The Ghost Orchid (19 page)

“I’m leaving Bosco tonight,”
Tom Quinn had written.
“If you want to go with me, meet me in the Rose Garden at midnight.”
Had she ignored his message or had she gone and been betrayed by Tom and left in the well to die? To have never left here, to have been trapped here at Bosco for all time. It’s not the end I want to envision for Corinth Blackwell . . .

Even though it’s beautiful here. From this height I can see the entire garden spread out below me, the newly fallen snow masking the signs of age and decay. I can see all the way down into the
giardino segreto,
where the statue of the Indian maiden crouches in a shimmering pool of snow that glitters like water as it catches the sunlight. The wind whips the snow up into plumes like sprays of water, and suddenly I can see Bosco as it must have looked when the fountains were on—the flash of water everywhere. But still, as beautiful as it might have been, what I want to picture is a coach waiting at the drive at the bottom of the gardens and Corinth Blackwell getting into it. Leaving Bosco forever. Following the rivers north, as Tom Quinn had promised. I almost do see it, a black shape coalescing out of the shadows at the bottom of the hill; but then instead I see myself, standing in the road last night, breathing in exhaust fumes while David waited in the commodious Olds for Bethesda.

I turn away from the window and see the open trunk just next to the toppled rocking horse. I kneel down beside it and lift up a dark blue dress. Two letters are stitched inside the collar:
CB.

I go through the rest of the trunk and find a leather satchel that holds a curious assortment of wires and picks. I saw one like it in Lily Dale, at the home of a medium who my mother said was a fraud. “This is how she tilts tables,” my mother said sadly—lies of any kind saddened my mother so much that I had early on given up telling even the smallest ones, since my mother could detect them immediately.

I look inside the cuffs of the dress sleeves and find the sewn-in pockets that would have held the wires Corinth used to perform her levitating acts. When I’m done, I fold all the clothes away and, taking only the satchel with me, close the trunk. As I head back downstairs, I wonder why the contents of the trunk sadden me so. After all, the evidence that Corinth was a fake supports the way I’m writing my book—it’s what I’ve always believed, that even mediums like my mother, who don’t practice intentional fraud, are merely responding to subconscious messages from their clients. So what if Corinth has turned out to be a more egregious fraud. It’s just as ridiculous to feel that Corinth has betrayed me as it is to feel that David has. But that’s exactly how I do feel.

I stop on the first-floor landing and look out the window. Although the sun has transformed the garden into a glittering mirage of its former glory, I can imagine that before long the garden will disappear beneath the snow, the paths will be impassable, even the roads out difficult to navigate. I’ve heard that guests are sometimes snowbound at Bosco for days . . . weeks, even. As I knock on Zalman’s door, I try to shake off the gloom that has descended on me—if only for Zalman’s sake—but as I turn the knob (Zalman must be asleep, as he doesn’t answer my knock), I can’t help feeling that before long the snow will seal us all inside Bosco just as the stone lid sealed Corinth into the marble well.

When I push open Zalman’s door, a gust of cold air hits me so forcibly I take a step backward. The wind snakes by me as though it were escaping from the poet’s room. I step inside and cross right away to the open window. A drift of crystalline snow has mounded on the sill, and as I struggle to get the window closed, it blows up in my face in a malicious little whirlwind that stings my cheeks and hangs in the air a moment before dispersing into the garden.

“Who in the world left this open?” I ask, turning to face Zalman’s bed.

Zalman is sitting straight up in bed, a red paisley shawl draped over his shoulders, his eyes bright and his cheeks an alarming shade of pink. I hurry over to him and lay my hand on his forehead, which is, to my surprise, cool. Looking closer at him, I see that the pink in his cheeks is makeup: two stripes of rouge applied like Indian war paint.

“The children came to pay me a visit,” he says. “I’m afraid I’ve been a victim of their little tricks.”

And suddenly I realize what it was Zalman said last night when I came back to the crypt with Nat and David. It wasn’t “We have visitors”; it was “We had visitors.” No wonder Bethesda looked so dazed.

