The Ghost Orchid (16 page)

A glove. Made of the palest green leather and lined with spotted yellow silk. I turn back the hem and read the label—
Latham’s Gloves
—and then look more closely at the lining. What I thought was a pattern in the silk is really a stain of some sort—red wine, maybe, or blood. A shallow pocket has been sewn between the silk and the leather.

“There you are! I thought I’d lost you.” It’s Bethesda, right behind me on the path. “I passed the entrance to the cemetery, but I see that you found it.” She brushes past and, pushing back a curving branch of dried roses that clatter like hanging beads, steps into a round clearing encircled by tall cypresses and filled with the white round stones—or at least so I think until I step into the circle myself (carefully folding the glove and tucking it into the back pocket of my jeans) and look down at one of the stones to see that it’s actually a grave marker inscribed with a name and a date. James Latham, March 3, 1879. The single date of birth and death telling his whole story: a stillborn child. Spinning in a slow circle, I see that the sunken gravestones spiral out from the center, a tightly coiled snake burrowed in a nest of the same black-leafed shrub that grows in the rose garden, and that there are nearly a dozen of them.

Bethesda leads me on a tour of Aurora’s lost children, walking between the stones and pointing down at each one as though she were naming flowers in an exotic nursery. “This was the first Cynthia,” she says, pointing to a stone that’s sunk so deep into the black ground cover that it’s like looking down into a miniature well. “She only lived a week. And here are James number one and James number two, both dead before their first birthdays.”

“My God, I had no idea. I knew she lost the three children and then Alice—”

“Those were the only children who lived past infancy. She had four stillbirths and three children who died of ‘crib death,’ as they called it in those days. After she lost the third child, she wrote in her journal”—Bethesda stops and, tilting her head, squints up toward the sky as if listening for the approach of a winged messenger—“ ‘I have begged my husband to release me from this torture chamber of procreation.’ Then Milo would go off to the city and his women and leave her alone for a while, but as soon as he came back . . .” Bethesda’s voice trails off and she holds both hands out at her sides, palms up. Standing in the middle of the cypress-ringed circle in her long, white voluminous sweater, she looks like a figure from a Greek tragedy, standing alone on the stage after five acts of unspeakable carnage. “Imagine what it was like to lose this many children! Can you blame her for doing anything—even suffering the humiliation of harboring her husband’s mistress under her own roof—to contact their spirits?”

I can’t think of an answer. Instead, I scan the circle of cypresses and notice a broken marble column lying beneath one. “What’s that?” I ask, walking toward the column.

“I don’t know,” Bethesda says, joining me at the edge of the circle. “I hadn’t noticed it before.” I pull back a cypress branch, uncovering a hollow in the greenery, like a cave that’s been carved out of the trees. The trunks of these trees, though, are dappled white and green, almost like the bark of a sycamore, although they’re much too slim and low to be sycamore. Moving closer, I can see that they’re actually marble columns that have been covered in vines and lichen, holding up a low triangular pediment.

“Maybe it’s a crypt,” Bethesda says, kneeling between the two columns. “Look, there are stairs going underground. In her journals Aurora refers to ‘the well of sorrows that lies beneath the garden and inside the pit of my soul.’ I’m going to see what’s down there,” she says, getting to her feet and starting down the marble steps.

“Be careful,” I call after her. I hope Bethesda doesn’t think I’m going down there. On the last step that the light reaches, though, she turns around to see if I’m following and I start to tell her that I’ll wait up here, but no sound comes out of my mouth. A form is emerging out of the darkness, just below where Bethesda is standing.

When I call out to warn Bethesda, she wheels around and loses her balance on the slippery marble, falling to the bottom of the stairwell along with whoever, or whatever, had been coming up out of the crypt, both figures disappearing into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs.

I take one look behind me, hoping that someone working in the garden may have heard my scream, but there’s nothing in the circle but the silent white gravestones. Then I plunge down the stairs. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light, and then I make out a raised circular well in the middle of the floor and beneath it two figures lying on the floor, one whose legs are skewed at such an unnatural angle that my stomach clenches. But then I realize that one of the figures on the floor is a broken statue, the other is Zalman Bronsky, one leg bent at an angle that’s almost as painful looking as the statue’s. Bethesda is crouched by his side, her ear pressed to his chest. “Is he—?”

