The Ghost Orchid (13 page)

At first the sensation of being bound drove her wild. She had to be carried off a stage in Utica kicking and screaming. After that her father made her wear loops around her wrists and ankles to get used to the sensation—but she never did get used to it. Instead she learned to leave her body at the first touch of the rope on her skin. It wasn’t a full trance—she kept her spirit tethered to her flesh, hovering just a few inches above, her body so relaxed that she was able to slip her hands and feet out of their bonds and so perform the tricks of her act. In time she learned to manipulate the knots without feeling the touch of the ropes on her skin.

It worked until that night in Gloversville. The night before, a man had approached them after the act. He’d lost a son in the war, he explained to Mike. Instantly Mike made up a fictitious sibling for Corinth also slain at Antietam. Real tears stood in Mike’s eyes while he talked about “Charlie’s” last letter home and Corinth half wondered if he wasn’t thinking about the baby abandoned in Corning, New York. The man wasn’t softened by Mike’s story, though.

“There’s something I must know,” he said, turning away from Mike and addressing Corinth directly, “but I won’t be made a fool of.” Corinth saw the color rising to the man’s face and felt her own chest muscles constrict, but with empathy not for the man’s grief but for his fear of being shamed. Something about his son’s death shamed him and it was this—shame, not grief—that he was trying to expunge. Corinth turned away and the man addressed Mike again.

“I’ll pay handsomely, but I must have certain conditions met.” And he whispered a sum into her father’s ear that Corinth knew instantly was enough for Mike to sell her body and soul.

The conditions were that the man would himself tie the ropes around Corinth’s arms and legs.

“You won’t even feel it,” Mike said when the man had gone and Corinth objected to the conditions. “You’re not even there, are you?” Corinth looked at her father and saw that the look of hard avarice that usually resided in his eyes had slipped. What Corinth saw instead was fear—fear of her and what she did. She realized then that she could use this fear against him—that she could leave him. But go where? He was the only family she had except for the baby sister who was already part of someone else’s family—a
normal
family. She thought, then, of the mill owner in Corinth, Milo Latham, who had once told her that she could always come to him . . . but then, she thought, that would be exchanging one sort of servitude for another.

That night Mr. Oswald (Corinth never learned his first name) came up onto the stage with a length of thick, rough hemp rope. He looped the rope first around her chest and then he bound her wrists behind her back and pulled down on the rope so that her shoulder blades were drawn together—the way a chicken is trussed—and then threaded the rope in between the rungs of the chair and tied her ankles to the chair legs. Some of the audience hissed while he was tying her, but this only made him pull the rope tighter. She could hear laughter in her head—and then she realized that the laughter was in Mr. Oswald’s head. It was a young woman laughing, but it was a joyless sound.

“She needs something of your son’s to hold,” Mike said when the ropes were tied.

Mr. Oswald withdrew something from his pocket, but before she could see what it was he crouched behind her and slipped it between her bound hands. A slim disc made of metal, Corinth thought, on a chain.

Corinth closed her eyes and tried to rise out of herself, but the ropes were too tight. It was as if her spirit were trapped by the ropes as well as her body and for the first time she imagined what it would be like to be trapped in her flesh for all eternity even after that flesh began to decay. To be buried alive in the prison of her own body.

She could feel sweat dripping down her arms and legs, soaking the rope. She tried to move her wrists to loosen her bonds, but that only made the ropes around her chest constrict so tightly she could barely breathe. They’d been tied in such a way that struggling pulled them tighter.
He’d learned it out west in the Indian Wars . . .

And then Corinth wasn’t on the stage anymore. She was in a cabin and it was cold . . . the cabin smelled of rancid fat and unwashed men, the way the loggers’ cabins smelled after a long winter. She smelled something else, something burning, and realized it was her own hair. Through the smoke she could see, with her eyes still closed, a small boy hiding behind a chair watching his father light the woman’s hair on fire. The woman, inexplicably, was laughing. Around the boy’s neck was a chain with a saint’s medal . . .

