The Ghost Orchid (21 page)

“Your great-grandmother was the head housekeeper that summer,” Nat says.

“Mrs. Norris?” I ask, unable to keep the excitement from my voice. “Your great-grandmother was Mrs. Norris?”

Diana nods. “You needn’t act so surprised. She had ambitions for her children. Milo Latham promised to send her son—my grandfather—to college for some work she did for him. He also promised her the cabin on the Sacandaga, which was built on land originally held by her family’s people, but then after he died Aurora Latham reneged on both promises. My grandfather worked his whole life here as a gardener and my mother worked here as head housekeeper, saving every penny so that my sister and I could go to college. My sister went to a fancy art school in New York City,” she says, casting a spiteful glance at Daria, “and has squandered her talent in drink. When it came time for me to go, we could only afford a secretarial school in Albany and I couldn’t even finish because Mother had a stroke and I came back to look after her. Evelyn White, the director, hired me as her administrative assistant and when she died, I was made director. No one knows as much about Bosco as I do, but the one thing I don’t know is what happened to my great-grandmother that summer.”

“What do you mean?” Bethesda asks.

Diana smiles. “For all your research into Aurora Latham’s life and your research for your novel,” she says, turning to me, “neither of you have noticed that there’s no record of the housekeeper after that summer. Apparently a mere servant wasn’t of interest to you.”

“I guess I thought she was old and died,” Bethesda says, looking uncharacteristically abashed.

“From what I read in the pamphlet I have, I thought she might have been let go,” I explain, unhappy to be cast into the role of social snob. “It was suggested that Mrs. Norris might have been working with Corinth Blackwell to produce the effects of the séances, but I can’t remember why—”

“Because she was Native American,” Diana says, tilting her chin up defiantly. “She was born in an Abenaki settlement on the Sacandaga Vly.”

“ ‘Vly’?” Bethesda asks.

“It means meadow,” Nat answers. “It was the rich meadowland and marshes in the Sacandaga River valley before the river was flooded and made into a reservoir. My grandfather told me stories about the Abenaki and Iroquois who lived there, how their burial grounds were underneath the reservoir.”

“Are you saying that just because she was Native American, Aurora believed she had something to do with kidnapping Alice?” Bethesda asks. I can tell she’s distressed at the thought that her biographical subject might have been prejudiced against Native Americans.

“Well, there was one other thing,” Diana says. “On the night of the second séance, the night that Alice Latham disappeared, my great-grandmother also disappeared. She was suspected of aiding the kidnappers, which is why Aurora Latham refused to honor her husband’s promises to my family. But I’ve always believed she died trying to protect little Alice Latham—she practically raised her—and that she never left Bosco at all. And now you all may have proven me right. I think the bones in the well belong to my great-grandmother, Wanda Norris.”

“I think so, too,” David says.

Everyone turns to him. He’s hardly spoken since we’ve come into Zalman’s room—except to identify my mother as a medium. I had imagined that he was still stunned from almost drowning in the well. Now, although everyone is looking at him, the only one he’s looking at is me.

“How could you know that?” I ask.

“It’s something I felt when I was reading the inscription.”

“And what was the inscription?” Zalman asks. “I’d like to hear what’s written at the source of the spring.”

“Mnemosyne,”
David says, “the Greek word for memory and the mother of the Muses. The instant I read it I could hear someone saying the word aloud, but then the longer I heard it, the more it sounded like
Ne’Moss-i-Ne
and the surer I was that whoever had been buried in the well was calling on the Indian maiden whose statue is in the rose garden. Who else but another Native American would pray to an Indian maiden? I was so sure of it that when I saw you, Ellis, I thought for a moment that
you
were the statue come to life—that you were Ne’Moss-i-Ne.”

David reaches out and gently touches my arm, that same look of longing he’d had in the well burning in his eyes. His hand slides down my arm to grasp my hand, but at just that moment Nat brushes by me, jarring my hand out of David’s reach, and storms out of the room, muttering something about returning the files to the office.

“Excuse me a second,” I say to David. “There’s something I’ve got to ask Nat.”

