Walking the Labyrinth (13 page)

“Has he? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, I am his mother—”

“He seems wise to me. As wise as you are, possibly. Do you remember what he said the last time he visited? He asked, ‘What have you learned?’ Mary says that every time we turn a corner in the Labyrinth we have learned something new. I thought it was very clever of him to remind us.”

Henry had put his question to me in the Labyrinth, before we had both come to supper; she could not possibly have heard him. Had he talked to Dorothy since then? But she was still speaking.

“Lydia, though,” Dorothy said. “It’s strange that he should mention Lydia, don’t you think? Perhaps she’s died. Has Harrison had any contact with her since she left him?”

“No.”

“Well, then. Perhaps she’s made the final turning of the Labyrinth. I hope she learned what she needed before she left us.”

She patted her hair again. Something strange was happening to it; it was growing longer, wilder, redder. She held it up so that it seemed pinned, the fashion that Lydia had used. Then she brushed her skirts with the other hand and I heard the clink of the chatelaine around her waist, the chain with its burden of scissors, keys, smelling salts.

I was nearly frozen with fear. “What?” I said. “How—”

The apparition—she could not be Lydia—smiled at me. Then she changed into my son.

I stood, knocking over my teacup. The apparition had gone. I looked around wildly. A serving girl hurried to my side.

“Did you—did you see him?” I asked.

The girl looked around her. “Your friend, you mean?” she said. “The old lady with the white hair? She’s gone, ain’t she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The girl looked at me oddly. I paid for the tea and left.

The next few weeks were horrible. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I could never be certain what was real and what a phantasm sent by my son. Fishmongers and flower-sellers, shop clerks and passersby would stop in the midst of what they were doing and speak nonsense or strange oracular phrases. “Turn your spectacles around,” one said, “and look at the backs of things.” “Doubt nothing, believe nothing,” said another. And another: “Close your eyes and see.”

In the middle of a bleak rainstorm a cab driver drove me through a forest of green oak and aspen, and then out into the city again so quickly I could not be certain of what I had seen. Another driver took me past a woman who looked exactly like Lydia, but when I shouted at him to stop I saw the woman fade and turn to mist. Once when my beloved Harrison put on an unfamiliar expression I nearly ran from the room. It was as if I were back in the Labyrinth, stumbling on fantastic scenes with every turn.

I tried, of course, to battle the illusions, to use my Gift to see what was real. But they were too powerful for me. I was the strongest of my family, but it seemed that in this one thing my son was stronger still.

I began to spend more and more time at home, sending servants to get the things I needed. I became short-tempered, ghost-ridden, seeing phantasms out of the corner of my eye. I stopped holding meetings of the Order at our house, and did not attend them when they were held elsewhere; Harrison went and told me how the seances had gone, how much I was missed. Poor Mary Frances did her best, speaking the rituals and reciting the messages from Arton, but everyone agreed that she lacked my Gift.

Our troubles multiplied. One day Harrison came home to tell me that the Order was under siege. Colonel Binder had demanded to see me, insisting that I teach him what he called the secrets of the Order. He claimed that we had promised him much when he had joined the Order, and that we had delivered nothing.

At the next meeting, Harrison reported, Colonel Binder had threatened to see a lawyer. If I did not meet with him, Binder had said, I would have to go to court to testify. The thought filled me with horror.

“Come with me to a meeting,” Harrison urged me. “Better still, let us hold a meeting here, let us show Augustus that we are hiding nothing from him.”

Dear, sweet Harrison! His head was filled with abstruse notions—labyrinths, initiations, pure and abstract knowledge. He had never wanted power of the sort that I had, preferring instead to make his way though ancient books and manuscripts. Dorothy’s elaborate history of the Order, her Minoans and Atlanteans, had been constructed with Harrison’s help. Sometimes I think that it simply did not occur to him that anyone would want to leave the library and use real power in the world.

I shook my head. “I can’t,” I said.

“Why not?”

I had not told him about our son’s dreadful actions; I did not want to worry him. “Augustus wants power,” I said finally. “And I can’t give it to him. But if he doesn’t get it, he will continue to think that we’re deliberately obstructing him. Perhaps it would be for the best if he took us to court. What can he prove?”

