The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

Zeal paused in the dark antechamber beyond the grotto. Something moved just ahead of her. Even before reason could reassure her that it was another rat, or some other creature like the barn cat that once found its way through the walls, she saw that it was a man.

  She tried to speak but could not. She had entered her dream. The beast waited at the centre of the labyrinth.

  He stood quite still. The whites of his eyes gleamed in the light from a candle lantern set on the floor. ‘So, you’ve come to me. I had begun to fear I’d be lost in this hell for weeks before I found you alone.’

  Roger Wentworth. Holding his unsheathed sword.

  ‘Here again?’ she said. ‘We wondered where you were when Gifford apologized.’

  Go back and hope to reach John in time, she told herself. Philip was right – the need to fight most often catches you unawares.

  ‘A man could lose his soul in this mire of deception and confusion,’ Wentworth said. ‘This monstrous house grows worse than I imagined. The grotto…the viciousness is clear. First you murder him, then you defame him. When I show the others, they will see why you must never go free again!’

  She took a step back. Wentworth stood between her and the way forward. ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘There are no secrets among your workmen. Nor loyalty neither. Did you imagine that there would be? Don’t try to run.’ He shifted his weight.

  She tried to remember what Philip had told her that might mean about a swordsman’s intent.

  Feel where he is in space, whispered Philip.

  Wentworth’s dagger still hung at his belt. Her own knife hung on its chain. Her hand moved.

  ‘Don’t!’ He raised his sword point.

  ‘Guile,’ she heard Philip whisper urgently. ‘Don’t fight unless you must.’

  Delay, she thought. Keep him talking until John arrives.

  If he arrives.

  ‘Who let you in through the workmen’s door?’ she asked. ‘Who gave you Paroli’s key?’

  ‘A God-fearing man who wants to see your corruption stopped as much as I do.’

  ‘Gifford?’

  Wentworth snorted. ‘Him? An over-nice, lily-livered smock when it comes to anything more than shouting!’

  ‘Who was it then?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask instead what I intend?’

  ‘Because I know.’

  She heard his breathing and the faint sound of a pleat in her linen trembling against the velvet of her bodice. No sounds of John coming up behind her.

  ‘Cheat,’ said Philip urgently in her ear. ‘Never fight fairly. The first rule is to stay alive.’

  His son’s boot creaked as he shifted his weight again.

  Soon, she thought.

  She began to unhook the top of her skirt from her bodice.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing dangerous, as you can see…Look!’ She undid the chain holding her knife. The blade rattled onto the floor. ‘Now you have nothing to fear from me.’ She unhooked as far as the back of her waist on one side and began on the other side.

  ‘Stop doing that!’

  She heard the change in his voice. ‘But you believe me to be a whore…’ Her fingers slipped on the hooks.

  ‘I know you to be!’

  She kept her eyes on him. Reached back to untie the last strings. They knotted. She yanked and broke them. Pushed down her skirt.

  ‘Witch!’ he whispered.

  The black silk creaked and hissed as it fell. She shook her petticoat free and stepped out of the black circle. ‘I often wonder if you don’t ask yourself why I gave myself to the father…’ She stooped to pick up the skirt. ‘…instead of the son.’

  As he lunged, she ducked aside and flung the skirt up from the floor around his sword arm, as Philip had taught her. Gave the massed fabric a twist, and hauled with both hands, swinging him with her entire weight. Unbalanced, he staggered and landed hard on one knee. In that instant, she was through the far door.

  She reached out for one of the rusty fragments of light. Her hands met a smooth, chilly wall. Dauzat’s maze.

  A cry of rage followed her. She moved fast. Here she had the advantage. She knew exactly where she was. Turned, turned again, doubling back, reversing herself, slipping through sudden gaps. Trying to be quiet. Stopping to listen.

  He was close behind, but blundering. Cursing.

  Then she was at the centre. She climbed.

