The Maze Read online

  Hélène stops moving her hands and looks up. Thomas is startled to see a pair of dark watery eyes and is held, rapt. She sends him a long, slow blink, causing tears to flood her cheeks.

  Thomas’s eyes jerk down to his knees. How strange. He can make out the sound of his own breathing above the crackle and spit of the fire. He can hear the candles guttering to his left and right. Then there’s that soft sobbing coming from sad-faced Hélène.

  Thomas lifts his gaze to Marguerite. Is this what you want? he asks with his eyes. You want to punish your companion, the one you gladly accepted into your life a few months ago? Did Hélène steal something, is that it? Or say something rude? Thomas opens his mouth, but doesn’t speak. His questions remain unasked.

  “Something you want to say?” Marguerite’s face loses some of its severity. She inclines forward. “I’m listening. Go ahead.”

  Thomas feels a racing pulse beating somewhere in his head. He leans forward in his seat. “I— I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “No?”

  “No, Marguerite, I confess to feeling lost.”

  The sobbing stops. Thomas darts a glance at Hélène, who now has both hands covering her face. Yet he can still see her neck, her trembling neck. Thomas tries to draw a breath, but thinks better of it. He returns his gaze to Marguerite.

  She is immobile. Her blue eyes say she is waiting him out. Where before Thomas was too warm, he’s now chilled. He has the shivering sensation that he is somehow caught. A Latin phrase he learned at school as a boy comes into his head. Iacta alea est. The die is cast.

  Marguerite glances at her cousin.

  “Now?” Madame Dufour asks. She raises her right hand off the arm of the chair.

  Thomas swings back to see his wife’s reply. Marguerite shakes her head. What is going on? Thomas’s eyes involuntarily well up. He looks beseechingly at Marguerite.

  His wet eyes, an index finger lifted up to stem a possible tide, have an effect. Marguerite gives up her ceaseless stare. She blinks in sympathy and looks away from Thomas’s youthful, penitent face. She pretends to examine her fingernails.

  “Oh, please.” A scowling Madame Dufour casts both hands into the air.

  Thomas and Marguerite turn toward their hostess. Madame Dufour’s complexion is dark, her chest puffed out. A thrusting hand punctuates the air. “If she won’t tell you, Thomas, I will. We saw you. We saw you in the maze. Yes, you, with this one here.” She jerks a thumb at Hélène.

  “The maze?” Thomas feels his shoulders hunch. He wishes his words had not come out so high-pitched. He could have done better than that. He tries to find a quizzical expression for his face, but he’s not sure that’s the face he presents. He flutters his eyes at Madame Dufour, then at Marguerite.

  Hélène lifts off her chair. She is off and running from the circle of chairs, heading for the door that leads to the stairs up to the rooms. She’s out and gone, leaving a gaping void in the salon.

  Instinctively, Thomas rises from his chair. He’s dazed. Maybe he should ... because he wants.... Instead, he looks down at his seated wife.

  Marguerite is shaking her head. Her face is once again as hard as it was when she first came into the salon. “You’d better not,” she says quietly but determinedly.

  Thomas hears the warning. Marguerite spoke it as calmly as if it were a mere statement of fact.

  “She— Hélène,” Thomas says, “your lady companion, she, she seems very upset.” Thomas hears Madame Dufour bark a laugh, but he will not turn her way. It’s Marguerite and only Marguerite who matters in this affair. Thomas puts a hand to his chin. He clenches his jaw, hoping that will help to steady all that’s racing inside of him.

  “So?” Marguerite opens her right hand to gesture her husband’s way.

  Thomas removes his hand from his chin. He leans back to press against the hardness of the chair. It feels good, good to hurt a bit. It should help him think. Yet no clear thinking comes. All he has are words. “Cousin said something about a maze?”

  Thomas hears Madame Dufour vent some wind from her ass. Or maybe she has laughed. He refuses to even give her a glance.

  Marguerite stares at her husband like she’s trying to peer through a mist, a cloud. “What?” he hears her softly say. Then she turns toward the fire.