“Saint Thomas,” she said aloud, but in a whisper only she and the two men on the stage could hear, “because that was his name, Thomas. He saw what you did to his mother and got away from you as soon as he could. Ran away to join the army at thirteen . . .”

Mr. Oswald bowed his head but not, as Corinth thought at first, in shame but to reach the end of the rope and yank it. All the air was pressed out of her lungs and her hands felt as if they were encircled in fire, but she didn’t call out because
she
hadn’t . . .

“You told her if she screamed, you’d kill the boy and so she laughed instead,” Corinth whispered, her voice so constricted by the ropes that she knew no one but Mr. Oswald could hear her.

He pulled the rope tighter, and this time her last breath was pushed out of her lungs in a long silent scream. She could see her father, as if through a fog, trying to pull Mr. Oswald away from her, but more clearly she saw the man who was scrambling over the seats in the theater, not caring whom he stepped on to reach her, his black coat spread out behind him like the wings of a giant bird. She recognized him as one of the magicians who had performed earlier in the evening. He vaulted to the stage and, heaving Mr. Oswald up by the hair, drove his fist into his face.

By then a crowd had stormed the stage and begun to drag Mr. Oswald off. Corinth wasn’t sure to where. She could feel her spirit, like a bird trapped in a cage rattling against the ruined frame of her body, trying to get out, but then the man who’d come to her rescue bent over her and she fastened her gaze onto his eyes. They were such a vivid, clear blue-green that they seemed to hold her there while he used his knife to cut the ropes, which were sunk deep into her skin, from her wrists. When he’d picked the hemp fibers from her wounds, he pried her hands open. There, embedded in the flesh of her palm, was the saint’s medal, St. Thomas’s face seared into her skin. Then her spirit found its way out at last and she lost consciousness.

Corinth opens her hands now and looks at the oval indentation in her palm. The image printed on her skin has faded faster than her memory of Tom Quinn. She had realized that tonight when she came to in the grotto with him leaning over her. Once again he’d come to rescue her.

Only he hadn’t. Not when she’d needed him most.

Corinth looks out the window and sees that shapes are emerging in the garden, the white statues gleaming in the early morning mist. A man in a dark coat comes out onto the terrace and lights a cigar, and then he walks down the fountain allée, the mist seeming to part before him. Yes, Tom had gotten her to quit the act and sever her ties with her father. He’d promised to quit the stage himself, only there was one more engagement in New York City he had to do and then there’d be money enough for them to buy a house, maybe start a business. He’d found her a place in one of the better glove shops—a family-run business with a proper boardinghouse for the glove makers to stay in. She’d be safe there until he came back. Only he hadn’t come back—or at least not until it was too late.

Corinth draws on her gloves and wraps a shawl over her head and shoulders. She wears her lightest slippers and steals downstairs and out onto the terrace without making a sound. As she makes her way down the allée, the mist seems to close up behind her, but at least one resident of Bosco watches her progress. At the foot of the stairs she finds Milo Latham leaning against the statue of Sacandaga, still smoking his cigar.

“Did Aurora tell you what happened?” she asks.

Milo takes a long puff of his cigar and exhales smoke into the fog. “At least I won’t have to pay his fee now for that abominable portrait of my wife,” he says. “Muse of Water, my ass!”

“What are you going to do?”

Milo shrugs. “I’ve called in a couple of favors from town. It turns out that Mr. Frank Campbell had a bad heart—all that loose living artists do these days.” Milo clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth and puts his arm around Corinth, pulling her toward him. “I hear you put on quite a show, my dear. I didn’t expect such fanfare—it’s far more than we agreed upon. You certainly didn’t need to kill the portraitist to convince my wife of your authenticity.”

“You know I had nothing to do with that,” Corinth says, stiffening under his arm.

