The Ghost Orchid (4 page)

We continue down the hill by the side path instead of the fountain allée. “To fully appreciate the iconographic program of the garden, you have to start at the bottom, in the rose garden at the center of the maze,” David informs me.

“Are you sure we won’t get lost in the maze? Isn’t it kind of tricky?” I ask. I hate mazes, always have. My mother once tried to explain that labyrinths were sacred and that walking them was a meditation of sorts, but I so loathe the feeling of being boxed inside a pattern that I could barely play hopscotch as a child.

David grins. “Not if you know its secret—which I do. You shouldn’t go in by yourself, though: it’s so overgrown that you really could get lost in there. Even if you navigate the labyrinth, you might not recognize the way out. See, this was the west door, but it’s almost entirely grown over.”

David gestures to a narrow slit in the hedge wall. It looks barely big enough to allow me through, let alone David with his broad shoulders; but when he turns sideways, I see he’s slim enough to slip through—in fact, he vanishes so quickly it’s as though the hedge had swallowed him whole.

“Come on in,” he calls from behind the thick boxwood, “the water’s fine.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath—as if I really were jumping into water—and plunge through the narrow opening. When I open my eyes, I might as well be underwater, the air is so thick and green. It even seems to ripple slightly as I peer down the long, narrow pathway hemmed in between the giant walls of boxwood to where David Fox is just turning a corner—but that’s probably just my nerves, I figure, as I run to keep up with David.

We turn, and turn again, going deeper into the winding maze. The paths seem to grow narrower as we go, and to slope ever so slightly downward.

“Are we going downhill?” I ask, trying not to sound as nervous as I am.

“That’s the trick,” David says. “As long as you’re going downhill you’re going right—of course, the ground is so overgrown now that it’s not always easy to judge the gradient—”

“But you do know where we are?”

Instead of answering, David laughs and half turns toward me, smiling. His face, seen at a three-quarters angle and in the green-tinged gloom of the maze, looks more like the face of the Green Man than ever. I’m immediately sorry that I’ve thought of that face, because it makes me wonder if there are more like it hidden in the walls of the maze.

“Are there statues in here?”

“Just two at the center,” David answers. “We’re almost there.”

I’m not sure if I’m glad of that or not. The idea of being in the center of all these tightly coiling paths is not at all comforting. I notice that the hedges are thick with spiderwebs—tunnel-shaped webs that burrow into the branches. Maybe it’s the spiders that give me that feeling of being watched. As I follow David I have the impression of shapes hidden in the green bushes—dark limbs and flashes of red. When David pauses at an intersection of three paths, I see that one of these shapes extends all the way to the top of the hedge, where a crest of red foams over the top of the greenery like a wave of blood about to crash down and engulf us.

“The rosebushes have really gone wild,” I say, looking back down.

There’s no answer, because David is no longer standing at the intersection. I rush to the crossing and check the three paths. There’s a flash of white at the end of one of the paths, so I head down that one. Only when I get to the next turn do I remember that David wasn’t wearing white—he was all in green. At any rate, the flash of white has vanished; it was probably just a splash of sunlight. I turn to trace my steps back to the last intersection, figuring that I’m better off waiting for David there than going farther astray, when I catch another glimpse of the white shape. It’s deep inside the hedge.

“Hello?” I call, crouching down and peering through the tangle of boxwood and rosebushes. Maybe it’s a child of one of the housekeepers who knows she’s not supposed to be playing in the gardens. “It’s okay,” I say. “I won’t tell anyone. Are you lost?”

A sigh moves through the hedges. I can’t tell if it’s the wind or a child’s cry, but I suddenly feel a tightness in my own chest as if I’m about to cry, and I can’t believe that the wind would stir such an empathetic response. “I’m coming to get you,” I tell the child, “just stay where you are.”

