The Freedom Maze (27 page)

“Beats me why you’re here at all,” Mr. Akins said. “Pardon me for asking, but does Mrs. Charles know where you’re at?”

The blue hound began snuffling energetically at Sophie’s skirts. She gave a ladylike scream. “Take it away!”

“Could I trouble you to answer me, Miss Fairchild?” asked Mr. Akins. “A runaway slave ain’t no small matter.”

“I’m not answering anything until you get this horrid thing away from me.” It was all too easy to sound hysterical. “Please, Mr. Akins?”

The overseer sighed. “You heard the young lady, McCormick. She don’t like your blue hound. Let him sniff ’round, see what he find.” The blue hound disappeared. “Well, Miss Fairchild?”

Sophie shivered with cold and nerves. She didn’t know what to say next, just that she had to keep him talking and away from the summerhouse. What would Miss Liza do?

“I do believe,” she said, “that I’m feeling a bit faint. If you give me your arm as far as that bench over there under the arbor, Mr. Akins, I’d like to sit down.”

She slipped her hand through his arm and leaned on him, glancing up around the deep brim of her bonnet.

He frowned down at her. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the summerhouse?”

“No,
indeed,
” said Sophie petulantly. “I’ve
been
in the summerhouse. There aren’t any chairs, and I’m certain I heard
rats.
I’ll just sit out here.”

Akins shrugged and led her to the bench. Sophie sank down gracefully, pulled Miss Liza’s lace-edged handkerchief from her reticule, and pressed it to her mouth.

“Better, Miss Fairchild?”

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Akins. I can’t abide dogs.”

The blue hound had stopped barking and seemed to be rushing from place to place, whining.

“Miss Fairchild.” Mr. Akins was clearly holding on to his temper with difficulty. “Mr. McCormick here thinks your slave wench is still somewheres on Oak River land. His dog led us here. And you’ll forgive me saying you seem mighty anxious to keep me out of that summerhouse.”

Reminding herself that Miss Liza Fairchild would naturally be a little nervous, Sophie allowed her lips to tremble. “I declare, Mr. Akins, there’s no call to be ugly. It’s perfectly simple why I’m here, but you must promise not to tell, because I’d get in terrible trouble, and so would”— she paused dramatically —“Someone Else.”

“Who would get in trouble, miss? Antigua? I promise you, that girl’ll be in more trouble the longer it takes to catch up with her.”

Why was the man so
stupid
? “Why do you keep going on about Antigua? I don’t give two pins about Antigua. I hope you do find her, and whip her raw.” Sophie fidgeted with her handkerchief. “If you
must
know, it’s my fiancé, Mr. Beau Waters. You see, Grandmama and Papa think I’m distracting him from his duties, so they’ve forbidden me to see him until after harvest.” She widened her eyes at him. “Have you ever been in love, Mr. Akins?”

Mr. Akins laughed unpleasantly. “I see. Don’t you fret, miss. I’ll keep your secret.”

“Thank you.”

But Mr. Akins wasn’t quite through with her yet. “In return, Miss Fairchild, I want you to let Crusher here take a sniff around the summerhouse. Just so we can say we done our duty.”

“Must you?”

“Yes, Miss Fairchild. Or I’ll march right on into that summerhouse and take whoever I find there straight to Dr. Charles.”

“Oh, very well. But do hurry. I have to get back to Oak Cottage directly.”

She held her breath as McCormick led the blue hound up to the summerhouse. She couldn’t see that far, but she heard Crusher’s ears flap as he shook his head impatiently.

“He don’t smell nothing here, Akins. Let’s us move along. C’mon,” McCormick shouted to the slaves grouped by the entrance. “We got us a nigger to catch.”

Mr. Akins lifted his hat, and Sophie gave him a little nod. He faded into the hedge. A moment later, she heard McCormick’s voice, startlingly close. “I would’ve bet a chaw of ’baccy the wench was there.”

“May be she was,” Mr. Akins said. “But she ain’t there now.” They passed around to the far side of the maze; when Sophie could hear their voices again, they were too far away for her to make out words. She counted slowly to one hundred, then she put on her glasses and tapped on the summerhouse door. “They’re gone.”

