There are various options.
Grüber, Stanford, Savvy, the whole internet – for she’s verified what they’d said about the Lefatigué family on her phone when back in the room – are part of some sort of elaborate put-up job; the family line is not in fact extinguished, and the lady she’d met is indeed whom she’d claimed to be. But this is neither likely nor feasible: think of all the people that would have to be in on it, all the technical legwork – and there is still the question of why they’d go to all that trouble. So, she thinks she can cross that one off the list.
Or, maybe the woman wasn’t real – not a ghost, no; Alex doesn’t believe in those, nor some undead Charlotte de Lefatigué, bathing her way to smooth-skinned immortality in the distilled essence of virgin youths. No, not-real in a different sense: a flesh and blood actress hired to toy with her, to unsettle her, so that if she ever does threaten to expose The Society’s hidden power games to the world, it can all be dismissed as the ravings of an unhinged mind; one that believes in five-hundred year old blood-bathing marquises.
She catches herself: Christ, Alex, get a grip. If they truly suspected you, then you’d be politely escorted to the nearest jail cell, or failing that tossed down a convenient alp. As usual, she’s overthinking things, sabotaging herself with … with …
There is a distant screech – a fox, is it? – followed by the eerie hoot of an owl. Ah, the children of the night; why don’t they shut the fuck up?
Where was she?
Yes. Probably some loon; a member of staff or an attendee with a wicked sense of humour – as the sensible Herr Grüber had suggested. She can go ahead as planned.
Savvy snores away gently beside her. Poor lamb is whacked out. All those workshops and breakout sessions have really done a number on him.
Having shaken off her spooky paranoias, day two of the conference finds Alex full of renewed purpose – which is more than can be said for her little princeling, and she has to practically drag Savvy out of bed.
She’s decided to risk the button camera. She’s nervy about this. Despite the low-tech vibe, they must have some anti-surveillance protocols in place. But it’s either that or find some other way to sneak a peek. Early on in their acquaintance she’d had a sly little go at hacking Savvy’s phone, which would have been the simplest thing (thinking that maybe she could get it to record audio, at least), but with passcode, fingerprint and face-rec access, it’s locked up tighter than a mother superior’s proverbial, so she’s resigned herself to never getting in there. She has the micro-drone, of course, if she can work out a way to pilot it inside, but at the moment she doesn’t even know where the conference is taking place – in the great hall, where they had dinner? And the château is so ancient that, while there may very possibly be secret passageways and portraits with hollowed out eyes for peepholes, there are no handy air vents to crawl along (or to send something down). So the easiest thing is to simply replace a button on one of Savvy’s spiffy little waistcoats, and wait until he returns at the end of the day to download and review the footage. For the camera records, but doesn’t transmit, thus lessening the possibility that the signal can be traced back to her. This also supplies an added buffer: if her plan hits the fan, poor Savvy will be her sap.
Sap. An interesting word, deriving from sapper, a military engineer tasked with building bridges, fortifications and trenches, and with laying landmines. (Where is she remembering all this from?) They were also known as miners, in that they would dig tunnels that literally undermined or sapped the enemy’s defences, allowing explosives to be placed there. Hence poor sap: someone tasked with thankless drudge work that was not only unglamorous, but – they were responsible for clearing minefields as well as seeding them – potentially lethal.
Which is what she is using Savvy to do, effectively. To tunnel in. To undermine. Poor Savvy, the unwitting sap. And all sapped after yesterday; sapped of his sap; a sapless sapper.
She allows her conscience a moment’s pang at the thought of his sweet little idiot face.
Still, it’s in a good cause.
All of which leaves her twiddling her thumbs for the rest of the day. Where to twiddle them? Somewhere to be seen, somewhere irreproachably public, where she can look plausibly shocked at any surveillance-based shenanigans in which the gentleman she is plus-one to has been caught in flagrante. She decides on the gardens – didn’t Herr Grüber recommend them? It’s probably the wrong time to see them, their botanical glories now hidden beneath a blanket of anaemic cold, but perhaps she can still appreciate their structure, their landscaped artistry.
