Walking the Labyrinth (9 page)

One day I went upstairs to put bedding in the linen room. As I closed the door I saw Lord Harrison coming towards me down the hall.

“Ah, Em,” he said.

“Yes, my lord,” I said.

He seemed at a loss. I did not need my Gift to see that he was drawn to me, and if truth be told I was drawn to him as well. I had tumbled one or two boys in my village, and had once spent a memorable night with Miss Sylvia’s coachman, but I saw that Harrison was different, honest and gentlemanly. But it was just this honesty, I thought, that would ensure that nothing would happen between us.

“I wanted to tell you that I appreciate how hard you work,” he said. “Both as a laundress and as an adept in our Order.”

“Thank you, my lord,” I said. As I went past him I felt the pressure of his arm against mine, and I continued to feel it at various times throughout the day. To be honest, I can recall that touch to this day.

A few days later Lydia received word that her father was dying. She packed quickly and left. The house without her seemed quieter, more peaceful. When I think of Lady Lydia today it is not her face or clothing that I remember, or even her remarkable red hair, but the fact that she wore what we called a chatelaine around her waist, an ornamental chain hung about with household objects. Scissors, button hooks, keys, containers of smelling salts—all these clanked together as she moved through the halls, so that there was ample time for the servants to hear her coming and seem to be hard at work.

While she was gone we held another meeting. Harrison did not sit next to me this time; I knew that he felt guilt because of his desire for me and that he would not take advantage of his wife’s absence. I told one man where he had lost his tie pin, another that the woman he courted would be receptive to his suit.

The session ended. There were so many things to gather up at the end of an evening in those days, hats, gloves, scarves, canes, parasols. Our guests would put one down to pick up another and forget where they had placed the first, so that it often took them an hour or more to get out the door.

But after all the confusion and bustle Harrison and I were at last left alone. I made to move past him; he turned; his arms were around me before I realized it. He smelled clean and good, of macassar hair oil and strong male scent. I felt the hardness of his pocket watch, and that other hardness below it. “We must not,” he said. “Dearest Em, we must not.” But all the while he held me closer.

We kissed. A servant would come at any moment to wind the clocks and douse the candles. “Come,” he said.

He led me upstairs, to one of the house’s many guest rooms. We undressed, frantic in our haste: skirt, bodice, bustle, corset, undergarments, boots with their maddeningly small buttons. Finally, free of our clothing, we lay on the bed and caressed each other. “Em,” he said, kissing my mouth, my breasts, my stomach. “Ah, Em.” His skin was white and smooth, with pale blue veins; he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Next to him I was brown and coarse as a tree.

I thought that if he stopped I would not be able to bear it. I kissed him back. He entered me, fierce and hard and sweet. “Ah,” I said. “Oh. Oh, my God!”

He stopped. “Em?” he said. “Dearest, what is wrong? Have I hurt you?”

“No!” I said. “Don’t stop, fool!”

He began again, at first slow and wary, then faster and faster. This time when he felt my spasms he did not stop; I think he could not. He cried aloud once and was silent.

I had never met a man so ignorant of women. I wanted to talk afterwards, to caress him, to explore and laugh and taste and touch. Instead he rose and dressed without speaking. As he left the room he said, “We must never do that again.”

FIVE

Rue and Ant

M
olly and John had alternated reading Emily Wethers’s book aloud. It had been John’s turn to read about Emily and Harrison making love; as he read he spoke slower and slower, obviously tortured with embarrassment.

“Oh, please,” Molly said. “Give me that.” She took the book from his hands and continued to read.

I must now leap over several years, and so come to 1883. You, my old friend, must certainly be aware of the significance of the date; it was the year you joined our little group.

One day while I was in the linen room I overheard Lydia Sanderson talking to Harrison. “Lady Dorothy Westingate would like to join our order,” she said. Her voice was low, intense; I saw that she valued the social cachet you could bring us.

“Lady Westingate? Where have I heard that name?” Harrison asked.