  ‘Where are you?’ His voice was suddenly very close.

  His hand brushed her ankle. Found it again and seized hold. She took her full weight on her hands and kicked at his head.

  He gave a roar of rage and began to climb behind her. She stamped on his fingers, hauled herself up the last three feet and threw herself forward onto the floor of the room above. She rolled away from his grasp, stumbled to her feet. Ran the final yards to safety and slammed the door of The Last Resort. He could not get at her through that heavy door. Then she saw what she had done.

  She tested the door, but she already knew that in her haste, she had forgotten the locksmith’s warning. She had not disarmed the lock. Wentworth could not get in, but she could not get out.

  85

  He could go back. This time, no shutters had closed behind him. He could retreat to the dreamlike passage where happy endings had felt possible. He could choose not to be a player.

  He touched the pale hand on the plate. A delicate woman’s hand. Marble.

  He remembered the handless nymph on the painted screen. There was surely a story there, if he ever had the chance to ask and she was in a fit state to answer. The heart was carved from a bright, slightly soft red stone, which felt unnaturally warm to the touch.

  To go back might be physically possible, even if it meant breaking through the theatre walls and cutting his way back into the leather chute. In every other way, it was now impossible.

  The stone palate at the back of the mouth curved into darkness. John felt with his hands and found a small opening near the floor. He would have to crawl to get through. He knelt and looked at where he knew the opening to be. Blackness. Not a glimmer of light. Not the slightest crack of a door or shuttered window. No apparent end. Soft, infinite, terrifying darkness.

  Sweat prickled on his neck. A band tightened around his chest. He could not make himself crawl through that low narrow hole into blind infinity.

  My darling Zeal. If you wanted to set me a test, you found it. This I cannot do.

  He went back and sat on the tooth, where light from the grotto still fell. The fine mist reached him even here. He looked again at the heart on the plate, then at the silver salt cellar beside it, and rubbed both hands over his face.

  The two objects were eloquent, but in a strange tongue he did not yet understand. The weight of their import was clear. What eluded him was whether this eloquence told him that she was mad, or that she saw the world as mad instead.

  Whichever it is, she fears I might stop here.

  He held the heart in his hand until it warmed to the temperature of his skin, while he remembered stories he had heard while hiding from bounty hunters on the outlaw island of Tortuga.

  Can’t abandon her again. Won’t. Never.

  But the alternative was to crawl through that hole.

  He replaced the heart on the hand and went back to the low entrance. He imagined that he had passed through it. His body went icy cold, as if he had dived into a half-frozen pond.

  Until that moment, he had managed not to remember a time he had been trapped in similar darkness, with the sound of rising water in his ears. He clutched his knees and rocked.

  I can’t do it.

  He lifted his head. He thought he had heard a voice. A second later, he heard it again. A man’s voice shouting in anger. The voice was muffled, but it was reaching him through the dark maw. He drew a deep breath and plunged into his nightmare.

  He arrived in a large dark room without windows, so thickly planted with slender columns that it might have been a grove
of young trees. A shadowy figure stepped towards him. It hesitated.

  ‘Zeal?’ he whispered.

  The figure stepped forwards again and stopped when he did.

  He squinted through the dim twilight that fell from above, light that might reach the back of a hayloft from a small window at the front. He slapped his hand to his sword.

  The figure did the same.

  He stepped forwards again and saw all around him an army of imitators. He turned his head. Bits of himself slipped out of sight and others appeared. He advanced on the closest self. On all sides, he saw himself vanishing into the shadows, scattering like a shoal of frightened fish. His stomach shifted as it had when a ship first rolled under his feet. He reached out to touch his own hands, met a shock of chilly glass. He swung to his right and cracked his forehead against more glass. His own eyes peered back, very close, watering slightly and indignant.

  He drew a long breath. Felt walls of glass on either side of him, angled to meet each other, each wall made up of leaded panes set into a gilded frame. He stepped forward. The gap between the walls narrowed so that a man could not squeeze between them. They sprang like fins from the columns. What he had thought was a complete column was merely a small section, given the illusion of a whole by its reflections.

