The Ghost Orchid (31 page)

“Damn. If I’d written
that
in a story, Leland
really
would have lambasted it.”

I don’t say anything. In the patch of reddish brown soil that’s been upturned by the tamarack’s roots lie a handful of white shards. Like tiny bones. I remember then what I saw that day in the bog with my mother. At the edge of a pond I had bent to pick a white flower that I thought might be the orchid my mother was looking for and saw, staring up at me from the water, a baby’s face. Its skin tanned like old leather. By the time Mira found me retching into the reeds, the face was gone, but I believed I had seen the face of a child sacrificed to the bog.

Nat kneels and picks up one of the white fragments and turns it over. I see half a wing of a blue bird merging into the white background.

“It’s the rest of the teacup,” I say with relief. “It’s just like the ones that are at Bosco.”

We don’t talk much on our way back to the car. I sense that Nat is immersed in his memories of the childhood summers he spent here with his grandfather—perhaps reevaluating those memories in light of what he’s learned about his family history—just as I am drawn back to that day in the bog with my mother.

I remember Mira finding me by the edge of the pond, sick and frightened by the baby’s face I had seen in the bog water. She cradled me against her soft breasts and belly—it was like being hugged by a Bronze Age fertility goddess come to life—and told me that it was because I was a woman now (apparently Mira had known all along I’d gotten my period) and that this happened to the women in our family. They saw things. They saw people who were dead and sometimes they saw people who hadn’t been born yet. The thing I had to do was
gain control
of it before it gained control of me. We’d have a séance that night to confront the spirit that had frightened me in the bog. But the séance Mira held that night hadn’t helped at all. All it had done was teach me how to close my eyes to the things I saw, to never let myself relax, to never trust myself entirely or allow myself to fall in love—a strategy that had worked fairly well until I came to Bosco.

“I may have some trouble getting the car turned around and up this hill in the snow,” Nat says when we get back to the Range Rover. “I’ll concentrate better alone. Why don’t you hike up the drive and wait for me at the top of the hill.”

I do what he says, but when I’ve reached the top of the hill, the sound of the Rover’s engine racing makes me turn around. The car is slipping backward, sliding toward the black maw of the pond, as if it were a mouth waiting to swallow Nat up into the bog. I realize that this is why Nat didn’t want me in the car: he knew it might be dangerous. I open my mouth to scream, but then the car comes to a halt and, in a burst of grinding gears and spraying snow, gains purchase and hurtles past me, skidding to a stop a few yards away. I stand for a moment looking back at the pond and the bog beyond the cabin, as if making sure that nothing is coming after us, but the only movement is the falling snow and the gentle swaying of the spruce trees.

I trudge toward the Range Rover, my eyes on the lowering sky that hovers over the black spruce trees that line the drive. It’s like looking down a dark tunnel spanned by a marble arch. As I stare into it I sense that something is coming down the drive. I squint into the swirling snow and see, at the end of the drive, a dark shape detaching itself from the spruce trees. I feel the boggy ground beneath my feet pulsing in a steady pattern that could only be horse hooves striking the ground. And then I see it. The black carriage driven by a man cloaked in black, a glimpse of the red interior—like a beating heart—a woman’s head craning out the window to look at . . . what? She seems to be looking straight at me.

Then it’s gone. The shadows resolve into trees and one large, raucous blackbird that takes flight into the overhanging sky and passes low over my head. I see something drop and bend to pick up what I think will be a feather, but instead when I open my hand I find that I’m holding a white flower. A bog orchid, crushed but still retaining the faint spicy scent of vanilla. The charm my mother and I had looked for in vain years ago. I slip it into my coat pocket, along with the pieces of the broken teacup, and get into the car.

Chapter Twenty-six

The fog is so thick that the only way Corinth knows they’ve reached the camp is the smell of peat in the air. Alice must sense it, too, because when the coach pauses she opens the door and jumps down.

“I’ll race you to the cabin,” she calls over her shoulder. “I know a shortcut.”

