Page 48 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
“Okay, Markham,” she says, waving me forward. “You’re right. Let’s go for a walk.”
The maze is still shrouded with gloom and shadows when we walk through the entrance. A marble Demeter and Persephone flank the entry arch cut into the hedge, their outstretched hands reaching for one another, their expressions joyful and their bodies frozen in the act of flying into a desperate, happy embrace.
“Estamond really liked her mythology,” I say as we start walking.
“I know,” Rebecca says. “And she certainly didn’t mind the raunchier myths either. For a Victorian.”
We turn our first corner, immediately turn again. It’s dark enough in here that I’m almost tempted to use the flashlight on my phone.
“Saint and I read that she was very improper, what with her sexy statues and inviting poets to come get drunk at her house and all.”
Rebecca laughs a little. “She sounds like someone we would like.”
“She does.” I stop at a junction and try to orient myself, but it’s hopeless. There are too many little dead ends and spurs, too many turns to keep track of our direction. Rebecca picks a path for us and we keep going. Neither of us knows the way, but with each corner, Rebecca seems to ease more and more, as if the very challenge of the maze is relaxing, as if the difficulty of it reassures her somehow. She leads us closer and closer to the center, choosing paths with startling ease.
I remember Auden telling me that Rebecca is a genius.
“I also read that this is very, very old,” I say, after several long minutes of us crunching over the crushed gravel. “Estamond renovated the maze and put in the statue at the center, but there was a Tudor maze here first. And before that, maybe a labyrinth.”
Rebecca is walking slightly ahead of me now, peeking around a corner and then doubling back to take the last turn we saw. “Labyrinths are not the same as mazes,” she says as we walk along her new route.
“I know!” I say, wounded that she would think I didn’t know that. “It was interesting is all. The possibility that there’s been something in this spot for over a thousand years, maybe even with the center in the same place—”
Rebecca stops right in the middle of the path and I almost run into the back of her.
“With the center in the same place,” she echoes, staring straight ahead, as if she’s seeing something I can’t. “Ah. Of course. A labyrinth. Like a turf maze, maybe, or paved.”
“Well, the book didn’t say what the labyrinth looked like, just that there was one—oh.” Rebecca’s pulled her iPad out and she’s started making notes for herself. “Has that helped? Did I help?”
She looks up at me with one eyebrow arched high. “Given that I still have the entirety of the design and planning to do, and given that I’m still the one who had the idea to begin with, I’d say the help was limited.”
“Pleeease?” I wheedle.
She sighs at me bouncing on the balls of my feet, but there’s a distinct smile pulling at the edges of her mouth. “Okay, fine. You helped.”
I beam and she rolls her eyes and mutters something like subbie, although I can’t hear for sure. But I don’t mind, either being a sub or purring under her praise. Who doesn’t like praise? Surely even Dominants do. And she’s smiling anyway.
She and I decide to make it to the center before we head back, and when we step into the silent, hedge-lined enclosure, I feel the same dazzling air of mystery I did as a child. There’s something about the statue, Adonis and Aphrodite, this mortal man clutching his goddess, something tragic, erotic, timeless.
Something hiding even deeper secrets underneath.
“I want to go there again,” I say, kneeling near the fountain to see—ah, yes, it’s still there, still like I remember. A narrow notch only two feet wide between the fountain’s base and the statue’s plinth, disguised from almost every angle by the crescent shape of the fountain’s basin, which nearly wraps completely around the plinth itself. In the slow-brightening light, I can barely make out the steep steps that lead downward.
“I’ve been once since we were kids,” Rebecca says, joining me by the fountain. “Five years ago. I was staying the weekend with Auden, and we went out there together. Just to see it.”
“And?” I ask, facing her. I want her to tell me that it was magical, alive, filled with fairies, and maybe there was a conveniently dropped letter from my mother explaining why she left her child and her husband and if she’d ever come back.
“It was lovely,” Rebecca says, “but it was wild too. The grass was so tall you could barely see where you stepped, and it was so still that the air itself felt thick. Like you could suspend things in it, like you could grab hold of it.”
And then Rebecca—confident, left-brained Rebecca—shivers, the few braids she’s left out of her low bun dropping in front her face as she does.
“It felt like it wanted something,” she says quietly, tucking the braids back. “Like it was waiting.”
“Waiting?”
She gives a quick nod, looking away, but her expression as she looks away isn’t one of sheepish admission. It’s determined. Watchful.
“It was waiting for me to do something. I didn’t know what—I still don’t know what. But I feel like I’m about to find out.”
