The Ghost Orchid (22 page)
For the first time since Tom had left she allowed herself to feel hope. Although Wanda White Cloud might not be the best company, she was a good midwife and baby nurse. By the time the baby was born, it would be summer. She’d stay here until she had her strength back, nursing herself on the teas and plant remedies her mother had taught her about, and then she would travel down the Hudson River to New York City, where she’d find Tom. Opening her eyes, she saw, lifting its head up through a thin scrim of snow, a white bog orchid, its pale petals trembling in the sunlight. Her mother had another name for the love charm. Ghost orchid. Because of the girls who drowned themselves when their love went wrong. Corinth bent to inhale its spicy vanilla scent, but left it where it grew. It didn’t matter, she told herself, if she found Tom. What mattered was the baby growing inside of her. As long as it was safe she’d take whatever else fate had in store for her.
And the baby seemed to thrive those last three months at Milo Latham’s camp. Maybe it was Wanda’s cooking or the teas she brewed from the plants they both gathered or the moisture that filled the air around the cabin. Corinth felt her skin soaking it up, drawing sustenance from the very air just as the sphagnum moss swelled in the spring rains. She was squatting in a patch of the emerald green moss when the first pain rose up as if out of the ground and toppled her off her heels. She felt the ground quake beneath her and a stream of water flood down her leg into the soft, absorbent moss. It was as if the bog were giving birth to her, she thought, sinking back into its clasp. Every spasm that rocked her was absorbed in the rocking of the matted ground, every gush of blood soaked up by the moss. She might have lain there until the baby came if Wanda, walking down to the road to meet the weekly arrival of supplies, hadn’t heard her screams. Wanda managed to get her to her feet in between pains, but by the time they got to the cabin, the pains were coming so fast Corinth barely had time to put one foot in front of the other before the next one swept through her.
“It’s coming too fast,” Wanda said, getting her into bed. She made her drink a cup of bitter-tasting tea and threw a handful of sweet-smelling grass on the fire. “Breathe this,” Wanda said, holding a switch of the burning grass close to Corinth’s face. Looking up, Corinth saw that Wanda had tied a red shawl across her mouth and nose. Her eyes above the cloth were like two black stones at the bottom of a clear stream. Corinth tried to lock her eyes onto them as the pains rocked through her, but the water grew cloudy and she lost sight of them. She could hear the rush of water all around her, carrying her on a strong current. When she closed her eyes, she saw Tom as she’d last seen him in her dreams, trapped beneath the ice in the river, looking for her, but when she reached out for him, he grabbed hold of her and pulled her deeper into the water. Then she saw that it wasn’t Tom at all, but the girl on the overlook, her black eyes dissolving into the water, her body shredding in the current just as Corinth felt her own skin ripping apart, her mouth opening to scream and filling up with black water. Just before the black water swept over her, she pried open her eyes and she was looking straight into Wanda’s. Wanda was holding the baby, a slippery thing covered by a fine film of reddish brown stain. She had given birth to a bog baby after all, Corinth thought, and then Wanda waved another bundle of burning grass across her face and the black water rose up and swallowed her.
When she awoke, Wanda told her that the baby had breathed its last breath while she, Corinth, slept. When she heard the words, she closed her eyes and let the black water close over her again. It was broad daylight when she awoke the next time, but whether it was the same day or the next or the one after that, she had no idea. Every time she opened her eyes the light was too bright. Wanda gave her more tea and she would fall back to sleep until one time when she awoke and Wanda said to her, “It is time.”
When she got to her feet, she could feel a current of blood flood out between her legs into the moss that Wanda had padded there. She could feel it leaking out of her with every step she took out of the cabin and into the bog as each step sunk deeper into the cushiony ground. She’d never walk out of here, she thought when they reached a place of open water. Corinth leaned against a tamarack tree to keep herself from falling. Wanda placed into her arms a swaddled bundle that was so weightless Corinth was sure her arms must be numb. “You must say good-bye to her,” Wanda said, “or its spirit will never be at peace and it will follow you wherever you go.”
Corinth looked up through the tight-bunched needles of the tamarack tree and said the words that Wanda told her to say. When she was done, Wanda held out her hands to take the baby back, but Corinth shook her head. She knelt by the side of the pond and, cradling the baby, bent over until the water reached her shoulders and her arms, and only then, when her skin and the child’s were both stained the color of parchment and old lace, did she look into her child’s face. But it was like looking at something that had happened a long time ago.
She felt how easy it would be to bend over just a little more and sink to the bottom of the bog, where her flesh and her child’s would cling together for all time. She felt Wanda’s eyes on her back. Not stopping her.
But then she remembered what her mother had said about the girls who took their own lives and how their spirits were never free. She imagined herself caught for all time in this place, her unhappy spirit dragging the child’s down into the muck. Better to let it go free.
“Good-bye, little one,” she said, realizing as she spoke that she hadn’t given the child a name. But it was too late. The baby’s face was already vanishing in the water, like a candle extinguished in the night.