Corinth calls after her to tell her not to go, that she’ll get lost in the fog, but she’s already vanished and Corinth has no strength to follow her. She barely has the strength to prop her elbows on the coach’s windowsill and stick her head out to look for Alice. The fog lies thick on the spruce boughs overhead, like a mirage of winter. At the end of the long colonnade of trees she sees a shape emerging from the fog that must be Alice, only then Alice herself leaps out from the woods just beneath the coach window. She’s holding a flower up, which Corinth just manages to grasp before Alice runs back to the woods. She looks back up the drive to where she saw the figure coalescing in the fog, but what looked like a woman a moment before now grows wings and takes flight. It’s only a large blackbird whose plaintive caw as it flies overhead so startles Corinth that the flower Alice had given her—a white orchid—slips from her fingers and falls beneath the wheels of the carriage, leaving behind only a fleeting scent of vanilla.

Tom carries her into the cabin, Alice close at his heels chattering happily about the cabin’s peculiarities and special features. She knows how the woodstove works and where the tea and sugar are kept in special sealed tins to keep the mice out. Does Corinth want her to make her a cup of tea to revive her from the journey? (She recites the offer like something she must have overheard.) Corinth nods weakly, more to give the girl something to do than from any great longing for tea. So far the child seems unperturbed to be here with two nearly total strangers, but surely she’ll start asking questions soon. What, Corinth wonders as she leans back on the bed, will they tell her? Should she tell her that Aurora Latham, who never treated her as a mother should, was not, in fact, her real mother? And what should she tell her about Wanda—the one person who treated her with any kindness?

Corinth closes her eyes and once again she is back in the well. At first she thinks Wanda must be dead, because it is so silent, but then she hears a harsh hiss, like air being slowly let out of a pneumatic tire, and she realizes that Wanda is conserving her breath as Corinth had toward the end, and as Corinth had, she is turning each exhalation into a shushing noise to silence the children. Only it’s not just the restless stirring of the dead children she silences but the muttering of the spring itself. The water is moving more slowly, drying up; soon it will cease to flow altogether. Wanda is cursing all of Bosco with her dying breath.

“Here’s your tea.”

Corinth opens her eyes, more grateful for the sound of Alice’s voice than the proffered cup. She’s poured the tea into her own cup—the flow-blue cup with her name at the bottom. Corinth reaches for it, but her hand is shaking too hard to hold it.

“I’d better help you,” Alice says, bringing the thin china rim to Corinth’s lips. She tips the cup and Corinth sees the letters at the bottom of the teacup—only now instead of Alice’s name she sees the name she gave to her own child.

The tea must have some kind of calmative herb in it because, while Tom is tucking Alice into a bed on the other side of the woodstove, Corinth falls asleep watching the light fade from the little window above her bed. When she wakes up, much later, the window is dark and the only light in the cabin comes from the dying embers in the woodstove. Tom is lying next to her in the narrow bed, asleep, but the moment she stirs he’s awake. He gets up and stokes the fire and boils water to wash her wound and then rebandage her shoulder.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he says. “I think I should get a doctor for you.”

“It’s too risky,” Corinth says. “They’ll find us and take Alice. I’ll be fine.” She’s far from sure that she’ll be all right, though. Along with the loss of blood, she feels she’s left some part of herself back in the well at Bosco—a part that Wanda is holding on to as she dies. That she is being silenced by Wanda’s dying breaths just as the children and the spring are being silenced.

“It’s too risky to keep her with us,” Tom says. “We could leave her someplace safe where she could be returned to her mother—”

“No!”
Corinth says, surprising herself with the strength she’s able to summon. “Whatever happens, you must promise never to let Aurora get her hands on her. If something happens to me—” Tom starts to interrupt, but Corinth places her hand over his mouth and goes on. “If anything happens to me, take her to my sister in Buffalo. The address of the family she’s with is in my diary. I’ve been sending money for years—enough for them to take care of Alice, too. Please, Tom, promise me.”

She sees something cloud in his eyes. “You haven’t had much reason to trust my promises in the past,” he says, “and there’s something I think I should tell you before I make any more.” She tries to lift her hand to silence him, but he clasps her hand and brings it to his lips. “I wasn’t at Bosco only as Violet Ramsdale’s employee,” he says. “I was working for Milo Latham as well. He approached me in New York and said he had need of my ‘skills as a conjurer.’ That’s how he put it. He said he was bringing a medium to his home at his wife’s request to contact their dead children, but that he wanted to make sure his wife was satisfied with the results of the séance. So I agreed to . . .
augment
the effects of the séance . . .”