“What did you promise him?” Harrison asked. “Did you put anything in writing?”

But I didn’t know, couldn’t remember. It had been so long ago.

All too soon what we feared came to pass. Binder brought suit against us, claiming, among other absurdities, that we had bilked him of five thousand pounds.

And as I feared, I was called to testify. I sat on the bench, waiting my turn, wondering when the judge or the lawyers or the spectators would melt away like phantoms, when the court would be revealed as just another exhibit in Dorothy’s Labyrinth. Several times I unbuttoned my gloves and bit my nails to the quick.

During a recess Binder caught at my arm. I was appalled to see how much he had changed. Gone was the dignified gentleman I had met thirty years ago. The forked grey beard was now snarled in impossible tangles, and had turned completely white. His usually impeccable clothes were rumpled and soiled. He looked tense, haggard; the whites of his eyes were a dirty yellow. Worst of all, he was barefoot, oblivious to the shocked eyes of the court turned upon him; his obsession with telluric currents had quite overcome him.

“Tell me the secrets,” he whispered hoarsely. “Tell me all, and I’ll drop the suit.”

I pushed his hand away. “Don’t be foolish,” I said. “You aren’t ready for that kind of knowledge—your bad judgement in forcing this trial shows that much. We didn’t ask you for money, and you didn’t give us any, and we can prove that in open court. Don’t think you can blackmail me.”

“But that’s exactly what I intend to do,” he said. “When this trial is over the world will know all the secrets of the Order of the Labyrinth, all its rites and rituals. They’ll know how you, a serving girl with two bastards, tried to rise far above your station. You won’t be able to hold your head up anywhere in England. Or lay it down on a pillow, for that matter.” He smiled nastily, and I knew that he was referring to my liaison with Harrison. “Unless, of course, you tell me how to move to the next grade.”

If I could have told him, I swear I would have done so at that moment. I saw the damage he could do to us. But my Gift was my own, and not something that could be taught. “You are not ready to be trusted with such power,” I said finally, and returned to my seat.

Everything happened as Binder said it would. He lost the suit, of course, but the rituals of the Order were revealed in court and published in the newspapers to great hilarity. The
Times
did not print the rest of the allegations Binder made, about my virtue and my life with Harrison, but other newspapers were not so kind. We were hounded by the press, jeered at when we went out. Members of the Order fell away; soon only Harrison, Dorothy, and Mary remained to attend the meetings. And Lady Dorothy, Harrison told me, was once again beginning to waver, to doubt everything I had told her.

Ruffians gathered at our house, shouting our names, taunting us with coarse insults, sometimes flinging mud and less savory things at our doorstep. Harrison had by this time lost his membership in his club and was driven nearly mad by their din; he finally took a flat in far-off Camden Town to have some peace. This stratagem counted for nothing, however, when he insisted on answering the letters that ridiculed us in the
Times.
The newspaper would not print his reply without an address; he was forced to give them the address of the flat to draw attention from our house, and so the mockers assembled there as well.

He hired a guard for the flat and began to hold our London meetings there. Once again he tried to convince me to come with him. Now that Colonel Binder had left us, Harrison said, it would be safe for me to attend the meetings. And Lady Dorothy missed me.

Because he desired it so plainly, and because I missed Lady Dorothy as well, I ventured out with him one evening. But as our brougham passed fields and ditches and came to gloomy, ill-lit streets a sadness descended upon me, a sadness that grew stronger as we continued past railway halls and taverns and almshouses. The place had not even received the new electricity; a solitary lamplighter walked the streets, setting his ten-foot taper to the lamps. The gaslights shivered as they caught.

Even more distressing was the occasional reminder of better days: carved facades now chipped and begrimed by soot, a marble portico or stone terrace, a once-beautiful garden run riot. I was reminded of a lady who used to attend meetings of the Order, a woman fallen on evil times. She had tried terribly hard to keep up appearances, but she could not see well enough to notice that all her dresses had faded to grey. It would break my heart when I saw where her seams had pulled apart, revealing the original colour of the material beneath.