“Better make sure,” Africa said.

Sophie ran through the maze and peered out cautiously, saw a ragged figure behind a tree wave and point off toward Oak Cottage. She ran back to the garden as fast as her tight boots would let her.

“Africa! Antigua! You got to leave, right now! They’re headed up to Oak Cottage, and if they see Miss Liza, it won’t take long for Mr. Akins to put it all together.”

Africa burst out of the summerhouse, her arm around Antigua, who was almost unrecognizable in a gray dress, a black shawl, and an unbecoming fawn headwrap. She was carrying a straw basket and quivering with excitement.

Sophie handed Antigua the reticule with the travel pass. Antigua hugged Sophie, Africa said, “There ain’t time enough for that,” and then they were all hurrying through the maze and Sophie was wondering whether Uncle Italy was waiting where he’d said and whether she and Africa could get back to where they were supposed to be before anybody missed them. The boots pinched, the corset made her breath come short, and her glasses were so smudged nothing looked quite the way it should.

She ran into a dead end. It was one of the room-like ones, decorated with a classical statue, a plump lady with a sheet around her hips and a smirk on her marble lips. The name Belle Watling popped into Sophie’s mind.

Who on earth was Belle Watling?

Sophie shook her head angrily, and turned to lead Africa and Antigua back to the right path.

There was no one behind her.

Heart pounding, Sophie ran back along her track. Her skirts dragged on the grass, and the hoop caught in the raggedy hedges. The morning smelled of recent rain, and very faintly, of roses. A wet breeze blew her the calling of bobwhites and a faint, angry buzzing.

“Hey there, Miss Sophie,” said a voice, and a fat, piebald animal-like thing appeared in the air in front of her, grinning toothlessly.

Sophie gaped at it.

“How you like the magical adventure I done give you?”

“What are you talking about? What are you? Where are Antigua and Africa?”

“They gone to they just reward. That other question, I done answer before. You recollect, don’t you?”

Sophie felt the world tilt and spin around her, as if she was about to faint. Then everything settled again, and she remembered. She remembered everything: what the Creature was and what it had done, where she had been and when and who.

Her knees folded, and she sat down hard in the wet grass, her skirts mushrooming around her. The angry buzzing grew louder, and a small airplane bustled across the sky overhead.

“It a lot to recollect, all to once,” the Creature said.

Disconnected names bounced in Sophie’s head — Mr. Akins and Mama,
The Time Garden
and Antigua. Antigua! “I have to know, does Antigua get away? And does Africa get in trouble? What about Sally and Asia? And Canny. Does Canny get over her burns all right? Was she upset when I didn’t come back?”

The Creature rolled its amber eyes. “You think I gots nothing to do but hang around here all day granting you wishes?

“They’re not wishes,” Sophie said. “They’re questions.”

“Either way, I ain’t going to answer ’em. You ain’t got no part in that story no more.”

“Story?” Sophie was furious. “That wasn’t a story! It was real!”

“Of course it real.” The Creature was impatient. “Still a story, though.”

“I remember now. You said I had to finish a story so I could come home. It doesn’t feel finished, though.”

The Creature shrugged. “Well, you part finished, anyways.”

Sophie looked around, trying to make sense of where and when she was. The air was hot and close — summer, then — and the grass she sat in was wet. It might still be the day she left, or another just like it. Had she been gone for hours or days? Were the police looking for her? How much trouble was she in, anyway? “Creature,” she said. “Would you please tell me how long I’ve been gone?”

It cocked an eye at the cloudy sky. “Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Long enough. You better scoot on home.” And then it disappeared.

It would have taken Mr. Akins and his knotted whip to make Sophie scoot just then. She sat in the wet grass, trying to think. She’d wished so hard to come home, and now she was here, she hardly knew how she felt. She was hot and sad — oh, yes, and very tired. Which wasn’t so very different from how she’d been feeling for the last week. At least now she wasn’t scared half to death as well.

“Sophie? Sophie! I know you’re hiding in here somewhere! It’s dinnertime!”

