Walking the Labyrinth (14 page)

In desperation I pushed out with my Gift. I flung Augustus against the side of the carriage and opened the door on my side. The pistol shot towards the roof. The other men in the carriage blinked stupidly with surprise. I hurried outside and waved to a passing hansom cab.

I retired again to my bedroom and spent several days in my bed, prostrated by fear and worry. During the long hours alone I turned over in my mind everything Augustus had said. Prime minister. I had little doubt Henry could achieve that for him, and with Augustus’s selfishness, his mania, I knew that the world would suffer greatly at his hands if he did. And I myself in prison, or deported …

I had to talk to Henry. It was one thing for him to frighten me with phantoms, another to promise his aid to this monstrous man. I sent him a letter summoning him to my bedroom.

A knock came at the door two days later. I reached out and saw with surprise that it was my son; I had not truly expected him to answer. “Come,” I said. I sat up, ready to match wits with him.

“I’ve been thinking about magic,” Henry said without preamble, setting his hat on my vanity table. He took a deck of cards from the hat and made them pass from hand to hand without looking at them. They seemed to flow, to be one thing, like a river. “Not old Dorothy’s magick, with that pretentious archaic spelling, but lies. Illusions.”

“Illusions,” I said. “I’ve seen more illusions than I like, these past few months. Why have you set yourself against me?”

He seemed not to hear me. “We could travel, you and I and Florence. We could perform magic shows all over England. People would flock to see us.”

“You’re mad,” I said.

He thrust the deck of cards at me. “Pick a card,” he said.

“No.”

“Very well, then, I’ll pick one. Now I’ll guess what it is. Jack of spades. I’m good, don’t you think? I even amaze myself sometimes.”

“What are you doing? What do you want?”

“I want you to pick a card.”

I took one, if only to silence him. “Two of hearts,” he said.

“Of course. You or I could do that in our sleep. Florence too, probably.”

“We could, but no one else can. People would pay, and pay well, to see us.”

“I don’t understand you. Why should we perform tricks for gaping fools? What is the meaning of these strange fancies?”

“Meaning?” he asked softly. He sat at my vanity table, studying his face in the mirror. Suddenly he pushed aside my silver-backed brushes and combs, my tinctures and perfumes, with his arm. He set his cards on the table one by one, some flat, some on their side. “Do illusions, do lies, have a meaning?” He balanced a card on top of a layer of others. “Sometimes they do, I suppose. The lies you tell Dorothy about her husband, for example.”

“What of them? What harm have I done? You’re too young to remember, but there was a time when Lady Dorothy refused to leave her house. If I can make her life a little happier—”

“And enrich yourself in the process—”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m about to tell you some unpleasant truths.”

“Oh, don’t, please. I’d much rather hear pleasant lies.”

I ignored him. “When Lydia left, your father lost a great deal of money,” I said. I had never told him this, did not know how much he had guessed. “His finances have never really recovered—our life here has been more precarious than you ever supposed. Lady Dorothy has been extraordinarily generous, has helped us many times over. In exchange I give her messages from her husband. If she ever withdrew her support we might as well move to the poorhouse. We might as well travel like gipsies, performing that magic show you’re so crazy for.”

He smiled; I saw his gapped teeth in the mirror. “I ask for lies, and lies are what I get,” he said. “Lydia didn’t leave Harrison. And you’ve already admitted you never gave Dorothy messages from her husband.”

“You have benefitted from what I’ve done as much as any. I was a laundress, and look at you—you’ve gone to away to university—”

“In America, since no school in England would admit a laundress’s bastard.” He set down another card. “And most people still snub us in the streets.”

“In America, yes. What of it? If not for Lady Dorothy you would be in service by now, a butler or a coachman. And they snub us because of that madman Colonel Binder and his suit—”

“Binder’s suit has nothing to do with it. They never spoke to us before that, because you were a serving girl and not even married to the father of your children.”

“Why are you so quick to come to Binder’s defence? He threatened me with a pistol, did you know that? And yet you see the justice of his position, and you won’t see mine.”

