Labyrinth Gate (46 page)

“I can’t decide that for you,” she said. She turned away and walked back through his dressing room into her own bedchamber, shutting the door but leaving it unlocked. Fire snapped and whispered in the hearth, and when she went to the window, she saw the familiar insubstantial wraiths moving with unnatural grace along the paths in the garden. They wavered, fading out, returning, as to the pulse of some undecided will.

She stood a while there, feeling the warmth of the fire flicker and fade and begin to die at her back, and abruptly swell up again into flame. Then she heard a soft noise, a footfall, and the door opened behind her.

Panels of morning light fell across the bed, illuminating Sanjay’s formal black tails and trousers as he sat on the mattress. He examined the portrait of the Queen of Heaven and Her Son that hung above the mantel while Chryse talked to him from her dressing room.

“There’s nothing here formal enough. And the gowns that
are
formal enough don’t quite fit.” A pause, augmented by rustling. “I’ll have to wear my wedding dress—a little old-fashioned, but correct enough for coronations, I should think. I hope it still fits.” Another silence, followed by more speech that was muffled by cloth. Eventually she appeared at the door with the dress on but unfastened. “Can you help me?”

He smiled and stood up. In a few minutes she stepped back for him to admire her. “I’d forgotten how beautiful you look in that dress.” He shook his head. “Do you realize we’ve been here an entire year?”

She hugged him tightly. “It seems somehow much shorter, and yet other times I can hardly remember being anywhere else.”

With a kiss, he disentangled himself. “We’d better go down. We have to be there by midday.”

On the stairs they paused, hearing an altercation in the front parlor.

“The way I dress never bothered you before.” Kate’s voice carried easily into the entry hall. “Bloody hell, did you drink something with your coffee this morning that turned you into a sanctimonious old—”

“Just for once, Kate. Just for once you might attempt to look like a lady.”

“Oh,
lady
is it now? You weren’t so damned particular before in your companions, Lord Vole.”

“You can give over this ridiculous lord-this-and-that. Kate. You know very well that for an event as important as this coronation—”

Lady Trent appeared in the doorway that led into the front parlor and, shutting the door behind her, advanced into the hall. Kate and Julian’s voices went on, but the closed door muffled their words.

“Quite the wrong tack to take with Miss Cathcart, I fear,” she said, smiling up at Chryse and Sanjay on the stairs. She looked less tired than she had the day before, but her years rested more heavily on her now.

“I don’t suppose there has been time to tell you, that Julian—” Chryse hesitated.

“Oh, I’ve known that Julian was in love with her for these last eight years. But I read from this new state of affairs that he was at last pushed by circumstances to admit it.”

“He asked Kate to marry him,” said Sanjay.

“That explains it.” Aunt Laetitia smiled again. Her expression was distinctly mischievous. “I expect they’ll get along very well.”

Through the door, they heard Kate’s voice raised in a couple of choice, penetrating swear words.

“Like that?” Chryse laughed.

“My parents, as was customary in those times, arranged a good marriage for me, to a man I had never met. I rebelled and ran away from home. Found myself in the middle of a rather wild adventure where I met a young man and fell madly in love with him—only to discover that he was the very betrothed I had meant to escape.” Her expression softened. “Oh, I married him, even took his title, which was less common in those days. We fought like cats and dogs until the day he died. The Haldane temper, you know. I’m glad to see that Julian has it in him. I was beginning to fear that he was too patient.”

The door into the parlor was flung open. Kate poised on the brink, face flushed, oblivious to the three people in the hall.

“Nevertheless,”
Julian said, his tone so close to a shout that it seemed to echo around the stairs, “you
will
ride with me to Wellminster Cathedral and not with those rash, raking, insolvent cardsharps that you choose to call friends.”

Kate slammed the door, whirled, and stopped short, seeing her audience for the first time.

Chryse laughed. “Oh, Kate.” She went over to her, taking her hand, and kissed her on the cheek. “Perhaps you’d better humor him this once.”

Kate glanced at Sanjay, but he merely nodded, trying to look serious but failing. “I’ll think about it,” she replied in an ominous tone. Chryse let her go, and she left the house.

