Walking the Labyrinth (10 page)

“It was hard for me to get my license—I had to prove to the licensing bureau that I was rehabilitated. But they finally believed me.”

“Hey, look,” Molly said. “No, don’t look. It’s that man again, the one with the cap.”

John turned around, pretended to study the view through the front window. “Damn. I was wondering when he would turn up.”

“I’m going to talk to him.” She stood.

“What? No!”

“Why not?”

“It could be dangerous. Molly!”

She went toward the other man. “Why are you following us?” she asked.

To her surprise he rose quickly and hurried out the door. “Come on,” Molly said to John. “He’s getting away!”

John followed her to the door. They watched as the man ran for a bus and climbed on.

“That’s it,” John said. “We’ll never be able to find him now.”

“Yeah, but we learned something. He’s as afraid of us as we are of him.”

“You’re right about one thing,” John said. “Emily must have been your ancestor. You both do what you like, and damn the consequences.”

They finished their meal and walked slowly back to the bed and breakfast. As John put his key to the keyhole the door swung open. John stepped back quickly, motioning to Molly to do the same.

“Someone’s been here,” he said.

“Our friend in the cap?” Molly asked.

“Maybe. Maybe he was making sure we were out of the way while he looked around in our rooms. Don’t come in.”

Despite his prohibition she followed him inside and watched as he quickly checked the closet and under the bed. “He’s gone,” he said. “Why did he—”

“Damn!” Molly said. “Emily’s book. He’s taken it.”

“Shit,” John said. He went over to the table where they had left it. Nothing else had been touched.

“Damn,” Molly said again. “Now we’ll never know what happens next.”

He looked at her sourly. “More to the point, we won’t be able to return the book to the Westingates. We’ll have to get it back.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” Molly said, “I have a feeling we’ll see Flat Cap again.”

“Is this intuition?” The sour expression was back.

“You mean like Emily’s?”

“Yeah. If everyone in her family had the Gift, and if she’s your ancestor … What am I thinking now?”

“You’re hoping we get the book back.”

“Too easy. Of course I want the book back.”

“Well, but there may be something to this. Aunt Fentrice always seemed to know what I’d done before I told her.”

“That doesn’t prove anything. Children are transparent that way. Can you tell who’s stolen the book? Where they’ve taken it?”

Could she? She felt her way outward, saw John’s tension, his dread of returning to prison. The book was … The book was … She shook her head. Something was blocking her, a fear of what she might learn. Some part of her felt relief that the book had been stolen, that the whole story of her family would not be told just yet.

“How much do you believe of what Emily said about this Gift?” John said.

“All of it,” Molly said. “I was down in the labyrinth, remember. There was something there, some magic. Anyway, why would she lie?”

“To make herself more interesting. To get Harrison to marry her. To con all those wealthy lords and ladies out of their money. It’s easier to believe that than to suppose she could actually read minds and predict the future.”

“You really don’t think much of my family, do you?”

“Look.” John took a piece of paper and pencil and wrote
“Allalie.”
Underneath that he wrote
“All a lie.”

“Good Lord,” Molly said.

“Yes,” John said.

With Emily’s book gone there was no reason to stay in Applebury. They checked out of the bed and breakfast and went to London, looking for traces of the Order of the Labyrinth there.

In London Molly saw what John meant when he had called his work dull. They spent hours in the library, tracking down old books, running newspapers through a microfiche. In the evenings she wrote postcards to Peter and Robin Ann and other friends, sending off prettily colored pictures of tourist sights she hadn’t actually seen.

“The trouble with secret societies,” she whispered to John one day at the library, “is that they’re secret.”

In reply John pointed to the book he was reading,
A Brief History of the Occult in Great Britain
by Percival Swafford-Brown. “The Order of the Labyrinth appears to have been founded sometime in the mid-1870s by a woman named Mary Frances,” Molly read. “Mrs. Frances either had some small psychic talent or the ability to tell people what they most wanted to hear; with this she was able to attract several wealthy and influential people to her seances.