“
I
know that, but I’m afraid the authorities might have a different opinion. But don’t worry, our story about the heart attack will work perfectly well. In fact, I think it would be a nice touch if you were to witness the death certificate when Dr. Murdoch is done.” He points toward the grotto.

“All the same,” Corinth says, “I think I should leave.”

Milo rolls back his head, resting it on Sacandaga’s shoulder, and laughs. “Leave? After last night’s performance? Why, Aurora was positively electrified! She’s convinced you’ve contacted the children. She wants to have another séance tonight.”

“It doesn’t bother her that a man is dead?”

“Oh, my dear, it will take more than one death to sway my wife’s fancy once she’s set her mind on a thing. And believe me, she’s set her mind on
you.
”

Chapter Eleven

The woman in white stands on the terrace as still as any of the statues.
Like an apparition,
I think, feeling suddenly cold. And then, moving back from the window, I chide myself that it must be a sightseer come to gawk at the artists. Although the estate is private, some find their way onto the grounds every year and have to be escorted off by the local police. I should probably go tell Diana Tate about this interloper. The woman’s stare, although not malevolent, is intense enough to be unnerving; it’s as if she’s directing all her energy at the house, willing one of its occupants out into the garden. And then, suddenly, I’m struck with the horror of recognition. The robed figure on the terrace is my mother.

When I get down to the first terrace, my mother is nowhere to be found. I think for a moment that I must have imagined seeing her. I had, after all, thought she was an apparition at first. Maybe that’s what she was. It’s a testimony to how horrified I am at the thought of my mother’s presence here at Bosco that the idea that I’ve seen a ghost instead is comforting.

I head down the steps, picking up the faint aroma of marijuana on the air. For a second I imagine the worst—that Mira is getting high in the garden—but then I remember that Daria often sneaks into the garden at lunchtime to smoke pot in the brambles. Then I hear a hissing noise from the bushes across the path from the cracked and crumbling river god. I call softly into a patch of dense ilex, “Mira? Are you in there?”

For an answer a many-braceleted hand snakes out of the bush and pulls me through a narrow opening into a small round glade. I’m so struck by the perfect circle carved out of green brush that for a moment I hardly look at my mother. Instead I look at the little statue at the center of the niche: a diminutive nymph drooping over a marble basin beside a marble bench.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” my mother says, looking at the statue, but stroking my hair back from my brow. “She’s the only statue here I get a good vibe from. That’s why I waited with her.” The statue
is
pretty—at least from what I can see that is left of it. The elements have so worn down the marble that the features of her face are nearly gone, as if she were melting into the water caught in the basin she holds.

“But how—?” I’m going to ask how she knew the little statue was in here, but, looking up at my mother and taking in her flowing white caftan, the ropes of crystals slung around her neck, and her long gray hair that hangs loose over her shoulders, I despair of questioning such particulars. My mother will no doubt tell me that the little nymph called to her or some such nonsense. I might as well get to the real question.

“What are you doing here, Mira? I thought I explained to you that Bosco doesn’t allow outside visitors.”

“Yes, but when you didn’t respond to my message, I knew something was wrong.”

“Your message? It was something about a key and an alarm. I don’t understand what I was supposed to respond to.”

“I told that girl that ‘the bees had started to swarm.’ ”

“Oh,” I say, taking a seat on the bench beside the water nymph, “that’s different. If I’d known it was a bee emergency . . .”

“Don’t mock, darling. You know how important the bees are to me. And to you. When you were a baby sleeping in your hammock, a bee walked over your lips without stinging you. You know what that means.”

“It means that I’m destined to become a great storyteller,” I say, dutifully reciting the words like a lesson learned by rote. This time, though, I don’t need to be reminded not to mock. I’ve always liked this piece of folk wisdom, especially since I learned that it originated with the ancient Greeks, who called bees, because of this, the birds of the Muses. “It is unusual for them to swarm this late in the year, isn’t it?”