  He turned, set his back into the narrow angle where the mirrored walls met and opened his arms as far as they would go to either side. He saw himself offering to embrace an army of selves. Full-face, in profile, half-seen from the back, left ear, front of right ear, looking squarely into his own eyes.

  A man rarely had the chance to see himself as others did.

  He didn’t care for what he could see in the dimness. Rough, ragged, with stubble high on his cheeks, lines, embedded grime. One shoulder drooped a little lower than the other. He could not tell which. An old scar dented his beard. The line of his thighs, which Zeal had stroked with such delight was now masked by leather trousers polished slick with blood and dirt. In quick succession, he spied a suddenly youthful curve of one cheekbone (right or left?), the glint of cold, weary eyes, a strange shell that was the rim of one ear. The wizardry of mirror multiplied all these ills into a host of evils. One such man was already too many.

  He moved away from the column. Fragments of self swam around him. His stomach shifted again. He had already lost the way he came in.

  With his eyes closed, his stomach settled and he could unscramble his thoughts.

  It seemed that an excess of self-contemplation interfered with reason.

  There’s nothing here but more trickery, he told himself. No magic, any more than before. Just tricks with mirrors. He had seen such things in gardens in the Low Countries and later in the Bermudas, placed at junctures in a maze. Tricks meant for pleasure, to stir a quick trembling of false hazard while a glass of wine and sweetmeats waited to reward the triumphant return.

  Oh, my dearest Zeal…He steadied himself on the nearest reflecting wall. How shall I read this one? What new illustrative trial have you prepared for your would-be knight? I hope you are waiting with my reward for confronting my many selves!

  He shook his head and set the world in motion again. He had opened his eyes, without thinking. On all sides, entire and fragmentally, other heads shook in a pattern as intricate as the scales on a fish.

  It was at least clear that…He stopped. In truth, nothing was clear. He had met nothing but deception and illusion in her underworld.

  Except for my sea. Don’t lose sight of my sea.

  What did I write?

  He could no longer remember his own words. Only that peculiar suffusion of joy as he looked down on the pair of clown fish swimming two feet below his navel. Whatever they had been, his words swam now on the walls of a grotto in Hampshire, like the other end of a broken thread, waiting to be picked up again.

  Now, my man, think how to get out of this place and find the perverse little creature. If she has told you one thing clearly, it’s that she wants to be found. That passage tells you so. Believe that! All that is truly being tested is your will.

  ‘Put yourself into my place.’

  There’s no rejection in that, surely. A plea, perhaps.

  I don’t mean to disappoint her ever again.

  A man who could escape indenture, then make his way from Tortuga to St Christopher’s and back to England, in the teeth of decreed exile and with a woman and child in tow, should be equal to this theatre of confusion.

  No more knocks on the head from blundering about like a trapped animal. A maze most often had a rule if only one could discover it.

  He began by testing the right-hand rule, turning always to the right. Came nose to nose with himself against a gilded column. Then he tried turning always to the left. Then he tried turning first left, then right. Then the converse.

  Surely so many of us must be equal to the task! he told the double self which blocked his way. Walls of green yew had seemed more friendly and fathomable than this splintered, infinitely repeating world. In a green maze, you could at least see the path, even if you weren’t sure which turning to take. Here there were no visible paths on the stone floor, not even false ones. He found no inscription, no secret sign, no emblem that he might interpret.

  Only myself. With all my sins.

  He stopped with a sense of revelation. How can such a man not understand and forgive everything? Whatever it might prove to be? And if I am now in her place, then by reason, she has been in mine. And therefore means to forgive me. He was still lost in thought when he imagined a flash of movement among the reflections.

  ‘Zeal?’

