The Ghost Orchid (5 page)

And then I hear a voice.

“The eloquence of water fills this hill.”

I look up at David but he lifts a finger to his lips and mouths a name—
Zalman—
and I understand. The poet must be standing above one of the fountain pipes reciting the first line of his poem for something like the two hundredth time today, only now I hear him exhale—a sigh that seems to reverberate through the hill—and the poem rushes out of him as fluid as the jets of the old fountain.

“The eloquence of water fills this hill,

its history as winding as a maze,

and influential yet, from vanished days

that echo in the present, lingers still

like ripples in a river, work their will

in suppleness of sculpture, stone eyes’ gaze;

the symphonies of water, sound’s sweet haze

seduce a genius time could never kill.

And yet one hears, while strolling past, a sigh,

as if lamenting sudden loss of love;

how beautiful the stone, but lost the art

when sculptor and his subject have to part.

Perhaps the water speaks, or else above

a spirit floats, a soul that will not die.”

With the sound of Zalman’s voice still echoing through the hollow hill, I suddenly know how I’ll write the first scene of my book. Corinth will visit the Fountain of Memory first—I can easily have her make the driver let her off at the bottom of the hill so that she can see the
famous fountain—
and then, when Tom Quinn comes through the door, she’ll feel as if her past has finally caught up with her. She’ll feel as though the crouching girl in the maze has sprung up to trap her.

Chapter Four

It’s not the past, though, that Corinth senses coming through the glass doors with Tom Quinn, it’s the future, smelling of rust and decaying vegetation, hanging over the sunlit garden like a veil of green gauze.

Corinth blinks her eyes and the veil lifts.

“Mr. Quinn, you’ll be wanting Mrs. Ramsdale, no doubt.”

The young man takes a few more steps forward and, without taking his eyes off Corinth, answers yes. Mrs. Ramsdale rises from the table in the alcove and brushes past Corinth, releasing from the folds of her dress a sweet odor.

“Are you ready for your dictation, Tom? I have the next chapter entire in my head.” Mrs. Ramsdale turns toward Aurora, laying a hand across her copious bosom and fingering a strand of pearls that are the shape and color of slightly spoiled Concord grapes. Beneath the sweet scent is the darker hint of decay, surprising in a woman as young and attractive as Mrs. Ramsdale, who surely can’t be much past her midthirties. “We’ll work in the garden, Aurora, so as not to disturb your interview with Miss Blackwell.”

Aurora leans back in her chair and closes her eyes for answer. Mrs. Ramsdale gathers the skirt of her dress in her hand and sweeps out of the room, leaving in her wake another long trail of the sweet heavy smell.

Laudanum,
Corinth thinks, taken to relieve some inner pain that’s eating away at her, which explains the aura of decay that emanates from her.

The young man—Tom Quinn—inclines his head slightly in Corinth’s direction and follows his mistress.

“Mr. Quinn is Mrs. Ramsdale’s amanuensis,” Aurora says, her eyes still closed and then, opening them. “You’ve perhaps read her novels?”

Corinth shakes her head. An image appears in her mind of a man and a woman in a moonlit garden, night-blooming flowers opening to release their scent; only instead of perfume the flowers exude the stench of death. “No, I haven’t had the privilege . . .”

“They’re abominable,” Aurora says tonelessly, as if informing her butler that the wine has turned, “but she’s a very sympathetic presence. I think you’ll find her a welcome addition to our circle. She’s quite interested in the spirit world. She claims to have seen the spirit of my little girl Cynthia playing in the garden.”

With a laudanum habit strong enough to imbue even her clothing with the scent, she probably sees plenty, Corinth thinks, and then, turning to Aurora, considers how best to approach the issue of the children. A moment she always dreads.

“I felt,” she begins, allowing her genuine reluctance to creep into her voice, because to appear reluctant is always a good effect, “a number of presences as I walked through the garden”—she thinks of the figure she saw at the end of the ilex grove—“especially in the little ilex grove to the west of the fountain allée . . . There’s a bench beneath a wisteria arbor . . .”

“The drawing master used to give Cynthia her lessons there.”

