The Ghost Orchid (10 page)

“You see, I grew up in a town where everyone’s a spiritualist of some sort. It’s called Lily Dale, and my family has lived there for over a hundred years, although by ‘family’ you have to understand I mean the matriarchy. Somehow, men never seem to linger long with the Brooks women; I never knew my father or my grandfather or any of my uncles, and my mother and my grandmother acted as if conception were a matter of mixing the right herbs and roots in their Crock-Pots, which, for all I know, is how I was conceived—in a witch’s cauldron from eye of newt and a shot of wheatgrass juice. Anyway, when I was twelve, my mother said I could start attending the ‘spirit circles’ to see if I had ‘the gift,’ as they call it. I only made it through one . . . apparently I fainted. For months after that I wouldn’t sleep in the dark or stay alone in the house, which, in a town like Lily Dale, was considered eccentric behavior.”

“Do you remember why you fainted?”

I take another deep breath, wishing there were more air in the grotto. Is this what Richard Scully meant by “mining my deepest pain”? What I had wanted to ask him was, how would I know if I dug too far? Even miners took canaries with them to test the viability of the air down in the deepest shafts. I look at David and wonder if he would be able to categorize what I saw at that séance the way he’d named the ghost orchid in the maze.

“No,” I say, deciding not to confide everything all at once, because there is no reassuring Latin term for the thing I saw at my mother’s spirit circle, no scientific explanation, either, for the voices I hear or the hand I saw from behind the grate. “I couldn’t remember anything. My mother wanted to put me into a ‘spirit trance’ so I could recover what happened, but I’ve never let her.”

“I don’t blame you. It’s bad enough that she let you attend that séance in the first place. No offense to your mother, but it seems irresponsible.” He slips his arm around my shoulder and, after a moment’s hesitation, I lean into him, feeling how solid he is, how . . . of this world. Not a very good canary, really, because he’d be breathing long after I succumbed to poisonous vapors, but he’d be good at pulling a girl out of a collapsing mine. I like how his fingernails are rimmed with soil and how he smells, faintly, of shaving lotion, a clean, citrusy smell with none of the cloying sweetness that I still smell when I think of that séance.

“No offense taken; I agree entirely. I couldn’t wait to get out of Lily Dale. I would never raise a child there.”

“So you don’t believe in any of that stuff?”

I turn to answer and realize how close his face is to mine, his dark unshaven cheek just inches away. I can feel my heart pounding, a sound like beating wings, like something caged trying to get out. David’s arm tightens around my shoulders and as he pulls me toward him over the rough stone bench I feel something sharp pierce my thigh and I cry out.

“What?” he asks, pulling away, the moment broken.

I reach down and pull something out of the cloth of my jeans. Turning it over in my hand, I see that it’s a broken piece of blue-and-white china, the edges of its pattern blurred, as if the china pattern had faded with time.

“It must have gotten caught in my jeans at breakfast,” I say, “from when Nat’s cup broke.”

At the mention of Nat’s name David stiffens and stands up. “I guess we should get going,” he says. “I don’t want to keep you from your writing.”

“No,” I say, getting up, not sure if I’m sorry that the kiss was interrupted. Although I am drawn to David, the last thing I need is to get involved with someone here. “I guess I should get back, but thank you for showing me this . . . It’s . . .” I turn around in a circle, looking for a word to describe the grotto. My gaze falls on a chink in the stone above the bench. “Is that the grate?” I ask. “You really can’t see it from this side.”

“I guess that was the point,” David says, already heading out the side passage. Instead of following him, I step up onto the bench and run my hands along the stone wall until I’ve found the opening in the rock. I press my face up against it, but the tunnel on the other side is too dark to see anything. As I move away I notice something embedded in the stone, a chip of paint or fragment of shell. I lift it up and see that it’s neither of those things: it’s the thin white crescent of a fingernail.

Chapter Eight

“As you can see, the nursery is rather lonely for poor Alice. She does little but draw all day long.”

The girl is seated on a wide window seat beneath the steeply sloping attic roof, her drawing pad balanced on her knees. She doesn’t bother to raise her head when her mother and her guest (the woman whose long dark hair and slanted eyes remind her of the captive Indian maidens in her own pictures) come into the room.

The room, though low-ceilinged, is huge, stretching almost the length and breadth of the house; only a small portion of the west side has been sectioned off into a separate room. Along the north wall four narrow beds are lined up like cots in a dormitory. Corinth shivers, remembering the year she spent working in the glove factory in Gloversville, sharing an unheated attic dormitory with a dozen other factory girls. She walks to the south-facing windows to warm herself in the sun and catches a glimpse of Frank Campbell, standing with his easel set up on the far edge of the terrace, talking to Mrs. Ramsdale. The novelist’s mauve peau de soie dress soaks up the early morning light like a deep, unlit pool—an image of stagnant water that rises in Corinth’s mind and threatens to seep over the sunlit garden.

