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“Extremes live within us all. The joy of association resides alongside the anticipation of loss. What is given will be taken, what we have is often only of value to us when it is gone.”
“A map is a conduit for wonder, a tool for adventure. But it is also an instrument of power—and like all things, power has two faces.”
“When you are sitting in silence, you open the door to a deeper wisdom—the knowing of the ages. When you are walking, with the path to that wisdom already carved anew by your daily practice, you find that an idea, a thought, a notion, comes to you, and you have the solution to a problem that seemed insoluble.”
A long journey in her motor car, a two-seater MG 14/40, always gave Maisie an opportunity to engage in uninterrupted thought. There was something about the rhythm of the road, the tires against tarmacadam that allowed her to delve deeply into whatever challenge was engaging her attention. She would change gears, slow down, speed up, as the journey required, and at no point was she anything but attentive to the task of driving, but at the same time, it was as if in the act of travel, her immediate concerns were lulled, and in her contemplation she seemed to plumb a greater depth of
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As clouds crossed the sun, each beam slanted down on the earth’s folds and inclines, giving an impression of movement, as if searchlights were in pursuit of a vanishing day.
“It seemed such an interesting word: wayfinding. Not ‘to find our way’ but ‘wayfinding.’
“You know the truth, Maisie. You know the truth, but you need the proof. The facts are there, Maisie, between the lines. The evidence is always between the lines, whether it is written or not. Look between the lines.”
Lady Petronella sighed. “I wish the whole thing didn’t seem so immediate sometimes—do you know what I mean?” She looked at Maisie directly. It was not a rhetorical question. Maisie nodded. “Yes, I do. I know exactly what you mean. You’ll be going about your daily round, and then, for one reason or another—” She shrugged. “I don’t know—possibly an aroma in the air, or the way the wind is blowing, or even something someone said—you feel as if you’re back there, in the midst of it all, and that it will never end.”
The truth always finds a way, Maisie, in some manner or form. You cannot deliberately change the course of the river without causing a flood or drought somewhere else.”
Maurice had cautioned her, in the days of her apprenticeship, that if the way ahead is not clear, time is often the best editor of one’s intentions.
She had lived at Ebury Place as both a servant and, later, a guest with her own rooms, but this new development—now far from secret, as Carter’s comment indicated—would test the Comptons’ self-described socialist leanings.
“Life is a riddle, my dear. It is filled with clues along the way, with messages we struggle to understand. You’ve been working on the case of a cartographer; you should know that all maps are drawn in hindsight. And hindsight, if interpreted with care, is what brings us wisdom.
