Unhonored

by Tracy Hickman

  “I hardly know where I am, let alone where I might begin,” Ellis sighed.

  “Well, if I might be so bold with her ladyship, might I make a suggestion?” Mrs. Crow prattled on, her eyes twinkling. She did not wait for a response to her question. “I would begin in the Old Quarter. There are many places there where someone might hide and few here in this house that go there. It reminds them of the past and I think it makes them uncomfortable. Still, you’ve got a guide in that Jonas and that could make all the difference.”

  Ellis stepped out of the costume and turned with no small reluctance to the drab green outfit that was so irritatingly familiar to her that lay across the narrow bed.

  “And one more word, if I may,” Mrs. Crow said, stepping back and once more crossing her hands in front of her. “That young man Jonas…”

  Mrs. Crow paused.

  “What is it, Mrs. Crow?”

  “I hesitate to say, my lady,” the old woman said through a troubled frown. “It’s not my place…”

  “Go on,” Ellis insisted.

  “Well, it’s true that he knows something about the Ruins … the Old Quarter of the house, I mean,” the elderly woman said, her words coming slow and with caution. “But he may be a bit too familiar with them, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m sure I don’t.” Ellis glared at Mrs. Crow. “Go on.”

  “I’m just saying that some places in the Ruins are not safe,” Mrs. Crow said, holding her pale hands up. “You’ll need him to help you find Miss Jenny but he’s not playing the same Game as the rest of us … or you, for that matter, my lady. In the end, it’ll be only Jonas that Jonas is thinking about saving. Mark my words.”

  Ellis picked up the drab, green jacket of the traveling suit from off of the bed, gazing at it thoughtfully. “In the end, Mrs. Crow, aren’t we all just trying to save ourselves?”

  * * *

  The double doors were still open onto the large garden courtyard. The stones of the path were wet from the rain that had finally ceased. The leaves of the trimmed bushes glistened slightly under the light from the windows of the floors above. The muffled sound of distant laughter drifted down from those same windows, carefree and oblivious around the figure of Mrs. Crow.

  She stood in the open doorway watching two figures moving quietly into the hedge maze that filled the courtyard. One was a man dressed in the house livery of a servant, an outfit completely unsuited for the task before them, but Mrs. Crow had insisted that the young man maintain his station. The other was a woman in a traveling dress who stopped at the edge of the entrance to the maze and turned for one last look.

  Mrs. Crow smiled and waved encouragingly at her.

  She raised her hand in acknowledgment and in a moment both the man and woman were gone.

  Beyond the maze rose the dark and forbidding wing of the house known as the Old Quarter or, more commonly, the Ruins. They were not ruins, in the strictest sense of the word, Mrs. Crow corrected herself, but simply abandoned to the decay of memory. The windows there were dark and as hollow as the grave.

  Mrs. Crow lingered at the threshold.

  Waiting.

  “Are they gone?” came the deep voice from the dark hall behind her.

  “Yes, my lord.” Mrs. Crow spoke without turning at all, her gaze still cast over the garden. “As I told you they would be. Everything is in place and I have sown the seeds of doubt between them. It will just take a little time for them to take root. That was always part of the plan.”

  “But not sending them into the Ruins!” Merrick stepped from the shadows, his face grim as he came to stand beside her.

  Mrs. Crow turned toward him, her blue eyes taking on a dull, featureless black color. Her words were as sharp as cold steel.

  “Are you questioning my scheme?” Mrs. Crow spoke the quiet words with such authority that they caused the small windows framed in the door to quake. Around them both, shadows began to gather into terrible forms with leathery wings and long sharp claws, their blank eyes turning to stare at Merrick.

  “No, not at all, Mrs. Crow,” Merrick said with careful words as he took a step back. “I am just observing that you never said you would send them into the old part of the house.”