“Zalman,” I say as I scrub the paint off his cheeks with a damp wash towel, “did the children visit you and Bethesda yesterday in the crypt?”

“Oh, no,” Zalman says. “It was their mother.”

“Their mother? You mean Aurora Latham? Is Aurora Latham here now?” I look around as if the founder of Bosco were to be found lurking in the corners of Zalman’s room. Somehow the idea of seeing the ghost of Aurora Latham is far more frightening to me than seeing the children.

“Oh, no,” Zalman says, patting my hand reassuringly, “she’s not here. She’s with Miss Graham.”

Chapter Sixteen

On her way back up to the house Corinth is drenched again and again by sprays of water that spring out of the fountain allée and arc across her path. The water pressure, now that Lantini has removed the stones from the well, has clearly been restored, but still the fountains are behaving erratically. The smooth cascade thrashes against the carved marble borders as if live trout were struggling upstream against the current. The jets that leap out of the fountain slap her with the weight and muscle of live fish. When she gets to the second terrace, she tries to turn down into the ilex grove, but a geyser erupts from between two paving stones and fans out in front of her, each drop of water refracting the bright sunlight into a rainbow that shimmers in the air, like a peacock displaying its tail. She can even see, as the water hangs suspended for a fraction of a second longer than seems possible, the eyes of the peacock’s tail, and then, as the mirage vanishes, she feels the eyes following her. The children’s eyes.

No, that’s one thing she can’t bear. She continues up the main path, her head bowed to the ground against the onslaught of water.
Giochi d’acqua.
Water tricks, indeed! She remembers what Aurora told her this morning—that James was the ringleader, enticing Tam and Cynthia into his
little rebellions,
to do his
little tricks.
Were these geysers some of James’s
little tricks,
then? And the arrow through Frank Campbell’s heart? Was that one of his little tricks, as well? She remembers the fingers on her wrist last night and the sound of children’s voices in the grotto—more than three children. What if James had found in death more accomplices for his tricks? What if he had found a whole tribe of ghost siblings to do his bidding? Did she really want to summon that host forth in yet another séance?

As if in answer to her question, someone somewhere starts to hum. Her skin, already chilled by her soakings, prickles, but then she realizes that the sound is coming from the pipes of the fountains. She remembers that the fountains at the Villa d’Este at Tivoli were designed to produce music—a music said to represent the voice of the Tiburtine Sibyl chanting her prophecies for great Rome. Of course Aurora, who had commissioned statues to cry, would want her fountains to sing. Maybe that’s all this is. The
giochi d’acqua,
the singing fountains—all tricks to bring back her children, to make her believe they are still with her.
I’m afraid I wasn’t always the best of mothers,
she said. From how she treats Alice, Corinth can believe it. Maybe this resurrection is supposed to somehow appease her guilt.

If so, Aurora will have to wrestle with her guilt on her own, as Corinth has done all these years since she laid her own child to rest under the tea-colored water of the bogs behind Milo Latham’s cabin on the Sacandaga. She won’t be the one to summon that horde of spirits, her little tea-colored one among them. She’ll go to Tom Quinn now and tell him she’s ready to leave Bosco, and Milo Latham, for good.

As she climbs the last steps to the last terrace, she feels strengthened in her resolution enough to hum along with the fountains, a simple tune that she soon remembers the words to:

Ring-a-ring o’ roses

A pocket full of posies.

At the top of the fountain allée one last spray of water fans out in front of her, this one seeming to spring, not from the fountain, but out of thin air.

Ashes, ashes,
the fountains sing as the water droplets form into the shape of a girl, her skirt billowing in a final curtsy as she drops to the ground.

We all fall down.

Violet Ramsdale, who has been sitting looking out her bedroom window since Dr. Murdoch left her a half hour earlier, watches Corinth climb up from the garden onto the terrace. The medium’s hair and dress are soaked, and a halo of mist is falling around her like a moiré silk shawl. She is humming to herself. A few minutes later Tom Quinn emerges from between two cypresses on the west side of the fountain allée. Had they been together?

