An Unveiling

The celebration for opening night does not take place until three months after the fact, the night before the market’s departure from London.

Mr.Marshall explains that it is occurring so late so as not to disrupt the company and the markets’ schedules before they have fully settled into them, at the event itself, which is held in his home, a deceptively modestly sized townhouse with a garden spanning acres.

Eli feels it would be too impolite to decline the invitation, so he arrives in the most colourful attire he can manage, which means his vest beneath his black suit is blue, and he tucks a pale ivory rose into his lapel. Michael and Alice are already waiting for him at the door, and insist they will accompany him inside.

At Mr.Marshall’s parties, guests are always received out the front of the house by staff and whisked down a long avenue of gilded baseboards and banisters and artifacts and art to the rear exit of the house. The 200 square metres or so to which the back door leads direction is a modestly decorated lawn lined with Spanish orchids and apple blossoms trees, it appears edges with golden white clouds in the spring. The paths that spiral from the porch to the trees are lined with large flat mosaic stones.

The porch is festooned with colourful paper lanterns that sway in the occasional breeze so guests’ faces are often bathed in light of every colour from Mazarin to cinnabar red. The tables are empty of food, but circled by chairs with woven seats and decorated with blown glass vases full of bouquets that permeate the air with the scent of some golden, sacred garden.

Staff peruse the crowds of guests and silently offer richly coloured drinks. When the guests’ empty glasses are placed on the table, they are taken away wordlessly and replaced with fresh, full glasses of the same beverage.

The garden farther away becomes a hedge maze and spirals away for some distance that guests cannot imagine/guess at and Mr.Marshall will not disclose.

The hedges are almost double the height of some guests, so those that enter, “at their own peril,” Mr.Marshall jokes, can see nothing other than the path before them and the direction from which they came.

The maze opens in several places onto some beautiful display of some sort. A flower garden, an exotic tree, an elaborately carved fountain that guests can hear bubbling from some distance, a topiary masterpiece. In many of these clearings there are benches so guests can sit to rest or appreciate the art, or have a moment of privacy with a companion.

Each guest who enters the maze finds some enchantment, in the strings of lanterns over the path, in the small koifish pond glittering with amber fish, in the bonfire that mysteriously changes colour. The deep, rich light, and the enigma of the maze bring the night to life. Many guests make a point at the end of the soiree to thank Mr.Marshall personally for the singular imagination/ingenuity of the maze and comment that its effect made the evening all the more splendid.

Guests do, however, experience difficulties in navigating the maze, as it has some thousand or more routes. The maze is dotted with staff for just that reason. They stand still, inconspicuous enough to blend into the hedges and shadows without notice, but prepared to point lost guests in the right direction, though none of them speak a word.

This does nothing to discourage guests from roaming the maze and it remains the main attraction for most of the night.

The crowd that gathers tonight is only members of the company, despite Mr.Marshall’s usual variety. They are all dressed in vivid colours that reflect off the vases on the tables, so the entire affair appears like some complex illusion of coloured light.

Several guests lounge in the chairs, their gowns of gold or red draped across the furniture, and many more wander into the maze of emerge, accepting or giving advice on where to turn.

Vivienne is constantly on her feet, moving with grace and speed, floating of the floor, her pale blue gown sweeping behind her, silver and diamonds winking at her ears and throat, like icicles. Despite her cool appearance, she is warm and inviting. When she is not attending to Mr.Marshall, who is not counting the number of glasses of champagne he is having, or speaking with the staff, she hovers by the porch to ensure everything is running smoothly and to rectify a problem, should one occur. When Mr.Marshall does notice her, and tells her to recline and rest, she smiles at him and hands him another glass, then whisks away to the kitchen to check on the first course of their dinner.

Eli feels out of place in a space so full of people, and in such a diverse and lively company. He almost craves solitude but dismisses the idea of returning to his rented flat alone. And Alice and Michael are determined to include him in every conversation they have.

Eli is constantly watching, suspecting some to be his opponent, but there are no suspicious glances returned, only smiles and greetings and a cacophony/bevy/number of introductions. It is not long before he is having an animated discussion with a gentleman in deep violet about art, and his opponent is forgotten completely.

In time, the gentleman in violet, whose name Eli did not catch, excuses himself, and wanders to a small party gathered at the foot of the porch.

There is a small crowd assembled around the dark eyed lady Eli has never spoken with, but on occasion has caught her staring at him. When he catches her eye as on of the men or women in front of him shift, she holds his gaze with a look resembling recognition.

The crowd only dissipates when the staff begin to appear with plates of oeuvre d’heuvres, and they seem reluctant to leave her, each member of the crowd is clearly smitten with her.

Eli uses the distraction of the arrival of food to escape into the maze. He traverses leafy corridors and aisles, smelling juniper, following the sound of a bubbling fountain, to a clearing. But it is not water he finds.

In the centre of the clearing, the ground is sunken, and filled with an enormous cast iron plate. It is barely visible beneath the flames dancing atop it, that roar so high they rise above the hedges and cast sparks alarmingly close to the greenery.

As Eli watches, the fire deviates from its normal ember colour. It shifts to indigo, beginning from its blue tinted base, and rippling to its tips. The sparks coming off of it are the same rich colour.

Eli is so enraptured with the fire that he hardly notices his instructor’s presence beyond it until his shadow appears through the teal tinted flames.

“What are you doing here?” his instructor asks.

“Looking for my opponent,” Eli says, watching the flames shift from green to the warm golden hue of honey. It is not a lie exactly; he finds it difficult to outright lie. But he can evade the truth as easily as he evades large crowds or attention.

“Then why are you out here?”

