Walking the Labyrinth (7 page)

“A magic show?” Molly asked. “Do you remember which one?”

“How could I forget? The Endicott Family.”

Not the Allalies
, Molly thought, disappointed.
Well, why should it have been, after all?

“But I don’t suppose you came all this way for my life story,” Charles said. “What do you want to know about the house?”

“When was it built?” John asked.

“Dorothy started the house in 1878, with money she inherited from her husband,” Charles said. “It took her five years. She added to it for years afterwards, of course. In this next room, for example …”

He led Molly, John and Kathy through the arched doorway into a hallway, and then to a room with a vaulted ceiling even higher than that of the drawing room. Marble pillars reached to arches which upheld the ceiling. Light shone through stained glass windows recessed beneath the arches.

“This is the Great Hall,” Charles said. “See the windows? There are twelve of them, three to a wall. Most people assume they represent the zodiac and in fact they do, but they’re also Dorothy’s family. Aquarius, here, this man pouring a water jug—that’s Dorothy’s husband. This one here is her son, doubled for Gemini. Virgo is Dorothy herself.”

Lady Dorothy seemed too ordinary to be immortalized in a window. She wore a hat and had the peering look of someone who had just taken off her spectacles.

“The account books say these windows were commissioned in 1885, when Dorothy was thirty-five,” Charles went on. “Dorothy’s son, in the Gemini window, was twelve. They were designed by Sir Edward Poynter.” To Molly’s blank look he said, “He later became president of the Royal Academy.”

“Who are the rest of them?” Molly asked.

“I’ve no idea,” Charles said. “Other relatives, presumably.”

The sun shone through the eastern windows, deepening the blue water of Aquarius, sparkling the yellow and gold fish in Pisces. One corner of the room was still in shadow. Molly could barely make out a young woman throwing a dark red shawl over her head. A lamb stood next to her. “Isn’t Capricorn supposed to be a goat?” she asked.

Charles went on ahead; he seemed not to have heard her. They toured the smoking room, the breakfast room, the dining room, the conservatory. “I know it’s absurd, all this space,” Charles said. “We don’t even entertain much. Most evenings we stay home and watch the telly, just as you do, probably.” He shrugged. “The library is this way.”

They entered a room filled with rows of books bound in red and brown and black. A wooden spiral staircase led up to a second story, a sort of mezzanine which was also lined with bookshelves. John took down a small pamphlet, holding it carefully.

“What have you got there?” Lord Charles asked.

“Lady Dorothy’s pamphlet. ‘A History of the True and Antient Order of the Labyrinth.’ I was wondering if you had a copy.” He glanced through the pages.

“It’s quite fragile, really,” Charles said, smiling his diffident smile. He held out a hand and after a moment John gave him the pamphlet. His hesitation was not embarrassment, Molly realized, but a way of keeping others at a distance, almost a form of rudeness. Charles returned the pamphlet to the shelves. Although he seemed proud of Lady Westingate’s peculiar house it was clear that he did not want to discuss her later folly, the Order of the Labyrinth.

“Is there anything else you’d like to see?” Charles asked. “We’ve mostly bedrooms upstairs, and servants’ rooms in the attic. They’re not terribly interesting, I’m afraid. Princess Helena and her husband, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, stayed in the blue room once. She was a daughter of Queen Victoria.”

“The labyrinth, if we could,” Molly said.

“Yes, of course. Kathy, would you show them the basement?”

“Sure,” Kathy said. “This way.”

Kathy led them out of the library and down a long hallway. She stopped before a door remarkable only for its plainness: unlike the other doors they had seen it was not carved or gilded or painted in any way. She opened it, turned on a light, and started down a flight of stairs.

The room at the bottom was filled with the clutter of generations: boots and broken mechanical toys, hunting rifles, chairs with three legs, a stuffed deer’s head. Paintings leaned against the walls.

Molly looked closer at the paintings. They seemed to be stilted nature scenes. “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings,” Kathy said. “I know they’re dire. We didn’t paint them, thank God.”

“Who did?” Molly asked.

“The last family that owned the house,” Kathy said. “Dreadful people. Industrialists playing at being gentry.”

