The door whined as he shut himself inside the soundless, floral-papered room. Dust motes filled the air as evening sun spilled in from a crack in the silk draperies.
He was drawn to the mantel. In a gilded frame, his mother’s portrait stared across the room, her hair the same deep blond as his, her eyes blue, her lips half smiling and pleasant.
Why was it always so hard to come here?
Maybe because he believed his aunt. Maybe because he’d always imagined the beautiful angel in the painting would have hated him as much as his aunt did. Or thought him wicked. Or lost her smile.
Or maybe because she’d left him.
William stepped closer to the mantel and ran a hand down the dusty, ornate edge of the picture frame. As a child, sometimes he’d lain awake at night and hated her for dying. For allowing him to be both motherless and fatherless in a world so lonely and cruel.
But he was a child no more. He understood the things that had not made sense to him in younger years, and he could no longer bear unforgiveness toward the beautiful woman in the painting for doing what no one could stop.
Dying.
Yet still. His chest tightened as he forced his eyes to meet hers. Coming here was as difficult as it had been then, and for reasons he could not justify, the old hurt still swelled.
He pushed it away and shook his head. He needed to keep his mind clear. The present was troublesome enough without dredging back hurts of the past.
He left the chamber and waited in his own until somewhere in the manor, a longcase clock chimed twelve.
Nervous anticipation surged through him as he shrugged on his greatcoat and slipped downstairs in the dark. Outside, he walked quickly toward the labyrinth.
The moon hung low, the light faint and pale as a slight breeze chased away the fog. Somewhere behind, a scratching noise disturbed the stillness, as if a branch were being smacked into one of the downstairs windows—but he was soon far enough away from the manor that the sound faded.
Sweat dampened his palms. Tonight, he would have answers. He’d had so many questions his entire life, and when he was young, he’d never realized how evasive or inconstant the answers had been.
Now he knew too well.
But all that was about to end. The time for truth had come. And Shelton, at last, was going to give it to him.
At the entrance to the labyrinth, William drew in the cool night air and hurried into the maze. The worn path crunched beneath his boots, an echo in the silence. Were all nights so quiet?
But silence was good. Shelton said so. “They listen best who have no mouth, and speak loudest who have no tongue,” he’d always said.
William had never understood the words exactly. He’d only listened. In the end, maybe that’s what Shelton had meant after all.
As William turned the last curve into the center of the labyrinth, he spotted the black-stoned bench in the dull light. “Shelton?”
He expected a shadow to emerge from the darkness, for the stooped old gardener to step forward into the moonlight.
He didn’t.
“Shelton?” Alarm tingled across William’s flesh as he turned a full circle and searched the shadows of the spherical clearing.
No movement. No answer.
Nothing.
Something must have detained him.Something worth more than his promise, his word. And little meant more to Shelton than that.
Unless he was merely late.
Yes, he must be late. He’d fallen asleep, or lingered at the garden, or checked the lock on the potting shed and—
A groan struck the air.
Tension barreled through William as he lunged toward the path adjacent to him and made the first turn.