“Assisting Lantini with some engineering problems” is what he said last night when she asked him what he was doing in the garden yesterday. “It feels good to work with my hands again.”

“Isn’t that what you are in my employ to do?” she asked, laying her hand over his and feeling, as she always did, a shiver of pleasure at the smoothness of his skin, the tautness of his flesh. “To work with your hands?”

He’d turned his hand over and grasped hers, squeezing a little too hard and then letting go, his hand escaping from under hers so quickly she didn’t even see it go, the long white fingers a blur, like the wings of a white dove released from its cage.

“I used to do more with my hands than take down someone else’s words,” he said.

“Of course,” she cooed, trying to draw him back. “I remember your act. How could I forget how brilliant you were on the stage. I’ve always said that if you wished to go back—”

The color rose beneath his marble-white skin, and she knew she’d said the wrong thing. He was already up, buttoning his shirt, striding toward the door, saying he needed some air and would take a walk around the garden.

“But aren’t you afraid,” she called out to him, “after what happened to Mr. Campbell tonight?”

He turned and smiled at that. “Frank Campbell was an ass,” he said. “He only got what he deserved.” And then he was gone and he didn’t come back all night. Punishing her for bringing up his act, no doubt. The Great Quintini! Of course he’d never go back after what happened.

It was a shame, because he was the most brilliant magician she’d ever seen . . . well, certainly the handsomest. What he had was promise. In time he could have surpassed even the great Robert-Houdin, whom she’d seen perform in Paris when she was a child.

She’d seen Tom Quinn perform for the first time in New York at the Odeon. She’d gone because she was gathering material for her next novel, in which the villain was a magician, but she’d gone back, again and again, because she’d become mesmerized by the handsome young magician. Tom had the quickest hands she’d ever seen. Plucking scarves and flowers out of thin air, conjuring orange trees and brightly colored birds from ether.

“He don’t stay with the standard stock-in-trade,” the Odeon’s manager, Jimmy Priest, told her when she asked to be introduced.
All in the name of research,
she’d told herself. “He’s ambitious, that one, always adding something new to the act to make a few extra dollars, but he don’t spend it like the rest of the performers. He’s got a girl somewhere, I think.”

When she met him in his dressing room, he told her he was experimenting with escape acts. He’d gotten the idea from a medium’s act he’d seen upstate. The girl had been bound to prove she was not producing her effects with her hands or feet, but he had noticed that because she had extraordinarily slim wrists and ankles she was able to slip out of the ropes when the lights went out.

“I think what the audience liked best of all,” he told Violet, “was seeing her all tied up.”

Yes, Violet could imagine that. In her books she always made sure that there was at least one scene in which the villain tied up the heroine, preferably in a high tower or a dark dungeon. There was something undeniably
titillating
about confinement. She had asked him to show her how he tied his knots—for research purposes of course—and, after feigning a blush or two, agreed to tie his wrists and ankles together so he could practice releasing himself.

“Aren’t you afraid that one of the gentlemen in the audience will know how to tie a knot you can’t free yourself from?” she asked. “Hadn’t you better . . . um . . . enlist the aid of some colleague?”

“You mean use a plant?” he said, laughing at her euphemisms. “Not a bad idea.”

She was in his dressing room when Jimmy Priest approached Tom with a proposal. The rope trick was getting old, he told Tom; there was a magician at the Regent who had himself tied up and sealed in a trunk, and one in England who had himself thrown in the river in leg irons. Couldn’t Tom do something like that? They could stage the whole thing off the piers.

“But the river’s frozen,” Violet pointed out.

“Even better,” Jimmy said, grinning around the stub of cigar in his mouth. “A fellow went into a frozen river out in St. Louis. Makes for more drama. We’ll drill a hole and toss him in, and he’ll be out in three minutes at most. If he doesn’t come out on his own, we’ll fish him out. He’s young.” He slapped Tom on the back. “He’ll survive.”