“The only document to come down to us from the OotL is a pamphlet by Lady Dorothy Westingate entitled ‘A History of the True and Antient Order of the Labyrinth.’ Lady Westingate makes the usual extravagant claims for her Order, going so far as to give them a history stretching back into antiquity. With the aid of their spirit guide Arton, she says, they can predict the future, make contact with the dead, learn the lost wisdom of the ancients. Adepts of the Tenth Grade, she states, can enchant a man so that he does their bidding.

“In her pamphlet Lady Westingate credits Mrs. Frances with the central conceit of the Order, the labyrinth. Events in our lives, Mrs. Frances explains, are turnings in the labyrinth. If we understand these events correctly, if we pass the tests given us, we are allowed to continue on towards the next turning, the next test. Each turning successfully passed allows the adept to advance a grade in the Order. There are rumours of an actual labyrinth beneath the house of one of the members.

“The Order grew in popularity during the occult boom of the 1880s. One of the men who joined around this time, a Colonel Augustus Binder, is typical of a certain type of seeker after mysteries. From 1870 to 1876 he was stationed in a regiment in Bombay in India, where he became acquainted with Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism.

“Upon his return to England he subscribed to
Light,
a London spiritualist weekly;
The Theodophist,
edited by H.P. Blavatsky and Henry Olcott; and
The Religio-Philosophical Journal.
His niece and heir, Sarah Binder, in a letter to her sister Anna, mentions finding over twelve hundred books in his library after his death, among them
Modern American Spiritualism, Isis Unveiled, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, People from the Other World,
and all five volumes of
The Vishnu Purana,
as well as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Hebrew dictionaries. ‘Oh, Anna,’ she adds, somewhat plaintively, ‘whatever shall I do with them? There is no bookshop here that will take them.’

“Even this very abridged list shows something of the breadth of Binder’s interests, which included spiritualism, theosophy, and Eastern religion. We also know that he attended meetings at a spiritualist camp in Massachusetts, that he joined the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and that he was one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research.

“All this frenetic activity appears to have come to an end when he discovered the Order of the Labyrinth in 1879. ‘I am very close to finding the answers I seek,’ he wrote Sarah Binder in October of 1880. ‘I have met a remarkable woman, Miss Emily Wethers, who seems to have true occult powers. I have been promised that I will know all when I reach the Tenth Grade of the Order.’

“Oddly, Binder does not mention the OotL in any subsequent letters to his niece. Perhaps he had been told not to divulge the secrets of the Order, or perhaps he had not learned as much as he had hoped he would. Emily Wethers (about whom we know almost nothing) and Mary Frances must have satisfied him in ways that the other groups had not, however, because he remained in the Order until 1910.

“Another member, Lady Dorothy Westingate, joined the Order in 1883. Her husband, Lord Albert Westingate, had died in 1878. As far as we know, Lady Dorothy returned home after his funeral and did not leave again for five years. The first time she ventured outside seems to have been to attend a meeting of the OotL.

“Apparently a medium in the Order, either Mary Frances or Emily Wethers or both, professed to have contacted Lady Dorothy’s dead husband. This marks a departure for the Order; they had never before claimed mediumship among their powers. (See Chapter 5, ‘Ghosts and Guides,’ for a comparison of occult groups which contact the dead and those which receive their wisdom from guides or masters on another plane. Madame Helena Blavatsky, whose masters or ‘mahatmas’ lived in the Himalayas, always spoke of mediums with a great deal of scorn.)

“It is difficult to see this new development within the OotL as anything but a desire for monetary gain. Lord Westingate had left his wife a very wealthy woman, though the precise extent of Lady Dorothy’s fortune is unknown. It must have been considerable, however, because from the years 1878 to 1883 she did little but add to the house she had inherited from her husband. According to her record books she spent over £50,000 on this task.

“A gentleman, it is said, never discusses money. Yet gentlemen have money, a great deal of it, and this money must come from somewhere. Lord Sanderson’s bank records, which were entered into evidence at his trial, show him in financial difficulties in the mid-1880s, though the ultimate cause of these difficulties is unknown. Perhaps he was caught up in the agricultural depression of the 1870s and 1880s, when wheat from the United States, newly strong after their Civil War, poured into England, causing the price of British wheat to drop. Perhaps he had industrial interests which failed when the industries of both Germany and Italy began to rival England’s.