A moment later Julian appeared. “Where did she—”

Sanjay came forward and drew him to the door, one hand on his arm. “Remember what I told you, Julian,” he said in a low voice.

Julian frowned, but he clasped Sanjay’s hand briefly in his own. “I’ll try.” He followed Kate outside.

“Do you know,” said Chryse slowly, pondering, “Julian once said that I was reckless to marry for love.”

“He was quite right,” replied Aunt Laetitia. “One is always reckless to marry for love. Ah, here is Master Coachman. We ought to go.”

Once they had settled into the carriage, she opened the shutters so that they could see the houses pass. “I have asked Coachman to take us by Fenwych House.” Her voice had a slight tremor. “I received a note this morning from Madame Sosostris. She wishes to see you.”

“Oh.” Chryse felt as if the seat had suddenly dropped out from beneath her. Her throat constricted. Then she remembered the cards, and the pouch, and she looked at Sanjay. He nodded, twice, to show that he had them.

“I thought,” she continued when she could speak again, “that it took weeks to get an appointment.”

But at Fenwych House Lady Trent disembarked with them and kissed them each on the cheek with a decided air of finality. Chryse paled, and Sanjay gripped her hand tightly.

“I’m not sure I’m ready to go,” he said.

“The wheel of the year,” murmured Aunt Laetitia. “It turns out, and it turns in, and leads you back to the place you started.”

Chryse felt tears gathering in her eyes. “But we haven’t said goodbye to anyone!”

Behind, the door to Fenwych House opened, and Madame Sosostris’s eldest daughter, Ella, waited expectantly for them to enter.

“A quick goodbye is the best.” Aunt Laetitia squeezed their hands in turn. Perhaps it was only the glint of the sun, but her eyes, too, were bright with tears. “I will write, if I can.”

“Mama is expecting you.” Ella’s voice was soft behind them.

With a last kiss, they left Lady Trent and followed Ella into the house. She led them through the empty parlor, past the double doors and tiny anteroom, and into the half darkness of the chamber where Madame Sosostris sat before the single table just as she had before. She might not have moved at all, as if it was only a moment that they had been gone.

“Madame. Monsieur.” Her voice had lost none of its resonance. In the dimness they saw her seven daughters standing or kneeling in the same positions, as Ella walked to her corner, as they had last seen them. It heightened the illusion that minutes rather than months had passed at Fenwych House since their last visit. “You have brought me something. Your Gates, first.”

Sanjay hesitated a moment, then handed them to her.

She laid them out with deliberate, practiced precision, every card set into its place: hinge, wheel, journey, and face cards. “Fifty-one,” she said. “But you are missing one.

“The Sinner,” said Chryse.

“Properly called the Queen of the Underworld.” The veiled form shifted forwards. “You have brought me something.”

Sanjay held out the monogrammed velvet pouch. She laid it on the table with dark-complexioned hands and contemplated it in silence.

Chryse looked at Sanjay. “We haven’t even looked in it yet,” she whispered.

As if in response, Madame Sosostris deftly opened the pouch and extracted its contents: a single card, which she laid in the empty spot.

The Queen of the Underworld, running blindfolded through the haunted forest.

Chryse and Sanjay were too astonished to speak.

“The deck is complete,” said Madame Sosostris.

“But—how did it get
there?”
Sanjay reached to touch it, pulled his hand back before he did. “It’s ours, Chryse. It’s the one we lost.”

“I know.” Her voice was almost inaudible. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand,” Sanjay repeated. “Are you going to take our cards?”

“They are your Gates. I cannot take them.”

“But then what is your reward if you give us back the card you said was the treasure?”

They felt that Madame Sosostris smiled, but the veil concealed all but her voice. “I brought you into your power. You came through the Gates and discovered the labyrinth. You can never be the same again.”

She lifted her hands, crossed them in front of her throat, and lowered her head until the top of the veil was almost touching her palms. A faint, resonant drone vibrated the air around them.

“Wait!” Chryse gripped Sanjay’s wrist, a little frantic. “Isn’t there some way we can come back?”