Ignoring the look of hurt in David’s eyes, I follow Nat into the hallway, catching up to him just as he steps out of the east door under the porte cochere. He wheels around when I call his name and smiles, but it’s not a friendly smile. I notice that his eyes have acquired the glittery green of that old glass bottle in his room.

“You read the recommendation letter Spencer Leland wrote,” I say, “didn’t you?”

Nat looks momentarily startled, but he quickly regains his poise and shrugs, feigning an indifference that comes off instead as coldness. “Yes,” he says. “Apparently I had great promise but a fatal flaw. He said I lacked form and discipline, but that if I found those, I might one day become a very fine writer indeed.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad—” I begin.

“No? Do you want to hear what
your
mentor, Dick Scully, had to say about you?”

I hesitate and Nat tilts his head back and barks a single “Ha!”; his breath condenses in the cold air into a white puff that hangs between us like an evil genie summoned by malice.

“Or did he show it to you already?” Nat asks. “It certainly reads more like a love letter than a recommendation, but then, Dick Scully always was a charmer and he always managed to pick the prettiest girl in the workshop to seduce.” Nat lifts one eyebrow and waits for me to contradict him, to deny that I was sleeping with my teacher, but of course I can’t.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” I say instead.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nat says. “It got you in here, didn’t it?” With that, Nat turns and walks off toward the office. The air stirs at his leaving, wafting the little white puff against my face. It feels like damp gauze and smells of drugs and decay. I turn back to the house and find David standing in the open doorway.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” he says. “I just wanted to thank you again for saving me in the well.” He holds out his hand and I take it. For a second I shudder, remembering something from the well. When I felt myself being sucked into the whirlpool, it wasn’t the water that was pulling me down. It was David.

Chapter Eighteen

When she leaves Tom’s room, Corinth feels less than reassured. Despite his promise to leave after tonight’s séance, she saw the hesitation in his eyes. She also scented the sickly sweet odor of laudanum in the air and, while seated on his bed, noticed a pearl-tipped pin—the same kind she had noticed in Mrs. Ramsdale’s dress—sticking out of the bedspread. Not wanting to confront him, she buried the pin deeper into the mattress. So his employer visits him in his bedroom. She should not, she knows, be shocked, nor is she in any position to reproach him. And what choice does she have? She needs him to get away. What money she’s been able to save over the years she has sent to her sister (carefully keeping the girl’s existence a secret from Milo Latham). If she can reach her, then they can make some kind of life together—with or without Tom.

She pauses on the landing and hears once again the tune she heard in the cemetery and then on the terraces.
Ashes, ashes . . . A pocket full of posies . . .

Her skin turns cold under her damp clothes and she begins to shake. The singing is coming from above her, from the children’s nursery in the attic. She considers going back to Tom’s room and begging him to leave now, but then she remembers his skepticism on these matters. He would tell her there is a logical explanation for the singing, and he might be right. The least she can do is find out for herself.

And so she heads up the stairs to the attic. She can hear along with the child’s voice the creaking of floorboards, as if the child were walking in a circle. Corinth is reassured that it sounds like one child’s voice and one child’s footsteps, and as she comes up into the attic, she sees only one child. Alice Latham, holding her hands out as if holding invisible hands, pirouettes inside a circle made up of two porcelain dolls with glass eyes, a carved wooden bear, a stuffed goose, and the rocking horse, draped in a red paisley shawl. On the last line of the rhyme she holds up her dress and plops down cross-legged on the dusty floor.

Corinth claps. “Very good,” she says, laying a hand on the rocking horse’s head. “Who taught you that?”

“Cynthia did.” And then, as if to answer a tacit question, she adds, “Last year, before she and the boys got sick.”

“You must miss her,” Corinth says, moving the horse aside so she can sit on the floor across from Alice, who regards Corinth with the same glassy stare as the dolls that sit on either side of her. She picks up one—the one with yellow hair and blue eyes—and holds it in her lap. The doll has better color in its cheeks than she does. Does this girl get any outside exercise? Everything about her bespeaks neglect, from the way her clothes are a little too small for her to the tangles in her waist-length dark auburn hair and the dark rings under her eyes.