  A scarlet sleeve vanished like a mouse down a hole. He looked at his own sleeve as if some sleight-of-hand might have transformed it. Once green, it was now black with smoke, the sweat of his horse, ship’s tar, blood stains and the general filth of living.

  ‘Zeal! Don’t tease me!’

  ‘She’s a murderer, Nightingale!’ A man’s voice.

  He decided that this place had muddled his senses. I thought I heard a real bird sing. Why not hear false voices now?

  ‘She killed three husbands,’ said the voice. ‘All her denials are lies.’

  He let out his breath. He was not mad. Had not imagined. It was indeed a man’s voice, muffled but undeniably real. He felt he should know it. But that man could not be here.

  ‘Nightingale?’

  The ancients had placed ears of brass around their theatres to fling the actors’ lightest murmurs out across the air to the most distant spectator.

  He looked into the gloom for sign of such a device.

  ‘Nightingale?’ The voice was now closer, though John had not moved. Then he heard the grating of a boot heel on the stone floor. Then a thump, followed by an oath.

  This was sounding more and more like an actor of flesh and blood. And not one who knew the maze, either.

  ‘Nightingale, can you hear me?’

  He stared at himself, infinitely multiplied in the act of listening. Watched his many mouths open to reply and then close again.

  What use to me are so many ears if not one of them can say where the voice is coming from?

  His eyes skated over the glassy walls but still found only himself.

  ‘Three husbands buried. And she means for you to be the fourth.’

  If this is a test of my love, it’s a brutal one, he thought.

  ‘Nightingale? Answer me. I know you’re there.’

  If I can’t find him, then he can’t find me, unless he is part of my lady’s tricks. In which case, he will find me whether I wish or no. But, whoever he is, he does not feel like her confederate.

  ‘What do you want with me?’ he finally called in return.

  ‘It is you, after all,’ said the voice with satisfaction. The sound of boots moved nearer.

  He had fallen for one of the oldest tricks.

  Zeal, my love, I fear this man is no attendant sprite. I know his voice now.

  ‘I want to do you a service.’

>   This time John stayed silent. On my left, he decided.

  He followed the mirrored wall on his right with his hand until it ended abruptly. His own puzzled face, a few feet away ahead of him, turned a little to beam its question back to its source.

  There had to be a pattern. The human mind could not build pure disorder without ordering it at least to some degree.

  He set his belly to the point where the wall ended and turned back on itself, stretched his arms forwards along both walls. With his right hand, he then followed the new mirror into the narrowing point of a corner. He pressed his back into the corner and again spread his arms along the walls to either side. Less than ninety degrees, more than forty-five. A flash of clarity eased the disorder in his mind. He stood at the centre of a hexagon, with its centre post now at his back, the hexagon cut into six slices like a pie by the mirrored walls.

  The voice followed him. ‘Don’t waste your baubles. Her commodious purse will swallow all you have.’

  There was no mistaking the malice now. John forced his thoughts back to divining the trick of the maze.

  ‘I’ve no doubt she swore to be faithful when you left,’ said Roger Wentworth’s voice. ‘And I’m sure that you, a willing fool, wanted to believe her.’ There were more sounds of someone moving amongst the mirrors. ‘What if I tell you that my ancient father had bedded her before your ship had cleared the Canaries…Can you still hear me?’

  Like Odysseus, John wished for wax to fill his ears and deafen him.

  ‘Her gate is open to all comers, Nightingale. And her garden is filled with poisoned herbs.’

  Sick with haste to escape the voice, he followed the right-hand mirror to the next outer corner.

  ‘She casts spells as potent as Circe. Sir Harry tried to escape but she silenced him before he could expose her.’

  As I mean to silence you, my mad friend, when we’re out of here and I can see where you are.

  He followed his hand into another narrowing point. Another slice of hexagon. He listened again. The infinity of selves rolled their eyes and tilted their heads. Then, suddenly, pattern replaced chaos in his mind. He was lost in a honeycomb of mirrors.