“He’s breathing,” Bethesda says, “but he’s unconscious. I think he’s broken his leg
and
hit his head. We’ll never get him up the hill on our own. You’ve got to go get Nat and David.”

“But I don’t know the way.”

“Just follow the white stones,” she says. I’m about to ask why doesn’t she go, but Bethesda snaps, “Well, don’t just stand there! The man could die while you dawdle.” Her voice is so coldly dictatorial it propels me right out of the crypt. I cross the circle of white stones and duck under the arch of dead rose vines onto the narrow path. I turn toward the house and see again that there are two paths, both going uphill, and no white stone to tell me which way to go. I know that if I keep going uphill I’ll eventually find my way to the house, but I also know that every minute I waste might prove fatal to Zalman.

I’m about to go back to Bethesda to tell her I can’t do it when someone steps out of the brush onto the right-hand path about ten feet ahead of me. It’s a small girl—about eleven or twelve—in an old-fashioned white dress, and she’s carrying a white stone. When she turns her head away, I see the pink ribbon in her hair and realize she’s the same girl I saw crying in the hedge maze the day I went there with David, and I wonder how I could have believed she was only an orchid—even though that’s what I smell now, the spicy scent of vanilla flooding the darkening evening air.

She starts up the path, looking once over her shoulder to see if I’m following—and of course I am. What choice do I have?

She leads me—skipping ahead of me so quickly that I can barely keep up (and at first I’m terrified of overtaking her)—on an entirely different path up the hill. She could be leading me anywhere, I think, but I stifle the thought, and we emerge on the first terrace within minutes. She’s shown me a shortcut. I look for her on the terrace, but she’s gone. Only a single white stone sits on the marble balustrade that I could swear wasn’t there earlier today.

I can see lights on in the library and head there, hoping that at least Nat has come down early for drinks. When I open the doors, I smell the peaty aroma of Nat’s scotch, but it’s David I see. He’s standing in front of the bookcase in the alcove putting a bottle back into a false-fronted cabinet.

“So that’s how you’re getting the stuff.” I startle at the voice and turn to see Nat. “Diana thought I was into the private stock.”

David looks up and sees me and Nat and a shadow crosses his face. He holds up his glass to both of us, and for a second I see the same curl of black smoke that had snaked out of the green medicine bottle in Nat’s room wafting out of the golden liquid in David’s glass. “Here’s to Bosco,” he says, “and finding inspiration where you can get it. It seems like you two have been into your own private stock.” He sniffs, and I can smell, along with the smell of peat and decay coming from the scotch, the marijuana on Nat’s clothes. I don’t have time, though, to explain to David that I haven’t spent the afternoon smoking with Nat.

“Zalman’s been hurt,” I say. “We have to get him to the hospital.”

I lead them down the hill on the path the girl showed me.

“How did you find this path?” David asks.

I don’t answer. I don’t even know how I remember the twists and turns and manage to avoid the false crossings, but I do. It’s as if the route has been imprinted on the insides of my eyelids. If I’m not sure which way to go, I close my eyes and I see the girl pointing the way. She’s inside me now, I think, and the thought fills me with dread.

By the time we reach the children’s cemetery, the sky is completely dark, but a full moon is rising in the eastern sky and its light makes the gravestones glow.

“What the hell is this?” David asks. “It’s not on any of my maps.”

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” Nat quotes.

“Fuck off, Loomis.”

“Guys,” I say, wheeling on the two of them, “we don’t have time for this.” And then, looking down into the dark crypt: “We should have taken a flashlight. I can’t even see the steps.”

David removes a small Maglite from his jacket pocket.

“Boy Scout,” Nat mutters under his breath as we follow David down the steps.

“Bethesda,” I call, “are you there?”

