Chapter Twelve
The answer to your question is no, I don’t know what I was thinking when I ditched my shoes and ran off into the garden, and
no, I wasn’t thinking about where I was going, and yes, I do seem to be stuck in the middle of the Elizabethan maze. I didn’t
see that coming. Well, not until I ran full tilt into an eight-foot-high privet hedge, that is. Privet hedges are actually
a lot harder than they look.
Rubbing my forehead vigorously, I take a look around. Hedges everywhere.
It’s obvious when you think about it, really. It’s obvious that I, in a blind panic over answering a simple question that
I was more than prepared for, would end up lost in the famously difficult maze of a grand country house, just as darkness
falls.
Not to be overdramatic, or anything, but I expect this is how I die.
They’ll find me one day, years from now. A skeleton in a nice lilac dress, propped up against the hedge, having starved to
death on a diet of grass and despair. Fine, yes, that is a bit over the top.
Still, the light is faltering and the long corridor of solid green that runs either side of me does seem to loom menacingly.
I am trying not to think about that time I accidentally watched The Shining when I was ten years old, when some of the older kids found a DVD of it.
A fear of mazes and also axe-wielding lunatics have
haunted my nightmares ever since. It’s also the reason I don’t trust twins.
Right, enough of irrational, fanciful, read too many novels and seen too many movies, Ava. I am a rational grown science woman.
If I know anything, it’s that I can get myself out of one dumb maze if I just think it through like a normal person.
It’s then that I see some glowing in the twilight at the end of those green corridors. A faint blueish glow. Maybe it’s the
effects of being stranded and alone for up to eleven minutes, but as I watch, the glowing light lengthens before my eyes and
I think I can just make out the shape of a woman. As it moves away, I begin to follow it. Didn’t Lady B say that the ghost
of the Blue Lady shows up when someone’s life is in mortal danger? Well, maybe if she’s a bit bored she sometimes turns up
when someone has been seriously inconvenienced by their own stupidity. Maybe it seems a bit mad to (a) believe in ghosts and
then (b) follow said ghost which (c) might just be the last of the evening sun streaming through the hedges, but it’s all
I’ve got so I put my trust in my whimsical bookwormish side and follow her.
A pang of anxiety twangs at my gut as I imagine what Peter Harding’s face must have looked like as I sprinted away from him.
And Lord B. Worst of all, Hal. Hal, who had been so brilliant and articulate, just looking at me running barefoot through the grass.
Hal, who for some strange reason that seems a lot more improbable than a ghost guide, might sort of fancy me?
Or at least he did until that spectacular display of craziness.
There must be many downsides being a ghost, but at least social anxiety isn’t one of them.
“Ava!” I can hear Rani calling for me in the distance. That’s good. That means they aren’t going to call out air search and
rescue to find me. In fact, if I started shouting really loud, she’d probably hear me, and then probably she’d come and get
me with some other people who know their way around the maze, and I’d be back at dinner before you know it. But when I think
of how people will look at me, and what they will think of me, even if they hide it, I’m less keen to go back to the party.
The blue light intensified for a moment a few feet in front of me, and I’m sure that for the briefest glimpse I can see a
woman’s face smiling at me, and then it vanishes as quickly as it had appeared.
“Come back!” I call after her.
“Ava?” A voice comes from the other side of the hedge.
Of course, it’s Forrest’s voice. Of course it is. It would be Forrest who finds me barefoot and lost, wandering about in a
frock that deserves so much better than this in the middle of a maze. Maybe if I stay quiet he will just go away. Closing
my eyes, I hold my breath and try to become one with the hedge.
“I know you are there, Ava,” Forrest says. “You do realise that I can still see you even if you close your eyes, right?”
Opening my eyes, I see the top half of Forrest peering over the hedge at me.
“How are you . . . ?”
“I’m balanced on one of the . . . argh!” Forrest plummets out of view. I hear a hard thud on the grass and some very creative
swearing. “I was balanced on one of the urn things. Now, I think I might have dislocated my shoulder.”
“Well, what are you even doing in a maze?” I ask.
“Looking for you!” he says. “I saw you bolt off across the lawn in this direction, and thought if it were me having a freak-out,
I’d go hide in the maze. I forgot that I have no useful sense of direction and would inevitably end up lost in here.”
“You’re lost too?” I ask.
“Yep,” he admits. “We’re in this together now.” I get a sense of him staring hard at the hedge. “Well, nearly together anyway.
Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m perfectly fine,” I snap back, defensive.
“Okay, excuse me for thinking that someone who sprints off to escape a mildly challenging conversation might not be totally
tip-top,” Forrest replies. “I shouldn’t have bothered worrying about you.”
“You shouldn’t.” I agree with him for once. “Anyway, how do you know why I ran away? Does everybody know now?”
“Yep,” Forrest says.
“Oh God,” I groan. “You find a way out. I’m staying here.”
“Oh, don’t be so pathetic,” Forrest says.
“I beg your pardon?” I ask him, glaring at the greenery.
“Well, do you think you’re the first person in history to make an idiot of themselves in front of other people?
Shit happens. Deal with it and move on. That’s my advice.
Like, did I freak out and run away when I had wine all over me, thanks to you?
No I didn’t. I sucked it up and got on with it. And that’s what you have to do now.”
“I don’t have to do anything you tell me to do,” I grumble, because I know he’s right.