She told Tom not to do it, but when Jimmy told him how much he thought he could get for the act with the right backing, she saw Tom’s eyes widen and then draw inward, thinking, she guessed, of that girl he had tucked away somewhere.

The medium, Violet thinks, rising from her seat at the window and crossing her room to her Saratoga trunk. Hidden behind a loose corner of the lining are several posters that she had found in Tom’s old valise and saved out of sentimentality. She loved the pictures of Tom in his magician’s garb and the ones of him bound in ropes about to be sealed in a trunk or lowered into the river, but the one she’s looking for now is from before they met, a program for July 9, 1882, at the Lyceum Theater, Gloversville, New York, advertising “The Great Quintini, Master of Disappearances.” She reads through the other acts and finds her. The little medium. Corinth Blackwell. So it had been for her that Tom was willing to risk everything in that foolhardy exploit.

While Jimmy Priest papered the city with posters—T
HE
G
REAT
Q
UINTINI
D
EFIES THE
F
ROZEN
D
EEP
! M
OST
S
PECTACULAR
W
ATER
E
SCAPE
E
VER
D
ARED BY
M
ORTAL
M
AN
—Tom practiced holding his breath and she timed him. He was up to three minutes when the day came. New Year’s Day. Tom had wanted to do it the week before Christmas, but Jimmy had insisted that New Year’s Day would draw the bigger crowd. And besides, they had to make sure the river was frozen “because,” Jimmy explained, “you’ve promised your public ‘the frozen deep.’ ”

The ice on New Year’s day stretched clear across to New Jersey, gleaming gold in the noonday sun. Only the hole ten feet off the pier where the ice had been sawed away was black, a dark eye surrounded by a corona of fire.

“You don’t have to go through with this,” she whispered to him as the throng of men and women on the pier parted to let them through. But when Tom turned toward her, his eyes were as dark as the black pit in the ice. It was as if he’d gone into some kind of trance to ready himself for his submersion and he was already far away from her, already in the black water under the ice. The crowd swept him away from her, pulling the fur cloak she had lent him from his bare shoulders, the men tying his arms behind his back.

“They’re your men,” she whispered to Jimmy, “the ones tying the ropes?”

“Of course, ma’am, do you think I want a dead magician on my hands?” Jimmy answered, exhaling rank cigar smoke into the cold, bright air.

She looked at the men and women in the crowd and saw that their eyes were all fixed on Tom as he was shackled. Tom had been right—the audience loved to see the ropes go on. It didn’t have to be a girl captive; Tom’s young flesh would do.

Closing her eyes against the glare of the sun off the frozen river, Violet felt herself transported to a little mountain village in Tuscany that she had passed through on her way to the baths at Saturnia (whose healing powers, an English friend had promised her, would put an end to all her pain). A boy, his hands and feet bound together, was tied to a statue in the town square’s fountain.
To appease the nymph of the spring,
the tour guide had explained, pointing to the statue the boy was tied to, a half-naked girl whose arms reached up out of the fountain’s spray to pull unsuspecting passersby under the veil of water.
So that the spring will never run dry. It’s considered an honor for the boy.
The ladies of her party had insisted on offering him food and drink and begged the village men to let him go, but the men of the village had only laughed and the boy had refused all their offerings. Still, the women had hovered around the square, stealing glances at the boy where his flesh pressed against the cold, wet marble.

She heard a splash and opened her eyes to see the dark water lapping over the ice. She looked down at her watch and drew in her own breath. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t draw breath until he did, but after two minutes she had to. She’d timed him before at three minutes. He had time.

When three minutes passed, she pushed through the crowds and grabbed Jimmy’s arm. “Pull him up,” she said. “It’s been too long.”

They hauled up the rope, but there was nothing at the end of it.

“He must have come untied from it while he was getting out of his bonds and the current took him downriver.”