“And in the maze,” Corinth says, suddenly picturing the statue of the crouching Indian maid transforming into a child crouched beneath an overgrown hedge.

“Of course they loved to play there. They played hide-and-seek and I’m afraid that sometimes the boys were naughty enough to forget about Cynthia. She once spent a whole day hiding in the hedges before one of the gardeners found her. Sometimes I’m afraid that their poor little spirits are lost in the windings of those paths. It’s what haunts me the most.”

Corinth leans forward and lays her hand over Aurora’s cool fingers. It’s a risky gesture, she knows, considering how reserved this woman is, but she’s learned to trust her instincts when it comes to grief.

“Sometimes a spirit does get lost on its way to the spirit world. It gets confused. But we may be able to help it find its way.”

Aurora turns her hand over and grasps Corinth’s hand, squeezing the bones hard. “Yes, yes, that’s what I’m afraid of, that they’re confused. Milo thinks that I want to contact the children for my own sake, but that’s not it at all. It’s because I can still feel them wandering the halls and the garden paths . . .” Aurora pauses, and her gaze moves from Corinth’s face to the glass doors and the steeply terraced garden beyond. Yes, Corinth thinks, remembering how she became disoriented walking up the hill, a spirit could find itself trapped in that garden. How must it feel to have designed a garden so complicated that the spirits of one’s own children couldn’t find their way out of it?

“. . . and I worry, too, about Alice . . . about how their presences must affect her.”

Corinth looks over at the little girl, who has remained crouched in her niche below the bookcase. She has made herself so small and quiet that Corinth forgot that she was still there. Corinth realizes that in Aurora’s accounts of the children’s games Alice’s name has been absent. Indeed, the child has the look of the one left out, the one who lingers on the edges of the game to watch and listen. Has she been listening now? The girl looks pale and undernourished, but of perhaps even more concern is that picture she drew and the influence it seems to imply.

“We’ll help them find their way,” Corinth says, trying to make her voice sound reassuring. She’s rewarded by a small wan smile and the release of her hand. As Aurora rings for the housekeeper, Mrs. Norris, to show Corinth to her room, Corinth looks down at her hand and sees that Aurora’s fingernails have left four little half-moons in the dark blue leather of her glove.

Dinner has been delayed to give Milo Latham time to return from the city. The doors to the terrace are left open to let in a breeze and, as Aurora announces, so that the guests can enjoy the “music of the fountains” and the scent of the roses, which are at the height of their bloom. Tonight, though, the voice of the water is drowned by the sound of the wind and the roses can’t compete with the sulfurous exhalations of the springs that feed the fountains.

Mrs. Ramsdale rearranges the limbs of the tiny quail on her plate, unable to eat a mouthful. It’s not the reek of the fountains, though, that’s taken her appetite away. That smell she’d grown accustomed to while taking the water cures in Europe and here in America. It’s watching Tom Quinn watching the little medium that’s awakened a fresh bloom of pain in her stomach. He’s pretending to be drawing out Signore Lantini on points of garden design, but she can see that his attention is drawn to the new arrival. Of course, he can’t help but include her in the conversation, since she is sitting between him and the little Italian (while Mrs. Ramsdale has been seated next to the tiresome portraitist, Frank Campbell), but still . . . she can see the way his eyes come back to her while the gardener drones on about Bramante and axial planning and the importance of alternating sunny spaces with shaded and the proportion between terrace and green, between the height of a wall and the width of a path . . . Well, who could blame dear Tom for allowing his eyes to rest on the one thing of beauty in this room while the beauty of the garden is parsed and dissected like some mathematical formula?

And she is beautiful. Even more beautiful than when Mrs. Ramsdale saw her two years ago at Baden-Baden. The fine dark hair, touched with sparks of red, lifting from her clear brow like the wing of a bird . . . yes, that’s how she’d put it in one of her novels . . . her waist slim as a reed . . . Mrs. Ramsdale feels her own waist, which has been thickening this summer even though she lives on practically nothing but tea and toast and consommé, pressing against her stays. While dressing for dinner tonight, she’d had to let the dress out and pin it up with dressmaker’s pins until she could get back to her dressmaker in the city to have it altered. And yet, Corinth Blackwell, who has eaten everything on her plate and is even now buttering a second roll, is slim. She eats, Mrs. Ramsdale, observes, like someone who has known hunger.