She enters the internal central courtyard and heads for the east wing, exiting out onto a forlorn sun patio that leads down some steps and along a well-maintained path. Even in this weather, there are a sprinkling of the ubiquitous white-gloved servants sweeping and shovelling, primping and pruning. The pathway leads through a miniature little landscape – hills, valleys, even its own little alps! It really is, as Grüber promised, quite delightful. A little village straddles a little river, an idyll of fortified churches and little boxy, coloured houses, a cute little town square with its own little locals sat at cafes and on benches – and all this little starts to make her feel a little queasy at its level of detail, like Alice after drinking the growing potion, or Gulliver in Lilliput – so it is almost a relief when the gardens move on to another theme. But it is only to present an equally disquieting prospect, and she is now Jack in the land of the giants, an emasculated Gulliver in Brobdingnag, dwarfed by huge trees and shrubs, awed by great stone furniture, tables and chairs that have to be climbed up to via oversized steps. Relativity is unsettling.
She walks on, passing greenhouses locked up for winter, and out into a wilder area, overrun at some past time and yet to be reclaimed. Chest-high hedges that once were trimly maintained in graceful curves now sprout abundantly, capriciously, or deteriorate at random intervals into sparsity, affording jagged windows onto neighbouring pathways. Even so, it is still possible to follow the twisting route that once led between the rambling growth.
It is a maze.
But her wanderings have taken her away from the regularly tended parts of the garden, and therefore from her goal of being publicly visible, and the further she has explored, the servants have dwindled too. Should she turn back? But then she spies someone, a solitary form at the maze’s centre, sat on a wooden throne raised upon a stone dais, its back to her.
And just then the figure turns and notices her; it waves.
It is the old – or rather, not so old woman, from the library; in fact, looking even more sprightly than yesterday. More upright, perhaps? Her chest more prominent? But anyway, this is a good opportunity for Alex to communicate her displeasure at the little prank she was subject to.
“Ah, it’s you.” The woman doesn’t raise her voice, yet somehow it still carries. “I am glad you’ve made it to the gardens. It is a shame you can’t see them in spring and summer, but they are lovely at any time of year.”
“That was a nice little trick you played in the library,” Alex says, continuing her path through the maze.
“You should have seen it all back in its prime,” the woman continues, as if Alex has not spoken. “This section was particularly fine. The topiary was exquisite – not that you’d think so, to look at it now. Nature needs constant care and attention, if it is to behave.”
“So was that your idea?” The winding path is not getting her any closer to the middle. “Or did someone put you up to it?”
“Mazes, especially. Did you know that the King and Queen of Bohemia – we’re talking Frederick and Elizabeth, of course, Jamie’s little girl – ‘Winter Queen’ was a bit of a misnomer; she was such a bright, sweet young thing. Now, they had a maze that changed as you walked it. Still don’t know their secret. At least, they wouldn’t say.” She laughs.
“Or do you expect me to believe all this …” Alex appears finally to be nearing the centre, but her next turn sends her in a long loop back out toward the perimeter. “… all this—I mean, do you think I’m an idiot?”
“Newton designed one that was meant to prove … What was it? Maybe it was to do with primes. The number of paces you take in one direction, and then … Anyway, something mathematical; I forget. But that man had no artistic bent, no appreciation of the feminine, if you know what I mean. Leibniz, not to be outdone, created one that in order to get to the middle you had to make calculations at each turn!” She laughed again, a surprisingly vibrant, throaty sound. “Talk about tedious! But they were all rather missing the point, I feel. You see, a maze is not a puzzle to be solved. Some of the oldest mazes – Cretan, Celtic, Native American – have only one path. Strictly speaking, this is not a maze but a labyrinth. One way that leads into the centre and out again. Because it is the journey that matters, don’t you see? Not the choices you make – for in truth, there are none. Or, I suppose, only the decision as to whether to go onwards or back. But that’s not really a decision, is it? More a giving up. There is no escape from the path.”
Alex has now stopped trying to get responses from the woman – she is obviously in the grips of some form of delusion, albeit it a very interesting and cultured one – and is concentrating on reaching her, but is frustrated to now find herself even further from the centre than when she began.
“So what is the point of walking them, you may ask, if there is no solution, no puzzle to be solved? Well, the reason for this can be seen if you really consider the shape of them – those early, primitive labyrinths, I mean. Took my breath away, when I first recognised it.” She looks directly at Alex. “They are wombs.” She stands up now and begins to descend the dais. “And what does it mean to walk into a womb, you may ask? To go back inside from whence you came? And once you’ve been there, to re-emerge? That’s the real question, isn’t it? That’s the real puzzle. Is it perhaps that, in Nature, there is no such thing as death?”
The woman disappears down an avenue, behind an old decrepit statue. And by the time Alex finally does reach the centre, and for the following ten minutes that she searches, there is no sign of her, and not a footprint other than her own to mark the fresh-fallen snow.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi/fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. All instalments are free, but you can support my writing by taking out a paid subscription, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments.