It was the sort of muggy summer day that dampened the dreams of Anglophiles, but Nanette didn't mind. Her family home, Pibble, had two outstanding qualities: It sat high on a hill and was sheltered by tall cedar trees, a shield from both the constant wind and drizzle, as well as the occasional heat.

Her bedroom window faced the house's downsloping back, overlooking an unfinished but well-wrought garden maze composed of straight lines of thick yew hedges some five feet tall. Her maid Charlotte had a green thumb and a few fingers into the bargain; the 90 degree turns and dead-ends could have been wrought by an expert designer. Charlotte simply shrugged and called it her "hobby." The maze was where Nanette sat now in the heat of the day, under the half-finished gazebo at the maze's center.

She sipped lemonade and looked idly at the surrounding 5-foot walls of garden maze. She had not ventured any farther into it. She was almost afraid to, as it seemed to grow by the minute under Charlotte's care. She heard Alistair strutting and sweating from somewhere beyond the surrounding hedges and being fussed at by Charlotte over a misplaced topiary. She giggled. Alistair had been her husband Rolund's solicitor before he'd been killed in a car smash-up 18 months ago. Her father's death some months ago had left her and her son Peter the last of the Naughton family.

She'd spent her twenties in various London flats and found Pibble cavernous, the countryside prosaic. Her neighbors were gentlemanly old coves, friends of her late father, amiable squires who bred sheep and wrote memoirs of their old infantry division. Alistair didn't thrill her blood, but he was her age, ambitious, sturdy, and enjoyed hanging around. Peter liked him. That and a house, and a small battalion of servants to attend you...it was enough, for a life.

Pibble had once been a social garrison, marshaled into armies of cook and clean, a sort of life-force that took in lorries of fruit and meats on Saturday afternoons and spit out peel and bones Sunday morning. For a 1923 affair they made a small moat at the back of the house and two horses fell in and drowned. Alistair had read her the tale from the Pibble House History, a leather-bound house diary whose vellum pages had survived some two-hundred years. She'd looked at the book as a child. Now she had one of her own. Presently Alistair came up to join Nanette under the gazebo, rubbing his thin dark hair. His Brylcreem was seeping in the heat, his cuffs were drenched, and his bow tie was a greasy knot. He took the offered lemonade gratefully. "Your maid was working me into a lather in that crazy maze of hers. I only stopped to chat a minute and she had me pulling weeds."

He quaffed the lemonade in four swigs.

"Yes. It looks so much thicker and bigger than even last week. Every morning trucks come and dump great truckloads of yew shrubbery, and within the hour she's planted it all. Now it's like they grow themselves. I shudder to get the bill, but for now I think she's worth every penny. Peter will love playing in it."

"She's working out, then?"

"Couldn't be better. Actually, it could be a little better. She's not adept at polishing the silverware, and her cooking is indifferent, but Peter adores her. That covers a multitude of sins in my book."

"They're inseparable," commented Alistair.

"Except for church. I asked her to go with us and she rather pointedly refused. I doubt she's religious at all, unless she does some nature worship."

"A pagan?"

"Perhaps. As long as she doesn't dance nude in the moonlight I guess it's not my affair. Speak of the devil."

Nanette waved to Charlotte emerging from the maze, a basket of flowers cradled in her arm.

"Just shoring up the topiary, ma'am."

Nanette surveyed her. In her white stockings, black court shoes and tan tunic, Charlotte could have stepped off the cover of an 1880's seed catalogue. Her long hair was kept tied at the back, a bit straggly and dirty. Her pale, sallow face was completely unblemished. A head-turner, if she ever worked at it.

"Carry on then. Just remember to wash down the windows."

"I will, ma'am." After the girl had passed back into the maze Nanette said,
"She's missed her true calling. Fact is, she'd much rather putter around the garden than do her real work."

"The garden maze is part of the house's history, dear. They purposefully burned it down the first maze in 1828, so says a Mr. John Naughton, I believe."

"Whatever for?" "I'll learn when I get to 1828."

"Always by the book, my Alistair."

Alistair had been her father's solicitor. Now he handled the estate for Nanette. Lately he'd been over every other day.

"Fancy they'll be a passage about you in there some day?"

She batted her eyes, amused.

"Heavens no, I mean-she's hardly just puttering, Nanette," Alistair said, stammering.

Nanette smiled at the way he switched the subject.

"She's an artist with the garden. It's like she was born to it."

"She's bewitched you, Alistair."

She was teasing; the girl seemed dead to anything but her garden.