There’s no answer at first, but then David’s flashlight beam finds the two figures (three if you count the broken statue), and Bethesda looks up, her eyes reflecting back the light like a cat’s.

“Beth—” Nat says, approaching her. “Are you okay?” She nods but still doesn’t speak. Instead it’s Zalman who says something in slurred speech that sounds like “We have visitors.”

“Sure, Zal,” David says, placing two fingers on Zalman’s neck and then running his hands down the poet’s leg. “This is a busy place. What brought you here, anyway?”

“I was looking for the source,” Zalman says, pointing behind him with his chin, “But I found more than I bargained for, I’m afraid, and gave myself quite a scare.”

I look past Zalman into the crypt. A hole in the ceiling lets in a circle of moonlight directly above a round cistern. It’s shaped like a well, but is more an idealized reproduction of a well than a real one. A broken hand rests on the edge, as if the marble figure on the floor had once stood there, looking down into the well. A large stone has been fitted over the opening—or partially over the opening. Someone—Zalman, as it turns out—has pushed the stone half off.

“I thought it might be the source of the spring,” Zalman says, his voice weak. “So I poked my nose in where I shouldn’t have.”

David gets up, and Nat and I follow him. He shines his flashlight into the well, and I look over the edge of the marble basin. The well is half-filled with the same rounded white stones that marked the path down to the cemetery, but lying on top of the stones, and bleached as white, are bones. The arrangement of the leg and arm bones suggests someone who died huddled in a tight ball. Someone who was buried alive.

Chapter Fourteen

Corinth hesitates only a moment after the girl turns, but still when she steps between the ilex trees onto the path, the girl in the white dress is nowhere to be seen. All Corinth sees is the green pollen floating down from the pines that tower above the ilexes, turning gold in the ribbons of sunlight that unfurl from the treetops, and then emerald as it settles onto the forest floor, where it lies thick and smooth and untrodden.

Then something white flashes in a patch of sunlight a few yards ahead, and Corinth starts down the path toward it, the carpet of pollen swallowing the sound of her footsteps. It’s only a stone, though, a white round stone like the one the girl had held in her hand. Corinth kneels and picks it up and blows the coating of pollen off it; clearly no one has picked it up in some time. The stone is perfectly round, veined gray, and familiar to Corinth, but it’s not a memory she wishes to relive at the moment. She rises to her feet and, brushing the dust from her hands, sets off down the path.

At the bottom of the hill the path continues through the box hedges surrounding the
giardino segreto.
Corinth can smell roses and hear the water from the fountains and, at one point, a voice, which may belong to Giacomo Lantini, saying something about the source of the spring, and then she sees a flash of pink in one of the hedges, which she guesses is an errant rose strayed from the rose garden. When she gets closer, though, she sees that beneath a spray of roses there’s a ribbon caught on a thorn—a pink ribbon, just like the ones tied to the bridle of the rocking horse in the children’s nursery. Cynthia’s favorite color.
She was buried with a pink ribbon in her hair,
Alice said.

Corinth reaches into the hedge to retrieve the ribbon, but when she touches it, the ribbon slithers through the branches and falls deep into a thorny thicket.

“Very well,” Corinth says out loud, as if she were a governess cajoling a willful charge, “keep your ribbon, Cynthia.” When she tries to pull her hand back, though, a thorn pierces the thin leather of her glove, digging deep into the skin on the underside of her wrist.

Corinth draws back her hand, unpeeling it from the glove, and instantly the pink ribbon falls out of the hedge at her feet.

Corinth laughs. “A trade, then,” she says, bending to pick up the ribbon and consigning her glove to the hedge. A breeze moves through the hedge then, shaking loose a cascade of crimson petals from the spray of roses, which, Corinth notices now, forms an arch over a narrow gap in the hedge. She steps through into a circle of cypress trees, the loose petals settling onto her hair like a crown.

She kneels at the first stone and reads the child’s name and the dates of its short life and then walks to the next and kneels again and again . . . After the fourth stone she crawls on her hands and knees from stone to stone, not because she is tired of standing and kneeling, but because she is too dizzy to stand. Milo had told her that his wife had lost “several” babies at birth, but she hadn’t imagined there were so many. It is unimaginable.

