not natural, and that it really was connected to the Maze.”
Signor Monticarlo looked puzzled, but was too polite to interrupt; he merely exchanged a glance with his daughter, who smiled at him tenderly. Lady Phythian took the hint, though, and elaborated her explanation.
“In addition to hearing tales of the ghost,” she said, “I had long grown used to seeing the document on which the Langstrade Maze is designed. Whether it really is a copy of a design originally made by Dedalus of Knossos I have no idea, but I am certain in my own mind that there is something mysterious and magical about it. I feel it whenever I look at the diagram, in the same way that I often used to feel the presence of the Langstrade ghosts when sitting on the lawn where the Maze now stands, even in broad daylight. I have felt it even more strongly while exploring the maze itself, during the years when its hedges were not as intimidating as they are now.
“At any rate, the ghosts whose lanterns I saw were definitely walking the maze, even though construction of the present Maze had not yet begun when I first saw the apparition. They were heading from the periphery to the center: the location where the Keep and the yew tree now stand proud once again, in commemoration of the glorious summer of 822 A.D., when Harold Longstride defeated Emund Snurlson in single combat and blocked the progress of the Viking invasion—the renewals of which he succeeded in keeping at bay for the rest of his life, although his descendants could not, in the end, resist the incursions of Eric Bloodaxe.”
Lady Phythian nodded her head as she drew to her conclusion, as if to imply that what she had said was more than sufficient to confound the most determined skeptic who ever drew breath.
“With all due respect, Lady Phythian,” Quentin Hope said again, just as insincerely as the first time, “and without wishing to endorse the unreasonably stubborn skepticism of my friend Mr. Escott, I wonder whether we might be confusing causes and effects slightly. You claim that the ghosts, in appearing to simulate the movements of someone walking the Maze that Lord Langstrade subsequently constructed on their stamping-ground, were reproducing some past event or ritual—but I can’t help suspecting that your seeing the ghosts, and your interpretation of their movements, might well have been partially responsible for the first Earl’s decision to site the Maze there, and the second Earl’s decision to complete his father’s plan. After all, there was no previous connection, even in rumor, between the ghosts and the diagram, was there? They were two entirely separate components of the first Earl’s imagined family history.”
“I am by no means the only person to have seen the Langstrade ghosts move in that peculiar fashion,” Lady Phythian said, stiffly. “I was not the first observer to connect the pattern with the Maze, but once the connection had been pointed out, I was able to see with my own eyes, and feel with my own heart, that it was true. The present Lord Langstrade has seen the phantom lanterns for himself, and so have his wife Emily and his daughter Cecilia. They have all confirmed that the lanterns’ movements do correspond, very precisely, to the pattern of the Dedalus design.”
“That tends to be the way with ghost sightings in Britain,” Escott put in, as if to inform Signor Monticarlo of a relevant item of folkloristic analysis. “Each seer reproduces what previous seers have seen, although each one also tends to elaborate the pattern a little further. There is a kind of feedback process, by which the reported illusions not only sustain one another but collaborate in their own elaboration and sophistication. That’s what Hope would call the fundamental psychognosis of the phenomenon—the phenomenon of ghost-seeing, that is, not the supposedly supernatural phenomenon itself.”
Signor Monticarlo was manifestly mystified, the terms of this speech having far exceeded the competence of his English but he nodded anyway and said: “Si.”
“There was no illusion involved,” Lady Phythian insisted, her voice becoming frosty in spite of the sultriness of the carriage, whose atmosphere was becoming rather oppressive. “What I saw was quite real.”
Michael judged that the built-up tension was in need of relaxation. “Unlike Signor Monticarlo and his daughter,” he said, “I’m vaguely familiar with the legends surrounding Langstrade Hall, but I really ought to obtain a fuller and more accurate account of them before I take on the task of painting the Keep. Would you be kind enough, Lady Phythian, to explain to us in a little more detail what you mean by the Dedalus design?”
“The original representation of the maze,” Lady Phythian said, apparently glad to be able to say something that could not call her honesty or perspicacity into question, “or, at least, the oldest surviving representation, is a piece of parchment that now hangs over the mantelpiece in the large drawing-room, carefully framed and protected by glass. The old Hall was built in the ruins of a Cistercian abbey that had been built in the thirteenth century and destroyed during Henry VIII’s abolition of the monasteries. The abbey had been reputed to have custody of several holy relics and a number of scriptural documents. The relics had all been stolen, along with their reliquaries, and the documents removed—with one exception, which had been hidden in a niche in the old crypt. When the crypt was converted into a cellar during the building of the old Hall, that surviving parchment was unearthed.”
The dowager hesitated briefly, presumably because she was about to move back into the realm of rumor and fancy, but soon took the plunge. “The diagram on the parchment was thought at first to be a sketch for one of the mazes that decorate the floors of so many Gothic churches, but the diggers working on the new Hall’s foundations also found evidence of a stone maze that far antedated the Abbey and must have been prehistoric. There were not enough stones left to allow the design or precise extent of the prehistoric maze to be calculated, but there was sufficient similarity to encourage the conclusion that the design antedated the Abbey too. The parchment itself must be Medieval, but what it represents is apparently much older than the thirteenth century—or, indeed, the ninth.
“The former Lord Langstrade came to believe that the design depicted in the document was a representation of a maze designed to fulfill some magical or mystical purpose, connected to the first settlement of the valley by refugees from Minoan Crete, including the great engineer Dedalus, whose escape from imprisonment before the catastrophe that destroyed Knossos is plaintively symbolized in the myth of his manufacture of wings and the subsequent death of Icarus. I believe that Harry once considered recreating the Maze in the same local sandstone of which the Keep at its center was to be—and is—constructed, but the cost of construction would have been prohibitive, so his son contented himself with hawthorn hedges. The central hexagonal space is some fifty yards across in the actual version, and the distance between the two outer hedges is almost twice that; the total length of all the hedges is, I believe, more than a mile.”
“Why did Lord Langstrade build the Maze around the Keep?” Michael asked, helpfully. “Does he imagine that Harold Longstride built his own Keep within a maze that was still present in his own day, or merely that he was aware that a maze had once existed there?”
“Harold Longstride would presumably have been aware that there had once been a stone maze on the site where he built his Keep,” Lady Phythian opined, cautiously, “even if it had been broken up long before his own era. Legend would have told him as much.”
“In respectful recognition of his own legendary status, no doubt,” Escott murmured, so softly that Michael was not sure that anyone but he had heard the remark.
Carmela Monticarlo spoke in English for the first time, to say: “I hope that I shall see the ghost. I should like to see a ghost.”
“Unfortunately, my dear young lady,” said Escott, in his normal voice, “you might have to go into the Maze to do that, since the hedges have now grown so tall as to cut off the view from the first-floor, where I have stood by a window more than once by night, in the hope of catching a glimpse of phantom lights—in vain, alas.”
“I