Turning from the window, she sees that Aurora has also been observing the two figures on the terrace.

“Here are all the children’s toys,” she says, indicating the shelves below the windows. “As you can see, there’s plenty to choose from, although much of their playthings are sadly worn. Heaven knows, I tried my best to impress upon them the importance of taking care of their possessions, but they were always leaving their things scattered abroad willy-nilly.”

Corinth looks down at the now neatly arrayed shelves and sees that indeed many of the book spines are tattered and broken and the dress-up clothes folded in their baskets are stained and frayed. One basket is full of broken toys, a tin gun missing its trigger, a hatchet without a handle, and an adult-sized bow with a quiverful of featherless arrows. It’s not the hard use that seems sad to Corinth, though, it’s the present
neatness,
the way the well-used toys have been so lifelessly corralled onto their shelves and into baskets. Even the rocking horse—so often ridden that its brown fur is worn down to its wooden frame—looks like an old dray horse waiting to be taken away and made into glue. Corinth touches the horse’s head, which is festooned with feathers and pink ribbons, just to set it into motion.

“That’s Belle,” Alice says, looking up from her drawing pad at the sound of the horse’s runners creaking on the wide-planked floors. “She was Cynthia’s favorite.”

Corinth crouches down so that she’s at eye level with the horse. She can see herself in its glass eye. “Are these Cynthia’s ribbons on her bridle?” Corinth asks.

“Well, they certainly didn’t belong to James or Tam,” Alice says.

“Don’t be rude, Alice,” Aurora says. “Answer Miss Blackwell’s questions civilly.”

“Yes, Miss Blackwell,” Alice recites in a singsong rhythm, “the ribbons belonged to my sister Cynthia. Pink was her favorite color. She was buried with a pink ribbon in her hair, but I imagine that ribbon isn’t such a pretty color now.”

“That’s enough, Alice. If you’re going to speak like that, I’ll send you to the storage room.” She points toward the door at the west end of the attic.

Corinth sees the girl’s look of defiance instantly melt into fear.

“Please, Mrs. Latham,” Corinth says, “I’m sure Alice can be of help to me in identifying each child’s favorite plaything. I think I’ll take one of these ribbons for Cynthia—”

“Take the one with the green stripe down the middle; that was her favorite,” Alice says, swinging her legs down from the window ledge and hopping to the floor. “I can tell you what the boys liked best, too.”

Perhaps it is gratitude for being spared the punishment of the storage room that turns Alice into a suddenly pliable child. The look she gives Corinth is the first she’s seen free of spite. She almost forgives her the “stinking savage” remark she made yesterday. After all, what kind of life is this for a child, living in this cavernous attic surrounded by the relics of her dead siblings?

It’s these relics, though, that seem to bring out the child’s best side as she confides to Corinth each one’s provenance.

“James made these arrows himself,” she says, drawing a sharp-tipped arrow—the only one with its feathers intact—from its birch-bark quiver. “He even found the feathers on a hunting trip with Papa up at the camp. They’re quail feathers . . . Tam carved this bear out of wood and gave it to James as an ‘animal totem’ to help him on hunting trips. Tam loved Indian things . . . see, he made this beaded headband for me.”

Throughout Alice’s recitation Aurora stands at the window, her arms clasped behind her back, looking out at the gardens. She doesn’t offer any anecdotes of her own or suggest any objects that she remembers as precious to her dead children. Her face is pale and impassive in the clear morning light, but Corinth can see a tightening in her jaw and the knuckles of her clasped hands are white. Perhaps, Corinth thinks, seeing her dead children’s playthings disturbed is too painful for her.

“I’ll take the ribbon for Cynthia,” Corinth says, coming to stand beside Aurora at the window, “and the arrow for James. But for Tam . . . well, all of the things Alice has shown me are things he made for someone else. Since they’re things he gave away, they might not have any
attraction
for his spirit.”

Aurora turns from the window with a look so nakedly full of pain in her blue eyes—
flow blue eyes,
as Corinth has begun to think of them—that Corinth has to look away. She looks down at the terrace, where Mrs. Ramsdale is slipping a tube of paint into Mr. Campbell’s pocket. When she looks back up, Aurora is removing something from her own pocket: a length of soft leather that unwinds as she holds it up. It makes Corinth think of the leather straps that bind the statue of the Indian maiden in the garden, but then she sees that it’s a necklace. The leather is wrapped around an ancient arrowhead carved from bone.

“Tam found this in the garden,” Aurora says, holding the necklace up until Corinth puts her hand under the dangling arrowhead. “He wore it every day of his life. Will it do?”

When Corinth nods, Aurora lets the leather strap coil into the palm of her hand. The moment she closes her hand over the carved bone, a red veil washes over her eyes and her ears are filled with the sound of her own blood rushing in her veins. She squeezes the sharp bone in her palm to keep from losing consciousness, watching Aurora’s lips moving without hearing a word.