  “True enough, Lord Merrick,” the old woman said with a suddenly gentle, demure smile. The horrendous shadows around them faded from existence. “But that is where she will discover the most terrible thing of all, the one thing that she cannot fight and from which she can never flee.”

  “Indeed?” Merrick raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “And what is this terrible monster she will find?”

  “The truth about herself,” Mrs. Crow said gently.

  “The truth?” Merrick frowned.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Crow chuckled through her malicious grin. “And it will destroy them both.”

  Mrs. Crow turned and stepped back into the servants’ hall.

  Merrick followed after her.

  Neither of them noticed a third figure slip into the garden maze behind them.

  8

  THE GARDEN

  Ellis looked up at the leaden sky. It had gotten lighter as the morning progressed but there were no breaks in the clouds. It had been dark when they first entered the garden but that now seemed ages in the past. What had at first appeared to be a simple garden maze had proven to be more devious and convoluted than she had imagined. The neat, trimmed hedges they had first encountered had slowly and increasingly given way to hoarier shrubs. The carefully trimmed grass beneath their feet now reached up around Ellis’s knees. What had looked like a simple and brisk walk across a small garden was turning into a wilderness expedition.

  “This is ridiculous,” Jonas said through clenched teeth as he pushed past the rough corner of an overgrown hedge. “What was Mrs. Crow thinking? Asking me to dress in this footman’s livery. Did she think we were going on a picnic brunch?”

  “I’m sure that I don’t know what Mrs. Crow was thinking,” Ellis said in return, her reply perhaps a little more brusque than she intended. Ellis reached across her jacket, lifting her small pocket watch into view. She frowned at its face. “It’s ten before nine in the morning. Just how far can it be to the other side of a courtyard garden?”

  “That depends,” Jonas said, “on how far it needs to be.”

  She could see the gables and ridgelines of the roof of the house on the far side of the garden court but little else. The hedges of the garden maze obstructed any more complete vision of the Ruins. Even the clouds overhead had lowered to obscure the topmost spires. What was worse, despite being able to see their destination, the increasingly unkempt hedges were twisting their course. Although they could see the slate tiles of the roof, it seemed to her that they were no closer to reaching them with every step than they were before.

  “Are you certain this is the way?” Ellis asked.

  “Yes, this is the way,” Jonas replied at once, as though daring anyone to defy the statement.

  “How can you be certain?” Ellis pressed him to answer as they were confronted suddenly with another intersection of passages to the left and the right. The two paths before them both led into trellis tunnels on either side that twisted into even darker regions beyond. The vines covering them were overgrown, making both directions dark and forbidding.

  “Because this is a different kind of garden maze,” Jonas said, considering which direction to take. “We don’t solve this maze … the maze solves us.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ellis shook her head, wondering if she had heard him correctly.

  “What I mean is that it’s not about going right or left so much as going right or wrong,” Jonas continued as he deliberated. “It’s about who we are, not where we go.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “And you’re expecting sense in a place like this?” Jonas raised his eyebrow in the dark, paisley-shaped mark over his eye. They looked again down the two divergent paths. “I think this may be it.”

  �
��May be what?”

  “The entrance to the maze.”

  “But we’ve been in the maze for hours now.” Ellis shook her head.

  “Try to stay close to me.” Jonas turned to face her, his eyes searching her own. “If we get separated, I promise I’ll meet you on the other side.”

  “If we get separated?” Exasperation crept in to color her words. “You’re supposed to be my guide through all of this!”

  “Please believe me, Ellis, I am here to help you but there are some things—some places—that you have to manage alone. It will be all right,” he promised, though he failed to hide the pain in his eyes. His strong hands took her by both shoulders. “You can do this. Please remember that I told you that you could do this, wherever the maze takes you. Promise me!”

  “Let go of me,” Ellis demanded. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Promise me,” Jonas insisted.

  “I promise,” she snarled.

  “What,” Jonas insisted. “What did you promise me?”

  “You know very well what I promised!” Ellis said with indignation and more loudly than needful. She relaxed and corrected herself. “I mean, I’ll remember that you said I could do this.”