Mira takes a seat on the bench and lays her hand over mine. The feel of my mother’s skin, softened by years of working with beeswax, melts something in me. I’d like to rest my head on her shoulder and inhale her aroma of honey and patchouli, but I’ve grown taller than Mira and would have to slump to reach her shoulder.

“An out-of-season swarm foretells a death,” Mira says. “That’s why I called you. I felt immediately that it had something to do with you.”

“Unless someone stabs himself with his pen or slips on a manuscript page, no one is going to die here.”

“But someone has died here, and died badly. I can feel it.” Mira’s eyes rake the walls of the ilex niche as if looking for intruders hidden in the greenery. In spite of myself, I feel the same chill I felt when I first saw my mother standing on the terrace. That feeling of something shimmering just on the edge of vision.

“Of course people have died here, Mira; the estate is over a hundred years old. Poor Mrs. Latham lost three of her children to diphtheria . . .”

“It wasn’t diphtheria.”

I’m taken aback by how certain Mira sounds. “I’m pretty sure that it was—”

“And it’s not the children I’m talking about. There are others . . .” I follow Mira’s gaze through the opening in the hedge toward the entrance to the grotto. “I felt something when I went by that fountain out there.”

“I think what you felt was a contact high from Daria Tate’s pot. I smelled it when I came down here . . .” I stop, taken with a sudden idea. As much as I’ve tried over the years to dismiss my mother’s
intuitions,
I can’t deny that Mira has an uncanny instinct. It might be just the thing to get me “unstuck” in the séance scene.

“Something did happen in that grotto,” I tell Mira. “It’s where the medium Corinth Blackwell held her first séance at Bosco. A man died of a heart attack. I’ve been trying to work out what happened. Maybe if we went inside . . .”

Mira’s eyes widen for a moment—a look of fear that I’ve rarely seen in my mother’s face—but then she asks, “It’s important for you to find out what happened?”

“Well, I’m kind of stuck at that part.”

Mira nods once and gets up off the bench. She lets go of my hand to briefly touch the head of the statue, and then she squares her shoulders and strides through the hedge, hips swaying, like some Amazon warrior ready to do battle. I follow in her wake, trying not to feel guilty about enlisting Mira’s aid to do something she obviously feels frightened of. I’m planning to tell her it’s not necessary to go inside the grotto if she really doesn’t want to, but when I come out of the bushes, Mira has already passed behind the limbs of the river god, having found the hidden entrance without any help from me.

Following my mother into the grotto, I can’t help remembering my almost kiss with David here, but then, when Mira turns to me in the domed room, any lingering erotic memories are banished. My mother’s eyes are glassy with fright; the hand she holds out to me is trembling. “Tell me everything you know about what happened here,” she commands with a voice that echoes in the domed room like an oracle.

I tell her everything I’ve read about the séance. About the wind and the children’s voices and the footsteps. When I tell her about the children’s handprints on the ceiling, Mira looks up and immediately finds the paint marks that I had seen before.

“Then Frank Campbell screamed and Tom Quinn—the novelist’s assistant—lit a candle and found that Campbell had had a heart attack.”

Mira shakes her head. “No, it wasn’t a heart attack . . .” Mira places her hand over her own heart. “A blow to the heart, yes, but not a heart attack.”

“You’re saying Frank Campbell was murdered by a ghost?”

Mira laughs. The sound, echoing off the grotto’s walls, takes me totally by surprise. “No, dear, ghosts don’t kill like that. I think it must have been one of the circle. I have a feeling the whole séance was a sham. Handprints on the ceiling . . .” Mira kneels and reaches under the stone bench. After a minute of groping around she pulls out what looks like a bundle of sticks but, when unfolded, turns out to be a telescoping rod with a carved wooden hand at its end. “. . . oldest trick in the book.”