“You remember her, surely. Her husband died several years ago. She hopes we might be able to pierce the veil between our world and the other side, to receive messages from her husband.”

“Receive messages from the dead? But we never have done. Our work is with Arton, a spirit—”

“Yes, a spirit. If we can reach him, surely we can contact the dead.”

“Arton inhabits a completely different plane. He is not dead—he has never been alive.”

“I’ve already invited her,” Lydia said. “She’ll be at our meeting next week.”

“Well,” Harrison said, “we’ll see what Em makes of her.”

This was my first encounter with Spiritualism, a popular—should I say sport?—in those years. Although I understood immediately what Lady Westingate would want from me, I did not think that I would give it to her. I know nothing of what happens after we are dead.

But when I met you, Lady Dorothy, my heart melted. You came to our meeting still dressed in black crepe, still mourning for your husband as Queen Victoria mourned for lost Albert. I saw that you had not left your house in five years, saw how lonely you were. And so when you asked me if your husband, also named Albert, had any messages for you, I closed my eyes and nodded solemnly.

“He says to tell you he is happy, very happy,” I said. “He misses you and eagerly awaits his reunion with you. But your work on this plane is not finished, he says. You must learn more, understand more, before you are ready to join him.”

This is how the deception started, with kindness. I learned everything I needed to know about your husband and your marriage just by looking at you, so the trick was not difficult. You remembered my every word in those days; sometimes you would even write them down in a little notebook you brought for that purpose.

As the years passed there were times when my inventions were insufficient to banish your melancholy. You would retreat to your house for months, where you would commission another painting or purchase another leather armchair. When you returned to our meetings I would outdo myself to provide a spectacle for you. Cymbals would clash, trumpets bray. A heavy scent of roses, Albert’s favourite flower, would pass briefly through the room; sometimes a spectral hand would drop a few red petals into your lap. Mirrors would hang suspended in midair, and in them it would be possible to see a dim outline of your husband. All these things I took from your mind; they were all things you desired.

Shortly after you joined the Order you were absent from our meetings for several months. I travelled to your house in Applebury and found you sunk in misery. “When will I be allowed to join Albert?” you asked me plaintively. “He gives me his love, tells me all is well. But what is that to me if I cannot see him, or touch him? Have I done something, or failed to do something, so that I am being kept from him?”

It was then that I broached the idea of the Labyrinth. I swear to you, Lady Dorothy, that I meant nothing more than to create a diversion for you, to give you something that would occupy your mind and keep you from thoughts of your dead husband. It’s true that I was remembering the ancient ruined mazes in the village where I was born, but at the time I had no idea of their significance.

You embraced the idea eagerly, excited at the thought of your house becoming a tangible symbol of our Order. Then and there you began to write to carpenters and bricklayers, stopping to sketch tangled mazes on your heavy embossed stationery. When you put your pen down I took it up again, elaborating on your drawings of the Labyrinth, straining to remember the twisting avenues of stone I had played in as a child.

I lived with you, on and off, for several months over the course of that year. You kept busy in your basement, directing the labourers who worked for you. And I went there too, watching as the Labyrinth took shape. I walked it from its beginning to where the labourers had left off, and as I walked I felt myself growing stronger. And not just me—it was as if I were giving strength to the wood and brick and plaster around me.

It was then that I remembered something my grandmother had told me long ago. “We give power to the places we live in,” she said. “We make them magic. Why does our village have such fat sheep and cattle? Look at this apple—have you ever seen such a rich red? It’s our doing, all of it.”

The mazes focused the power—I saw that now. I had never understood that before, though I had seen my grandmother, and my mother too, walking those lanes of stone. Perhaps they didn’t fully understand it themselves. It’s strange, isn’t it, Lady Dorothy, that Mary Frances should have stumbled on such a powerful symbol when she founded the Order. Or perhaps not—she had a vestige of the Gift, and perhaps she had learned this method of focusing it.