  Jonas laughed slightly, his hands releasing her from his firm grip. “That temper. I never would have guessed that I would actually miss it. You were always so careful with words, Ellis, except when you were mad.”

  “Angry,” Ellis said without thinking. “You meant ‘except when I was angry.’”

  “Still correcting me, too, eh?” Jonas said, his smile diminishing slightly. “So, Ellis, which way do we go?”

  “Which way?”

  “Yes … Left or right?”

  “You’re supposed to be the guide,” Ellis said. “Isn’t choosing your job?”

  “It won’t make any difference, Ellis,” Jonas quietly urged her. “Just choose.”

  Ellis was finding the situation more exasperating by the moment. She turned, peering down each of the paths. Both wound out of sight into near complete darkness. Each seemed equally forbidding.

  “You say they both lead to the Ruins?” Ellis asked.

  “Yes, they both lead to the old part of the house,” Jonas confirmed.

  “Then let’s go left,” Ellis said.

  “Left it is.” Jonas nodded, reaching out and taking Ellis by the hand.

  Ellis snatched her hand back, still smarting from Jonas’s teasing as they came to the first turn in the vine trellis. She turned the corner. Here the dark tunnel, sparsely dappled with sunlight, branched in three directions.

  Jonas had vanished.

  “Jonas?” she spoke into the silence of the garden.

  No one answered her in return.

  “Jonas,” she called again.

  “Ellie!”

  Ellis turned toward the sound. It came from the left most of the vine-covered maze halls. It sounded distant to her ears, muffled and indistinct yet she was sure it was her name.

  “Jonas?” she repeated, her voice sounding more uncertain than before. She took several hesitant steps into the left branch of the vine-covered trellis tunnel. She could see that its dark passage was lit only by a half-dozen thin shafts of light that had managed to penetrate the thick leaves of the covering vines. It ran straight for something like fifty feet, the thin shafts of brilliant light making it difficult to gauge the distance. There it turned sharply to the right.

  Ellis took another step. “Jonas? Where are you?”

  She froze, staring.

  A dark figure was staring back at her from the dim far distance of the corridor. She thought it was a little girl or boy, she could not tell at this distance, and poor. The features of its face were indiscernible. Ellis was reminded strongly of the little child on the lighthouse island that she had seen through the telescope at Summersend whose face she also had never seen. She had wondered about that child as well but now this figure was haunting and disturbing, staring back at her, unmoving and unmoved.

  Ellis swallowed and gathered up her courage to speak to the still figure staring back at her from the shadows veiling its eyes. “Hello? Are you lost?”

  The child shifted its weight slowly from one foot to the other.

  “Ellie! I’m here! Come find me!”

  The voice startled Ellis. It was not coming from the child but from somewhere farther along beyond it. It was familiar to her, still muffled and distant. A man’s voice—deep and warm.

  The shadowed child at the end of the hall turned and ran, vanishing almost at once from Ellis’s eyes.

  “Wait! Child!” Ellis called out. She plunged into the vine corridor after the faceless child. “Come back! I want to talk to you!”

  Ellis ran down the length of the dark vine tunnel intent on seeing the face of the child. She came to a quick succession of junctions in the maze, at each catching just a glimpse of the child as it dodged down another branching path. She could hear the child laughing up ahead, a bright, delighted sound all jumbled with the deep resonance of the voice always ahead of her.

  “Come along, Ellie! You’ve almost got me! You can do it, Ellie!”

  Ellis felt a wrenching in her soul that was too wonderful and dreadful for her to bear. Yet she rushed onward after the child always before her in the maze and just out of reach.

  “Wait!” she called out. “Stop!”

  She turned a corner again and suddenly emerged into a large garden space in the middle of the maze. She stopped, her eyes squinting slightly in the suddenly brighter space.