There’s a narrow gap in the hedge near the ground, like a tunnel that’s been burrowed through the boxwood, that I’m able to crawl through. It’s probably how the child got in here in the first place, only the child might be small enough to evade the thorny rose branches that tear at my hair and clothes. I try to keep my gaze on the white shape in front of me—I can just make out the girl crouched in a hollow carved out of the hedge, her white dress pulled down over her bent knees, a pink ribbon hanging in her ash-colored hair—but I have to turn twice to free my shirtsleeve from a thorn and when I turn back the second time, the girl is gone. In her place is a white flowering shrub.

“Ellis?” I hear David’s voice from somewhere behind me.

“I’m in here,” I call. He must hear the quiver of tears in my voice, because he’s at my side in a moment.

“Amazing,” he says, his voice so hushed with awe that for a moment I think he must sense the girl’s presence. “
Plantanthera dilatata.
” He whispers the Latin as if saying a prayer.

“Bog orchid,” I say, touching the splayed lip of one of the flowers. Its scent, a mixture of vanilla and cloves, rises on the air, carrying with it some indefinable sadness.

“Yes, how did you know?”

I hesitate, thinking that once again I’ve acquired some unexplained knowledge, and then, to my relief, I identify the source. “My mother took me looking for it once in a bog near our house. She said the Native Americans used it for a love charm. She said they had another name for it . . .”

“Ghost orchid,” David says, “because if you saw it through a misty bog it would look—”

“Like you’d seen a ghost,” I finish for him.

The fountain at the center is a bit of a disappointment after the intricate prelude of the maze. It’s hardly recognizable as a fountain at all. The boxwood and roses have grown in a tangle into a tight circle around the marble basin, which itself is covered in a thicket of ivy and some kind of dark-leafed shrub that spills over the fountain and covers the surrounding ground. The statue of the crouching girl is overgrown, her face peering through a curtain of ivy. David circles around behind her and, pushing aside a shaggy bush, uncovers the other statue. This one is of a young man.

“These don’t look classical,” I say. I feel marginally calmer in this small basin of open space at the center of the maze. “I thought this was the center of the iconographic program. They look kind of . . . I don’t know . . . hokey.”

“They are. Look at this one’s name . . .” He brushes aside a film of dirt and lichen growing on the statue’s pedestal. Carved in the marble is the name Jacynta.

“Jacynta?”

“Aurora Latham made it up. It’s an amalgamation of the names of the three lost children.”

“Before they lost Alice, you mean.”

“Yes . . . there was James and Cynthia and . . .”

“And Tam . . . short for Thaddeus.”

“You’ve done your homework, I see.”

I smile, pleased to finally receive a compliment here at Bosco, even if it’s from a landscape architect and not another writer. “But I couldn’t tell you who this is supposed to be,” I say, walking back to the statue of the crouching girl.

“Jacynta’s beautiful Indian girlfriend, Ne’Moss-i-Ne,” David says, coming to stand beside me.

“Ne’Moss-i-Ne? It sounds . . . well . . . it doesn’t sound like a real Indian name, but like something a camp owner in the Catskills would make up.”

David laughs. “You’re close. There was a real Iroquois girl who led a band of French explorers to this spring. The local legend goes that she fell in love with a French missionary who later betrayed her village to an Abenaki raiding party. She was taken captive, but she managed to escape and run west to a cliff above the Sacandaga River, where she jumped to her death. Her name was probably something that sounded like Ne’Moss-i-Ne and that was as close as the early settlers could get. Until the Lathams bought this land, the locals called the spring Mossy Spring. But then Aurora heard the story and claimed that she heard the girl was called Ne’Moss-i-Ne. She might have made it up, because the name is really too close to be coincidental.”

“Too close to what?”

“Its Greek equivalent. Think about it. It’s not an uncommon practice in New York place names. Seneca was originally named
Otsinika,
which is Algonquin for ‘Stone,’ and then through transliteration and folk etymology it became the classical ‘Seneca.’ ”

“So Ne’Moss-i-ne . . . Ne’Moss-i-ne . . .”