“I am enjoying the maze. All of the other guests have had the opportunity, I thought it only fair that I do the same.”

“This has nothing to do with the game,” his instructor says, circling the fire. He stops  at a position that makes him visible to Eli, but is not close. “This party doesn’t either. You could be studying right now, instead of floundering your time here.”

“Any one of them could be my opponent,” Eli says. “And they are all here, I thought it would be easier than searching for one spread around the market, as per usual.”

“That is true,” his instructor says.

Eli eyes his former instructor. The flames deepen to midnight blue, and where they ride above the hedges they are almost indiscernible against the night sky. In the darkness, ______’s expression is difficult to see.

“You know who my opponent is, don’t you?” Eli says.

“Of course.”

“But you won’t tell me who it is.”

“At the beginning of this challenge, a disclosure clause was decided upon. However, if you happen to discover who your opponent is, there is no punishment.”

“Does my opponent know who I am?” Eli asks.

“It is highly likely.”

Eli feels as though the fire has blazed into brightness, like a beacon, enough to inform the entire company of where he is. He feels exposed, faced with an invisible opponent who knows his own identity. He feels as though the scales of the game are already tipped in their favour.

“Mr.Kells?” says a voice. Eli turns quickly to find one of the green bedecked staff waiting at the entrance of the clearing.

“Yes?” Eli says, eyes darting to the shadows, but his former instructor is gone.

“I believe Ms.Fairchild is looking for you,” he says. Eli realizes that he is the first of Mr.Marshall’s staff Eli has heard speak.

And he had thought Alice would be too distracted to realize he was gone.

“Thank you for coming to get me, then,” he says.

The man bows and leads Eli out of the maze in a series of twists and turns Eli cannot hope of memorizing. He is too preoccupied hoping that guests wandering the maze alone and speaking to themselves is not considered unusual.

Alice waits for him on the porch, and directs him to Mr.Marshall, who shakes his hand enthusiastically and calls for Vivienne to get him a fresh glass of champagne.

There is a round of questioning about Eli’s past, which he evades with vague answers (“I grew up in London,” “I traveled much.”) and when he excuses himself he only gets as far as the top of the stairs before he encounters a crowd of suits gathered around the same dark-eyed lady from earlier.

Now Eli can see her hair is as dark as her eyes, almost black against her pale skin, and she is dressed in a deep olive green gown, which leaves her shoulders bare. She laughs infrequently, but smiles at the speakers, who each seem eager to earn her attention.

“How do you do it?” One man says.

I could never reveal my secret,” she says, and this smile is directed in Eli’s direction, though at another gentleman. For a moment, Eli forgets to breathe.

“You can tell us,” says a gentleman in blue. “We won’t tell,” he adds with a wink.

“My secret shall die with me,” she says.

“Miss Morgenstern, we insist,” someone says, from the back of the crowd. “We will bring you back from death, if you would tell us.”

“How?” Eli asks, before he can think the question through.

All eyes turn to him, including Miss Morgenstern’s. They sparkle in that familiar enticing way, but the smile accompanying her words is not altogether welcoming. “Perhaps they will pray. Or perhaps they will use magic. It does not take much to bend the world to one’s will.”

“It has a price,” Eli says. “Bringing back the dead is impossible. There is no price for that.”

“Nothing is impossible,” Miss Morgenstern says. Her eyes narrow and she looks as though she is looking through him rather than at him.

Pieces begin to fall into place, impressions that they have met before, her looks and enigma. Her zoo of chimaera.

Eli feels suddenly stupid for never considering her, simply because they have never spoken and because it seems too obvious a choice.

Eli wishes he could step out of her line of sight, but the company is too intmate around them to hide himself, and he feels trapped by her dark eyes, like a butterfly pinned beneath glass.

Eli moves to respond but before he can, dinner arrives, and while many of the guests prefer to remain standing and wandering, Alice insists he joins a group of them who are sitting down to a more formal affair.

As she whisks him away, Eli turns to catch one last glimpse of Bethany, who smiles at him wolfishly.

Eli is seated between Michael and Mr.Marchand, who are quiet, though Alice begins a debate about the origins of the foot that invites the entire table to join. Eli, however, is too distracted to pay attention.

No one notices that he barely touches the food, or lifts his glass with a shaking hand. Though he has gone white as a sheet, the coloured lights hide his paleness.

Over the courses, Eli tries to catch glimpses of Bethany in the crowd, and sees only pieces of her at a time, her deep green gown, her white hand, her sparkling eyes.

When Eli finally escapes, making the polite excuse that he left a conversation unfinished, he cannot find her anywhere. There is no myriad of people gathered around her, and those that spoke to her earlier in the evening are as confused as he when Eli inquires as to her whereabouts.

“Vanished into thin air, she did,” jokes one gentleman.

Alice only finds him once more before the end of the night, and asks him if he is alright, but Eli gives a short non-answer before fading into the crowd again.

When he does say goodbye, Michael insists on leaving with him and must forcibly drag his sister from the admiring crowd in the front hall.

“Quite the night of surprises,” Michael says as they descend the front stairs and breeze past the gates.

“Pardon?” Eli says.

“I did not know Aurelius could dance,” Alice says.

“It was enjoyable, wasn’t it?” Michael says, and smiles when Eli agrees.

When he returns to his rented flat, Eli leans heavily against the door and does not move for some time. The clock on the mantel ticks loudly in the silence. When he does move, Eli sits at his table and opens his notebook. It is not until he is phoned and reminded of the train’s departure that he looks up from his notes and symbols.

Art by Nguyen Thanh Nhan

Text by Lucie MacAulay