“You disapprove of contacting the spirit world?” Mrs. Ramsdale asks, and then, not waiting for an answer: “Or perhaps you are afraid.”
Campbell’s narrow shoulders stiffen underneath his linen smock. “Afraid? Of knocks and rattling tables and disembodied voices? I’ve been to my share of séances, madam, and I can assure you that if I didn’t find the motive behind them so reprehensible, I would be amused.”
“The motive?”
“To exploit the grief and vulnerability of the bereaved. But then, I suppose you adore such sensational spectacles. It’s like something out of a novel.”
“You’re confusing me with Mrs. Braddon, I think. I abhor the use of the supernatural in fiction,” Mrs. Ramsdale says, placing her hand over Mr. Campbell’s and lowering her voice to a whisper. “And I abhor the exploitation of a mother’s grief just as much as you do. I would much rather see the medium leave Bosco, but then, I suppose that will depend on the outcome of tonight’s séance.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if the Blackwell woman is able to trick our hostess into believing she can contact the children, there will be no end to her stay here . . .”
Mrs. Ramsdale allows her voice to trail off. She has just realized that what she took for a marble face in the underbrush is really a man’s face. It’s Tom Quinn, crouched in the ilex grove just behind where Lantini is fiddling with the satyr fountain—or where Lantini was a minute ago. He’s disappeared so suddenly that Mrs. Ramsdale has the impression that he’s been swallowed up by the satyr’s mouth.
“But what can either of us possibly do about that?” Campbell asks impatiently.
“If Corinth Blackwell is unmasked as a fraud, then Milo Latham will ask her to leave immediately,” Mrs. Ramsdale says, moving her eyes away from Tom Quinn for only a moment.
“Then that is what must be done,” Campbell says. “How do you propose to do it?”
Mrs. Ramsdale looks back toward the ilex grove and sees that Tom Quinn has also disappeared. It’s as if the garden has suddenly swallowed up the two men. “I can do nothing, Mr. Campbell,” she says, “but you can.”
“But why me?”
“I attended one of Miss Blackwell’s séances in Baden-Baden and spoke to several other of her clientele. She always insists that gentlemen alternate with ladies within her circle. She claims that the complementary energy of male and female produces a charged atmosphere. Milo Latham has already said that he won’t be back tonight in time to participate, and I believe I can make sure that my amanuensis sits on the opposite side of the table, so that leaves you and Signore Lantini on either side of the medium.”
“And what do you propose I do?”
“At the séance I attended, the chief effect of the evening was the appearance of disembodied hands floating above the table. It’s her signature. The hands stray about the table, fondling the sitters in a most lascivious manner because, Miss Blackwell claims, her spirit guide is a blind Indian maiden who must touch the faces of the sitters in order to trust them. After this undignified groping, the Indian spirit guide breaks out into the most uncivilized whoops—” She stops, having noticed that Mr. Campbell has gone as white as the paint on his brush. “It’s all a sham, of course, you mustn’t be taken in. Miss Blackwell is very talented, I will admit, but her talents consist of ventriloquism and legerdemain. In other words, she has the fingers of a pickpocket and the stage talents of a music hall performer—which is where she appeared in her younger days.”
Mr. Campbell’s look of fear is replaced with a censorious expression. “A music hall performer! Here at Bosco!” His eyes scan the hillside as if he expected to see the Muse statues lift their skirts and break into a spirited cancan. What Mrs. Ramsdale notices, doing her own survey of the garden, is that the Italian has reappeared on the east side of the Pegasus fountain. How, she wonders, did he get to the other side of the garden without crossing the fountain allée? And where has Tom gotten to? “But why not just tell Mrs. Latham of her history?” Campbell demands of her, drawing her attention back to himself. “Surely she would never have allowed her here if she knew she’d appeared on the stage.”