The flickering lights of the fireflies have disappeared from the gardens at Bosco, replaced by the lights from the candles that the servants carry down the fountain allée to the grotto in preparation for the séance. Corinth checks that the wires are firmly tucked into her sleeve pockets and finds in one the hellebore root she dug up from the garden two days ago. The same root that she remembers removing from her sleeve and putting away in her toiletries case, but when she opens the case, she can’t find it, and the handkerchief in which she wrapped it is also gone. She examines the twisted root and then sniffs it, which causes her to sneeze three times. Her mother had told her that, ground and mixed in a drink, the hellebore root could make a man’s heart beat when it had stopped, but that too much of it would stop his heart for good. As she slips the root back into the toiletries case, she wonders why Aurora Latham would have planted it in her garden.
In the library Milo Latham opens the hidden shelf where he keeps his scotch and pours a glass for Tom Quinn. “Here,” he says, handing him the heavy cut-glass tumbler with its two inches of amber-colored liquid. “My private stock imported from the island of Islay off the coast of Scotland. I have to keep it locked up or else Aurora’s painters and gardeners would piss it all away.”
While Latham turns back to the cabinet to pour his own glass, Tom takes a sip and winces at the taste. Like drinking peat. When Latham turns around, though, he takes a larger swig and nods appreciatively. “That’s grand,” he says.
“Drink up,” Milo says, draining half a glassful in one swallow. “You’ll need some fortification for tonight’s show. Let’s try not to get anyone killed this time.”
“Like I told you, Mr. Latham, the arrow that killed Frank Campbell didn’t come from the bow you gave me. I didn’t even get a chance to use it; I was too busy putting frogs down Mrs. Ramsdale’s dress.”
“I bet you were,” Latham says, draining the last of his drink and turning to pour himself another. “Listen, I don’t care about Campbell; I’m glad to be rid of him and I squared everything with the doctor. But I don’t want any mistakes tonight. I’m paying you good money to make these séances convincing so my wife will be satisfied that the spirits of our children are at rest and we can go on with our lives. I’m sick and tired of living in a goddamned crypt.” He drains his glass and puts it down so forcibly that the crystal chimes against the ormolu tabletop. Then he crosses the alcove to a writing desk against the far wall, takes out a sheet of paper and a pen, and begins to write. Tom sees that his own glass is empty and, since Latham has left the bottle out, pours himself another.
“Pour me one, too, while you’re at it,” Latham calls from the desk. “I’m writing up a bill of sale for you, Mr. Quinn. I noticed that you admired my hunting cabin when we met there last month.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” Tom says, the scotch bottle poised over Latham’s glass. “The deal was cash.” Cash he’ll need, he thinks, if he’s going to take Corinth away from here.
“Well, I haven’t that much cash on me at the moment, Mr. Quinn. Real estate’s becoming quite valuable in the Adirondacks, especially with the state buying up land for their precious park. I think you’ll find that you can sell this parcel for more than the amount we agreed upon. Besides, I’ve been meaning to sell it for some time now—bad memories, you understand, from the trips I took there with the children.” Latham blots the ink and folds the paper in half. Turning, he finds Tom Quinn right behind him holding two glasses of scotch. He takes the one offered him and gives Tom the paper. “Good hunting,” he says, clicking his glass against Tom’s and bolting down another two ounces of the Laphroaig. Tom nods at the toast, not sure if his host is talking about the cabin now or tonight’s activities. Then he takes a sip of the scotch and finds that the taste has begun to grow on him.
Tonight there is no procession to the grotto. Corinth makes her way down the fountain allée accompanied only by the purl of the water and the rustle of the wind moving through the cypresses. Lonely sounds, certainly, but for now at least wholly natural. There’s no singing in the fountains, no sighing in the wind. Wanda Norris, standing outside the grotto with a candelabra held aloft to light her way into the passage behind the river god, looks solid and substantial and very human. There’s no mistaking her tonight for an animated statue. Corinth is determined that there be no magic, no stray whiff of spirit, in tonight’s proceedings. Aurora Latham, like half a dozen of the women she’s been employed by over the years, needs to say good-bye to her children just as Corinth said good-bye to hers. She has never in the ten years since she knelt by the water in the bog caught a glimpse of that tea-stained face, and she intends that after tonight Bosco will be as rid of its ghosts as she has been of hers.
The table has been set up just as last night, close enough to the stone bench so that one of the circle can sit there. They’ve left that seat for her. The men of the party rise as she enters, and Tom moves his chair so she can sit down on the stone bench, next to Milo Latham and directly across from Signore Lantini. Aurora sits next to her husband, Mrs. Ramsdale next to Tom. When she’s seated, Corinth looks up and for a moment, instead of men and women, she sees the circle assembled earlier today in the attic by little Alice: the two dolls in the place of the women, the carved wooden bear and stuffed goose in Milo Latham’s and Signore Lantini’s places. Only Tom’s eyes meet hers with human warmth instead of a glassy stare. She blinks her eyes and the members of the circle regain their human features.