Walking the Labyrinth (4 page)

“No, I ate on the plane,” Molly said.

“Why don’t you get a good night’s sleep then? We’ll talk in the morning.”

“I’m not tired. It’s only eight o’clock in California. Aunt Fentrice, I wanted to ask you—”

“Well, I’m tired, dear. It’s been a long drive for me.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking—” Lila came in and set the car keys on Fentrice’s desk. Even Lila was older, Molly saw with surprise. The housekeeper seemed to have grown smaller; she shuffled rather than walked, her shoulders stooped. “I’ll let you go then. See you in the morning.” Molly kissed Fentrice and went upstairs.

Her old room was as she had left it, the brass bed with its patchwork quilt, the small scarred wooden desk. Over the desk hung an old map of the world, now badly outdated; she used to study it instead of doing her homework, wondering what the exotic-sounding places were like. To the right of the desk was a bookshelf over-filled with her childhood books:
The Jungle Book, Hans Brinker, The Hobbit, The Phantom Tollbooth
.

She had spent whole afternoons reading in this room, she remembered. She had rarely invited anyone over, preferring instead to go to other kids’ houses. Had she been ashamed of Fentrice? Or was it that she didn’t want the kids at school to know too much about her and her aunt, didn’t want to give them ammunition for their crude jokes and insults?

When Molly came into the kitchen the next day Fentrice had breakfast ready, pancakes and tea and slices of cantaloupe. “Real maple syrup,” Molly said, delighted. “You can hardly find this in California.”

Fentrice smiled. She sat opposite Molly at the round oak table. Sunlight came in through the window. “How did you sleep?” she asked.

Molly added milk to her tea. “Wonderful,” she said. “Listen, Aunt Fentrice—this man’s been bothering me again.”

“Which man, dear?”

“The one asking questions about you. He showed me a clipping about your family, about you and Callan and someone named Thorne—”

“Thorne! I haven’t thought about her in years. Lila, dear, there’s no water left in the kettle. You’ll have to add some more before you turn the stove on.”

Molly nodded to the housekeeper. “Morning, Lila. Was Thorne related to you?” she asked Fentrice.

“Oh no. She joined us somewhere along the way. I don’t remember where now. And then she left us—Oh, it’s all so long ago.”

“The clipping said you were sisters. That you looked like her.”

“Did it? How odd.”

“Here.” Molly took the Xeroxed article from her pocket and put it on the table between them.

“Andrew Dodd! Do you know, I think I remember him. Cocky young man, he was.”

“He remembers you too.”

“Is he still alive? Good Lord. Whatever happened to him?”

“He got married, apparently. Quit drinking. Had some kids, grandkids. Look, Aunt Fentrice—”

“Did you go to see him? Andrew Dodd? Why?”

“Because of all these—all these questions.” Molly spoke quickly. “He said you were wild, that you wore scanty clothes, that you and Thorne played tricks on him.”

Fentrice laughed. “He must have confused us with some other act.” She turned the article over, saw Molly’s attempt at a family genealogy. “Well, if you’re interested in the family you should have asked me. Let me see …” She picked up a pencil. “Our parents were named Verey and Edwina Allalie. And our grandparents, Verey’s parents, were—let me think. Neesa and Harry.” She wrote those names on the page.

“Allalie?” Molly asked.

“What, dear?” Fentrice frowned and crossed out Thorne’s name, then looked up at Molly.

“Were their names Allalie too? Neesa and Harry?”

“I think so. They were my father’s parents, so—oh, I remember now. We changed our name when we came to the United States.”

“Changed your name? Why?”

“Everyone did it then. We were immigrants, starting a new life.”

“Where did the family come from?”

“Somewhere in England.”

“What was the old name? Do you remember?”

“No. In fact I think I had another name in England, not Fentrice.” She thought for a while, shook her head. “Well, it’s gone now. I was two years old when we got here, I think. That’s right—it was 1910. Callan hadn’t even been born yet.”

“Really? You were born in England? Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“There was nothing to tell, really. I certainly don’t remember it.”

“Why did the family come here?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A new life, a fresh beginning. A lot of people did it.”

“When did you start touring?”