Henry looked up from the house of cards he was constructing and turned slowly towards me. I sensed that he was at a loss, and I pressed my advantage without quite knowing what it was. “I’ve lied to Lady Dorothy, yes,” I said. “But you have done far worse by agreeing to help Binder and his friends.”

“Have I?”

“Of course. What were you thinking of, promising Binder he would become prime minister? Don’t you realise how much harm the two of you can do?”

“You’ve misunderstood my question. Have I agreed to help Binder?”

“Haven’t you? He claims you did.”

“But have I?”

I reached out with my Gift. For the first time in my life I could read nothing at all. Henry smiled infuriatingly. Had Binder lied to me? Why had I been so quick to imagine the worst of my son? Could it be that he had not turned away from me after all?

“You haven’t joined Colonel Binder and his friends,” I said.

He nodded. He looked at me as a teacher might study an apt pupil, waiting for something.

“You haven’t turned against me,” I said. “Binder lied about you, to frighten me.” He nodded again. “But then why did you send me all those apparitions? Why did you frighten me nearly to death?”

He set down a last card. “Lies,” he said. “Lies and truth. And illusion, which can be used in the service of either.” He pulled out a card from the bottom layer of the house he had fashioned. Impossibly, the house remained standing. He grinned, and the cards fell in a heap.

“I think I see,” I said slowly. “Our house here, everything I have built, is based on illusions. Illusions I have created in the service of lies.”

“The lies you told Dorothy about her husband,” Henry said. “And the lies you told about Lydia.” He paused. “A few months ago Father told me something about how Dorothy had helped us. After I left him I went over the account books without his knowledge. I was not aware that the deception had gone on for so long, or that it had involved such a large amount of money. If it continues Dorothy will lose her house, and everything she has. She may be in danger even now.”

“So the illusions you created were in the service of truth, the truth about our position here,” I said. “They frightened me, yes, but you meant them to make me think, to shake me up a bit.” I laughed, a little breathless. “I have—I have explored another turning of the Labyrinth.”

My son laughed too. He retrieved the cards, put on his hat, and walked out.

After he had gone I spent a long time thinking about the things he had said. I thought of the serving girl I had been, the brown innocent maid from the country. When had wealth started to matter to me, and position? I remembered the man and woman in the Labyrinth, their riches piled so high on the table between them that they could barely see each other, and I understood that they were Harrison and myself, that our money had become more important to us than the enjoyment of each other’s company. And I remembered what had become of those two figures in the tableau, their bodies picked to skeletons.

I thought of lies, and of truth. At first I had lied to Dorothy in order to save her, to rescue her from her prison of brick and glass. But when Harrison had lost all that money I continued the deception in part because she was so generous to us—and I had done it without thinking, with my only aim that of preserving our fortune. Was it lying to tell Lady Dorothy the things she most wanted to hear? Was it lying to tell her those things for profit? She had made a thousand decisions based on what I had told her about her husband. Shouldn’t those decisions have been made clearly, from truth?

And what of Colonel Binder? Had I truly promised him what he claimed in court, power and wealth? His presence at our meetings, a respected military man, had added to our prestige. Could I have offered him these things to urge him to stay, things I had no intention of giving him?

How had I changed so, over the years? Gradually, and without noticing it, I had become seduced by wealth, by position. This is my testament to you, Dorothy my friend, so you will have no doubt noticed how many times I referred to you as “Lady.” And yet we were friends, with the friendship of equals. I was intoxicated by that word “Lady,” as intoxicated as I was by Harrison’s title. Lord Harrison. I even wrote, on scraps of paper, “Lady Emily Sanderson.” Oh, I was seduced, truly I was!

Henry was right. Riches and power count for little. What matters lies beyond that: self-knowledge, self-mastery, a world outside our narrow lives here. I saw that this was precisely what I had tried to teach Dorothy when I had urged her to leave her house, and I understood as well that such things cannot be taught directly. They have to be shown, as my son had shown me, as I could show others.