  The latest log the servant boy has tossed in gives a hiss and pop. Thomas wonders why the lad will not go away and take the other servants with him. That would leave just him and Marguerite to work things out. Except for the dour Madame in whose château this terror is unfolding.

  Thomas swings back to face Marguerite at the same moment as she does the same. He is struck by how tragically sad she now appears. Her anger appears to have slipped away. Thomas tilts his head, puzzled. What does this mean? Marguerite shrugs her heavy shoulders. She looks over to her cousin.

  “Show him, Cousin. Show him what you have.”

  Thomas tips back his chair as he watches Madame Dufour lean to the far side of her vermilion seat. With a little smile, Madame returns his troubled gaze as she reaches downward and outward with a blind grasp, her hand and fingers searching for something on the floor.

  Thomas steals a glance at Marguerite, whose face has no more colour and shows no more relief than it did a moment ago. Thomas lowers the front legs of his chair to the floor. He snaps back to see what it is that Madame Dufour is dramatizing.

  And there it is, held aloft in Madame Dufour’s slowly waving right hand. A telescope. Holding it up brings a cruel, hard smile to her mouth. Thomas winces. He pivots back to his wife.

  Marguerite gives the slightest possible shrug. “That’s right,” she says. “A spyglass. We saw what happened in the maze. Her, that thing, in her blue dress.”

  Thomas’s mouth goes dry. He gestures emptily with his hands, then makes the same pointless gesture a second time. He opens his mouth only to have it lock shut again. There was something he was going to say, but ... it’s disappeared. He summons a not-guilty expression to his face, yet it fails to arrive. Maybe she would prefer bewilderment or surprise? Something or anything that allows for some kind of mistake and innocence. Normally, Thomas has a reservoir of appropriate faces, but he doesn’t know where or how to summon them. So he sits here, cold as ice, and says nothing at all. He supposes that he looks as stupid as he feels, because all he can think to do is blow out a stifled breath.

  “Nothing then?”

  Thomas looks back to Marguerite. She’s waiting for an answer, and she’s waiting with one of the longest faces he has ever seen. It has lengthened by at least an inch, he thinks. Did he do this? Yes, he has to admit, he played a part. But he does not say so. He merely blinks at Marguerite. Then there comes a shrug. It wasn’t really my fault, those shoulders are supposed to say on his behalf.

  “Oh my,” Thomas exhales. Then, like a flower that bends toward the light, he turns slowly toward the thing – twisting so he can take it in where it lies, across Madame Dufour’s ample and triumphant lap. Thomas looks at the spyglass like it’s a completely foreign object, a puzzle he’s going to have to figure out.

  —

  As Thomas nods and maintains eye contact with Marguerite, it occurs to him that it’s like being in a garden filled with bees, a maze. You hear the hum; it’s all around, such an incessant song. Yet after you go inside, you cannot recall or describe what it is you’ve heard. It’s just a hum. That’s how it is with bees – and his wife's talking.

  “Yes, of course,” he says to his wife.

  Marguerite’s eyes are shining as she once again lays down the law. That he is a young and foolish husband. Thomas has lost count how many times, more or less, the same message has been offered up in the twenty-four hours since Hélène fled the salon. Yes, the very same salon with the very same cast, minus Hélène, of course. And without the telescope.

  Thomas has not seen his lover since, though
he did that morning keep himself hidden in the doorway of his room to catch two of Madame Dufour’s servants whispering down the hall. They spoke about “that one” – no one since last night has dared to speak Hélène’s name – who’d been sent to the attic the night before. There she lay still on her bed, silent, refusing to eat or drink or get up. The manservant added that he thought the fallen woman was to be taken into Vitré as soon as it could be arranged. “Cast into the street” was the phrase Thomas heard. “As is only right,” a woman servant replied. “Where she belongs, is it not?” Then the servants went their separate ways, and Thomas took two steps back and closed the door.

  “That’s true enough,” says Thomas very softly to Marguerite. It has to be his turn to say something to his wife.

  “What’s true enough? Are you even listening to me?”

  “I misspoke. I meant I understand.”

  “Well, I hope so.”