Although the day is warm, the grass in the shaded circle is damp and the skirt of her dress is soon soaked through and tainted with the smell of rot. The chill travels from her knees up her thighs until it settles between her legs and deep in her womb. To have borne this many children into the hands of death . . . ! Corinth had barely survived the one.

She sits back on her heels so abruptly that the cypresses start to spin around her like a ring of children clasping hands in a circle. In fact she can almost hear them.

Ring-a-ring o’ roses,

A pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes,

We all fall down!

Corinth squeezes her eyes shut and presses her hands—one gloved, one bare—over her ears. She knows that if she opens her eyes, she will see them. Aurora’s lost children, all of them, not just James and Cynthia and Tam, but the ones who lived for months and even, God forbid, the ones who never breathed at all. And what she is most afraid of is that among those bereft spirits—water spirits, her mother called them, children who never lived to breathe outside their mothers’ watery wombs—she will see her own child, dead before the sun set on her first day on earth.

When she told Milo Latham that she was pregnant, he told her that his wife was also with child. “She is very anxious,” he told her, “because she has already lost several children at birth or soon after.”

Corinth bowed her head, gauging that the only appropriate response to the misfortune of her lover’s wife. They were in his office at the glove factory. A large gilt-edged glass window overlooked the sewing room. To the women looking up from their sewing it must have looked as if Corinth was being fired.
Let them think what they will.
Her work had been falling off these last weeks. Her fingers felt cold and numb all the time, as if the baby were drawing to it all the blood in her extremities, which made it difficult to work the needle. At night, in the women’s dormitory beside the factory, when the other girls whispered and gossiped to one another, Corinth drew into herself, wrapping herself into a tight ball on the narrow cot. She couldn’t seem to get warm. The snow piled up outside in drifts that covered the ground-floor windows of the factory. Sometimes she wondered if Tom wanted to come back but couldn’t. She dreamed that he was trying to come up the Hudson, but that his ship had gotten stuck in the frozen river. Sometimes she even dreamed that he was caught beneath the ice, and that she was swimming beneath the ice looking for him. In the mornings her fingers were as blue as if she had indeed spent the night swimming through cold water, but she knew that was foolish. He had abandoned her. He preferred a life on the stage to a life with her. He had vanished as deftly as the handkerchiefs and bouquets he made disappear in his act.

When the other girls began to rest their eyes on her stomach under the layers of her dress, she went to Milo Latham. She had been right after all to have him in reserve. He, at least, didn’t abandon her.

“You will be taken care of,” he told her, “but of course you must leave here. I have a place that is secluded where you can go—accompanied by a trustworthy and competent servant who’s attended my own wife through her travails. Be ready at first light tomorrow. The carriage will be waiting by the factory gate.”

Corinth dared only then to raise her eyes. She had to see if he was telling the truth—whether she could trust him or not. The look that she saw in his face was more than she could have expected; his eyes were resting on Corinth’s swollen waist, and when he lifted his eyes to hers, they were actually wet with tears.

The carriage he sent was his private brougham, the seats upholstered in rich red velvet and draped with thick fur rugs. She could have wished, though, for a less conspicuous conveyance, knowing that the girls in the dormitory would be looking out and that they couldn’t help but recognize the owner’s carriage. If Tom Quinn ever did come back . . . but it was too late to worry about that. The driver was already urging on the horses, who leapt at the touch of the reins as if anxious to be gone. Corinth settled back into the soft upholstery, drew the furs up around her, closed her eyes, and willed herself into oblivion.

When she awoke, the carriage had stopped. She wasn’t sure how long she had been asleep, but she expected that she had slept through most of the day. When she raised the window shade, it was impossible to tell what time of day it was, though, because they were surrounded by a deep fog. Corinth tapped the roof of the carriage and the driver, only his eyes showing between hat and scarf, slid open a little window.

“Why are we stopped?” Corinth asked.

