Walking the Labyrinth (8 page)

“Are you going to return the book?”

“Well, of course I am. We’ll pay another call on the Westingates and I’ll slip it back into the library. What do you take me for?”

“I don’t know,” Molly said.

FOUR

An Account of My Life, by Emily Wethers

I
was born in the country, around 1860. 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.

My parents and brothers and sisters all had what we called the Gift, which had manifested itself in our family as far back as memories ran. It is the Gift that allows us to find lost hats and gloves, to guess what a man will say before he speaks, to make objects disappear in one place and reappear in another. The villagers would occasionally come to us for advice on stray sheep or matters of the heart; their parents, and their grandparents, and their great-grandparents had all done the same before them.

Harrison once asked me whether the villagers had thought of us as witches, and seemed startled when I laughed. The villagers had grown up with us, and thought our skills nothing untoward.

The Gift was strongest in me. My grandmother could remember her grandmother, a woman who lived in village memory as the one who had calmed the great storm of the last century. My grandmother said that with my brown hair and blue eyes and the gap between my teeth I looked very much like her, and that my talent was perhaps as strong as hers.

When I was seventeen or eighteen (our village did not keep track of such anniversaries) I went to work as a laundress in the great house. I was conscientious about my duties, and if it appeared that some item of clothing would not be ready in time I would use the Gift to see that it was cleaned. I did not do this often; I knew that I would be overwhelmed with work if the other servants had an idea of the extent of my talent.

The daughter of the house, Miss Sylvia, enjoyed taking her carriage to London, where she would spend a few days making the rounds of dressmakers and milliners and visiting her friends. She would generally take her maid, Henrietta, but on the day my life changed Henrietta had fallen ill. The housekeeper, a sour, squinting old woman named Jane, was given the task of finding a reliable girl to travel with Miss Sylvia, and as it happened her gaze fell upon me.

“You, girl,” she said. “You’ve a level head on your shoulders. Can you take charge of Miss Sylvia’s toilette?”

I said that I could, and we set off for London.

This was the first time I had been to London, and it appeared to me splendid beyond belief, a riot of sound and smell and colour. I had never seen so many people, nor carriages, nor houses jostling together side by side. We left our bags at the house of one of Miss Sylvia’s friends and set off to the dressmakers’ shops.

As we entered the first shop a couple was leaving. The man wore fashionable muttonchops and a high bowler hat; the woman had a pale face and astonishingly bright red hair which she had pinned tightly under her hat, almost as if she were ashamed of so much richness. He had tucked the woman’s arm under his, and she was cradling her stomach protectively with her other hand.

So preoccupied was she that she very nearly pushed me back into the street. It was not this that aroused my ire, however, but the fact that the man raised his bowler hat and apologised, not to me but to Miss Sylvia.

“You don’t need to be so careful of your wife,” I said to him. “She ain’t pregnant.”

I think it was the word “pregnant,” never used in polite company, that stopped him. “What?” he said.

“She ain’t pregnant,” I said again.

Lady Lydia looked at me hatefully, but the man, Lord Harrison Sanderson, seemed not to notice. “Who are you?” he asked wonderingly. “How could you possibly know such a thing?”

“Come, Harrison,” Lady Lydia said. “We’ll be late for the lecture.” And Harrison raised his hat again, this time to me, and allowed himself to be led away.

It was easy enough for Harrison to find us again. He asked his friends, not of course about me but about Miss Sylvia, and his inquiries led to the great house in our village. I had had a premonition of his visit, and so I was not at all surprised to see his carriage coming up the drive a few weeks later.

He was not terribly clever, my Harrison, but he knew enough to spend a few hours in polite conversation before asking about a mere lady’s maid. It was getting on towards supper before he was finally led downstairs to the laundry room.

“What is her name?” he asked.

“Em,” Miss Sylvia said, and at the same time I said, “Emily Wethers, sir,” and curtsied.