  Thomas hears Madame Dufour clear her throat off to his right. He does not turn her way, but he understands the noise as some kind of coded comment – an injunction to Marguerite to not give him a second chance to make their marriage work.

  “I do, Marguerite,” affirms Thomas exclusively to his wife. He lifts his right shoulder and arches a portion of his back at Madame Dufour and her guttural sounds.

  “Yes, well,” says Marguerite. She adds an almost imperceptible tip of her head.

  Thomas notices and thinks it a good sign. The resolute anger of yesterday evening is now spent, gone entirely from Marguerite’s face. In its place, though, are dark circles under her eyes. Hers is a visage not of fury but fatigue.

  Marguerite resumes her instructions. Thomas detects a hopeful cast to his wife’s light-blue eyes. He sits farther back in his chair. He’s not chosen one of the bitter wooden ones, with their hateful memories of a night gone wrong, but one with fiery-coloured stripes twisting in a weave, spreading out and intersecting against a beige background.

  As Marguerite’s voice modulates up and down – more like a brook than bees, Thomas thinks – he finds himself wondering what dinner might be. He’s feeling peckish. A morning of the silent treatment followed by hectoring has taken its toll on him. Thank the heavens he was able to get away for the better part of an hour, out to the obelisk in the distant field. He did not dare perambulate in the brick courtyard or upon the garden paths. Not after yesterday. And God forbid he even so much as glance at the maze.

  No, if he was to walk, and he was determined he would, it had to be somewhere else. And so he chose the obelisk, which apparently Madame Dufour’s late husband’s grandfather brought from distant India, or was it Egypt, and had erected on the spot. Thomas came back to the château along the road between the avenue of trees. The same route their coach passed down what seems like a lifetime ago.

  Poor Hélène. She’s done nothing but what nature ordains. Yet she has to pay the price and thereby lose the life of comfort she’d gained through cleverness. More than once since the incident in the salon, Thomas has wondered if he should slip away to the attic to see if she is all right. But each time, he weighed the impact of such a course and decided it best to leave matters as they lay.

  “Harlots and trollops are just that, do you understand?” Marguerite is waiting for a reply.

  “I do.”

  It’s almost amusing, he thinks, to watch a person’s mouth form the sounds they make. Cadence up, cadence down. Yes, Marguerite really is a brook.

  “Thomas? Thomas?”

  “Not even listening,” Thomas hears Madame Dufour say. “Wasting your time. But I’ve said that before.”

  Thomas draws a bead on Madame Dufour. He still refuses to speak to her, but he can give her a glare. Then he offers two pronounced shakes of the head, to let the woman know that she is not worthy of conversation, hostess or not. Thomas is showing Marguerite that her husband is a gentleman. He will not stoop to making unkind remarks to her cousin, however justified he might be.

  Thomas turns to Marguerite. He projects his most earnest listening face.

  “Playing you for a fool,” Madame Dufour mutters in a lower voice from her seat.

  “On the contrary.” Thomas addresses himself to Marguerite in a soft voice. He stiffens his back toward Madame Dufour. “I am one thing and one thing only, my wife. That is contrite. It is your forgiveness and only your forgiveness I request.”

  A groan issues from behind his back. Thomas gives his wife a shrug, along with a tolerant, understanding smile. Then he rises from his chair. He goes down on one knee in front of her.

  “I make this pledge. It’s all that I can do. I’ve wronged you, that I admit. I violated your trust. The sacrament of marriage was broken, but please understand it was not my intent.

  “Yes, it happened and I was there. I was in the wrong, I now admit. A woman, your companion, she lost her way and tempted me to join her in a lusty whim. She was my Eve. Like Adam, I too failed the test. I committed a carnal sin. We both know I cannot go back and remove the stain.

  “Know this: if I could, I would. Know that, my loving wife. The pledge I make is this. You have my word, Marguerite, my solemn vow. I will never again transgress against our marriage as I did yesterday with your former maid.”

  Thomas rises to his full height. He leans forward to place a hand on either side of Marguerite’s head, touching firmly the bright white wig that goes round her ears on each side. Puffs of powder fly up then snow down. Marguerite blinks in utter surprise as Thomas lightly kisses her on the forehead.