“To come once across such distance to this land is a gift.” Madame Sosostris’ voice had taken on a slight blur, as if the vibration in the air came from her person. “To come here twice from
your
home is dangerous, for it can alter you past all recognition.”

“But there must be some way,” insisted Sanjay.

The room grew darker. He could no longer distinguish the faces or forms of Madame Sosostris’s daughters.

“You must follow the path. But without a guide you could not know where you would end up, or how you might return. Skills such as mine are long sought and hard won.” As her voice grew more distant, it grew also more familiar without becoming recognizable. “But the key to travel is the Gate.”

Under their feet, the floor shuddered and fell.

“Oh, Sanjay!” Chryse clapped her free hand over her mouth. “I really feel sick.”

Madame Sosostris spoke one last time, more an amused thought than a voice. “You will have a souvenir from your visit here. In a little over seven months’ time.”

“You’re pregnant!”

The cards fluttered down around them. Lights came on, and they found themselves in the elevator as it descended. They knelt and gathered up the cards that were now scattered across the carpeted floor, all fifty-two of them.

The elevator shuddered to a halt and its doors opened to reveal the grey concrete corridor that led to the parking garage of the hotel.

“I told you that this would happen,” said Chryse, accusing.

Sanjay laughed. “Let’s go home,” he said, taking Chryse’s hand.

T
HE SKETCH TAKING SHAPE
on the paper could have been a preliminary rendering for a painting to be entitled “The Queen of Heaven nurses Her Infant Son, Lord of Man, on Whose Cross shall all of our Sins be hung.”

In fact, although Chryse
was
nursing their seven-week-old baby son, she was also, with her free hand, laying out cards on the table at her right. She examined each one before she placed it with a bemused expression. The movement of her hand and of her husband’s as he sketched was the only motion in the room, except for the rhythmic suckling of the infant, Julian.

“Just think,” said Chryse as she laid the last card, the Queen of the Underworld, into its place in the pattern: hinge, wheel, journey, and face cards. “Maretha must be holding a child of about this age. There are times now when I think it must have been a dream.”

Sanjay paused. “Those compositions you did got you accepted into graduate school, didn’t they?”

She smiled.

“And I have something to show you. I’ve been saving it as a surprise.” He set down his sketchpad and went into the bedroom, returned with a bulky, manuscript-sized package. With great care, he withdrew the contents and sat at Chryse’s feet.

“But those are—” She gaped at the title page of an over-sized manuscript:
Pictures From Another Land.
“Those are galleys. What is this?”

He began to turn them for her, and she saw their journey, and the excavation, come to life again before her eyes: Maretha cataloging hieroglyphs, Mog and Pin and Lucias hiding in the ruins behind; the earl sitting at table, aloof and frowning; Julian elegant in his town wear, Kate slouched in a seat, glass of ale in one hand; Charity looking prim and Thomas Southern looking solemn, Aunt Laetitia mischievously wise and Professor Farr simply confused; images from the factories, the ruins, the forest—all as she remembered them, yet with a clarity that she knew was the vision Sanjay brought to such sights.

“You know I’d been reconstructing all the sketches that were burned. But I didn’t tell you that, on a lark, I suppose, I assembled them as if they were the record of one of those nineteenth-century artist-travellers who roamed the globe drawing various exotic locales and then publishing sets of lithographs. I was afraid nothing would come of it.”

“But something did.” She watched, rapt, as he flipped page by page through the galleys. “They’re beautiful, Sanjay.”

“Thank you.” A small, secret grin quivered on the edge of his lips.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“They’re so pleased with how this one turned out that they want me to do a series.” He stopped trying to hide his smile—it touched, more than his mouth, his eyes, mirroring his delight and excitement. “Of different countries, here, to see—well, I suggested something like ‘faces of humanity.’ To show how we’re all human on one level, all bonded by that link, despite our other differences.”

“Oh, Sanjay.” Chryse laughed, low. “How idealistic of you.”

“Someone has to be.”

She lowered her free hand to rest on his shoulder and together they looked again at the faces and scenes they had left behind. “Do you think I look different?” she asked as she considered an illustration of she and Maretha cataloging glyphs. “My aunt Emma didn’t recognize me when we got back.”

He shrugged. “You were pregnant.”