“I’d try the hedge maze,” Christopher said, “if only because we were just talking about it.”
Right. “I’ll see you back here after I’ve finished humiliating myself?”
“I imagine I’ll be upstairs by then,” Christopher said. “It might take a while. He’ll want to luxuriate in it, no doubt.”
No doubt at all.
“But don’t worry,” Christopher finished brightly, “my room doesn’t overlook that part of the garden.”
At least there was that one thing to be grateful for. I headed out, with the dragging feet—or at least the sinking feeling—of Marie Antoinette walking towards the guillotine.
The front door,quite obviously, opens into the front of the Hall, and out to the courtyard. I opened it and peered out, but there was no sign of Crispin. No sign of anyone else, for that matter. The fountain in the middle of the courtyard burbled quietly in the morning sunshine, but that was the only sign of life.
I’ll admit I had half expected to hear the roar of the Hispano-Suiza’s engine, that Crispin’s first instinct had been to jump into the motorcar and take out his aggression on driving too fast down the winding roads to the village, but other than the fountain and the birdsong, there was nothing to hear.
Nonetheless, I closed the door behind me and trudged across the courtyard and over to the carriage house. The Hispano-Suiza was still parked where it had been upon our arrival yesterday, between the duke’s—the late duke’s—more staid Crossley Touring Car and the Astleys’ Bentley Tourer. Crispin was nowhere to be seen. I even called his name, and got no answer.
The hedge maze is located behind the house, so next I turned my attention, and my feet, in that direction. He could be anywhere, of course, but we’d certainly used the word ‘maze’ enough that it might have made an impression, so it seemed a logical place to continue my search.
I wandered through the formal gardens, past the fountain where Christopher said he had waited for Grimsby last night, toward the back of the Hall.
The European hedge maze arrived on British soil during the reign of William III, perhaps better known as William of Orange, who was king for a couple of decades during the late sixteen-hundreds. By then, hedge mazes had already been popular on the Continent for a few hundred years, and hundreds of them were constructed all over England over the next two centuries. The Sutherland Hall maze was one of those.
It wasn’t terribly large, and although I had gotten irrevocably lost the first few times I’d ventured into it (goaded by St George, of course) and had had to be rescued (by a gloating St George), the experience had mostly borne in upon me the necessity for figuring out the pattern of the maze so it wouldn’t happen again. As I recall, I had been twelve when I traversed the maze with a notebook and pencil in hand, endeavoring to draw myself a map. That done, I went to my room and memorized the path. After that, I was never left to weep by myself, surrounded by green hedges, again. St George had been fit to be tied when he’d realized it, too.
But I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that. I was supposed to be planning my sincere apology, a concept which filled me with the most horrible sense of nausea.
I did not want to apologize to Crispin.
Not because he didn’t deserve it, because in hindsight, I could see that I had perhaps jumped a little too briskly to berating him for something he absolutely had not suggested he would do. In fact, I had no reason whatsoever to think that Crispin would pick lovers from below-stairs at the Hall, or for that manner from the staff at Sutherland House.
Indeed, between his grandfather—until yesterday—and his father and mother, I would have guessed Crispin would have been made absolutely aware of what would happen should he do something so ill-advised.
Besides, whatever his other faults may be, and I knew without a doubt that they were plentiful, I didn’t believe seducing the staff was something he’d stoop to. He’d think it was beneath him, and not in the way I had made it sound earlier. Not that Sadie the parlor maid—who, by the way, had to be at least ten years Crispin’s senior, and who was as round as a dumpling—was beneath him, but that sexual relations with the servants was. For all his other faults, I couldn’t see him exerting his dubious charms on anyone who wasn’t both upper-class, stunning, and rich.
No, the reason I didn’t want to apologize was because I knew I was wrong, and I knew he would rub it in if—when—I gave him the chance. Because he was Crispin St George, and he’d never let an opportunity go by to get beneath my skin. He was going to make me grovel, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.
It had been a decade since we’d played in the garden maze, but the twists and turns came back to me as I entered the cool greenness of the paths and turned right.
The maze was created from common English yew trees, evergreens with red berries, none of which were in evidence at this time of year. Its shape is roughly square, and unlike some mazes, the paths are perpendicular, not serpentine, which made the map a lot easier to draw back in the day. Right, eight steps; left, seven steps; left, nine steps… And while I was now several inches taller than I had been at eleven, the hedges inside the maze still topped my head by a bit. Right at the front, where the entrance was, they were shorter—five feet instead of six or seven—but once I got into the maze, they got taller and the gloom got deeper. Because it was early and the sun was close to the horizon, the maze itself was shady and a bit cool. I wrapped my arms around myself as I trudged towards the middle of the labyrinth.
The center of the maze opens into a clearing with a couple of benches and a sundial. It’s a nice place to sit and breathe after traversing the maze, and the sundial is a lovely piece of art, with a base carved from marble and a weathered copper face. It must have started out bright, but has since oxidized to a pale green, and it is inscribed around the edges with Roman numerals.
Normally, it’s the first thing I look at when I reach the center of the maze. This time, my gaze was arrested by the two figures next to the sundial instead. A man, flat on his back on the dewy grass, the toes of his black shoes pointing straight up at the sky. And the other man, kneeling beside him, head bowed.
EIGHT
I must have made a sound,because Crispin’s head jerked up, and he spun around to face me, his eyes large and startled in his pale face. When he recognized me, he slumped. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Who did you think it was?” I looked past him without waiting for an answer, and added, “Is that Grimsby?”
Crispin nodded. “Don’t look.”
“Why wouldn’t I look? What’s—?”
And then I moved far enough to the side that I could see for myself what he didn’t want me to look at. “Good Lord.”
My head started swimming, and I took an involuntary step back.