Someone was calling her from the center of the maze. Sophie hauled herself to her feet and walked slowly back, lifting her skirts free of the unmown grass. When she reached the garden, she had to steady herself against one of the mosscovered urns. It was one thing to travel forward a hundred years; it was another to see the changes that a hundred years could make. Everything was overgrown with thistles and weeds; the summerhouse was a shapeless mound of Virginia creeper and climbing roses.

A sturdy white woman stood beside the broken sundial. She looked as run to seed as the garden, with an untidy bun and a faded cotton dress that showed her legs almost to the knee. Still, she was a white woman, and potentially dangerous. Sophie’s pulse beat nervously.

The woman, turned, saw Sophie, and went still.
Like a muskrat caught raiding the bean patch,
Sophie thought. “Hello, Aunt Enid.”

“Jesus have mercy,” Aunt Enid said shakily. “It called me Aunt. And in broad daylight, too.” She closed her eyes and clasped her hands. “
Our Father, which art in Heaven
—”

Fighting an unholy desire to giggle, Sophie removed the bonnet. “I’m not a ghost, Aunt Enid. I’m Sophie. I’m back.”

Aunt Enid’s eyes sprang open. She looked Sophie up and down, only half-convinced. “Sophie? Why are you dressed up like the Girl in Yellow?”

“Not the Girl in Yellow. Miss Elizabeth Fairchild.”

“Who is Miss Elizabeth Fairchild? And how did you come by that dress? Not to mention the shawl and bonnet?”

“The bonnet was a present. I stole the dress and the shawl.”

Aunt Enid’s face was a study. “You stole them! Sophie Martineau, you tell me what’s going on here, or I swear I’ll — I don’t know what I’ll do. Bust, I expect.”

Sophie sighed. “You won’t believe me.”

“I don’t expect I will,” said Aunt Enid. “But, with the help of the Good Lord, I aim to try. There can’t be any easy explanation for you to be a good three inches taller than you were an hour ago.”

“Three inches taller?” Sophie said. “Really?”

“At least. And you’ve filled out in the bosom, too.”

“Oh, that’s rags,” said Sophie, but she knew it wasn’t, not entirely. “Miss Liza’s seventeen, nearly.”

“Miss Liza?” Aunt Enid’s voice was grim, and her face was pale under her tan. “That would be the Miss Elizabeth Fairchild you mentioned earlier?”

Sophie took pity on her. “I’ll tell you all about it, Aunt Enid, I promise. But let’s sit down. It’s a long story.”

They went to the stone bench under the rose arbor. Or rather, where the arbor had been — it had long since rotted and collapsed. The bench was still there, though it was cracked and dirty and thick with rain-wet moss. It would stain her dress, Sophie thought, and pulled the shawl from her shoulders to sit on.

Aunt Enid settled herself on the far end of the bench, propped her hands on her knees, and watched as Sophie stripped off the tan gloves and laid them in her bonnet.

“Well,” said Aunt Enid tartly. “I’m waiting.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“You can start with Miss Elizabeth Fairchild.”

Sophie had heard that tone before, from Old Missy. It made her want to invent a soothing lie that would make her aunt stop looking at her like that. But this was 1960. Aunt Enid wasn’t Old Missy, and Sophie had no soothing lie to tell. “Elizabeth Fairchild lived here, Aunt Enid, on Oak River Plantation, in Oak Cottage. A hundred years ago, in 1860.”

“And just what does that have to do with you?”

“I was there. I went back in time.”

Aunt Enid’s hands clenched on her shamefully skimpy skirt. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“No.” For the first time, Sophie dared look up from her lap and straight into her aunt’s eyes. “But it’s the truth.”

“My land,” said Aunt Enid.

Sophie closed her eyes. She was so tired she felt dizzy — or maybe it was because she hadn’t eaten in a hundred years.

A hundred years. That was funny. Sophie giggled.

“I’m glad you find the situation so amusing.” Aunt Enid’s voice was dry.

Sophie bit her lip. “I don’t. At least, I guess I won’t, once I really understand I’m back. It’s been almost six months for me.”

“Almost six months,” said Aunt Enid. “I declare. And where did you spend those six months, exactly?”

“In the Big House, at first. But I got sent to the sugarhouse after Old Missy thought I’d stolen Miss Liza’s hairbrush.”