“No, you don’t,” he says. “And maybe you aren’t the woman that everyone says you are. Maybe you are just someone who’s going
to give up and slink back to your lab and make out with your computer . . .”
“What the fuck?” I ask the privet.
“And if you are, I don’t care. Less competition for me. But either way, we are getting out of this maze now, okay? Because
I am hungry, and you won’t like me when I’m hungry.”
“I don’t like you now,” I say. “So, if neither of us knows the way out, how are we going to get out? I was following the ghost
of the Blue Lady but she vanished when you showed up. You probably scared her off.”
“Okay, I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that and proceed as if you are a rational human being,” Forrest says. “Right. Let’s
apply logic to this problem. I got to you by turning right all the time. That means that all I need to do to get out is turn
left on the way back, easy-peasy.”
“But I’m on the opposite side of this hedge from you,” I say. “And anyway, can you remember which direction you came in, and
which right is right?”
“No worries,” Forrest says. “Okay, let’s try this. Follow my voice to the right and we’ll meet at the next intersection, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. For as long as it takes us to get out of the maze, we are in it together and he’s right, I just have to deal with it. I mean if I thought running away from cocktails was embarrassing, staying lost in a maze just to not hang out with Forrest would make me look really crazy.
“If we just go right along here, then at the end of this length of hedge there should be a . . .”
“Hedge,” I say, looking at another identical wall of leaves. “We’ve reached a dead end.”
“Huh,” Forrest says. “I guess I must have got turned around when I heard your voice,” he says. “Not a problem. Let’s turn
around and walk back the way we came, and that will be the right way to go, okay?”
“If you say so,” I say, without much confidence. I will admit it is nice to hear him walking on the other side of this hedge.
“Hmm,” Forrest says. I can hear him frowning, then, “Oh shit, I can turn right now. How about you?”
“I can only go left,” I say, looking down a shadowy corridor.
“Damn.”
“I guess we have to break up to go forward,” I say. I’m surprised by the pulse of anxiety this gives me.
“Okay, how about this?” Forrest says. “I’ll go my way, you’ll go yours, but we keep shouting each other’s names so we can
hear where the other is, and then hopefully we’ll find a way to meet up.”
“Okay,” I say. My voice sounds annoyingly timid. It’s infuriating that I’m glad that he isn’t going to just leave me.
“Ava,” Forrest says as if he’s read my catastrophizing mind, “it’s okay, you know. We are only like at maximum thirty feet
from civilisation. Nothing that bad can happen.”
“I know that! God, I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”
“Yep, I’m getting the totally fine vibes loud and clear,” he says. “Right, well, if we lose each other and never see each
other again, I have found your company barely tolerable.”
“Back at you,” I say.
So, we start to walk. I can hear my name receding into the distance as I keep calling his, our voices dancing around each
other in the cooling air. At one point his call is so far away that I think we must have lost each other completely, and then
Forrest’s voice starts to get a little louder, and little louder still, bit by bit.
Within about ten minutes I’m at the end of this row and make a right turn and . . . there he is at the other end of the narrow
path.
“Forrest!” I shout happily, before I remember the whole nemesis thing.
“Ava!” He waves, delighted, and before I know it I am running towards him and he is running towards me.
I am here to tell you that neither one of us thought about how this headlong full-gallop reunion would end, because traditionally
it’s not with a formal distance and a polite handshake, it’s with a big hug at the very least. I guess the prospect of a big
hug scares him at least as much as it does me as he starts to slow down to a jog. By the time we are about to meet we are
both basically strolling, him with his hands in his pockets, me looking around the hedges like I have never seen one before.
“Well, that worked,” he says, pleased with himself.
“At least now, we won’t die alone,” I say.
Then a stupendous rustling comes from one of the hedges. Forrest and I turn to look at it as it trembles and growls. And then swears very creatively.
“There aren’t any bears in the UK, right?” Forrest asks me.
“There shouldn’t be,” I say, as the hedge swears. “But then again, there shouldn’t be peacocks either.”
“Good Christ, I will have the gardener fired!” Lady B splutters as she falls out of the hedge and onto the grass, before leaping
to her feet and smiling at Forrest and me in turn with the poise of a woman who just made a graceful entrance through a set
of French doors.
“There are supposed to be thin areas in each hedge in case of emergencies,” she explains. “You know, in case someone has a
heart attack in here and the paramedics need to get to them stat. I could have sworn one was around here . . .” She looks
around at the identical hedges for some kind of defining characteristic.
“Hang on a sec.” She walks past us and sticks her arm easily into the hedge. “My mistake! Hodgkins’s job is safe after all.
Now”—she looks us up and down and gives me a knowing smile, although I’m not sure what it is she thinks she knows—“sorry to
say your adventure is over. Follow me please. We’d best take the usual way out to preserve your lovely dress, Ava.”
“I’ll admit I’m glad I’m not dying in your maze,” I tell her.
“Don’t be silly. Nobody is dying in my maze,” Lady Beaumont says over her shoulder. “No one has died in the maze in . . .
oh . . . at least fifteen years and that was an accident. Now come on, follow me. I made everyone wait for dinner until we
had retrieved you, and Lord B does get awfully grumpy when he’s hungry.”
It takes about three minutes to exit the maze.
“Oh,” I say, looking at Forrest. “That’s quite embarrassing.”
“Let’s just say we made it to the middle and got attacked by a bear on the way,” he mutters, giving me a lopsided grin. I’m
smiling back at him before I can remind my mouth that he is not our friend. And by then it’s too late.