At last, then, the student body: Tull, Edward, Lucy, Boulder and eighteen of their fellows, the latter of whose individual attributes and shortcomings will remain unsung — but let us say a fair cross-section of overachievers, with archetypal brainiacs and bullies to bracket the middling. It is heartening to note that for the length and breadth of the voyage, there wasn’t a single disciplinary problem of substance (and not a weapon, real or makeshift, brandished): the children, sensoria taxed and disoriented by constant movement through culture and time zone, shocked lungs breathing the recirculated air of an albeit opulent airship, had been transformed from jackasses into sweet, humble citizens of the world — in no time, the little dears possessed the poise and plenitude of UNICEF emissaries. They behaved with grateful worshipfulness toward their immediate hosts (Edward and his sister) while still managing to pay cousin Tull the worshiped-by-association homage or lack of it required by his given mood. Suffice to say that within mere days after the Los Angeles departure, the normally boisterous, disrespectful Four Winds mob became fine-tuned choristers, whose vocals could swing from ragtime to near liturgical at the instructive glance of any adult — or Trotter — on board. Oh, but they were good.
Let us address their itinerary. For the reader who tires of such inventories, a solution is at hand: accidental tourists may skip ahead, while the more adventurous (it is hoped, the majority) will be asked to surrender their passports forthwith. The trip will be swift — or perhaps feel swifter than our prefatory remarks — and cover much ground.
We are already in New Orleans; for Edward wished to visit a place where Mardi Gras masks are made.† The atelier outshines Olde CityWalk’s by a long shot. Not that Edward is covetous — it has the opposite effect. He is utterly seduced by all manner of feather, bead and sequin. But the legendary city is oppressively humid, and this does not make anyone happy. A prearranged visit to the home of Anne Rice salves their wounds. The sequestered writer is ill and graciously sends her regrets; an extensive tour of the imposing, atmospheric grounds is offered by her handsome son, also a novelist. Lucy is at once besotted, but cannot compete with Boulder, who already whines that if she’d been old enough she was certain to have been chosen by his mother to “limn” the part Kirsten had played in Interview with a Vampire. She is a snake! thinks Lucy uncharitably of her best friend, who keeps posing and wriggling and “limning,” and the young man seems fairly entranced. Disgusted, Lucy dumps Christopher Rice without him ever having known they were a couple.
England-bound. Cabin lights dimmed in readiness for sleep. The student body lay in flattened, cashmere-upholstered lounges while Tull Trotter, prompted by a certain mischievous cousin, entertains the spellbound Four Winders (and one or two anxious adults, who pretend not to listen) by reading aloud from a book of transcripts containing the blackbox recordings of fatally crashed airplanes. Aside from Tull’s radio-play voice, all one can hear is the drone of engines in the howling void, from which they are separated by a metallic husk of mere inches. Edward — whose king-size head, it may be too painstakingly observed, rested upon a $2,500 oversize Legends eiderdown pillow, its feathers collected by hand from Icelandic nests so as not to harm the ducks — titters devilishly from beneath his 435-thread-count filigreed oyster-colored silk hood, while Lucy, that high-flying authoress, tries to cadge a few moments with her Smythson Blue Maze Mystery journal, sending a scowl or two Tull’s way. Other than Edward, the only person deriving any real pleasure from this theater of cockpit cruelties is Mr. Hookstratten’s consort, the very weedy Reed; Tull’s tasty morsels (particularly monologues that end with pilots screaming for their mothers) elicit a steady, sardonic grin. The man is in his element.
Trinnie had insisted that while in England they visit her mentor — Randoll Coate, maze maker extraordinaire — for a tour in Gloucestershire. The extremely tall, extremely eccentric eightysomething gent was among the most amicable and learned of men (that would include Mr. Emerson Tabori) the Trotter children or for that matter the entire troupe had ever had the pleasure to meet. He spoke a great deal in phrases and whole paragraphs of other languages, and it was not a bore to wait for the enlightened translation, though sometimes the wait was very long indeed; some of the group is waiting still. At first defensive, for he was loath to have the Saint-Cloud maze upstaged, Tull gradually conceded that the Master’s creations were, well, different and, as such, not really competitive with his mom’s (or “mum’s,” as Lucy would have it, for while in England her pronunciation of words had subtly shifted; though to say the newly adopted accent was English would have been too generous). Some of the hedged puzzleboxes were barely three feet in height — Mr. Coate not subscribing to any hard-and-fast rules when it came to grafting his imaginative constructs onto garden or hillock.
As the Four Winders helped feed one of his egg-shaped foliated creatures bonemeal, he glanced up to ask — first in Italian, then in English—“What’s the difference between a book and a labyrinth? Nothing! There is no difference.” (He was full of koans, beans and majesty.) Lucy flushed at the revelation and instantly put pen to Smythson, certain that Merlin had just solved the Mystery of the Blue Maze. But Edward knew that Borges had said it first.
He led them deeper through a breathtaking lunar puzzle while recounting the minotaur’s tale. For the children, it was like hearing it afresh; such was Randoll’s art, they could almost smell the flatulence of that hairy, mythic beast. When he said “labyrinth” was thought to derive from the Minoan labrys, or “double-headed ax,” Edward, in the tireless arms of his carrier, cursorily added (and much to their host’s enchantment) that the item was most accurately defined “as a unicursal spiral to the center whereas a maze is a multicursal route: junctions and deceptions.”
“Choices,” added Randoll sunnily.
The old fabulist did not dawdle; like young Theseuses, they followed the thread of his erudition as best they could and in a short while found themselves within a “see-through” maze of espaliered apple and pear trees. Finally, five hundred yards farther, they traipsed amid the whimsical “Imprint of Man,” an enormous boxwood footprint, the great toe of which resided on a specially created Coatesian island of an adjacent river. Ms. Keaton nearly expired with delight; it was she, with Dexter at one hand and the intoxicated Lucille Rose at the other (for, at least while on the larger Isle, that is what the braided girl demanded to be called), who spearheaded the successful search-and-rescue of a disoriented and embarrassed Mr. Hookstratten — his verdant explorations of Randoll’s more complex outgrowths having been more labyrinthine than expected.