Free Walking the Labyrinth by Lisa Goldstein

are silly, untutored creatures, and so we are, some of us and some of the time. Yet we can learn. It is because I have learned that I am able to write this book. I owe it to you, my old friend, to tell you the truth for once, without deception and without art.
    My parents and brothers and sisters all had what we called the Gift, which had manifested itself in our family as far back as memories ran. It is the Gift that allows us to find lost hats and gloves, to guess what a man will say before he speaks, to make objects disappear in one place and reappear in another. The villagers would occasionally come to us for advice on stray sheep or matters of the heart; their parents, and their grandparents, and their great-grandparents had all done the same before them.
    Harrison once asked me whether the villagers had thought of us as witches, and seemed startled when I laughed. The villagers had grown up with us, and thought our skills nothing untoward.
    The Gift was strongest in me. My grandmother could remember her grandmother, a woman who lived in village memory as the one who had calmed the great storm of the last century. My grandmother said that with my brown hair and blue eyes and the gap between my teeth I looked very much like her, and that my talent was perhaps as strong as hers.
    When I was seventeen or eighteen (our village did not keep track of such anniversaries) I went to work as a laundress in the great house. I was conscientious about my duties, and if it appeared that some item of clothing would not be ready in time I would use the Gift to see that it was cleaned. I did not do this often; I knew that I would be overwhelmed with work if the other servants had an idea of the extent of my talent.
    The daughter of the house, Miss Sylvia, enjoyed taking her carriage to London, where she would spend a few days making the rounds of dressmakers and milliners and visiting her friends. She would generally take her maid, Henrietta, but on the day my life changed Henrietta had fallen ill. The housekeeper, a sour, squinting old woman named Jane, was given the task of finding a reliable girl to travel with Miss Sylvia, and as it happened her gaze fell upon me.
    “You, girl,” she said. “You’ve a level head on your shoulders. Can you take charge of Miss Sylvia’s toilette?”
    I said that I could, and we set off for London.
    This was the first time I had been to London, and it appeared to me splendid beyond belief, a riot of sound and smell and colour. I had never seen so many people, nor carriages, nor houses jostling together side by side. We left our bags at the house of one of Miss Sylvia’s friends and set off to the dressmakers’ shops.
    As we entered the first shop a couple was leaving. The man wore fashionable muttonchops and a high bowler hat; the woman had a pale face and astonishingly bright red hair which she had pinned tightly under her hat, almost as if she were ashamed of so much richness. He had tucked the woman’s arm under his, and she was cradling her stomach protectively with her other hand.
    So preoccupied was she that she very nearly pushed me back into the street. It was not this that aroused my ire, however, but the fact that the man raised his bowler hat and apologised, not to me but to Miss Sylvia.
    “You don’t need to be so careful of your wife,” I said to him. “She ain’t pregnant.”
    I think it was the word “pregnant,” never used in polite company, that stopped him. “What?” he said.
    “She ain’t pregnant,” I said again.
    Lady Lydia looked at me hatefully, but the man, Lord Harrison Sanderson, seemed not to notice. “Who are you?” he asked wonderingly. “How could you possibly know such a thing?”
    “Come, Harrison,” Lady Lydia said. “We’ll be late for the lecture.” And Harrison raised his hat again, this time to me, and allowed himself to be led away.
    It was easy enough for Harrison to find us again. He asked his friends, not of course about me but about