“I thought the Westingates owned the house,” Molly said.

“We lost it for a while,” Kathy said. “Fortunately Charles was able to buy it back.”

How?
Molly thought. She was just about to ask when she felt John step on her foot. She looked at him, annoyed. How were they going to learn anything if they didn’t ask questions?

Upstairs a bell rang, and was answered. More bells chimed in. “Tibetan music,” Kathy said. “My husband loves it. And the acoustics in the Great Hall are fantastic. The labyrinth is this way.”

They picked their way through the jumble on the floor and stopped before another door, this one open. A hallway lay beyond it; several feet down another hallway branched off at right angles to the first one. Kathy switched on the light. The walls were blue, lit by frosted white lamps placed at intervals along the corridor.

“Do you know how to get out?” Molly asked.

“I did once,” Kathy said. “When we moved back Charles and I went exploring. I don’t know if I’d remember, though.”

They heard a tinny double ring upstairs, clashing with the Tibetan bells. “Damn, there goes the phone,” Kathy said. “Charles won’t answer that. Excuse me a minute.” She hurried back through the room and up the stairs.

“Why don’t you let me ask questions?” Molly said when she had gone.

“How long have you been a detective?” John said.

“I’ve got to start somewhere.”

“Okay. You can start by letting me teach you something. Very few people want to talk about their money. If they do they’ll bring it up themselves. Charles mentioned the family fortune a few times—he’s the one I’d ask about finances. He wants to pretend all this means nothing to him, but you notice he keeps dropping names. Kathy wants to think she’s British aristocracy.”

“How do you know?”

“Look at her clothing. Nothing fancy, even a little worn. Reverse snobbery. And did you notice how sarcastic she was about the family who had lived here before? She has even less right to play at being gentry—at least they were British. My guess is that Charles married her for the money and she married him for the title. It’s a common enough arrangement. That’s probably how they managed to buy the house.”

“But she said ‘When we moved back.’”

“She was speaking figuratively. When we the Westingates moved back to our ancestral home. You can see now why they wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

“How are we going to find out, then?”

“Look into the sale of the property. Read the newspaper articles or the church registry about their wedding and then trace her through her maiden name. Hang out at the local pub.”

Molly shivered. The basement was even colder than the drawing room had been.

“It’s obvious they’re trying to conserve money,” John said. “I’ll bet there’s only one room in the entire house that’s well heated. And did you notice they don’t seem to have any servants?”

“So who keeps it clean?”

“They probably hire …” John paused. “Sheep!” he said. “Of course.”

“What?” Molly said.

“I’ve got to check something out. Go into the labyrinth. Try to get lost.”

She almost said “What?” again. But John had left, hurrying toward the stairs. She walked down the blue hallway and turned right at the first door.

This corridor led to another room. A man sat at a desk, his head bent over a newspaper. She nearly cried aloud. Then she saw that the figure was a statue, a mannequin.

She put her hand on her heart. Good Lord. Who would create such a thing, and why? Now she could see that the man was dressed in somber Victorian clothing, and that there was a thick layer of dust on his shoulders and hair. A tea tray with china cups and a silver teapot, also covered with dust, sat to the left of the newspaper. The desk held a blotter, several fountain pens, and a gilt clock. The newspaper was dated 1887 and said something about Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.

As she left the room she glanced over her shoulder to make sure she hadn’t imagined it.

The next rooms were just as odd, or odder. In one a hanged man dangled from a beam in the ceiling. In another a woman stood, holding a lion on a heavy chain; as Molly got closer she could see that the woman was blindfolded. A third room looked like a treasury, with a hoard of necklaces and rings and brooches sparkling in the light from the frosted white lamp. A man knelt on the floor and lifted a chain of jewels to his face, an expression of wonderment on his face.

Once she thought she saw the first room, the man at the desk, ahead of her. Relieved, she began to run; she had found her way to the beginning of the maze. But when she got there she saw that the scene was different: the newspaper had been opened to another page, and a dark stain covered most of it. She looked up and saw that the man had shot himself; the stain was blood. She hurried to the door and turned at random down a hallway.