In addition, our position in England was becoming intolerable. Colonel Binder and his cronies had not exhausted their store of malice; we were in very real danger from them. And Dorothy—I owed it to you, Dorothy, to tell you the truth.

I spent a long time alone with these thoughts. And at the end of it I decided on many things. I called my family to me, my son Henry and his wife Edwina, my daughter Florence, my lover Harrison. It was dangerous to stay here, I told them, faced with Colonel Binder’s viciousness; it was always dangerous to offer power and not deliver it. Binder had waited thirty years to make his move, and that only because he had never been certain of the extent of my Gift. Foolishly, I had shown him what I could do that day in the Labyrinth.

We discussed various alternatives, and finally we decided to emigrate to America. We spent a giddy day choosing new names for each of us, making certain that Binder would never find us. I understood from the books Harrison had given me that America was an invented country, a state of mind. And so we picked invented names, the stranger the better: I changed into Neesa Allalie, Henry turned into Verey, Florence into Lanty. Henry and Edwina’s daughters, who were then three and two, became Thorne and Fentrice.

I will send you money from America, as much as I can. When I first met you I was still, in many ways, an ignorant farm girl. I knew nothing of finances; I thought that lords and ladies had money and the common people had none, and that this was the way it had been and would always be. The only way I knew to get money for Harrison and my children was to accept it when you offered. I’ve learned a great deal since then. When you can see a little ways into the future, making investments becomes remarkably easy. I will try to give you back everything I owe you.

And I wrote this book, which I will have delivered to you, Dorothy, when I am gone. And I did the one last, necessary thing I told you of, and then we went to America.

SEVEN

Uncle Sam

M
olly finished reading. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” John said, writing quickly. “Neesa, Verey, Lanty. Fentrice, Thorne. There, we found her—Thorne. But what happened to Callan? And Lydia?”

“Callan was born in America,” Molly said, taking out the genealogy she had sketched on the back of Andrew Dodd’s article from the
Tribune.
It had become smudged and torn, tattered at the edges.

“All right, but what about Lydia? Where did she go? Emily apparently saw her in the labyrinth, thought that her hair looked like a pool of blood. Was that her guilty conscience speaking?”

“What—you think she killed her? First you have my aunt kill Thorne, and now my great-great-grandmother kills Lydia? You really think we’re a bloodthirsty bunch, don’t you? I suppose Fentrice came all the way from Illinois to kill that man in the storefront, Joseph Ottig. I mean, she’s only eighty-seven.”

John held up his hand. “Of course not. But what did happen to Thorne? We have Emily’s own testimony that Thorne and Fentrice were sisters.”

Molly hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said finally.

“Could your aunt have lied to you?” John asked.

“Maybe. Maybe she did. But what do I do now? Go back and confront her? Maybe Thorne died, and if I asked Fentrice to talk about her death it would bring back unpleasant memories. She isn’t young—she’s—”

“Eighty-seven. You told me.” He paged back through his notebook. “What was the one last thing Emily did before she left for America, I wonder?”

“But look how much we know,” Molly said. She took a pen from her purse and added the names Emily had listed to her genealogy. She hesitated, wrote
“Thorne”
and a question mark. “The family left England because Emily had a change of heart, because she and her son wanted to use their talents to help others. That’s why they became traveling magicians—not because they’d come down in the world, but because they wanted to teach. Look what they did for Andrew Dodd, for example—he stopped drinking after he interviewed them, married and settled down and raised a family.”

“You’re giving them an awful lot of credit,” John said. “The way I see it, they left because Colonel Binder threatened them, and because they’d been ridiculed in the papers. And maybe because Dorothy stopped giving them money. Dorothy and Emily obviously had a falling-out—Dorothy moved Emily’s window, the Capricorn window. In Emily’s book she says you can see the sun shining through it.”

“I bet she moved the window because Emily finally told her the truth—that she’d never gotten any messages from her husband. We know Emily managed to deliver the book to her because we found it in the library. Imagine how Dorothy must have felt when she read it.”

“Angry at being duped, probably. Emily practically admits she did it for the money.”