The Edge of Recall (9 page)

Smith didn’t know what to think of Tessa’s working like a laborer. With her qualifications, she should never have to touch a shovel. Did she not understand delegation? Her part, like his, was to visualize, conceive, and direct others to bring those plans to fruition. Yet there she was, digging in the field all by herself.

She said she’d never recovered an ancient labyrinth before, but even if it were a dig, she could have workers uncover the site. He shook his head. Not his business. As long as she completed her design and executed it on schedule, she could do as she liked with the labyrinth—as it seemed she was.

Deeply focused, she appeared oblivious to his approach, though that could be intentional, he supposed. He stood four feet away when she finally noticed him with a sudden, searching gaze that made him want to run far and fast.

He cleared his throat. “Everything all right?” The question could have opened delicate areas better left alone, but thankfully she merely nodded.

He motioned to the spade. “You’re really going to dig it out by hand?”

She brushed the hair back from her face. “I’m trying to see what’s here. These side walls have held the troughlike shape of the path”—she dug in again—“for a long time. It looks like the stonework survived the fire.”

“So it seems. The wooden structure burned readily enough.”

“I wonder what started it.”

“I’m guessing that would be
who
. According to Gaston’s records, the religious feuds in this area got nasty.”

She turned. “Didn’t the Maryland colony pass a religious tolerance act—like a precursor to the First Amendment?”

“To start with. But others came in who disagreed. When they came into power, they destroyed churches and schools before religious tolerance was restored.”

“So it wasn’t an accidental fire.”

“Records are sketchy on this exact one, but from what I’ve read generally, the odds are in favor of intent. Especially since it wasn’t rebuilt. I’m not sure what you’ll find digging around in there.”

Her hand recoiled from the shovel. “You don’t think people were in the labyrinth when the hedge burned.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time hatred in God’s name had deadly results.”

A shudder passed over her, but with only a slight hesitation, she repositioned the spade. “Thanks for the warning.” She stomped it into the earth. It sank with a distinct metallic clang.

He tipped his head. “What was that?”

“Not a skeleton.” She tossed the clod aside.

“Here, let me.” He took the spade and maneuvered its blade close to her last cut. His also hit metal. She knelt and brushed the dirt away with her hands.

“There’s something there.”

He removed another chunk of sod, and another.

“Be careful of the stone walls.” She shoved dirt off a discolored metal rod. “Here,” she said. “Dig here.” Off to the side of the path.

He obliged, and she cleared a metal curve and leaf. She looked up. “The gate?”

“Could be.” He was not much for old things but had to admit this intrigued him, especially seeing how Tessa lit up.

She took back the spade and dug vigorously. When she appeared to tire, he took over, carefully removing the turf from the gate as she kept clearing the dirt. In a little more than half an hour, they lifted it from the ground where it had lain for possibly three hundred years. Tessa was breathless as she ran her hands over the vines and leaves.

“This
pax
symbol in the middle means
peace
. The labyrinth would have been used in that pursuit.”

“Too bad it didn’t work.”

“Smith, this is—” She shook her head, speechless.

He pulled a smile. “Shall I consider myself thanked?”

She dragged out a grudging “Yes,” but couldn’t hide the excitement as she gripped an edge of the gate. “Can you help me move it onto the turf?”

They laid it flat and examined the design and condition. Six feet by three, he estimated, with a keyed lock.

Tessa brushed the surface with her hand. “I think it’s bronze, oxidized, but it might still be saved.”

“Think you’ll use it?”

“If I could figure out why it was there in the first place. I’ve never seen a gated labyrinth. I was hoping the historical society might have something about the monastery, but so far I haven’t found much.”

“The college has archeological and historical information. They’re currently rebuilding historic St. Mary’s City. You might try there, but remember, Tess, you can’t say anything about what we’re doing. Not even to get information.”

“It can’t hurt to ask around.”

He wasn’t so sure. “Don’t pique anyone’s curiosity.”

“I know how to be discreet, Smith. Better than some people I know.”

“Meaning me, I suppose?”

“I didn’t mean anything.”

“I’m quite sure you did. You’ve been sinking those tiny barbs since you got here.” He frowned. “What is it you think I betrayed?”

“Besides me?”

“You? How?”

“Never mind.” She focused her attention on the gate. “Don’t you have something to do?”

“I have loads to do, but I’m not leaving that statement—”

“Forget it, Smith.” She rubbed furiously at the dirt caked on the leaves of the gate.

“Right.” He wouldn’t even try to parse her comment. If she thought he’d been anything but circumspect in their prior interaction . . . All right, he had told their classmates what he thought of her defection. And what he thought of her new plan. He sighed. She might have a point, but wasn’t there a statute of limitations?

The last thing he needed was drama, when this opportunity could open doors to people and places he might otherwise bang on his entire career and never gain entrance. He’d have to trust Tessa to uphold the non-disclosure. Gaston was near maniacal on that. She might not like it—or him—but she’d better not violate the agreement just to pay back some real or imagined slight of years ago.

Gaston was not a man to cross. He would slap a lawsuit on them so fast. Couldn’t she simply plant the labyrinth?

He blinked in the shadows that were not enough, squinting into the overcast light at her working in the field. He should be sleeping, but he couldn’t resist looking. One more look at her on her knees, brushing the ground with her hands.

He could almost feel her hands. Stroking. How long since a person’s hands had touched him? Humming softly, he slid his fingers down his arms, over his tender skin. In just the way she brushed the dirt. How easy it would be to creep up, creep up and see if she was soft, as soft as she looked.