“Tom, I know . . .”

“No, you don’t know everything. I knew you were to be the medium. I knew you were Latham’s mistress. I agreed because I wanted to get back at you for not waiting for me in Gloversville. I was going to plant the tools I used in the false séance in your room and then unveil you as a fraud—Violet would have been only too happy to help.”

“But you didn’t,” she says. “You didn’t go through with it.”

“The minute I saw you again I knew I couldn’t. But still, I faked the séance—”

Corinth begins to laugh, but the motion hurts her shoulder too much. “If only Milo knew! There was no need to fake anything. His children’s spirits are only too real. He found that out too late . . .” Corinth’s voice trails off.

“You mean he died of fright?”

“No,” Corinth says, shaking her head, “or at least, not fright alone. Aurora put hellebore in his scotch. It can kill a man if his heart is weak.”

“Then I’m lucky my heart’s not weak: I had two glasses of Latham’s scotch last night.”

Corinth looks out the window by her bed and sees the great shaggy shadows of spruce trees emerging out of the darkness and hears the call of a red-winged blackbird. It’s almost dawn. She looks up at Tom, his face bathed in the pale light, and then looks toward the bed where Alice is sleeping, the girl’s dark eyelashes fringing her pale cheek, which is pillowed on her long, slender fingers.

She lays her hand on Tom’s chest. “No,” she says, “you have a strong heart.”

She’ll have to tell him that Alice is his daughter, she realizes, but tell him in a way that will leave no doubt, so that he’ll protect her no matter what happens. She takes her hand from his chest and reaches for his hand, wrapping her fingers around his wrist, and pulls herself up to a seated position. The blood swims from her head, but she bites the inside of her cheek to keep from fainting.

“There’s something I have to show you,” she says, “before Alice wakes up. It’s only a short walk and I’m feeling much stronger.”

When she hears the cabin door close behind them, Alice opens her eyes. She counts to a hundred (the number James insisted upon when they played hide-and-seek) and then jumps out of bed and runs to the window. She can see them, Miss Blackwell leaning heavily on Mr. Quinn’s arm, entering the path that leads into the bog. Whatever can she mean to show him in
there
? Not that there aren’t many wonderful things in the bog—emerald green pitcher plants that hold water like a vase, tiny frogs that look like Mother’s best enamel brooches, white flowers that smell like fresh-baked cookies, and twisted pieces of wood that the bog water polished and hardened to look like the carved ebony in Papa’s walking stick. James said that the bog water preserved everything. That if you slipped and fell into the water and drowned here (which could happen very easily because there was quicksand everywhere and traps set by Indians), your body would never rot, but be preserved like the Egyptian mummies that Papa took them to see in the big museum in the city. There were bodies of Indians, James said, perfectly preserved at the bottom of the bog and waiting to reach up and drag you down to keep them company. His stories scared Cynthia so much that she would never step a foot off the cabin’s porch, but Alice wasn’t afraid. Wanda had taught her spells to say and plants to pick to keep as charms to protect her. She knew where the sinkholes and the quicksand traps were better than anyone. And so she decides to follow Miss Blackwell and Mr. Quinn into the bog to see what it is Miss Blackwell wants to show him.

Walking is harder than Corinth thought it would be. She finds she hasn’t breath enough to talk at the same time, so she’s quiet until they come to the tamarack tree that leans over the pond at the center of the bog. Fog still covers the opposite bank, but the sun has burnt though the mist here. The sphagnum moss below the tree is emerald green and brightly colored dragonflies flit over the surface of the water. At first she’s afraid that the name she carved was gone, but then she finds it.

“My mother named me for the place I was born so that my spirit would always know where to come back to, but I didn’t know what this place was called,” she told Tom, “so I named her for my sister.” She smiles when she sees Tom make a face at the name. “My sister was named for the place where she was born. The family that took her moved to Buffalo a little later.”

“You were pregnant, then, when you left Gloversville.”

She nods, unable to speak. How can she explain that day when she met Latham on the post office steps? How she doubted that Tom would ever come back? Corinth digs her fingers into the rim around the knothole where she carved the baby’s name.