“You underestimate the power of a mother’s grief, and”—Mrs. Ramsdale takes a step closer and, though she has already been speaking in hushed tones, lowers her voice even more to demonstrate that she is taking Mr. Campbell to a new level of confidence—“as much as I love Aurora and revere her dedication to the arts, there are times when I fear that she is willing to forgive too much in the name of art. Now, if Miss Blackwell were an artist”—here she allows her gaze to drift admiringly over Campbell’s portrait, suggesting the gulf that exists between genuine art and the kind of rude theatrics practiced by entertainers such as Corinth Blackwell—“I’d be the first to forgive the eccentricities and the irregularities of her upbringing. I’ve heard it said, by the way, that the reason she is able to so convincingly reproduce an Indian guide is that she herself is a half-caste.”
“No!”
Mrs. Ramsdale shrugs. “I think it’s quite possible, but that’s not what’s really important. We both want to protect our patron, but more than that, I think there’s something larger at stake here.” Mrs. Ramsdale lifts her eyes to the garden spread out below them—to the water cascading down the central fountain allée, the white marble statues glistening in the sun—and then finishes by resting her eyes on the painted moonlit garden in the background of Campbell’s portrait. “If Aurora’s vision of Bosco as a haven for true artists is to be fulfilled, we can’t allow it to become a circus of freaks and mountebanks.” She picks up a tube of white paint from Campbell’s paint box and slips it into the painter’s pocket. “I believe that the spirit guide’s hands belong to Miss Blackwell. That during the séance she somehow manages to slip her hands free of the circle to roam among the guests. Perhaps she does it with a false set of gloves. So, if you were able to smear a bit of white paint on Miss Blackwell’s hands . . .”
“Won’t she notice the feel of paint on my hands?”
“You can say you’ve just used some hand cream to ease your chapped skin. In fact I’ll make a show of loaning you some. At the worst, she’d be afraid of using her hands and then the séance will be ‘a blank’ and Aurora will think she’s unable to contact the children. But if she does use her hands, the evidence of her touch will be all over the room. When we turn on the lights, we’ll unmask her duplicity and Aurora will ask her to leave in the morning. What do you say, Mr. Campbell? Shall we do it for the sake of Aurora and Bosco?”
Corinth follows Aurora up the west stairs, trying to regain her equilibrium. It’s been years since she had a spell like the one she just had in the breakfast room. As a child she had them quite frequently. In fact, it was her spells that led her to her life as a medium.
The first time it happened she was six years old, sitting at the kitchen table while her mother and two other women from the Vly, Mary Two Tree and Wanda White Cloud, played cards and smoked their pipes, which meant it was a night her father was out, because he objected to the sight of women smoking. A dirty Indian habit, he called it. Corinth loved the smell of the women’s pipes, though, an altogether different smell from what the men smoked. The women used an herb that her mother gathered from the edges of the cranberry bogs when they traveled in the summer to visit her people at Barktown, the settlement on the Big Vly, the marshy lands west of the Sacandaga River. The smell reminded her of the way the grass smelled when the men from Barktown burnt the fields for autumn hunting, the smoke mingling with the fogs that rose over the marshes and bogs.
Her mother had been the daughter of an Iroquois chief. She left Barktown to marry the white logger named Mike Blackwell. They came to this mill town just before Corinth was born, after Mike had broken his leg on a log drive on the Sacandaga. A curse, some of the other rivermen said, for marrying an Indian. But in the stories the Barktown women told, it was the Indian women who were cursed for the lovers they chose.
Mary
Two Tree told a story about the daughter of a chief who was planning to marry a white man. When the chief found out, he poled himself and his daughter out into the bogs on a spruce log raft and then, after binding himself to his daughter with leather thongs, toppled them both into the bog. People said that when you heard a loon calling across Cranberry Bog on a foggy night, it was really the voice of the drowned girl.
