“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.”
When they come out of the niche, Mrs. Norris is standing in front of the statue of the river god, holding up a lantern to light her mistress’s way into the grotto. The light etches deep grooves into the housekeeper’s face, making it look as fiercely weathered as the face of the Indian brave representing the Sacandaga.
“Will you be attending the séance, Mrs. Norris?” Corinth asks, addressing the housekeeper directly for the first time since she’s arrived at Bosco.
“She’ll be standing outside,” says a voice from behind Corinth. Turning, she sees that it’s Mrs. Ramsdale, leaning on Tom Quinn’s arm as she comes down the steps. “So that we’ll be certain that the séance is uncorrupted. I suggested as much to Mrs. Latham.”
Corinth bows her head to Mrs. Ramsdale. “An excellent idea,” she says. “We wouldn’t want the circle corrupted.” She gestures for the novelist to precede her into the grotto, but Mrs. Ramsdale suddenly realizes she’s dropped her vial of smelling salts and enlists Tom Quinn to look for it. As she crouches on the ground Corinth catches once again Mrs. Ramsdale’s peculiar scent—a combination of Aqua di Parma, laudanum, and something else that Corinth recognizes as the reek of death—a corruption that springs from the woman’s womb and spreads outward in a miasma so thick Corinth is overwhelmed by it and feels herself growing faint. Frank Campbell puts out a hand and steadies her as she precedes him and Signore Lantini into the grotto.
A table has been set up so that the stone bench serves as one of the six seats. Corinth sits there, directly across from Aurora Latham, and the men take the chairs on either side of her. When Frank Campbell is seated, he crosses his hands on top of the table and it immediately begins to rock.
“Ah, already the spirits make themselves known!” Lantini exclaims.
“I’m afraid it’s a waste of your engineering talents, signore,” Aurora says, “but perhaps you can find some way to steady the table.”
“Certo!” Lantini flashes a quick smile and disappears beneath the table.
Corinth turns to Frank Campbell. “I hope you don’t mind being seated next to me, Mr. Campbell. Sometimes the vibrations of the spirits are felt strongest by the sitter closest to the medium. There was a gentleman in Naples—a prince, in fact, of an old Neapolitan house—who complained that his hand was numb for a week after our séance. I wouldn’t want to interfere with the progress of your marvelous portrait of Mrs. Latham.”
Campbell’s eyes cut across the table to where Mrs. Ramsdale is being helped into her chair by Tom Quinn, but she doesn’t meet his look. Quinn does, though, with a curl of his upper lip as if he were amused at the medium’s brazen attempt to frighten Campbell.
“Nonsense,” Campbell says, his voice echoing in the domed space. “I am only afraid that my hands will be rough to you. The solvents I use to clean them are not very gentle . . .”
“Here, Mr. Campbell,” Mrs. Ramsdale calls from across the table. “I promised you a bit of my hand cream when we spoke earlier.” She passes a small jar to Lantini, who passes it to Campbell. When he opens it, the grotto is instantly filled with the odor of roses. Instead of using the hand cream, though, he reaches into his pocket and squeezes a dab of white paint on his hand. When he looks up, he catches Aurora staring at him. It was foolish to write the letter, he realizes. Aurora is a proud woman and doesn’t like her plans put into question. He only hopes that after the medium is unmasked, she will see that he was right.
“Mrs. Norris will stand guard at the entrance to the grotto so we won’t be disturbed, Miss Blackwell,” Aurora Latham announces. “Are we ready to begin?”
Before answering, Corinth lays on the table the pink and green ribbon, the bone arrowhead, and James’s quail-feathered arrow. “Now, if everyone would please extinguish their candles—except for yours, Mrs. Latham. We can leave that one at the center of the table.”
Aurora places the antlered candelabra at the center of the table—now steady, thanks to Lantini’s adjustment to its legs—extinguishing all but one of its candles, which spreads a circle of light that just reaches the fingertips of the twelve hands spread out on the table. The rest of the grotto—the domed enameled ceiling, the rock walls, and the faces of the men and women seated around the table—recedes into the shadows.
“We’ll join hands now,” Corinth says, her disembodied voice seeming to float on the still air. “Remember, whatever happens, do not break the circle.”