“Our parents did it—it was in our blood, you might say. Callan took to magic right away, from when he was a small child.” Fentrice frowned again. “I used to wonder if that was healthy for him. Towards the end it sometimes seemed that he couldn’t tell truth from lies.”

“The clipping said the family had been touring for centuries.”

“Did it really? Oh, dear.”

“Can I see the scrapbook?”

“Of course. Finish your breakfast and we’ll have a look for it.”

But though Fentrice searched in all her closets and even ventured down to the basement, she couldn’t find the scrapbook anywhere. And then it was time for lunch, and after lunch Fentrice went out to work in her garden. The housekeeper had the afternoon off.

Molly wandered through the house, looking at the familiar paintings and vases, the spinet piano. On the piano was a black-and-white photograph of her aunt as a much younger woman, her light brown hair parted in the middle and drawn back in a bun. She had lifted her head and was smiling, eager, the gap between her teeth clearly visible. At her feet was the trunk Molly remembered.

The trunk. What better place to keep a scrapbook, mementos from the past? Molly went upstairs to her aunt’s bedroom and found the trunk where she had seen it last, at the foot of the bed. She knelt and unlatched the large metal lock.

The trunk smelled of cedar, though it was not made of wood. Molly lifted out carefully folded clothes, necklaces and bracelets wrapped in tissue paper. Something hard and flat lay at the bottom. She pushed the clothing aside quickly and looked inside.

It was a small block of cedar. She took out the clothes and the block and felt around but could find nothing else. She sat back, disappointed.

The trunk seemed larger on the outside than on the inside. Could there be a false bottom, a hidden drawer? But what would her aunt have to hide? Damn John Stow anyway, him and his suspicions.

Almost without thinking she felt along the inside of the trunk. Her fingers found a hole at one of the corners. She pulled. The bottom lifted out.

She looked inside eagerly, excited. There was nothing there. She nearly shouted aloud in frustration.

She picked up the false bottom and started to put it back. Something was taped to the underside, a large manila envelope.
Probably empty, after all I’ve been through
, Molly thought. But her fingers were trembling as she pulled it off.

She opened the envelope and took out a yellowing pamphlet.
“A History of the True and Antient Order of the Labyrinth,”
the cover said.
“A Lecture by Lady Dorothy Westingate, Adept of the Eighth Grade. London, 1884.”

The pages inside were filled with small, barely legible print. “I’d like to thank all those who provided me with this platform from which to disseminate the fruits of my years of research, in particular the Master of our Order, Lord Harrison Sanderson, and his wife Lydia,” Molly read. “In this lecture I intend to prove the antient and legitimate ancestry of our Order, and to defend it against those quarrelsome members of other orders who claim for us an existence of only ten years.”

Molly began to skim. Lady Westingate did not seem to think in paragraphs; each page was a solid block of type. “All around us lies the evidence of a race of labyrinth-builders,” Molly read. “The Cretan Palace of Minos … the Druids, the age-old Masters of India, the inhabitants of the drowned cities of Atlantis … an aura of the most spotless blue … a task for which our souls have laboured through many lifetimes.” The abbreviation of the name of order, “OotL,” was always printed in boldface, and had smeared in several places.

Molly read on. “One proof, however, I am prepared to give, and that is the ineluctable fact of our magick. We of the OotL are able to create and destroy, to bind and to loose, to bend the world to our will. There is no other order in all of Britain, I daresay in all the world, that is able to do this. Our guides in the spirit realm, revealed to us by our guide upon this Earth, Miss Emily Wethers, have shown us miracles that no man can deny: we have all seen them. We alone hold the wisdom that has descended to us through the ages.”

“Molly!” Fentrice called.

Only now did Molly feel as if she had intruded on something private. She put the pamphlet in the envelope and taped the envelope to the false bottom, then put the bottom back and quickly replaced the clothes and jewelry. “Yes?”

“I’ve found the scrapbook,” Fentrice said. “Where are you?”

Molly closed and latched the trunk. She stood. “I’m coming, Aunt Fentrice,” she said, and hurried downstairs.

“Look at this,” Fentrice said, sounding disgusted with herself. She sat at the oak table in the kitchen with the open scrapbook in front of her. “It was in with my cookbooks.”

Molly sat next to her. “There—that’s Callan, your grandfather,” Fentrice said. “And this is me—can you believe I was ever so young?”

