church porch. Several of the tendrils here were initials, each, he guessed, one of the fallen. In pencil, it was beautiful; in illuminated glass, he thought the effect would be stunning. For a second he was too moved to speak.

William was looking at him intently.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Laurence said, relieved that it was so good and that he didn’t have to dissemble. ‘It’s so full of life and grace and detail. Not at all sombre.’ He looked at his friend, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know what to say. Brilliant hardly covers it. What does Lydia think?’

‘She feels as you do, I believe,’ William said with animation. ‘She said she wanted something true to Digby, because it’s first and foremost dedicated to him. I never knew him, of course, but he sounds like a man with a certain vigour for life. I hoped this might carry that spirit.’

Laurence weighed his next words carefully.

‘Depending on the colours you choose, the red and gold,’ he pointed to William’s tidy writing, ‘it’s also going to feel quite ... explosive.’

William nodded, looking pleased. ‘I’m so glad you saw that. It’s not easy to look at a pencil drawing and imagine height and changing colour and light. But I intended there to be movement, even violence, at the core of it; I wanted it to carry a truth as well as beauty.’

Laurence had a sudden sense of what William had lost in the terrible catastrophe of his war. What kind of visionary architect might he have been if he had remained whole-bodied?

‘I didn’t want it to offend her or, worse, hurt her,’ William went on, ‘but it’s not just that the volatile energy hints at how these men died. It’s also a nod to the church itself: St Barbara.’

‘I think it’s the first St Barbara I’ve seen in England,’ Laurence said, ‘although I looked it up and there are three others: a newish one near Coventry, one in Worcestershire and one in Lincolnshire.’

‘She’s more common in the orthodox Church,’ William said, ‘or so I’m told.’

‘And in Catholic churches,’ Laurence said. ‘There’s one in Rome. She’s the patron saint of explosives and lightning and, indeed, violent death, which you obviously know.’

William said, ‘So, you see, it all connects, which is satisfying. People who look at the window might just see pretty images or they might think they understand its deeper associations—it doesn’t matter. They’ll be there.’

Laurence understood William’s contentment. Easton had its dark past and its sorrows, but now perhaps goodwill and hope were being rebuilt.

William tapped his pipe, looked at the bowl doubtfully and took out some more tobacco.

‘For those who believe in such things it’s also a plea to St Barbara to keep us safe from any more disasters. I wouldn’t suggest that to Eleanor, or she’d have me locked up.’

Laurence smiled.

‘She’d think it was the most appalling superstition,’ William said. ‘She’s already explained to me that Barbara was simply a manifestation of the heathen god Nertha or Thor the god of storms. A desperate fantasy constructed by oppressed and starving peasants. So I’ve rather blurred that bit in discussing it with her.’

He clamped his teeth round the stem of his pipe and somehow managed to smile.

‘But, extraordinarily, she also turns out to be the patron saint of architects.’

Chapter Four

The next day, on his way through the rear of the hall and through the green-baize door to find William after lunch, Laurence had stopped to look at a framed photograph on the wall. It showed the servants at the end of the previous century, when there were at least fifteen of them. Now, as far as he could tell, there were no live-in staff. Maggie and Mrs Hill seemed to be up at the Hall most of the time. David, with the help of Maggie’s grandfather, apparently took care of the house and garden, and acted as chauffeur if necessary. Certainly the Hall was no longer the grand establishment it once was.

On most days, Frances had explained, Mrs Hill just left out a plate of cold mutton or beef for luncheon, with pickled beetroot, eggs and pickled onions for anyone who wanted them. Today, although six places were laid, Laurence was alone in the dining room. Eleanor had taken a picnic and gone off with Nicholas to fish for tiddlers with a jam jar.

When he joined William in his office, William greeted Laurence with a broad smile while doing a calculation on paper. As he put down his pencil to speak, they heard footsteps approaching. Julian was preceded by Scout, bounding in and jumping up at Laurence. Julian wore what looked like old riding breeches and his socks and shoes were muddy. Even the elbow patches on his shapeless Norfolk jacket were coming adrift. Restraining Scout, he felt in his pocket for a dog biscuit, which Scout took from his hand.

‘Lydia’s not well at all,’ Julian said, quite gruffly as if he was speaking to the dog, but looking up at Laurence and William. ‘Just came to see if you chaps were getting on all right. I’ve been with David, checking the sluices.’ Now his face lightened. ‘When I was a boy I used to go and watch the miller upstream from here, clearing the wheel and the cogs. It would have been done like that for centuries. It used to fascinate me, seeing the water kept back and then the power of it teeming through the gates when he’d finished. We used to send corn to be ground there. Now we’re using an almost identical system of sluices and wheels to make electricity.’ He seemed to find this as astonishing as the millstream had once been.