“She had blond hair like this,” Alice says, fingering the doll’s hair, as if this were an answer to the question of missing her sister. “So did James and Tam. They said I had dark hair because I wasn’t really Mother and Father’s child, that they’d found me in the woods. A little Indian baby left to die.”

Corinth remembers Alice’s remark about “stinking savages” and guesses that this story was not made up by her siblings as a compliment.

“I think your hair is pretty,” Corinth says.

Alice sniffs, pretending, Corinth feels, not to be pleased. “You would,” she says. “It’s the same as yours.” Alice untangles a lock of her hair and leans forward across the circle to show Corinth, who stares at the coil of hair as if it were a snake about to strike.

“Take down your hair so we can see,” Alice orders in a peremptory voice that reminds Corinth of Aurora. “It’s all wet and messy, anyway.” Corinth reaches up and touches her hair, which is damper than she’d realized, and is beginning to take the pins out when she feels the air stir on the back of her neck.

“Alice, what are you doing on the dirty floor in your new dress? Your mother will be very angry.”

Corinth turns and looks up at Mrs. Norris, who is scowling not at Alice but at her.

“What does it matter if I’m not allowed to attend the séance tonight anyway?” Alice replies, getting to her feet and slapping at her skirt in a way that smears the dirt deeper into it rather than shakes it off.

“Go straight to your room and I’ll be down to give you a bath,” Norris tells her. “And put that doll away,” she adds, pointing to the doll that Alice is still holding. “It’s not yours to play with.”

Alice’s face turns as bright pink as the doll’s painted cheeks. “It’s my fault,” Corinth says. “I asked her to show me some of Cynthia’s toys.” Corinth takes the doll from Alice and combs her fingers through its blond hair. Real hair, she realizes with a shiver, remembering that the girl with the pink ribbon who led her to the cemetery had blond hair as well. But no, they wouldn’t . . . As Alice slips out behind Mrs. Norris, she turns and gives Corinth a shy smile, and for an instant the sulky face is transformed into something almost pretty. Corinth risks a small smile, but it’s quickly squashed by Norris’s scowl.

“Leave the child alone,” she says when Alice has gone down the stairs. “You were brought here for the others, not her.”

“Someone ought to be brought here for her. Why doesn’t the child have a governess?”

“I do for her,” Norris says. “I nursed her through the diphtheria last year and she was the only one to survive it.”

“You were always a powerful healer, Wanda White Cloud,” Corinth says, pronouncing the housekeeper’s Abenaki name formally and bowing her head slightly to honor her. She would rather count Wanda as a friend than an enemy. She will need all the help she can get tonight. Wanda lifts her chin at the sound of her Abenaki name, and for a moment Corinth glimpses the strength in her jaw and her black eyes, the strength of the warriors she is descended from, but then the eyes narrow and the jaw trembles. “You still blame me for your lost one,” she says. “You think I could have saved it.”

Corinth shakes her head. It’s not what she meant at all, but as Wanda stretches her hands out, she sees the two of them in the bog behind Latham’s camp, Wanda’s hands outstretched to take her lifeless child from her, and she has to admit that Wanda’s right. She did blame her. At that moment on the bog she hated Wanda so much that she could not hand her dead child over to her.

This time, though, she hands the doll to the housekeeper, noticing as she does that the doll’s porcelain cheeks are so pink because someone has drawn stripes of war paint onto the delicate bisque.

Corinth stays in her room through dinner, sending down word to her hosts that she must prepare herself for tonight’s séance by meditating. She wouldn’t call what she does
meditating,
though. She sits at her window and watches the garden grow dark and the fireflies emerge out of the deepening shadows. The moving lights remind her of a château she stayed at once in France. For a
fête,
her hostess had ordered candles affixed to the backs of turtles that were then released into the
bosquet
to roam at will to create the illusion of fairies flitting between the trees. It was a pretty effect, but near the end of that summer Corinth found one of the creatures sealed in its own shell by the dripping wax. It had suffocated under the wax carapace, a victim of its mistress’s aesthetic whimsy. How long, Corinth wondered then, before she fell victim to a similar fate, before she was sealed within the role she played?