In 1886, several years after Lydia left, Harrison’s fortunes received a severe blow. He had made a number of bad investments, and it was in this year that various notes came due and the managers of some of his ventures pressed him for more money to stay afloat. His banker, Mr. Griffin Patmore—

Molly looked ahead a few pages. “Molly?” John asked.

“Look at this—it’s all about Harrison’s finances. Lists of assets and deficits, pages and pages of it. I wanted to know what happened to Lydia.”

“Does it say?”

“Nothing that I can see. Look at this.”

John took the journal from her and they studied the columns of numbers together, the pluses and minuses. John paged to the end of the journal. The round, flowing hand reappeared; the narrative had apparently resumed. He turned back to the lists.

“Why on earth did she think this would be important?” Molly said. She glanced at her watch. “Good Lord, it’s three o’clock. I’m starving.”

“Now’s as good a time as any to take a break,” John said. “There’s supposed to be a pub somewhere nearby. Want to see if we can walk it?”

“Sure.”

They left the bed and breakfast. Outside John turned right and headed down a street lined with small shops, a grocer’s, a post office, an estate agent.

“So,” Molly said. “Emily’s the one with the gap in her teeth, like me and Fentrice. Does that mean she’s the head of this whole clan? Does that make her Neesa? Harrison is probably Harry in the genealogy. Do you think they got married?”

“Of course not,” John said. “Lords didn’t marry their laundresses.”

“But if he’s Harry he had children by her, or at least a child. Fentrice said her parents were Verey and Edwina, and
their
parents were Neesa and Harry.”

“He still wouldn’t marry her. It took money to run a household like the one Harrison and Lydia had. People married to join their fortunes, and Emily had to be penniless. Anyway, it wasn’t so easy to get a divorce in those days. Harrison would have to prove adultery.”

“Or Lydia would.”

“But why would she want to? There would have been a terrible scandal. Besides, the laws were weighted toward men—a judge would have been much more lenient where Harrison was concerned. But he probably returned to his wife after this one lapse.”

“But Emily says something about ‘after Lydia left.’ And she stayed in the Order for years, and somewhere along the way she learned how to speak better English. Who would she learn that from if not Harrison?”

“Anyone, really. She seems very resourceful.”

“So they held hands at the meetings, exchanged steamy glances, and never said a word? Never made love again?”

“Probably.”

“But she had a child, at least according to my aunt,” Molly said. “I wish we hadn’t stopped reading.” She looked down the street. “Why does that building say ‘Take Courage’ on the side?” she asked. “Courage about what?”

“That’s the pub,” John said. “Courage is the kind of beer they serve. Some pubs here are tied to a specific brewery.”

They went inside. Molly, remembering the sheep in the stained glass window, ordered a shepherd’s pie. They took their food and went to sit down.

“How do you know all this stuff?” Molly asked. “Victorian divorce laws?”

“I read a lot.”

“That’s what you said before. I read a lot too, but I couldn’t tell you what it took to get a divorce in the nineteenth century.”

“There was a year when I didn’t do anything but read.”

Molly felt, very strongly, as if she had come to a fork in a labyrinth. She could ask him why, and he would tell her, and they would take another step toward friendship. Or she could change the subject.

“How come?” she said.

He sighed. “I was—I was in jail, actually.”

“In jail! Why?”

“For being stupid. I was a clerk in a law firm. They made me a notary public, someone who would notarize all their documents. I just signed what they put in front of me, and it turned out that one of the partners was practicing fraud on a grand scale. Only all the documents had my signature on them, not his. So I got a year in jail.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing. Like I said, I was stupid. I spent a year reading everything in the prison library. You’d be amazed at what they had, old books that no one wanted anymore, an ancient edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
And I helped one of the guys figure something out about his case, where to find some of the evidence he needed, and he got off. So when I got out I became a private investigator. I was fed up with lawyers, and anyway no one would hire an ex-con—it was the only thing I could think to do.”

“Good Lord.” She remembered the ease with which he had stolen the book from Lord Westingate’s library. So that was where he had learned how to steal, and other things too, probably.