For a long time the only sound is the sound of water falling from the fountain above and around the grotto and lapping into the small pool inside the grotto. It’s a sound, though, that contains a multitude of sounds within it. One could imagine voices, footsteps, or even music in the melodic gurgle and rush of the water . . . or a drumbeat, which the sitters, one by one, begin to hear above the sound of the water . . . a sound that seems to arise out of their own heartbeats, hardly noticeable at first but then drowning out every other sound. Then the beats grow louder and are joined by a high keening cry—like that of an animal or a woman in pain.
It is joined by another voice, coming from the place where Corinth sits, but unlike the medium’s natural voice. “We are looking for the spirits of the three children. James, Cynthia, and Tam. They may have lost their way home. Their mother is waiting for them here; she wants them to know they can come home now.”
“I won’t be angry that you were hiding from me,” Aurora says. “It’s all right to come out now.”
The sound of drums fades, and a wind rises in the giardino segreto outside the grotto, a high wind that whistles through the hedge maze and sounds, at one moment, like laughter, and the next, like weeping. Beneath that sound: a halting beat, not drums this time, but footsteps . . . only they’re faltering, like the footsteps of someone whose feet have been bound.
The sound strikes such terror into Corinth’s heart that she feels her spirit beating up against the walls of her body, like a firefly trapped in a jar, looking for a way out. She squeezes Tom’s hand until the china shard embedded in her glove digs into her palm, but she doesn’t even feel its point. She is rising above the table, passing through the domed ceiling of the grotto and moving through water, like a trout swimming upstream, fighting the current of the fountain . . . and then she’s free, rising above the garden. Looking down, she can see the fountain allée and the terraces, the marble statues of the Muses glowing in the moonlight . . . but something is different. The clipped yews have burst out of their trimmed shapes, the ilex has grown wild and covers the hill in a thorny mass. The statues lie broken and what she thought were statues are actually ghostly shapes walking along the paths—the shades of Bosco’s future artists that Aurora’s little speech in Egeria’s niche has summoned forth. She can see a pair of figures, pale and insubstantial as fog, walking through the maze, only the maze has turned into a thicket; the roses have gone wild and twined themselves into the shaggy boxwood hedges, twisting themselves into the shapes of women struggling to free themselves of their bonds . . . and she sees that they’re all the same figure: the bound Indian girl who’s limping along the overgrown paths, trying to find her way out.
“Ne’Moss-i-Ne,” Corinth whispers, pulle
d back into her body by something brushing against her lips, something light and feathery as a kiss.
A strange giggle bubbles out of Aurora Latham. “It can’t be. I made her up.” But then something brushes against Aurora’s face and her laugh turns into a scream.
Whether made up or real, dead or alive, something is moving through the hedge maze and getting closer. A gust of wind rushes into the grotto and blows out the candle. Like a trapped creature the wind scours the walls, shrieking into the niches set into the rock and scraping the tiles down onto the table.
A dampness spreads on the back of Mrs. Ramsdale’s neck and slithers down her dress.
Something pulls Signore Lantini’s mustache.
Frank Campbell feels hands all over him, tugging at his pockets. Once, when he was a student at the Academy in Rome, a band of child pickpockets assaulted him as he strolled through the Pincian Gardens, swarming over him just like this—like rats! Later he was ashamed to tell the carabinieri that he’d been robbed by children and instead made up a story about a gang of street thugs, knowing full well that the police officers knew he was lying. He feels that same shame now as the insidious fingers work their way down his waistcoat. He tries to fend them off, but his left arm has gone entirely numb. One of the little hands slides between his legs and, first gently, and then not, squeezes his testicles.
He opens his mouth to cry out, but the sound dies in his throat as a searing pain pierces through his chest.
All the while, Aurora Latham calls out, “James, Cynthia, Tam,” repeating the names of her dead children like a prayer.
Then something flashes in the darkness. A match is struck, a candle lit, and a pool of light spreads out from the candelabra, which Tom Quinn is holding over Corinth. At first her eyes seem unfocused in the glare of the candlelight, but then, slowly, she comes back to herself and recognizes him.
The look she gives him makes his throat go dry.
The Ghost Orchid Page 10
