Labyrinth Gate

by Kate Elliott

  “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.

  Epilogue:

  The Queen Of Heaven

  THE 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, o
n 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.”

  “But still—” She hesitated, tilting her head. “What’s that noise?”

  “What noise?”

  “Sort of a low drone—”

  The next instant he, too, heard it; their eyes met with the same idea. On the table, the cards showed a faint blurring nimbus of light and a shadow above. The drone ended abruptly, and an envelope dropped one inch to land with a light smack on the tabletop.

  “Well?” cried Chryse after a long moment of stunned silence. “Open it!”

  He did so.

  “‘My dear Chryse and Sanjay,’” he read. “‘I promised that I would write, and so I shall, having some expectation that this letter will be able to reach you, although little that any further communication will prove able to.’

  “‘There is a great deal of news to impart. The coronation of Georgiana was a great success, and her wedding to young Prince Frederick, a rather plain, unassuming lad, I must say, went off to great acclaim by peer and populace alike. Thank Our Lady that that business is now settled.’

  “‘As well as private meetings with the Earl and Countess of Elen, Julian, Miss Cathcart, and myself, the queen took the surprising step of granting a royal charter to the so-called correspondence societies of the working classes, as a tribute to the help they gave her in passing my letter on. Of course the charter itself means nothing if the government chooses to suppress what they consider to be seditious writings, but the recognition is doubtless worth twice its weight in gold to folk like Mr. Southern.’

  “‘However, it is the more personal news that I expect will interest you the most. Maretha was delivered of a baby girl on the day of Hunter’s Run, speaking in the ancient year—’”

  “Wouldn’t that be the exact same day as—”

  “Shh, you’re interrupting. ‘—and the child has been christened Elena. The earl continues as cold and aloof as ever, but there is a new quality tempering him now which I will not attempt to define, except that Maretha at least seems to be flourishing. She has a certain, shall we say, glow about her that has sustained itself without fail since the Festival of Lights.’

  “‘Mr. Southern and Miss Charity Farr were wed some six months ago in a very quiet ceremony. She is, I understand, expecting again. One is constantly amazed at the fecundity of the lower classes, although one also wonders if Mr. Southern’s rise in the world will doom his progeny to small families. He is progressing in his studies, as I hear it, but has refused a vicarage in a rich parish on lands the earl owns in favor of a Heffield parish in the midst of the worst slums. Ah, well, one reaps as one sows.’”

  “He would, of course,” said Chryse. “The better to incite the new generation of union agitators.”

  “‘The youth Lucias, having recovered from his injuries, has proven to have very common antecedents: he is the son of one of the grooms at Blackstone Palace. He has been given a position as an undergroom in the Queen’s establishment, and by all reports is quite happy there.’

  “‘The two urchins saved from the factory have, at Julian’s insistence, been apprenticed out to respectable trades, a far cry better than they could have expected even had they not been sold to the factories. However, this social conscience sits strangely on Julian’s shoulders—he is not to my mind of the reformer’s cast of mind, but we all of us need one purpose or another in order to give some sense to our lives.’

  “‘I had thought that your sudden departure might prove to be the catalyst on which Julian and Miss Cathcart would resolve their differences, but it did not prove so. After one very long month, Julian at last proposed a scheme to end the stalemate once and for all: He made her a wager, to a game of cards, where if he should win, she would marry him, and if he should lose he would never mention the subject again.’

  “‘This seemed to me a clever enough ploy, since Julian has, like all the Voles, the devil’s own luck with the cards. I was frankly surprised when Miss Cathcart accepted, until it occurred to me that perhaps she wanted to lose. Imagine my amazement when Julian lost!’