“What do you think of our new arrival?” Latham asks, leaning over to whisper softly in Mrs. Ramsdale’s ear.

“She seems to be entertaining Aurora,” Mrs. Ramsdale says, grateful for her host’s attention if not for his choice of subject matter. Milo Latham hasn’t been able to take his eyes off Miss Blackwell any more than Tom has, but then, she reasons, he’s gone to considerable expense to have her brought here at his wife’s request. And even the rich, as Mrs. Ramsdale has learned, want to be sure they’ve gotten their money’s worth. Often enough that’s how they’ve acquired their money in the first place.

“I wasn’t in favor, you know, of satisfying this whim of Aurora’s,” he says, “but you know how determined she can be.”

“She has a strong will,” Mrs. Ramsdale says. “She never would have survived these last few years if she didn’t. Of course, you’ve had to suffer as much . . .”

“Yes, but I have my work. There’s nothing like a river full of logs to keep a man’s mind busy, and then the gentlemen in the legislature have contrived to keep me lively . . .”

“You mean the new bill to protect the forests?” Mrs. Ramsdale asks, glad she’s kept up with the news. “Will that affect your lumber business?”

Latham shrugs. “Not seriously. And that’s if it passes at all. There’s plenty of opposition.”

Giacomo Lantini, overhearing this last remark, tears his eyes away from Corinth Blackwell and addresses his host in his faltering English. “But isn’t it true that the cutting down of the trees is—how do you say?—making the springs to run dry? And if the springs and the streams that feed your great American rivers and canals dry up, then how will the ships carry their goods across such a huge country? From where will come the water to feed your great cities? Our ancestors, the Romans, understood the power of water.”

“Signore Lantini is descended from a long line of fountain makers,” Aurora says, bestowing a proud look in the little man’s direction. “
Fontanieri.
He has designed our marvelous fountains for us and routed the springs to feed them. Only this summer the pressure has been so low that he’s had to build a new pump to draw water from the springs at the bottom of the hill up to the top. There’s barely enough water to keep the fountains going.”

“Leave it to my wife to place her gardening plans above the demands of commerce and urban hygiene,” Milo Latham says, smiling indulgently at Aurora at the other end of the long table.

“We should be grateful,” Frank Campbell, the portraitist, says, speaking up for the first time this evening, “for Mrs. Latham’s devotion to art and beauty. I know I am.” He lifts his glass to his hostess, and the other guests follow suit. “Here’s to our Muse of Water!”

“Easy for him to say,” Milo Latham murmurs in a low whisper into Mrs. Ramsdale’s ear as she touches her lips to the brim of her glass without drinking. “He doesn’t pay the bill for Aurora’s devotion.”

Corinth, on the other side of the table, overhears the remark. She has long ceased paying attention to Signore Lantini’s lecture on gardening. She has found it difficult to concentrate on anything with Tom sitting next to her, but the exact nature of the Lathams’ marriage is of moment to her, as her success here depends on pleasing them both. She wishes Tom were as concerned with his employer’s feelings. Mrs. Ramsdale is clearly jealous of her amanuensis’s attention to her. She wishes Tom would look away, but since he won’t, she turns to him.

“You seem quite knowledgeable on the subject of classical gardens,” she says. “Where were you educated?”

She knows full well that Tom Quinn was educated at a Catholic orphanage for boys in Brooklyn, New York, but she’s hoping that if he remembers how much damage she can do to whatever history he’s presented to his employer, he’ll stop staring at her.

“I was home tutored by my mother, who was headmistress at a finishing school for young ladies in Gloversville. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? The Lyceum?” His face dimples as he mentions the name of the music hall where he and Corinth first met ten years ago. She understands Quinn’s message: he can do at least as much damage to her as she can to him.

“I lived with the Van Dykes of Gloversville for a summer while painting their three daughters,” Campbell says. “I don’t remember a school called the Lyceum, but there was a rather disreputable theater . . .”