“How . . . ?” I’m going to ask Mira how she knew the rod would be there, but then I realize that, like the question of how she found the nymph statue, the answer is unlikely to be satisfying. “So you think Corinth Blackwell was a fake?” I ask instead.

“I didn’t say that, dear. Authentic mediums have been reduced to using inauthentic means. Sometimes it’s easier than exposing oneself to genuine spirits. There are things better left unseen,” she says, and I know she’s thinking of the one séance I attended when I was twelve. I wonder for not the first time if she saw what I saw. Or did she only guess at its horror from my reaction? “I imagine your medium didn’t want to conjure up a real spirit—but she did anyway. When you have the gift, you can’t hide from it. Sooner or later it will come looking for you.”

Suddenly Mira looks very tired. She places her hand on the ground to steady herself and then pulls it away as if she’s touched something hot. “I think I’ve exhausted what I can tell you here,” she says, getting slowly to her feet. “I’m sorry I haven’t been more of a help, but I think I’d better . . .”

Before she can finish her sentence, Mira is already leaving the grotto. When I join her outside, I’m alarmed by how washed-out and weak my mother looks.

“Come on up to the house, Mom,” I say. “You need to rest.”

“No, it’s against the rules and I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Mira puts her arm around me and draws me to her, hugging me tightly. “I know how important it is for you to be here. This is your journey; I can’t take it for you.”

When she lets me go, she holds my gaze for a moment and then turns away. I’m surprised. I had thought she was going to try to get me to leave, warn me off Bosco, beg me to come home . . . but instead she’s already walking away toward the hedge that surrounds the
giardino segreto.
She turns at an opening in the hedge and raises an arm in farewell. I wave back, stifling an urge to call her back. When she disappears into the hedge, I have the uncomfortable feeling that the opening in the hedge has closed up behind her. I feel not so much that my mother has been swallowed up, as that I have been sealed in.

My mother’s visit was so brief that I begin, in the next few days, to wonder if it happened at all. The image of my mother standing at the bottom of the garden, white-robed and loose-haired, merges with half a dozen other images that haunt my dreams: various girls in flowing white drapery who wander the gardens of Bosco as if lost. The dreams always end the same way, with me following one of these figures through a grove of ilex so dense that all I can see of the fleeing girl are wisps of her white dress that catch on the branches and leave diaphanous shreds on the thorns. The thorns tear at my own skin, but I know that if I let the girl out of my sight, I’ll lose my way and be trapped in the thicket forever. I follow her down a path sloping toward the center of the maze, a green tunnel that grows darker and narrower until I realize that it’s not leading into the center of the maze, but into the center of the earth. I catch up with the girl just as she begins her descent into the underworld, and she turns, there on the brink between light and dark, her face pale and smooth and featureless as a river stone. Only it’s not time and water and wind that have wiped her face clean, but thorns that have flayed her flesh as she ran through the groves. The white-blazed trail I’ve been following is a trail of flesh.

Any doubt, though, that my mother’s visit was imaginary is put to rest when, after three nights of these dreams, Diana Tate calls me to her office in the gatehouse. I walk over after breakfast, clutching my thin cardigan across my chest in the cold wind, fearing the worst. The Board has realized they made a terrible mistake letting me in; my professors have retracted their recommendations; I’ve been unmasked as a fraud. The Tudor gatehouse, at the end of a long, winding path through tall pine trees, looms in their shadows like the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel.” I have to struggle against the wind to get the door open, and when I do the wind follows me in, stirring the pamphlets about Bosco on the shelves in the reception alcove. Each one is decorated with a drawing of a Greek goddess pouring an amphora into a spring beneath a pine tree, and each of these girls seems to look up at me as if challenging me to defend my right to stay here at Bosco. The only live girl in the alcove, Daria, is behind the reception desk, slumped in her chair with her eyes closed and legs sprawled on her desk, listening to a voice that drones from the speakerphone.