  —

  Thomas turns and strides across the room. Marguerite follows her husband with her eyes as he goes out through the far door, the door that leads to the foot of the stairs.

  “You’re not ... you’re not accepting that?” sputters Madame Dufour. “Please, Cousin, tell me that. Why he’s—”

  “Hush, woman. He’s my husband, not yours. You’ve never understood that.” Marguerite puts a finger to one of her eyes. She has to stem a tear before it gets away. “Not one bit.”

  She notices that Madame Dufour rolls her eyes but then tightens her lips. So she should. Marguerite knows she is not the first wife to turn the other cheek and two blind eyes to an errant man. It is, alas, what wives must often do to preserve the sacred vow.

  “All right then,” says Madame Dufour standing up. She gives two sharp claps of her hands. “Come now. Come here.”

  The two servants – the wide-eyed man Thomas had been rude to the evening before and an attractive girl no more than sixteen – come hurrying through the near door.

  “There you are,” sings out Madame Dufour. “To your stations, my people. Bring up the platters from the kitchen, if you would. Let’s go then. To the table we go. Come on, Marguerite. We must eat, I suppose.”

  Marguerite pushes herself slowly out of her chair. She hopes there is no frown on her face, but she suspects there could be. She does not much like her cousin barking commands. “I think I’ll go tell Thomas. He must be famished, I think.”

  “I see.” Madame Dufour purses her lips. “You do that, Cousin, you do that.”

  “Thank you. I hoped you’d understand.” Marguerite takes a few steps toward the door that leads to the steps, then halts. She turns back to Madame Dufour. “Thomas is more, I mean better, than you think.” She does not wait for any reply or comment. Marguerite spins round and is gone from the salon.

  —

  “Is he now? We’ll see, won’t we?” whispers Madame Dufour to the empty salon after the door swings shut. “I’m afraid, dear Cousin,” Madame keeps to herself, “that one actually does reap what one sows.”

  —

  Ensconced in the library after a filling meal, Marguerite has a pensive look on her face. She’s studying the wine in the bowl of her glass. Or rather, she is studying the image that the after-dinner wine reflects back at her. It does not bring a smile. If it’s no
t a tired eye staring back, then it’s an overly lined forehead. Thank God for the wig that covers her sadly aging hair. Where oh where did her youthful looks go?

  She glances over at her husband. The nonchalant expression on his young, handsome face reassures Marguerite that he’s oblivious to her misgivings about her advancing age in comparison to his. How fortunate that is. Yes, Thomas erred with that strumpet in the maze, but it was not entirely his fault. Men are like dogs following a scent, and that trollop was the one who led him astray. The man has been castigated long and loudly enough. It’s time for Marguerite to move on, to compose the next chapter in the marriage. There is much to look forward to. She thinks of the silver motto ring she gave him when they wed. The Latin inscription along the outside band reads: Crede quod habes, et habes. Believe that you have it, and you do. Marguerite smiles at the recollection of that thought and at what she had inscribed on the inside of the band, not in Latin but in French: Mon amour.

  Throughout this evening’s dinner Thomas said nothing more than please and thank you. He continually presented a contrite face, at least to Marguerite. Sourness toward her cousin is something else again. She would like to see those two exchange at least a few civil words. In time, perhaps. The more important thing is that the lesson of fidelity Marguerite has been teaching her husband all day long seems to have been absorbed.

  Thomas rises from his chair. He has a snifter of something strong and golden in one hand. He acknowledges his wife with a wink as he proceeds over to the bookshelves, where he scans the spines to read the short titles, occasionally giving an approving nod. He sips his drink then puts down the glass on a shelf. He pulls out one slim book and opens up the first few pages. Marguerite studies him as he reads the beginning of whatever it is. She cannot help but wonder what kind of husband Thomas Pichon will be for her in the years ahead. She already suffers from gout. There could be – no, there will be – worse ahead. Will he be attentive and kind? Marguerite takes a long drink. It finishes off her wine. There, that’s better. There’s no longer enough liquid for any reflection at all.