"Alistair, did you remember to bring the papers for the property transfer?"

"Oh my. I forgot the papers, sorry. They're at the office."

She looked at him with mild reproach. The second time he'd forgotten.

"Alistair, after Rolund's death I don't want to leave anything to chance. Bring them soon, please."

"I will, Nanette."

********

Nanette stood, hands on her hips, looking up at the house's face. Another day and the bottom windows had not been washed. She didn't bother to call for Charlotte in the house. She went to the garden gate and found it locked.

"Charlotte, this gate is locked," she shouted down the long yew corridor. "Please let me in."

"Did you leave something in the gazebo, ma'am?" Charlotte's return shout.

Nanette could barely see the gazebo over the yew hedges. The maze was a regular fortress, like some battlement. Truly amazing how it had grown so high so fast. She touched it and it was thickly tufted, like a bound sheave.

She could run into it and it would knock her down, it was that thick.

"But it's not ready to see yet, ma'am."

"Whatever do you mean?" Nanette laughed, trying to conceal her annoyance. "Open this gate, please. I don't need a reason to walk in my own garden."

Charlotte rounded the corner and with clear reluctance opened the gate and let her mistress pass. Nanette clinked the gate shut.

"Thank you. You will keep this gate unlocked in the future. Now go and wash the windows down, please."

A very slight hesitation, then "Yes ma'am."

Charlotte unlatched the gate and walked back into the maze. Nanette walked down the path. She soon caught the fun of the maze. Maybe she was too protective of him. Nanette retraced her steps. She remembered the way: two rights, then a left, then a right. But the first right made two turns she didn't remember and then she hit a dead end. She couldn't find her way out. The hedges were suddenly higher, towering over her head. An unnatural silence descended. The hedge rows, so inviting and neat, had become a narrow alley, as if God in had turned away. She started screaming. "Charlotte!"

Charlotte appeared in the path, arms folded, while Nanette relayed her fright.

"I got lost and couldn't get out."

She felt abashed for screaming, but it had been terrifying, like a child's nightmare.

"Charlotte, I think this is too much. Think how frightened Peter would be if he got lost. I was about to plow through the shrubs to find an escape route."

"Peter will never have to worry."

Nanette noticed Charlotte's odd emphasis but didn't comment.

"Charlotte?" Peter's high keening voice. "Are you going to help me make a bunny?" "

Yes, Peter," Charlotte called back.

"It was just your mother getting lost in the maze."

Nanette followed her out, locking the gate behind them and taking Peter's hand. They walked on wordlessly. Nanette called after them.

"Peter, don't you want to come inside? It's getting late." Her eyes were wet. "I'll read you a story. The one about the dragons."

But Charlotte had her shears out, bent over a bunny ear, sharpening it as Peter watched, enraptured. Whatever they were talking about in the garden was too absorbing for her to interrupt. There was no room for her there. Her eyes wetting, she turned and went inside the house. In the library she thumbed through an Agatha Christie, attention flitting from the clock to the front hallway. Nanette went up to tuck him in but he was already asleep. Knowing it was silly and selfish, she shook Peter awake.

"Mommy?"

"It's alright. Mommy's here." She hugged him, more for her own comfort than his.

"We haven't talked in awhile. Did you have fun today?"

"Yes ma'am. We made some rabbits and some puppies out of the bushes. She said with magic they'll start growling."

"You like Charlotte, don't you?"

"Yes Mother."

"Call me Mommy, Peter. Don't know what she's on about, wrapping you so tight in these sheets." Nanette threw back the covers. One of Peter's hands was clutched tight in a fist.

"What's that in your hand, Peter?"

He looked guilty. "Don't tell Charlotte. She might get mad."

She smiled; now it was her turn to have a secret. "I won't tell."

Peter opened his hand to reveal a small white knuckle bone. Nanette frowned.

"Where did you get this, Peter?"

"It was in the garden. I picked it up. It's a bone like Max chews on."

"Let me see."

She turned it over. It looked like a cow bone, or maybe one from a large dog. She stuck it in a dresser drawer.

"We'll just keep this here for safekeeping, shall we?"

********

It was muggy that night so Nanette threw the two bay windows open. The windows opened on to the maze, an undifferentiated mass in the dark. She fell asleep and was soon dreaming, wandering the maze again like an abandoned child. Then a bell started trilling in the garden and she turned, looking for the noise somewhere over the hedges. Then she was awake and the bell was the phone. The answering machine clicked on and the voice was Alistair's.

"Nanette." The voice was thin and shallow.