“Well, Em,” he said. He was terribly earnest; he seemed always to consult some inner moral code before taking any action whatsoever. His hair and beard were wavy and black, almost blue in some lights, and he had deep brown eyes, concerned eyes. He wore a watch chain of heavy gold that draped across his stomach before disappearing into his vest pocket. He seemed anxious not to be thought patronising, and so, of course, I found him the most patronising fellow I had ever met. “How did you know that my wife—that we had hoped for the arrival of a child?”

“There’s lots I know, my lord,” I said. “I know that you’re an adept of the Eighth Grade of the Order of the Labyrinth, but you want to be Tenth Grade. I know that you and your wife wanted a child for nigh on five years.”

“How—”

“It’s the Gift, my lord,” I said. “We all have it in my family.”

I knew this would intrigue him, and it did. I will not bore you with the details, but before nightfall I had a new master: Lord Harrison had taken me on at twice my previous salary.

The next day we set off for London. For several weeks, though, nothing seemed to have changed: I continued to work in the laundry, though now I worked for Lord Harrison and his household. I was introduced to Lady Lydia the day I arrived but fortunately she did not recognise me; she paid little attention to servants.

One day Lord Harrison made his way down to the laundry room, a serving girl in tow. It was the first time I had seen him since coming to work in his household.

“Em,” he said. “I’d like you to get dressed. This girl here will help you. I’ll be presenting you to the Order of the Labyrinth tonight.”

I heard the excitement in his voice but did not know its cause. There were things here I did not understand, and I saw that I would have to pay close attention to what was about to happen.

The serving girl helped me wash and dressed me in a corset and bustle—the first I had ever worn—and bodice and skirt. She led me to the Great Hall and withdrew silently. I saw men and women dressed in finery—fox furs, watered silk, cravats, silver—and I wanted to follow the girl, to return to the familiar safety of the laundry room. What could these handsome, expensive people want with me?

“Good, we’re all here,” Lord Harrison said. “This is Em Wethers. She has a special talent, what she calls a Gift.”

I looked around the room. To my surprise I understood that these people were no different from the villagers and servants I had known; I saw the same greed, love, envy, kindness, hatred, generosity. I was no longer frightened.

“We’ll begin, then,” Harrison said.

He gestured to a few of the others, among them a heavily rouged woman and a gentleman with a grey beard that forked in two, like a serpent’s tongue. They began to trace a pentagram on the floor around the table. At each of the five points they paused to light a candle and to recite more invocations. Soon the room smelled heavily of wax and of some herb I did not recognise.

Harrison motioned us to the table. Someone lowered the gaslights while he lit candles set at intervals along the table. The lights rippled like water over our faces as we sat.

“Let us join hands,” Harrison said, sitting. He closed his eyes, and everyone around the table followed suit. Everyone but me; I was eager to see what would happen next.

The woman wearing rouge spoke. “We are travelling through the turnings of the Labyrinth. Each turning represents an important event in our lives, a test successfully overcome. We turn now right, now left, and now right again. And now our guide, Arton, comes to meet us, clothed all in golden light. Arton, do you have a message for any of those present?”

The woman opened her eyes and looked around wildly. Her hair was dyed a flat black; she was tall and heavy and wore a skirt and bodice edged with black lace at her wrists and neck. Silver and garnet earrings dangled from her ears. “There is a message for—” Her face screwed in a frown. “—for Edward.”

She fell silent.

I turned to my neighbour on my right, the gentleman with the forked beard. “Who’s she, then?” I asked.

“Hush,” the man said.

“Yes,” the woman continued, less agitated now. “Arton bids me say that Edward’s son is alive, and will return.”

“Not soon, I’d bet,” I said. “He’s in India.”

There was consternation around the table, expressions of shock, surprise, startlement. “Hush,” the man next to me, Augustus Binder, said again.

But by far the strangest response came from the man I took to be Edward. “By George, and I’d give him ten thousand pounds to stay there, too!” he said.