“But after these initial difficulties the fortunes of Lord Sanderson began to rise while those of Lady Westingate fell. At the time of his disappearance in 1910 he owned two houses in London and a majority share in a brewery, a shipping company, and a steelworks. In 1912 Dorothy Westingate, facing an acute shortage of funds, was forced to sell her house.

“Outright accusations of financial impropriety appear in 1910. On August 19 of that year Colonel Binder brought suit against four members of the Order, Mrs. Mary Frances, Lord Harrison Sanderson, Lady Dorothy Westingate, and Miss Emily Wethers, claiming that they had defrauded him of thousands of pounds. Why he waited thirty years before resorting to legal action is unknown.

“In the course of the trial Colonel Binder released several of the Order’s secret documents and rituals, some of which were printed in the
Times
and other newspapers to widespread amusement and ridicule. One
Times
reader wrote, ‘It is possible that there is a more foolish, more credulous man in all of England than Colonel Binder, but it is difficult to think who he might be. Any man who believed in “the spirit guide Arton, clothed all in golden light,” has no business calling himself defrauded; he may as well have gone for advice to a conjurer at a county fair, or to a man who fries pancakes in his hat. One hopes that he has learned from the experience, and that he counts himself fortunate in having spent only a few thousand pounds for the privilege.’ Binder’s suit was dismissed amid a welter of accusations and counteraccusations.

“Lord Harrison Sanderson disappeared later that year. Rumours placed him in India, in Egypt, in America. Did he take Colonel Binder’s money with him when he left? No one knows.

“Without Sanderson the Order splintered into various schisms. A small branch existed in London as late as the 1930s. In the 1950s the Order was revived in Los Angeles and a few years later a second American branch started near San Francisco. Very little has been heard from the OotL in recent times.”

Molly got the London
Times
microfiche for August 1910, threaded it onto the reader, and wound it to August 19. She found nothing there, but in the next issue, August 20, she was rewarded.
“Colonel Augustus Binder Brings Charged of Fraud in Lesser Applebury,”
a headline said, and under that in smaller type: “‘
The Order of the Labyrinth Promised Me Wealth, Power
,’ He Says.”

The story was the same as that in Swafford-Brown’s history. Binder said that he had been promised an initiation into the secrets of the Order, that he had been asked for money totaling over five thousand pounds, and that finally, at the end of thirty years, he had received nothing but what he called “folderol.” As proof he offered documents he claimed were rituals of the Order, which the
Times
reprinted in a separate article.

“Miss Emily Wethers, who was observed to bite her nails to the quick both on and off the stand, said that the Order had asked for nothing from Colonel Binder,” the story continued. “‘We requested his presence at the meetings, nothing more,’ she said. ‘Where are the five thousand pounds he claims to have spent? I daresay there is no such sum missing from his accounts.’ As her testimony came late in the afternoon the court recessed for the day.”

Molly wound the fiche to the next day, August 21. “She seems awfully nervous,” John said. “Biting her nails to the quick, it said.”

“Maybe she bit them all the time,” Molly said.

“She didn’t mention it.”

“Would you? If you were writing an account of your life would you put in all your bad habits?”

The librarian raised his head and scowled at them. “Okay, okay,” John said. “Here it is.” He pointed to the headline on the screen.
“Fraud Trial Continued in Lesser Applebury
.”

“Colonel Augustus Binder, who claimed to have been defrauded of ‘over five thousand pounds’ by members of the Order of the Labyrinth, received a blow to his case today as his banker, a Mr. Thomas Wheeling, took the stand. According to Mr. Wheeling, ‘Colonel Binder has never withdrawn any large sums of money for which I cannot account, nor has he written cheques to the Order of the Labyrinth or to any of the four defendants.’ Lord Harrison Sanderson’s banker, Mr. Griffin Patmore, took the stand next and noted that Sanderson had never received money from Colonel Binder.

“The proceedings were interrupted by Colonel Binder, who shouted, ‘You’re a pack of liars, all of you. You’ve defrauded me, and Lady Dorothy as well,’ and was suppressed.”