I repeat the name until it begins to sound vaguely familiar . . . a name tickling at the edges of memory . . . and then I recognize it . . . of course, memory itself.

“Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory.”

“And mother of the Muses. The statues of the Muses on the terraces are her children,” David says, gesturing toward the hill and walking toward a path in that direction.

We come out of the maze into the sunshine at the foot of the hill and walk toward one of the ruined fountains. I feel better out in the open space and better since my apparition turned out to be a harmless plant and the only ghost on the premises has been categorized as the orchid kind, placed into its proper genus and species. I can tell, too, that David likes me, and I feel inclined to let myself like him back even though I swore that I wouldn’t get involved with anyone until I finished the book.

“Who are these guys?” I ask, pointing at the two nude males who lounge on either side of an oval basin that must have once held water but now is overgrown with weeds and ivy.

“This is the Fountain of the Two Rivers. The one on the left represents the Sacandaga and the one on the right is the Hudson. This was Milo Latham getting a little of his own program into the iconography. The Latham lumber would have been carried down from the Adirondacks on the Sacandaga River—before it was dammed and turned into a reservoir in the thirties—and then carried on the Hudson to his mill.”

While the Hudson is depicted as a mature man, the Sacandaga is a muscular young Indian brave, his head shaved into a Mohawk, with an expression so fierce that even though his face is split by a crack that runs from the top of his skull to his feet, I can feel some hostile animus emanating from the statue.

“What about the horse?” I ask, turning away from the angry river god—maybe having his river turned into a reservoir is what has turned him sour—and walking up the stairs. “What does a horse have to do with the Muses?”

“It’s Pegasus,” David answers.

“But this horse doesn’t have any wings.”

“They were broken off . . . vandals, I suppose . . . It’s shocking how the gardens have been allowed to deteriorate. Hopefully my report to the Garden Conservancy will generate interest in restoring them.” I glance at him, looking for any suggestion of what I sensed last night on the terrace—that he’d prefer to leave the gardens in ruins—but he appears genuinely devoted to the garden’s restoration. It must have been my imagination. “They were an engineering feat,” he goes on. “Aurora not only hired Italian sculptors and gardeners, she brought the most renowned
fontanieri
in all of Europe to design the fountains.”

“
Fontanieri
?”

“Hydraulic engineers skilled in creating not just fountains but elaborate water effects. Giacomo Lantini—whose journal I’ve been reading—was a genius, especially in creating
giochi d’acqua
—water jokes. For instance, this fountain, the Pool of Pegasus, what does it remind you of? Remember that we started with the Fountain of Memory.”

I look up at David, but the sun, nearly overhead now, blinds me. I feel suddenly nervous at how much time is getting away. Time I’m supposed to be using for writing, not answering mythology trivia questions. But then I realize what he’s getting at. “The spring on Mount Helicon, home of the Muses—Pegasus strikes the ground with his hoof and the water gushes up. Poets were supposed to drink from the spring for inspiration.”

“Exactly—the Hippocrene Spring, it was called, or the Horse Well. So of course it makes sense that Aurora, with her love of the arts, would commission a fountain that celebrated the wellspring of creativity. The water that feeds all these fountains is pumped up the hill from the Fountain of Memory. But she didn’t stop there. Look at the stones that pave the path leading to the fountain. . . what do you notice?”

The stones are broken in places, grass and weeds growing between the cracks. There’s a pattern, though, beneath the layers of moss and dirt. “Horseshoes, how clever . . .”

“That’s not all. When the fountain was intact, all you had to do was step on one and a jet of water would shoot out, drenching you.” David kneels down by one of the horseshoe shapes in the stone, takes a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, and pries loose the horseshoe. Beneath it is a round copper ring—a pipe leading down into the bowels of the fountain. I crouch down next to it and hear a sound like that of someone drawing breath, as if someone were buried deep in the tunnels beneath the hill, waiting for us to let in the air.