  Her eyes quickly grew accustomed. Here, the nearly overgrown garden had been immaculately groomed and dressed. The hedge walls of the rectangular area were trimmed into beautiful symmetry; the grass beneath her feet was painstakingly short and uniformly trim. The edges of the flower beds were crisp lines and filled with flowers, whose colors were only muted by the dull sky overhead.

  “I … I know this garden,” Ellis murmured to herself. “I’ve been here before.”

  “There you are, my little Ellie!”

  Ellis turned sharply toward the voice at the other end of the garden. She caught her breath, tears welling up in her eyes.

  He was tall and thin; all arms and legs as he used to jokingly tease her. It was a too-oft-repeated joke between them that had long become more endearing than amusing. He stood in his evening dress, his starched wing collar shirt undone and his white bow tie draped around the back of his neck. The buttons on his white waistcoat were undone although he still wore his black dress coat. There were grass stains on his shoes, which her mother would scold him about before they left for the evening. He had left his top hat in the front hall so that he would not forget it. Ellis remembered she had been so upset about her parents leaving for another in an unending stream of social functions that she had tried to make them stay home by hiding in the garden until they were too late for their party to leave.

  Now he stood at the other end of the hedged garden just as she remembered him from when she was seven years old. His hair was mostly black and only barely showing signs of a receding hairline. His mustache was dark and full. His eyes were bright with merriment for he loved her so and, though she did not know it at the time, relished any excuse to play with her.

  “Papa.” Ellis breathed the word out as a sigh.

  Charles Murry Harkington’s smile was genuine, warm and broad with joy when he saw his daughter at the other end of the garden plot.

  “Ellie!” her papa said with delight. “There you are! Playing a game in the garden, are we?”

  “Papa!” Ellis’s lower lip trembled as she uttered the word again. She did not dare move for fear that the vision would be broken, that her father would vanish and take her heart with him as he had once before.

  “Ellie, my girl,” he said. “Can you catch me? It’s my turn, Ellie! See if you can catch me!”

  They had played a game. He had coaxed her back to the house that evening with a game.

  “No, Papa!” Ellis crie
d out. “Please don’t…”

  “Come on, my girl!” her papa called out as he turned, the tails on his coat flying outward from his waist as he spun on his heels. “You’ll not catch me!”

  Her father ran away from her, running through the gap in the hedge at the far end of the garden.

  “NO!” Ellis screamed. She ran quickly across the open lawn, plunging back into the hedge maze beyond.

  She caught a glimpse of her father to her right, his coattails flapping behind him as he loped along, glancing backward toward her to make sure she was following him. She wheeled to the right in pursuit, running headlong and heedless.

  “Papa!” she screamed, tears flowing freely from her eyes, blurring her vision. “Stop! Wait for me!”

  She wheeled around another corner of the maze, the trimmed branches of the hedge stinging her arm as she brushed against them. He was there again, closer this time but still more than ten steps ahead of her. She lost track of the turns they made through the maze. She ran with abandon, her heart beating against her chest, her lungs aching. Still her father remained ahead of her at every step. She could see with every glance backward at her that the lines in his face were growing deeper and more careworn. His hair was receding and growing grayer at the temples with every step. His paunch, too, was growing yet somehow he always remained just out of reach of her.

  “Catch me, my girl!” he called out, his voice growing more raspy and thin. “Almost there, my little Ellie! You almost have me!”

  The clouds overhead had grown darker and more menacing. Ellis took no notice. The sound of thunder came closer by the moment and the world darkened as they sped through the maze.

  “Almost, Ellie!” her father called laughingly to her. “You’ll catch me yet, girl!”

  She was within a few steps of him.

  The rain began to fall.

  He turned a corner before her and she followed at his heels.

  They ran out of the hedge. The rain obscured the distance but Ellis could see enough to know they had entered a small park in the garden. There was the veiled shape of trees by the side of a river to her left and a tall folly built in the shape of the Pantheon in Rome ahead of them.