I saw that Edward’s son, who was also named Edward, had had to leave his college at Cambridge after a scandal involving a friend’s sister and the sister’s maidservant. I saw that he had lived riotously at Cambridge, and that his only communication with his father had consisted of requests for money. Before he left for India he had not seen his tutor in over a year.

“He’ll come home to you,” I said. “But in three or four years, and so different you won’t hardly know him. You’ll like him better then.”

The rouged woman, Mrs. Frances, was looking at me with open admiration. She said, her voice low, “She speaks with Arton.”

I saw that this woman had some small Gift, but that she needed the rituals, the candles, the invocations to focus it. “I don’t know no Arton,” I said. “I see Edward in India, that’s all.”

“What else does Arton say?” another woman asked.

I looked slowly around the table, gazing at each one in turn. What should I tell them? That this one would die, and that one prosper? That this one, so gently holding his wife’s hand, would return tomorrow to the waterfront and the men he desired?

I needed time to think. “He don’t say nothing more,” I said.

After the meeting Mrs. Frances came up to me. “You have a great talent, young lady,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “We all have it in our family.”

She laughed. It was a deep, gravelly laugh, beginning somewhere in her belly. “Immodesty becomes you, my dear. A word of advice, if I may. Don’t fuck Lord Harrison, much as he desires you.”

Not one of the fine men and women I had worked for had ever used that word, so familiar to me from my village childhood. It was as if, by not talking about it, they had managed to convince themselves that all the messy business of life did not exist.

“No, I won’t do that,” I said. “And he would never.”

She laughed her strong laugh again and pressed my hand. “So,” she said, “there are some things that even you don’t know.”

The meetings continued. I was astonished, even a little scornful, when I learned what they would have me do. Rituals, incantations, invocations—they seemed like children playing a game, the rules of which they had not yet mastered. In vain did I tell them that none of this was necessary, that I learned all I needed from one look at their faces.

At every meeting, therefore, we drew the pentagram and lit the candles, spoke the invocations, held hands around the table. I would close my eyes and pretend to enter a trance, though I refused to speak the nonsense about the turnings of the Labyrinth. And then I would tell them what they most needed to know.

One woman had arthritis. I saw that this would worsen, but I saw also that the pain had woken within her a fear of death, and I was able to reassure her that her life would be long and, except for her illness, fairly happy. A man fretted over a new business venture, but I said nothing to him; I saw the business fail and his life along with it.

I can see today those meetings so long ago, the broughams drawing up the drive, the men entering and shaking the rain from their chesterfields, the women from their capes and mantles and boas. Beneath these outer coverings the men wore tailcoats with a flower in the buttonhole and bright waistcoats, the women crinoline bustles and trains trimmed with ribbons, frills, lace. Candlelight gleamed on silk, crepe, satin.

I must move forward a few months in my narrative and describe the members as I came to know them, before you, my dear friend, joined the Order. They were an odd group, even for their class. Colonel Augustus Binder, the man with the serpent’s beard, sometimes slipped off his shoes and stockings when he came in the door and sat at our meetings barefoot; he thought that this allowed him to feel the nearness of the telluric currents. It was inexpressibly strange to see this careful man, with his neat tailoring and parted beard, walk towards the table on naked feet.

But he was not the most eccentric of them. A sharp-faced fellow named Jack Frederick brought a green cordial which he would sip at intervals during the evening; he claimed it would double or treble his life span, though I saw that it was nothing but distilled fish and hay. Another man had painted a third eye on his forehead and talked about his sexual exploits on the astral plane. But this proved to be too much even for our freethinking group, and it was made clear to him that his first meeting would also be his last.

After the first few meetings I saw that Harrison generally sat to my right, and that there was a kind of eagerness in the way he took my hand. I was not the only person to notice this; once or twice Lady Lydia pushed him aside and grasped my hand so tightly it hurt.

I did not want to cause Lydia pain. Furthermore I had seen, in both the houses in which I had worked, what happened to servants who aspired above their station. I tried to arrange the table so that I sat between two guests, Colonel Binder and Mrs. Frances, for example.