“And who’s that?” Molly asked, pointing to a woman on the other side of Callan.

“Do you know, I think that’s Thorne. Yes, it must be. I don’t think we look anything alike—that young man Andrew must be seeing things.”

Not so young anymore, Molly thought. “Where did you get the tiger?”

“The tiger—let me think. Callan rescued her from another act, I believe. That’s right. They had mistreated her dreadfully—it took her a long time before she would trust anyone but Callan. Several people in the act wanted us to leave her behind.”

Fentrice turned the page. Molly saw a candid black-and-white photo of her aunt sitting at a bench at a train station, a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“When did you quit smoking?” Molly asked.

“A few years before you were born, I think. We didn’t know smoking was harmful in those days—in fact, we believed it was good for us. I could never understand why it was so hard for me to climb a flight of stairs.”

The next photograph showed an old woman bent over a table. It took a moment for Molly to realize that she was playing pool. “Ah,” said Fentrice. “That’s my grandmother. Neesa Allalie.”

“She played pool?”

Fentrice laughed. “Toward the end of her life that’s all she did. She seemed to have lost interest in everything else.”

There were yellowed newspaper reviews on the next few pages, chips from their corners missing.
“Scintillating,”
the headlines said.
“Stunning.”

Molly stopped her aunt from paging ahead. “Look at this, a clipping from London. Did you play there? What was it like?”

“London, let me think. No, I can’t remember. It was all so long ago. …” She turned the page.
“Magicians Dazzle at the Paramount,”
a headline said. “Hey,” Molly said. “It’s the article from the
Tribune
.”

“Why so it is,” Fentrice said.

“He said he made it all up. Andrew Dodd. He said that he couldn’t remember anything when he got home.”

“Poor man. Drank too much, as I remember.”

“He said he gave up drinking after he interviewed you.”

“Well,” said Fentrice, “I guess we did something right after all.”

“There’s another picture of Thorne. She must have been with you in Oakland.”

“She must have been.” Fentrice turned the page to a black-and-white photograph. “See this baby Callan’s holding? That’s his daughter, your mother Joan. He was so proud of that child.”

“My God,” Molly said, struck by several emotions at once, sorrow and love and curiosity and even anger at the mother who had died and left her.

“Here she is again,” Fentrice said, pointing to a photograph Molly recognized. It showed a woman kneeling to talk to a child. “And that’s you. You were two years old, I think.”

“You know, I think I remember her. I can see her kneeling, just like this. But then I wonder if it’s this picture I remember. You gave me a copy when I went away to college.”

“That’s right, I did.”

Fentrice’s bridge group visited the next day. Lila got out biscuits and the china tea service and set them on the table, then retired to the kitchen. Fentrice poured the tea.

These women had come to play bridge for as long as Molly could remember. There were three of them, all unmarried like her aunt. Vivian and Lillian were sisters who dressed alike; as a child Molly had had trouble telling them apart. They used to hug her and pinch her cheek hard enough to hurt. “Oh, how sweet!” they would exclaim to each other, far too loudly. They smelled of face cream and too much makeup. Molly had quickly learned to keep her distance from them.

There had always been something odd about the third woman, Estelle. Now that she was grown Molly could see what it was: Estelle was a little slow, confused by the simplest things, flustered even by the ritual of pouring the tea. Her teeth were straight and perfectly white—dentures, Molly realized. Her dress was loose and shapeless, like a sack, but she was festooned with jewelry, dangling earrings, massive necklaces, rings that covered her fingers up to the knuckles. She had always worn heavy black glasses, the lenses growing thicker over the years; now they looked like goldfish bowls, the eyes swimming behind them. Estelle was also, Molly remembered, the best bridge player of the four of them.

“Goodness, Molly,” one of the sisters said when they had settled to their tea. “Look how she’s grown!”

“How sweet she looks,” the other sister said.

“Hi, everyone,” Molly said. She never stayed for the bridge games, had never even learned how to play. “I think I’ll go out for a while, see how the town’s changed.”

“Be back by dinner,” Fentrice said.

Molly stepped out the front door. Odd, she thought, that three such strange old women should all live in the same small town. Four, really, counting her aunt. Did the kids call the other ones witches too? She couldn’t remember, recalled only the hurtful comments about her and Fentrice.