Free Walking the Labyrinth by Lisa Goldstein Page B

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    The woman wearing rouge spoke. “We are travelling through the turnings of the Labyrinth. Each turning represents an important event in our lives, a test successfully overcome. We turn now right, now left, and now right again. And now our guide, Arton, comes to meet us, clothed all in golden light. Arton, do you have a message for any of those present?”
    The woman opened her eyes and looked around wildly. Her hair was dyed a flat black; she was tall and heavy and wore a skirt and bodice edged with black lace at her wrists and neck. Silver and garnet earrings dangled from her ears. “There is a message for—” Her face screwed in a frown. “—for Edward.”
    She fell silent.
    I turned to my neighbour on my right, the gentleman with the forked beard. “Who’s she, then?” I asked.
    “Hush,” the man said.
    “Yes,” the woman continued, less agitated now. “Arton bids me say that Edward’s son is alive, and will return.”
    “Not soon, I’d bet,” I said. “He’s in India.”
    There was consternation around the table, expressions of shock, surprise, startlement. “Hush,” the man next to me, Augustus Binder, said again.
    But by far the strangest response came from the man I took to be Edward. “By George, and I’d give him ten thousand pounds to stay there, too!” he said.
    I saw that Edward’s son, who was also named Edward, had had to leave his college at Cambridge after a scandal involving a friend’s sister and the sister’s maidservant. I saw that he had lived riotously at Cambridge, and that his only communication with his father had consisted of requests for money. Before he left for India he had not seen his tutor in over a year.
    “He’ll come home to you,” I said. “But in three or four years, and so different you won’t hardly know him. You’ll like him better then.”
    The rouged woman, Mrs. Frances, was looking at me with open admiration. She said, her voice low, “She speaks with Arton.”
    I saw that this woman had some small Gift, but that she needed the rituals, the candles, the invocations to focus it. “I don’t know no Arton,” I said. “I see Edward in India, that’s all.”
    “What else does Arton say?” another woman asked.
    I looked slowly around the table, gazing at each one in turn. What should I tell them? That this one would die, and that one prosper? That this one, so gently holding his wife’s hand, would return tomorrow to the waterfront and the men he desired?
    I needed time to think. “He don’t say nothing more,” I said.
    After the meeting Mrs. Frances came up to me. “You have a great talent, young lady,” she said.
    “I know,” I said. “We all have it in our family.”
    She laughed. It was a deep, gravelly laugh, beginning somewhere in her belly. “Immodesty becomes you, my dear. A word of advice, if I may. Don’t fuck Lord Harrison, much as he desires you.”
    Not one of the fine men and women I had worked for had ever used that word, so familiar to me from my village childhood. It was as if, by not talking about it, they had managed to convince themselves that all the messy business of life did not exist.
    “No, I won’t do that,” I said. “And he would never.”
    She laughed her strong laugh again and pressed my hand. “So,” she said, “there are some things that even you don’t know.”
    The meetings continued. I was astonished, even a little scornful, when I learned what they would have me do. Rituals, incantations, invocations—they seemed like children playing a game, the rules of which they had not yet mastered. In vain did I tell them that none of this was necessary, that I learned all I needed from one look at their faces.
    At every meeting, therefore, we drew the pentagram and lit the candles, spoke the invocations, held hands around the table. I would close my eyes and pretend to enter a trance, though I refused to speak the nonsense about the turnings of the Labyrinth. And then I would tell them what they