The rooms opened out into corridors, or the corridors swelled to contain the rooms. The road was no longer straight but twisted, branching. There were bends in the labyrinth that revealed towers, gardens, grottoes.

In the weeks and months that followed Molly would sometimes wonder if she had ever left the labyrinth. It seemed large enough to contain forests and rivers, streets and signposts, even entire cities. Maybe all the strange and confusing things she was to encounter later were only more rooms in the endlessly forking maze, each a tableau cunningly arranged by whoever had invented this. Maybe everyone in the world—clerks and cab drivers, her aunt and all her friends and coworkers—was an allegory for something else.

“Molly!” someone called.

“Over here!” she said.

“Where?” It was John.

“Don’t come in. Keep shouting—I’ll find you.”

She followed the sound of his voice. The hall grew straighter as she went. Finally she passed through a door and thought she saw the first room she had entered, the one with the man at the desk, across the corridor. But what if it wasn’t? What if the John she had heard was different from the John she had come to the house with? She hurried to the room to make certain.

“I see you!” John said. “Molly! Where are you going?”

“Oh, dear,” she heard someone else say. It was Kathy Westingate. “I should have warned you about the labyrinth.”

“Molly!” John said.

Sure now that this was the same room Molly went back to the hallway and headed toward John. “Oh, dear,” Kathy said as Molly joined them. “You’re covered with dust.”

“There are whole
rooms
in there,” Molly said.

“It’s not really safe to go in without a guide,” Kathy said.

“Rooms with people, mannequins,” Molly said. “Jewels. Flowers. Animals.”

John looked at Kathy Westingate. “Is that true?” he asked.

“Animals?” Kathy said. She shook her head. “I don’t—it was some kind of initiation, I think.”

“For the Order of the Labyrinth?” John asked.

“I think so. I’m sorry—I should have warned you.”

“I’m all right,” Molly said. With every second that passed she felt more rooted in the present. She couldn’t possibly have seen everything she thought she’d seen; she had become confused, disoriented. “Don’t worry about it. It was interesting, actually. Did Lady Dorothy build the maze?”

“Yes,” Kathy said. She led them back up the stairs to the ground floor. “Would you like to see anything else?”

“I don’t think so,” John said.

They said good-bye to the Westingates and thanked them for their hospitality. John called a cab.

When they were seated safely in the back seat of the cab Molly said, “Are you going to tell me what that was all about? Sheep?”

John drew a book out of the inner pocket of his jacket. It was bound in cracked and faded brown leather; there was no title on the cover. “Did you steal that?” Molly asked. “From the library?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, he says. Calmly, like he’s done it all his life. What on earth did you do that for? Is that why you wanted me to go into the labyrinth—so that if Lady Westingate got off the phone too soon you could tell her I was lost? Create a diversion?”

“Yeah.”

“John—”

“Okay, okay. Do you remember the stained glass window of the woman and the sheep? When you said you thought Capricorn was a goat?”

Molly nodded.

“There was someone mentioned in the pamphlet by the name of Emily Wethers. A wether is a castrated sheep. When I realized that I remembered that this book had been shelved next to Lady Westingate’s pamphlet, and that the books were alphabetical by author. So this could well be by Emily Wethers, or if not then maybe another book by Lady Westingate.”

He opened to the first page.
“An Account of My Life, by Emily Wethers,”
it said. The handwriting was flowing, graceful. Molly turned the page.

“I was born in the country, around 1860,” the same hand continued. “There are those who think that rustics are silly, untutored creatures, and so we are, some of us and some of the time. Yet we can learn. It is because I have learned that I am able to write this book. I owe it to you, my old friend, to tell you the truth for once, without deception and without art.”

John closed the book. “We’ll read it at the bed and breakfast,” he said.

“Who was she?” Molly said. “I like her already. What did she have to do with the Westingates? Who is she writing to?”

“We’ll find out.”

“John? How did you know that—about the sheep?”

“I read a lot.”

“Sounds like it. Sheep and silverware—what else do you know? Where did you learn to steal like that?”

John shrugged. “Here and there.”