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Orestes had told her that belief is as strong as reality in this place. Claire takes a deep breath and faces the location where she wants to enter. She closes her eyes. I cannot see it, she tells herself. But it is there; the archway is there. I know it is there.

She steps forward. For a moment, there is a horrifying feeling, as if stems and roots and leaves are burying themselves in her skin, as if they will pierce her throat and crawl out her mouth—and then, quite suddenly, the feeling stops. Claire pauses, catching her breath; her chest is burning with exertion.

‘Claire,’ a voice says. When she opens her eyes, she is inside the maze, and someone stands in front of her.

It is herself, as she once was: a girl of sixteen in her best linen dress, tied tightly at the waist with a blue bow. She holds a lantern in one hand. It is a dangling, filigreed dome resembling a birdcage, lit within by a small yellow flame.

Claire recognises the lantern instantly. She remembers that day very clearly, a day in Versailles when she and Genevieve had snuck away from dinner to explore the grounds at twilight. They had dipped their hands in the fountains and giggled like children stealing bonbons from a jar; danced without music around the orangery; kissed each other’s cheeks behind topiaries, for that was as much intimacy as they would dare, their knuckles brushing, their faces flushed. A perfect summer, that was, when all the world made sense to her and each week still had seven days.

‘I will take you there, Claire,’ the vision says, in a soft voice so like her own, the accent slightly rougher—she had not taken such pains with elocution before she had decided to become someone else. ‘I will take you to a better place. I could build you a new home here, where you might lie in the grass with your beloved and wander the fountains of Versailles. All is possible at the Château.’

‘My beloved,’ Claire says. ‘Leander? Genevieve?’

The vision gives her a soft, girlish smile. Demure and sweet—a smile more Genevieve than Claire. ‘Why not both of them? You three shall be so happy together, lost in Reverie. You will never feel sorrow again. You will forget everything except your joy.’

Claire stares at the light within the lantern. It glows, it sways, the flame flickering like a firefly attempting to escape a jar. It is so beautiful. She recalls speaking with Leander the first day of the auction—it feels like months, like years, as if each passing hour here has spanned a week or more.

The lie of the lantern: we always want to head towards the flame.

‘But sometimes,’ Claire murmurs to herself, ‘we must turn away.’

And so she turns away.

Before her, the labyrinth appears as a single, endless corridor, reaching without end towards the horizon. Petals of honeysuckle float down from above; the sky is cloudless, lilac blue, and her view of the sun is obscured by the hedges. Claire raises her fan and looks through it, but nothing appears much different. She must keep going, she knows, until a path is revealed.

‘Claire,’ says her own voice, as the vision tries to turn her back. ‘What will you do, once you leave? It has been but three days since you arrived. Your memories remain, and they will continue to haunt you. Love, heroism—these things are not enough. They will never be enough.’

‘I know.’ Claire looks at the watch: fifteen minutes remain. Time is passing too quickly. The Lady is fickle indeed. ‘It does not matter. I must try, even if I fail.’

Without looking behind her, she continues into the maze. The vision does not try to stop her. It knows—the Château knows—that Claire will not be swayed.

How long has Leander wandered these paths? Time seems to have ended, somehow; he has no sense of where he began, or where this must end. Somewhere within this endless expanse of turnings and leaves and flowers he has begun to forget what he is looking for. An entrance? An exit? A woman, he thinks—Claire—but once he thinks the name it flutters away like a moth. The air is so sweet here, he is dizzy with it. Ropes of honeysuckle hang from the tops of the hedges like nooses, and the gravel rolls beneath his feet with the steady rhythm of a tide. Step forward, step back. Turn once, turn twice, and he has been here before—hasn’t he? A man made of leaves stands here, pondering the labyrinth. A robin made of jasper watches him from atop the topiary’s head.

‘I am lost,’ Leander says to the bird, and it responds with a high musical twitter. A gentle breeze curls around his shoulders.

‘Mother, I am lost,’ Leander says, more loudly this time. ‘Why would you bring me here if there is nowhere for me to go?’

The robin twitters again. Leander takes a seat beside the topiary man, crossing his legs on the gravel. Missah, his mind supplies. At least he will have company.

He stares at the opposite hedge, the leaves brushing the tips of his shoes. Was this path always so narrow? If he were to stand, the hedges would barely accommodate his shoulders. Leander blinks, frowns. The hedge has engulfed half of his boot. He attempts to pull his leg away—his foot is stuck, branches digging into his ankle like teeth. In silent horror, he observes as the hedge crawls farther forward, engulfing his calf, his knee. The Château is consuming him.

He wants to scream, to laugh. How foolish he has been. Why would you bring me here? he had asked. There is nowhere for me to go. But Leander isn’t supposed to go anywhere, of course.

Leander is not meant to escape the labyrinth. He is the worm now, squirming on its hook. The bait for someone else—the woman wandering the maze, searching, desperate. He cannot save her.

She must save him.

Twenty-Seven

The path is endless. The sun crawls higher, taunting in its slowness, its light slicing across the horizon as if it intends to gut Claire where she stands.

Without the fan, there is no way except forward—but with it raised to her eye, small turnings emerge: a small tunnel within a hedge that she must shuffle through on her hands and knees, through waterlogged dirt crawling with larvae; a pair of golden ladders that guide her over the wall and into another corridor that seems identical to the first; and a pathway so narrow Claire is obliged to inch through it sideways, branches tearing at her skirts and leaving them tattered. She has a sense that she is going further within, that eventually she will reach the labyrinth’s centre. But she has no proof that Leander is even here, and as she continues, the maze only seems larger and larger, endless and hungry, until she begins to wonder if it will be possible to ever leave.

Still, the sun rises, and Leander remains missing. So Claire runs; she climbs and crawls and lurches between each turning and dead end. She wonders if perhaps she has spent her entire life running. She wonders if she ever left that forest outside Le Havre, if every moment of her life since then has been a delusion. Even now, Claire feels as if she can hear the men calling after her as she weaves through narrow corridors of blossom and leaf: Little bird! You are free now! And these voices at her back, so clear, so insistent, are a memory and a visitation and a truth, a truth that she cannot escape—that this is a hopeless endeavour. Has the Lady dredged up these voices from Claire’s memories in yet another act of cruelty? Or have Claire’s attempts at sanity finally failed so utterly that she can no longer tell past from present?

She reaches another dead end. When she turns to look behind her, all other turnings seem to have disappeared, even through the fan. Claire lowers it, her hands trembling, and leans heavily against the hedge. Tears well and overspill—she will not keep herself from crying, not now. She has endured enough, she thinks, without denying herself the indulgence of sorrow.

The breeze plays lightly at her hair. She can hear the voices growing closer and closer. Little bird, you are free now!