“We’re picking up another passenger here, miss; only I’m afraid that they might miss us in this fog. My orders are to wait until dusk.”

The driver slid the window shut before Corinth could ask any further questions. She tried to settle back in her seat, but the motion made the weight of the child shift over her bladder. She hadn’t relieved herself since early morning. She peered out the window again and saw the looming shapes of shaggy hemlocks dimly through the fog. The only sound was the shuffling of the horses’ feet and the drip of water from the trees. Of course Milo would have chosen a secluded spot for them to meet the “trustworthy servant.” She listened to the slow drip of water from the hemlock branches until the pressure on her bladder became unbearable, and then she opened the carriage door and stepped out into the muddy road. The driver, muffled in a hooded black cloak, barely turned to look at her.

“I’m going to walk a bit to stretch my legs,” she said.

The driver turned back without any comment, but as Corinth started toward the woods, she heard his voice behind her. “Watch you don’t fall into the river. We’re not far from the cliff.”

When she entered the woods, her boots sinking into the deep snow, she heard a rushing sound that must have been the river, swollen with the winter’s heavy snows. It sounded faraway, but that may have been because the fog muted the sound or because it was so far below the edge of the cliff—which might actually be quite near. She took careful steps forward, resting her gloved hands on the trunks of the pine trees and peering into the fog-shrouded woods. The fog was deeper in between the trees, rising from the snow and mingling with the dripping hemlock branches. When she had gone far enough, she squatted behind a tree broad enough to block the view from the road and, pressing one hand on the trunk to steady her awkward weight, relieved herself. When she was done, she stood up too quickly and for a second the fog seemed to go darker and then, as she recovered, become brighter—as if some light were trying to pierce the gloom.

Perhaps the driver had lit a lantern to help her find her way back. But no, it was in the wrong direction. The light was coming from the opposite direction from the road . . . unless she’d gotten turned around. It must be the driver’s lantern, or the servant’s carriage had arrived. Corinth took a step toward the light and the light receded. When she stopped, the light stopped. Then it seemed to stretch and grow in the fog, a candle flame reaching toward a draft, pulsing in a rhythm that matched the quickened beats of Corinth’s heart. She took another step forward, and the light flickered, almost went out, and then throbbed back, rising with the fog from the snow and gathering itself into the shape of a slim girl in a pale leather dress, her bare feet delicately poised on the crust of a snowdrift.

The girl smiled and held out her lovely bare arms to Corinth. Two torn leather straps dangled from her wrists, and Corinth could see that, like hers, the girls’ wrists were scarred from the marks of her bonds. Then the girl rested one of her hands over her swollen belly. Yes, Corinth thought, she understands everything that I have suffered. As soon as Corinth stepped forward the girl turned, leading Corinth through the deep snow away from the road, away from Milo Latham’s blood-padded carriage and
that
imprisonment. At the edge of the cliff the girl turned again and held out her hand for Corinth to take. She would not be alone. But as Corinth reached her hand out, she felt an angry thump—so strong that at first she thought it was a blow from outside, but then she realized it was the baby flipping inside her like a trout leaping against the current of a fast-moving stream. She drew back her hand, and the girl’s mouth opened wide, the black hole of her mouth melting into the two black holes of her eyes until her face dissolved into long, sinewy ropes of fog. All around Corinth the fog was shredding, lifting off the ground like decaying flesh falls off the bone, and the air was full of the sound of beating wings. She could see clearly the river below the cliff, the fast-moving water and the hard, rocky beach where the river bent sharply. She could see, in impossibly crisp detail, the round white stones that lay at the bottom of the sheer, bone-shattering drop.

Inside the circle of cypresses Corinth opens her eyes and sees one of the round white stones resting on one of the gravestones. The stones could so easily have marked her own grave. She has often, over the past ten years, wished herself buried beneath them, her bones washed clean by the river, bleached to the same color as those stones. The baby who asserted its life so forcibly there on the edge of the cliff didn’t have the tenacity to last till the first night of its life. Why, Corinth has wondered every day of the last ten years, did it hold her back if it hadn’t meant to stay?