“At least she died with her father and so her spirit was not alone on its journey to the Sky World,” Wanda White Cloud said. “Better than the girl who lay with a French missionary. When he learned she was pregnant, he ran away. She was so ashamed she ran to Indian Point and threw herself over the cliff. My cousin, Sam Pine, said he was hunting for deer in the woods by Indian Point two winters ago when a fog suddenly arose out of the ground and out of nowhere stepped the prettiest and saddest-looking girl he’d ever seen. He called to her, but she walked away. He followed her right up to the edge of the cliff and nearly fell over. They say she prowls the woods looking for young men to lead to their deaths and that if you ever see a fog rising by the Point, you’d best head the other way.”
There seemed to be a fog in the kitchen, so heavy was the smoke from the women’s pipes. The smoke and the talk of spirits made Corinth light-headed, so that the edges of things began to blur. She watched as the blue of her mother’s gingham dress began to bleed out onto her white apron, like blueberries staining white milk, and then Corinth was suddenly rising up, looking down on her own body and the bodies of the three women sitting around the table, her spirit carried upward on a plume of the sweet smoke. The smoke from up there was like a light frost lying on top of everything—clear enough for her to see through but making everything seem separate and faraway and close all at the same time. She could see the bald spot on the top of Mary Two Tree’s scalp, where a hank of hair had gotten pulled out by a threader at the glove factory where she worked before coming to the lumber mill. She could see the cards in Wanda White Cloud’s hands—a two and a six of spades, an eight and a three of clubs, and a jack of hearts—and she watched while Wanda raised the bid and Mary folded her cards down on the table.
Just like Wanda White Cloud to bluff, Corinth thought. Her mother always said that Wanda White Cloud would tell a lie when the truth would do. I’ve got to tell Mama, she thought, and the thought, as if it were a lead sinker, dragged her right back down into her bones—so fast and hard she gasped as if the wind had been knocked right out of her.
“Have you been into the molasses again, Cory, and choked yourself?” her mother asked.
She shook her head and then, climbing into the warmth of her mother’s lap because her whole body felt cold, like a coal stove that’s been left unlit all summer long, whispered into her mother’s ear, “Wanda doesn’t have any cards that match, Mama, you can beat her easy.”
She felt her mother stiffen and was afraid she’d made her angry, but when she looked up, she saw her mother studying her the way she did when she thought she was sick. She touched a hand to Corinth’s brow and Corinth leaned into it, hungry for its warmth.
“You feel cold, child. Go sit by the fire.”
And then her mother met Wanda’s bet and raised her two bits. When she put down her cards, Wanda turned around in her chair and looked at Corinth long and hard with her black eyes, and Corinth, even though she was crouched right next to the fire, felt a cold breeze blow right through her . . . as if she were still outside her body and Wanda White Cloud had sent a wind to scatter her spirit to the four corners of the earth.
Later when she was in bed her mother came into her room and, sitting on the edge of Corinth’s mattress, asked her how she’d known what Wanda’s hand was. Had she sneaked under the table and peeked? Corinth explained how she’d risen above the table with the smoke. She didn’t think her mother would believe her, but she did.
“Women of our people have been able to do this before,” she said, smoothing the woolen blankets across Corinth’s chest. “I had an aunt once who the people called Find-Anything because whenever anyone lost something, she could rise up out of her body and go find it. At first, she used her gift for important things like finding where the deer were grazing in the hunting season or where the best berries were growing in the spring, but then people would ask her to find a lost sewing needle or a child’s toy and then there were those who wanted her to spy on a straying husband or a wife when she went to the village to trade. Her spirit left its body so often that one day it couldn’t find its way back to her body. Find-Anything became Can’t-Find-Her-Way-Home. She was like an old tree that’s rotted inside—and smelled bad, too.” Her mother wrinkled her nose. Then she lowered her head so that Corinth could hear her whisper. “And that’s not the worst thing that can happen. Sometimes, when your spirit is outside of your body, another spirit may try to enter your body and steal it from you. That’s why I named you after the place on the earth where you were born. So your spirit would always know where to come back to. Still, you must use this gift for important things—not for games or tricking people.”