“What?” Corinth says over the roaring in her ears. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.”

“I was saying that Signore Lantini is making some adjustments to the water pressure in the fountains. I wanted them to be at their best tonight when we have the séance, but something has been blocking the flow from the main spring. I asked him to have more water pumped up from another spring, but I’m afraid he’s overdone it a bit.”

Corinth looks out the window and sees that water is coursing down the fountain allée like a mountain stream after the snow melts; it is spurting up from beneath Pegasus’s foot like a geyser. The gentle lapping and gurgling of the fountains has been replaced with a torrent of floodwater, and for a moment Corinth could swear she feels the house trembling on its foundation, as if it were about to be swept away. Then the force of the water in the fountains subsides altogether and the rushing in her ears becomes a dull hum.

Aurora sighs. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid one of the pumps must have broken. Let’s hope he gets it fixed by tonight’s séance in the grotto.”

“The grotto?” Corinth asks, surprised. It’s the first she’s heard of this plan. “Why there?”

“Because I think that’s where the children have gone. They liked to hide there from their nurse when it was time to come in to dinner. Maybe they’re hiding there now. Surely you felt their presence—” Aurora pauses until Corinth looks at her. “Oh, I forgot, you haven’t been to the grotto yet.”

After dinner the servants carry a folding table and chairs and candles down to the grotto. Candles have been lit all along the fountain allée to illuminate the path down the hill, and each guest has been given a candle to hold. Aurora, who has asked Corinth to walk with her a little ahead of the other guests, carries a candelabra made from the spreading antlers of a moose. When they reach the bottom of the hill, Aurora stops and steps into a small niche carved out of ilex and motions for Corinth to follow her. Before she does, though, Corinth looks up the hill to see the candlelit procession—like a swarm of fireflies descending from a castle. She imagines the statue of Jacynta, hidden in the boxwood maze, his sword drawn and ready to do battle with the regiment of lights. Then she follows Aurora.

“Have you seen my Egeria?” Aurora asks, holding the candelabra aloft to light the little niche.

Corinth thinks for a moment that she must be referring to an errant housemaid, but then she notices the small statue nestled in the ilex: a slim girl drooping over a marble basin filled with water.

“She was a nymph who married Numa, the second king of Rome. When he died she wept so inconsolably that the gods took pity on her and turned her into a spring. I found her this winter, after the children died, in an old villa in Tivoli, serving as a feeding trough for the family’s chickens. When I saw her I thought, yes, that’s what almost happened to me, my grief nearly melted me to water. But seeing something so lovely—that spoke so eloquently to my grief, I felt an easing of my pain, as if my spirit had been lifted out of my body and freed of its pain. Do you know what I mean?”

Corinth nods, startled by a description so like what she experienced only today. It’s not what she expected from Aurora Latham, and she feels a swelling of compassion for the woman that’s not entirely welcome. “Yes, yes, I think I do,” she says.

“I determined then that my home here at Bosco would be more than just a tribute to the children. It would be a tribute to the power of art to console grief. I want to do more than collect some statues; I want to bring artists together to be inspired by this place so that they, too, can produce works that will comfort others in their grief. Mr. Campbell called me his Muse of Water last night,” she says, pulling a folded sheet of pale gray paper out of her pocket. “See, he gave me a letter today in which he addresses me as such”—Aurora holds up the sheet so Corinth can see the salutation, but it is folded so she can see nothing else—“and implores me not to conduct this séance. But he doesn’t understand the necessity. Look, look around you! Can’t you see them?”

For a moment Corinth thinks that she means the other guests, who are walking down the hill, but then she sees from the way that Aurora’s eyes are darting all over the garden, into the recessed niches and dark groves and the candlelit paths, that she has something else in mind.

“The artists who will come here! The writers and painters and musicians! The very air is thick with them! They’ve come to drink of the spring, but the spring must be cleansed for them first.”

Aurora’s voice is so urgent, so filled with conviction, that Corinth half expects to see a crowd of ghostly supplicants kneeling at Egeria’s basin, lapping up springwater, but the little nymph is alone, her head bowed so deeply over her basin that she looks as if she’ll drop into the water at any moment. Corinth feels a sudden unreasoning pity for the lifeless marble girl, wrested from her home in Italy and transplanted in this foreign soil.

“So you mean to collect artists as well as statues,” Corinth says, before she can consider the way her words might be construed.

She can sense the other woman stiffen, her limbs in the moonlight becoming as immobile as those of the marble statue. “I suppose you could put it like that,” Aurora says, her voice cold. She holds the candelabra up to light the way out of the niche, but as Corinth is passing her, Aurora turns back to look at the statue of the nymph and says, “Another interesting thing about Egeria. Her spring was sacred to the vestal virgins. If one of them broke their vows of chastity, they were condemned to death. Do you know how they were killed?”

“No,” Corinth says. “How?”

“They were walled up in a tomb,” Aurora says, “and left to die. They were buried alive.”