But she would scream. Scream and shield herself. Run.

Better just to look. No! Better not to look. Not to want. She was one of them, not for him. No one for him. He clutched his head and slunk down, down low under the dark trees where the sun didn’t reach. Needles and leaves crunched under his side, under his cheek. He wanted his place but couldn’t get there, not with her where she was, where she shouldn’t be, where she took the dirt off the place she should not be.

This one had been there so early he couldn’t get back. A moan that was more like a growl deep in his throat made a chipmunk scurry, but he didn’t snatch it. He curled up and let the moans come. What could he do, how could he make them leave? He knew so many things, but not that, never that, because he hadn’t needed to.

Not since he’d been hidden, since she had made the screamers go away. But she was not there anymore. So long, so long since she had been there. And he was alone. And he had to make them go. And he didn’t know how.

CHAPTER

8

Tessa had spent a good portion of every day over the month she’d been there on a different part of the property with her sketchbook and pencil, reading the land, watching what it told her about the play of light, the fall of shade, the flow of moisture. She sat down now, cross-legged, listening to the call of an oriole. Somewhere farther a squirrel chirped its way up a tree. Crickets and grasshoppers sang in the grasses as the fall sunshine warmed her head. With her design nearly complete, her excitement had grown, though nothing compared to her plans for the labyrinth.

She closed her eyes and drew a seed pattern of a Greek cross, four dots and two inverted half circles at the top, then two sidefacing at the bottom. Eyes still closed, she added curving lines that yielded a seven-circuit design, not caring that some of the connections were off. The blind approximation calmed her racing thoughts and triggered creativity, while sharpening her analytical processes.

Feeling the cooling sweep of a shadow, she opened her eyes to Bair leaning over. “You drew that with your eyes closed.”

She smiled. “It opens kinesthetic channels when sight is removed from the connection between thought and hand.”

“Looks like a different pattern.”

“It’s the classic design. Not my personal favorite, but I’ve styled quite a few from turf, dwarf shrubs, and other ground covers. It lends itself well to landscape.”

“What’s this one?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s the medieval design, like the floor of Chartres Cathedral. Possibly Roman, since both have four quadrants, but the Roman is traveled sequentially, and this path appears to run back and forth through the structure as a whole.”

“You can tell all that from what’s here?” He looked over the uneven ground.

“If you know what you’re looking at.”

She picked up her pencil and drew the design, then held it up for Bair to see.

He looked from the drawing to the field. “Yes, quite. Still, I’m surprised Smith recognized it.”

She was too. Although she had drawn enough of them in his company. He had admired her doodling until she decided to make them reality.

“It’s going to be big.”

“Yeah.” Translating the intricate and exact proportions to a topiary path would be her greatest challenge yet. If she intended the hedge to grow an assumed height of six feet, she would need a width of two feet for stability, path width two and a half. “Let’s see. Twenty-two circuits, four and a half feet wide, plus the center, which equals one quarter of the total . . .” She did the math. “I’ll be working with a diameter of a hundred thirty-two feet, or fortyfour yards across.”

“No small task.”

Walking it, she’d been aware of its size, but now she consciously considered the job before her. “I’m pretty certain the original designer followed the straight-angled Chartres script without the decorative elements of the cathedral’s floor labyrinth. I’ll know more when I uncover enough of the path to see the first turns.” Although now, with every cut of the spade, she wondered what she might unearth. “I wish I knew more about it.”

“Have you read the documents?”

She nodded. “Mr. Gaston’s documents contain the most information I’ve found. The etchings are fairly detailed for the structure”—a wooden colonial chapel with wings that would have held the priests’ cells, kitchen, storage, education and workrooms— “but not so much for the labyrinth. I haven’t found more than a passing mention of the monastery in records outside Mr. Gaston’s.”

“According to Smith, he privately acquired everything he could.”

She raised her brows. Lots of people wanted to know the history of their land, but left it for the public as well. “St. John’s didn’t seem to have been around long enough to impact history before it got destroyed.” She hoped with everything in her the priests’ bones did not lie within the labyrinth.

“Hard to imagine that kind of violence.”

“Is it?” She looked up, surprised. “With Islamic suicide bombers who want to kill us all as infidels?”

“But these were all Christians. They simply worshiped differently.”

“True.”

In spite of Smith’s dire warnings, she had managed to learn a little about the local history without raising alarms. “Lord Baltimore envisioned a colony without an established religion, where all believers in Christ could worship in peace. The original act went so far as to punish with fines people who used terms like Puritan, heretic, Calvinist, Papist, or Lutheran in a ‘reproachful manner.’ Very forward thinking for the time, but naïve.”

“What happened?”

“Puritans who had been forced out of Virginia and given refuge in Maryland wrested control, suspended the Toleration Act, and denied Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and Anglicans religious liberty.”

“That’s a nice turnaround. So what happened?”

“Oliver Cromwell recognized the excessive persecution and restored the Toleration Act, but by then the monastery and its peace labyrinth had been burned to the ground.”

“Makes you wonder what God thinks of it all.”

“Yes, it does.” She nodded. “Especially since the infighting between Christians hasn’t stopped. It never took long whenever Mom and I tried a new church before one group or another was being criticized. I guess that’s why some people choose a private relationship with God over any church at all.” She had not meant to say so much, but learning the monastery’s history had struck a chord with the nomadic search she and her mother had made for a place to rest away from petty quarrels and politics, and why she still sought God in the labyrinth’s solitude.

“Well, um . . . I was wondering . . . when you might be finishing up.”