“Is this what we’ve come to?” I asked Harrison. “This meanness?”

“Hush, my dearest,” he said, laying his hand over mine.

There were signs on several of the windows:
MADAME SOPHIA WILL ANSWER ALL YOUR QUESTIONS, LADY FATIMA KNOWS THE MYSTERIES OF THE EAST
. This was a street of charlatans, where wretched frowzy women studied their tense hopeful clients over glass balls, where cloth from India hid the mechanisms of wheels and wire that worked their tawdry miracles. And I would be counted as one of them—I, who carried within me the true Gift of our family.

Our driver let us off at a house as squat and dark as all the others. Harrison nodded to the guard posted at the door and we went inside.

I stayed that evening, spoke my piece and comforted those in need of it, but I did not return. I would never attend a meeting of the Order again.

Many nights Harrison and I lay in bed, holding each other and waiting for the storm to pass over us, wondering if it had done its worst or if there were other trials awaiting us. Through it all Harrison continued to trust me. He was a very simple man in some ways; he had given his love to me as he had never given it to Lydia, and he would not withdraw that love.

One day I received a letter from an old member of the Order, Jack Frederick. Frederick had deserted with the others, unable to bear the public ridicule. In the letter he intimated that he would be willing to return if I could satisfy him on a few points. He did not believe the accusations of that scoundrel Gus Binder—he knew from his own experience that we had never asked any member for money—but he wanted the answers to a few questions.

I wrote him back, saying that I would be pleased to see him. Harrison, I knew, would be happy to welcome him back to the fold.

It was strange to venture from my house after so many months of solitude. A thick yellow fog hung over the streets and covered everything but the carriage lights, which shone out like strange pearls. People emerged from the depths and then passed, and were absorbed once again by the veils of smoke and soot. Sounds were muffled, faces blurred.

Of course I did not see the three men waiting for me around the corner. One pinioned my arms behind my back while another pushed me into a carriage that had been standing at the curb. I was too startled to call out, let alone to use my Gift. When I came to my senses I saw that I had been abducted by Augustus Binder, Jack Frederick, and another man I did not know. Despite the cold weather Augustus wore neither shoes nor stockings, and his trouser cuffs were badly stained with mud. The third man was tall and heavily muscled, a servant of some kind.

I was not unduly frightened. By this time I was so used to strange sights, to discontinuities in what I had thought of as real, that I was nearly certain this was just another performance contrived by my son. The men would next say something incomprehensible, I thought, and then melt away. I studied them dispassionately, as though they were waxworks.

Augustus drew a pistol from his coat pocket. At that moment I began to feel fear, and I reached out with my Gift. These men were real enough, not sent by my son as I had thought. I had never faced a pistol before, did not know if I could.

Augustus said, “I want the secrets of your power. I have waited long enough.”

“You are not ready for them,” I said.

He waved his pistol threateningly. “We have formed another Order,” he said. “Jack and I, and all the others who are tired of waiting. We will have your secrets, and we will teach them to anyone who asks.”

I shook my head, feeling out cautiously with my Gift. If I could turn the pistol away, opening the carriage door at the same time …

“We have recruited your son, Henry,” Augustus said. I looked at him sharply, and he smiled. “Ah, that frightens you. Your son has this power as well, doesn’t he? He’s told us that you and he quarrelled bitterly a few months ago. Is it any wonder he should want to join us, to come over to our side?”

I felt real terror now. My heart was pounding so loudly I could barely hear him. Was it true that Henry had joined these men? Why would he want to? But I no longer understood anything my son chose to do. Why did he torment me with phantoms? Why did he oppose me?

If Henry had cast his lot with these men there was nothing I could do. In many things he was stronger than I; he had proved that in a dozen confrontations.

“Henry has promised to share his power with us,” Augustus went on. “Unlike his mother, who continues to use hers for her own selfish ends. We will be able to work wonders, to gain temporal power in England—no, in the world—and spiritual power in Arton’s realm. There’s no end to what we can do, really. Take a good look at me now—in a few years I will be prime minister, at the very least. And you—you’ll be in prison, or deported in chains.”