"Alistair!" Awake now, she snatched up the receiver.

But Alistair was gone.

********

For three days Nanette left phone messages that stacked up on Alistair's answering machine. Tuesday morning she hung the phone up and looked out the kitchen window, holding a cup from a bitter pot of coffee Charlotte had made. She really needed to talk to Alistair now. This morning she was bound for the doctor's to confirm what she had suspected for a few weeks: She was pregnant.

She dawdled in bed, listening unthinkingly to the faint noise of waterworks coming from the garden, interspersed by an occasional cracking sound. Had Charlotte constructed a cement fountain? She would not have been surprised. A thin drizzly sound, like a lone cherub pissing down a marble wall. She got up to look outside and noticed the gazebo was gone. With little regard for decorum she took a stick and banged on the locked gate. Charlotte emerged from around the bend of the maze, looking peeved.

"Charlotte Klein, did you destroy the gazebo?"

"Yes ma'am." Not even averting her eyes. "I needed the alcove for a statuette."

Nanette sighed a ragged sigh. "Alright, then. I'm letting you go. Stick to your gardening. You obviously have talent. But I hired a maid, not a topiary artist. I'll forgive the destruction of the gazebo, but you must leave tomorrow. While you're still on my payroll, you may run the errands you've neglected for the last four days, starting with the grocery shopping. Thank you."

When Nanette was finished, Charlotte said "Yes, ma'am," curtsying impassively.

Charlotte turned and walked. Brushing herself, she went inside the house and came out with the wicker shopping basket. Peter's blond head appeared out his bedroom window.

"Charlotte, where are you going?"

"The store."

"May I go too?"

"You must ask your mother."

"Mother, may I go to the store with Charlotte?" Peter shouted from the window.

"Yes, go with her," Nanette said raggedly.

The boy would just cry without his Charlotte anyway.

Nanette waited on the porch until the noise of the car's engine faded. Then, using the duplicate key she'd had made in town, she entered the maze. Had not Theseus defeated the Minotaur in the Labyrinth with just a sword and a ball of string? Benefits of a classical education, Nanette thought, taking one end of her yarn and knotting it securely to the spire of the wrought-iron gate. The maze had become hostile territory. The yew was burgeoning, on the edge of wildness. The walls were narrower now, perhaps the result of growth. Flowers of all shapes and colors were interwoven, a William Morris wallpaper come to life. It was strangely dry and brittle, yet steely, she was unable to break off a piece for inspection.

It was a longer walk that she remembered to where the gazebo had stood. The garden was apparently a true maze now, with only one solution amidst a series of dead ends. The further she went, the higher the hedges. Finally the maze widened into a sort of alcove where the gazebo had once stood. A statue of a man stood in the center of the space. Very true to life, finely detailed. It looked strangely like Alistair. Closer, and it was Alistair, right down to the deep-set eyes and that slight, superior indentation of lips that formed his smirk. She felt both relieved and disturbed. It explained why the gate was locked. Charlotte and Alistair were lovers. This was her tribute to him.

Even now, Nanette could appreciate the girl's quasi-supernatural artistry with hedges and trimmers. Drawing closer, she saw the shrub was thinner than Alistair, like an inner mold. Plunging her hand through the thick dense eaves, she felt around for the frame. Instead her hand sank into something soft. She pulled her hand out and stared, letting it drip. Bits of pulpy flesh flaked from her hand and onto the immaculate path. Time hung languidly in the flower-pungent air. Even the drizzling fountain was part of the peace. Time was in a holding pattern, rising and falling, replenishing itself like the fountain.

In that long, ripe moment, several impressions softly pelted down: The Alistair-sized hole scooped out of the immaculate shrubbery behind the statue. The unclassified bone rattling around in a dresser drawer upstairs. The charnel house stench beneath the flowery overlay. She dropped the ball of yarn and started running the way she'd come. She didn't scream. She just ran. She ran and ran, following the string of red yarn backwards, passing a small bear cub topiary here, a rabbit there. Warrens of rabbits. She ran and when she was too tired to run she staggered. Still no end. The hedgerows had grown so tall here that nothing was visible over them, twelve feet tall if an inch. Taller then when since she'd first entered . England was elsewhere. She was in a parallel world of two-dimensions, composed only of right angles and straightaways. The sun was red and queer and squashed just above the top of the hedge, like a sun from another planet. Then the sun slipped down and she was at dusk in an alien world of immaculate grass paths. God had turned away.