  “‘I had not realized up to this time the subtlety of my nephew’s plan, for of course now Miss Cathcart had what she had claimed to desire all along—freedom from Julian’s importunities. But the result produced was quite the opposite. With a group of the most disreputable rakes and sharps you have ever met, she went on a spree of wild drinking, gambling, and carousing that quite scandalized polite society—only to disappear from sight the day after winning a handsome fortune at the tables. When she reappeared one month later (poor Julian left in ignorance of her whereabouts and cross as flinders the entire time), she was quite sober and enrolled as a student at the College of Surgeons. Whereupon she promptly seduced my nephew—so I hear—and then, claiming that she had compromised his reputation past redemption, said there was nothing to it but that he must marry her.’

  “‘You may guess that I am pleased.’”

  “I might at that,” said Chryse, laughing.

  “‘It all has fallen out exactly as I hoped it might years ago. You may also guess that I wish the very best for you and your son, and that I shall always remain, your fond aunt (if I may style myself so), Laetitia Haldane, Lady Trent.’”

  “How did she know we had a son?” asked Chryse.

  Sanjay did not reply. There was a little silence as they sat together. The baby had fallen asleep.

  “What are you thinking of?” asked Chryse at last.

  Sanjay took her hand and smiled at her. “Weddings and gifts and the fragmented remains of old paintings. I suppose the real treasure is in learning to connect the lines and isolated pieces into a coherent whole. The same picture is hidden there. We just each of us see it in a different fashion.”

  “One that makes sense depending on who you are?”

  He reached past her to pick up the central card of the deck: the Gate. “I think it must be so,” he said.

  The Gates

  THIS IS THE DECK as it usually appeared in medieval times.

  Many different permutations have appeared in other places and other times.

  I. THE HINGE

  1. DAWN

  Letter: C

  Picture: Out of a cottage comes a little child, walking stick and satchel in hand.

  Meaning: Beginning; optimism, “a new day,” setting out on a new endeavor; inexperience, newness, development; early understanding, origin of idea or activity.

  2. DUSK

  Letter:

  Picture: Same cottage—an old person, bent and weary, returns to the hearth within.

  Meaning: Ending; completion of a cycle, a task achieved; pessimism, oldness, finish; rest and hope of shelter.

  3. T
HE GATE

  Letter:

  Picture: A gateway of stone.

  Meaning: The path, road, or passage to another place or state of being; the hinge on which all decisions and choices are made, however large or small, changing the traveller in the act of passage.

  II. THE WHEEL OF THE YEAR

  1. THE FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS

  Letter: A

  Season: Midwinter Solstice

  Picture: A young woman, wearing a circlet of burning candles, crowns a young man with a circlet of unlit ones, soon to be lit.

  Meaning: The birth of the new year, or of any venture or quest.

  2. TWIN’S FAERE

  Letter: J

  Season: The Thaw

  Picture: Tents of a medieval crafts fair fill the background; in the foreground, a man works smithing over a hot fire while a woman weaves an elaborate tapestry on a loom beside him.

  Meaning: Aspiration and inspiration; work and labor, individual and unique; expression of one’s own self.

  3. SOWER’S DAY

  Letter: AE

  Season: Spring Equinox

  Picture: In a field, a woman and a man work side by side, the woman furrowing, the man sowing.

  Meaning: Planting; sowing for a future project or for future use or harvest; planning ahead, working to purpose, worthwhile and effective labor; balance and harmony.

  4. FEAST OF SOMORHAS

  Letter: O

  Season: The Flowering

  Picture: At the high table, the bride and groom preside over a lavish feast. The bride is dressed in green, the groom in black; on the wall behind hangs a tapestry depicting the Harvest Faire—it is seen to be the same tapestry that the artist in Twin’s Faire is working on.

  Meaning: Marriage, unity, choice and renewal; fertility; desire.

  5. HIGH SUMMER EVE

  Letter: E

  Season: Midsummer Solstice

  Picture: An obviously pregnant woman kneels before a mature man. A “daisy chain” is looped around his wrists—it is impossible to tell if the woman is putting this chain on him, taking it off, or receiving it from him.