It had been an easy role to play at first: conjurer of voices, message bearer between two worlds. Her patrons were satisfied with so little. The men wanted to know their mothers had loved them, the women that their children forgave them their inability to save them. More and more over the years it had been the children whom she was asked to contact. It was her specialty. Corinth knew what the mothers wanted to hear.
I’m happy here, Mother. There is no pain. I’m with Grandmama (or Grandpapa or Aunt Harriet . . .). I want you to be happy. I am always with you.

As if the beyond were an extended holiday and these were their children’s
cartes postale
! She hadn’t needed to summon any obstreperous ghosts (whose demands of the living were not so easily satisfied as the living’s demands of them); she merely had to recall her own reluctance to pass her child over to Wanda to understand why these women clung to their lost children.

At first, though, she had been glad enough of Wanda’s help. When she returned from the overlook to the brougham and found Wanda waiting for her, she remembered what her mother had said about her:
A good healer, no matter what anyone else says about her.
Corinth had shut out from her mind those other things when Wanda placed her firm, capable hands on her and half lifted her into the carriage.

“You shouldn’t be wandering in the fog, especially in these woods. This is where that girl who was pregnant with a white man’s child jumped to her death. She waits here, hungry for other women’s babies. You didn’t see her, did you?”

Corinth shook her head, but when she looked up, Wanda pinned her with her black eyes and Corinth nodded.

“Don’t worry,” Wanda said, “we’ll burn an offering for her tonight to send her spirit on its way.”

“Where are we going?” Corinth asked.

“To Mr. Latham’s camp on the Vly. Land that belonged once to my people. It will be a good place to wait for the baby.”

The camp on the Vly was not far from the overlook, but the carriage had to go slowly because of the fog that came off the river and filled the surrounding valley like a preview of the floodwaters that rose in the spring. Passing through it, Corinth imagined they were deep beneath a lake and the white mist was the clouds seen through the water. Where the Vly Creek flowed into the Sacandaga, they turned west away from the river, crossing flat meadowlands bordered by marsh and bog. Barktown, the settlement where Corinth’s mother had grown up, was to the south. Corinth knew the bogs from the summers on the settlement when her mother would take her collecting for the plants that grew there. They collected spongy sphagnum moss to stuff mattresses and make diapers for babies, and bog rosemary and leatherleaf for making tea. Her mother taught her to burn sweet gale to ward off mosquitoes and how to make a wash from reindeer moss that would soothe a colicky baby. She showed her the white bog orchid that girls collected for a love charm and told her stories about the girls who came back to the bogs to drown themselves when that love went bad. Their bodies would sink in the bog, but their skin and hair would never dissolve, only turn the color of tea and float in that limbo between earth and water for all time.
That’s what happens to spirits who take their own life; they can never be free of this earth.

When the carriage left them at the camp on the edge of the bog, Corinth wondered if she had jumped off the overlook after all and this was her limbo. While Wanda carried to the house sacks of food (flour, potatoes, salted meat—enough for a month, although Wanda told her that the carriage would return once a week to bring them fresh food), Corinth made a fire, but its heat didn’t stop her shivering. The fog wrapped around the cabin like a winding sheet. The sound of water dripping from the fancifully carved eaves (Corinth later saw something like them at a chalet in Switzerland) made her feel as if they were underwater, that the house had already sunk into the depths of the bog. That night she dreamed of women’s faces, stained the color of tea, pressing against the windows.

In the morning the fog had lifted, and after a breakfast of Wanda’s griddle cakes and bacon, she felt strong enough to take a walk. Wanda cautioned her to watch her footing in the snow, but under the trees nearly all the snow had melted. She found moss that had survived the winter and, in sheltered places, bog rosemary and leatherleaf that she gathered and stuffed into the pockets in her sleeves, in which she used to keep wires for levitating tables. As she walked over the damp earth, she could feel the water trapped beneath the ground and feel, too, the baby, slippery as a mink frog, stirring in its own pool of water beneath her skin.
Little bog baby,
she said to herself, lifting her face to the watery sunshine.