“But how can I stop it?” Corinth asked, terrified at the thought of ending up like Find-Anything, a piece of rotting wood or, worse, losing her body to an evil spirit.
Her mother took out a soft leather pouch stitched with blue beads in the shape of a turtle from her pocket and opened it to show Corinth the sharp-smelling herbs inside and the bone needle punched through the leather flap.
“When you start to see the edges of things blurring, prick your finger with this needle and rub some of this rosemary under your nose. It will keep your spirit tied to your body”—she tapped the beaded turtle on the pouch’s flap—“just as the mud stuck to Turtle’s back to make the land.”
The needle and the rosemary had worked—at least most of the time—until her father had found out about her “gift” and thought of ways he could make money with it.
Now, as Corinth climbs the last flight of stairs to the attic nursery, she draws from her pocket a shard of blue china from the broken teacup. The color of the china where the blue has bled into the white is the color of ghosts. At least it’s the color of that poor wisp of a thing haunting Indian Point, whom she saw later, many years after hearing Wanda White Cloud’s story. She slips the shard into her glove until its sharp point presses into the palm of her hand. The last thing she wants at the séance tonight is to encounter any real spirits.
Chapter Seven
“I can show them to you, if you want.” He pushes aside the pile of blueprints that lie between us and moves closer to me.
“Show what to me?” I ask, rising from the bed. The springs make a sound like a small animal’s cry when I get up. I rest my hand on one of the bedposts to steady myself and notice what look like claw marks in the soft birch wood.
“The tunnels. The passage goes straight down from this room into the basement and from there into the entrance to the underground tunnels.” He’s already moving toward the bookcase and feeling along the side for the hidden hinge.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not much for tunnels and mazes, and I can’t imagine they’d be very safe after all these years.”
“I’ve already been down in them,” David says, swinging the bookcase open into the dark passage, “and I can give you my word as an architect that they’re structurally sound.”
I wonder if a landscape architect is really qualified to make that kind of judgment. Isn’t it a bit like having a PhD in literature give you a medical checkup? I’m thinking of a polite but firm way of saying no when David Fox dangles the final enticement.
“Think of how important this could be for your book. It’s the key to the mystery of what happened that summer, I’m sure of it. And no one else knows about it—not even Beth Graham.”
The basement at Bosco, more like a cave than part of a house, is hewn out of the living rock. The walls gleam damply where David points his flashlight.
“I thought the springs were all dried up,” I say. “Are you sure
these tunnels won’t flood while we’re in them?”
“Here,” David says, ignoring my question, “hold the flashlight for a minute. I think this is the entrance.”
“I thought you said you’d gone down in them already?”
“I did. It’s just that Aurora went out of her way to keep the tunnels a secret.” David is running his fingers up and down the surface of the dark, slimy rock. I can’t imagine how he can bear touching it, but then, he must be used to getting his hands dirty. His fingers pause on a ridge in the rock, dig into a shallow crevice, and a piece of the wall suddenly swings open. The flashlight reveals a narrow passage behind it.
“Okay,” David says, “this time you hold the flashlight to light the way and I’ll walk ahead—just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“The tunnels pitch forward sometimes, and if you aren’t careful, you can slip.” He turns to me and smiles, trying, no doubt, to look reassuring. The flashlight shining up onto his face creates a very different effect; he looks more like a demon about to descend into the maw of Hades. He must guess from my expression how he looks, because as I follow him into the tunnel, I hear him intoning in Italian, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”
“Very funny,” I say, recognizing the warning on the gates of Dante’s hell: Abandon all hope, ye who enter.
The tunnels aren’t so bad, though. They’re wider than I would have thought and neatly lined on both sides with slate. Copper pipes run above our heads. David tells me at several junctures what part of the fountain he thinks a specific pipe is attached to. Only when we have made half a dozen turns does it occur to me to worry about getting lost.
“It’s the same as the box-hedge maze,” he tells me. “All roads lead to Rome. As long as you keep going downhill, you’ll get out.”
The Ghost Orchid Page 8