Still she followed the string. Dizzily she imagined blocks of bushes shifting across her path in front of her, or opening up behind her. Shrubbery dogs snarled in her path, red berries hanging from their mouths like frozen blood drops. A piped-in stillness hung. She felt on the track of a monster always just flitting around the next turn, just an eye-blink out of sight. Still she trudged forward to meet him, half-flinching as every turn revealed another long stretch of hedge. Her shoes had fallen apart. She discarded them, to suffer the pricking of sharp stones. She walked on bleeding feet like a penitent, past dells of gardenias and tulips, past a globe of frogs, reaching out at the walls of iron shrub to keep from falling. She feared if she fell she would not have the spirit to get up. She called for Charlotte, Peter, Alistair. Father.

Then she rounded the very last corner she would ever turn and as she lost hope there was the end of the yarn, pitched into the sticky topiary. She tugged on it but it wouldn't come. Too tired to fear, she curled up on the grass, cupping her briar-bloodied feet in her hands, and slept. The dream pierced her fevered brain. It was clear as glass now. Like a bird, she surveyed a patchwork quilt of mazes, mazes wrapping in on themselves into Chinese box puzzles, breeding curlicues and hairpin turns and dead-end eddies, widening into alcoves and narrowing again, laying down long lanes of shrubbery which raced unaided along the ground, covering the land– Nanette woke to the sound of metal on metal. Charlotte stood above her, holding the shears. The blades gleamed blood orange. In the strange clarity of near sunset her face was flushed, radiant.

Nanette staggered to her feet, backing up into the maze, eyes on Charlotte. She rounded a turn and started to run, again reversing her torturous trek. She rounded another turn and then hit the wall, stunned. A dead end, the first. Behind her the blades squeaked open and shut, open and shut. There was no way over and no way out but through the wall of yew. She jumped in head first and could instantly go no further. Sap released from the shrubbery was syruping over her face, and into her nose, making it hard to breathe, while every move she made just secured her more tightly.

She moved to back out but with every wriggle became more deeply stuck. Panicked, she could imagine nothing else but wriggling, which released more and more of the binding sap. Now she knew how her Alistair had spent his last day. Her skull was being squeezed. Her black field of vision flooded hazy red, as constricted blood vessels pressed against the back of her eyes. Her last conscious impression was Peter's voice, calling for Mommy from beyond the hedge walls. But she didn't trust her ears, and in the next second with a resounding crack they were squeezed into her head.

********

In the fold of Charlotte's skirt was tucked a passage torn from the Pibble house history book, dated March, 1828: "The kitchen staff was summoned to the garden by the screams of the servant girl Becky, who claimed to see in the maze the figure of a young woman flitting freely in and out of the hedgerows, freely like an apparition."

Accompanying the tiny tight script was a rather good amateur sketch of a girl with a blank face, muddy eyes and long blond hair. Alistair had outlived his usefulness once he'd forged Nanette's signature, transferring Peter's guardianship to Charlotte in the event of Nanette's death. Charlotte had continued to sleep with him for another few days, just for the novelty.

Then two days ago Alistair had found the diary entry in the Pibble house diary and they'd had a row. But Charlotte had charmed him out of his resolve, and they had even played one last time in the maze. After she told him she loved to watch a man writhe, he let her pitch him into the hedgerow.

Alistair was a born submissive, and not all of the abrasions on his body were from his struggle with the yew leaves. Charlotte didn't worry. The birds and the elements would gobble up that evidence soon enough, and with the changes to come in the world, the death of a man like Alistair Crum would be a low priority indeed. Charlotte set the clippers down and stepped back from her work.

She had set Nanette's up in an alcove all her own, adjacent to Alistair. Over the next several days Nanette's bones would break, the skin popping open all over, choking in the steely yew that covered her stiffening body, now bleached of its blood. The foliage would then dry and shrink, crushing her bones, compacting the sculpture into something true to life. All it would require then would be the occasional trim. The sound of waterworks grew louder as the hedgerows drew up the fresh blood, capillary action carrying it off to the farthest ends of the burgeoning maze. The maze began moving as one mass, shifting, thickening, heightening. Something made Charlotte approach Nanette's statuette.

Yes–beneath Nanette's thickly cracking, broad-shouldered breastbone, Charlotte discerned another set of bones tucked in Nanette's abdomen, squishy unformed ones, now squirming. A little girl, six weeks in the womb. Charlotte grimaced. An unpleasant task, but it had to be done. Otherwise the frame would sag and the topiary statuette wouldn't grow properly.

"Stand back, little one. Mommy has to make a trim," she said, casting a protective glance back at Peter as she swung open the shears.