The Ghost Orchid (6 page)

“Don’t you own one of the glove factories in Gloversville, Milo?” Mrs. Ramsdale asks Milo Latham.

“Yes, Latham Gloves.” He answers Mrs. Ramsdale’s question, but his gaze is fastened on Tom Quinn now.

“Veramente!”
Lantini exclaims. “Gloves and lumber! I didn’t know your business ventures were so . . . how do you say? . . .
diverso.
”

“Leather and lumber both come from the same source,” Latham answers, regarding the Italian with unconcealed contempt. “Our great northern woods. My land holdings in the Adirondacks afforded such a quantity of deer pelts that it made sense to go into the leather-processing business.”

“When I think of all the poor slain deer . . .” Aurora says, fanning herself with a black lace fan of Italian design that Corinth recognizes as a type made by the nuns of a certain order in Rome.

“And yet, my wife is one of our very best customers!” Latham says, lifting his glass to Aurora. “A dozen pairs of gloves are delivered to her each month, in all the latest colors and styles.”

“I notice that Miss Blackwell is also a devotee,” Aurora says, nodding at Corinth’s gloved hands.

“I apologize for wearing gloves at the table,” Corinth says. “I’m afraid that my hands are so sensitive to . . . certain sense impressions that I find it unbearable to touch anything with my bare hands. I’m not sure where these gloves were made, though . . .”

“Why, I believe I can see the manufacturer’s label here,” Tom Quinn says, touching the hem of her glove and turning it over to reveal the label. His fingers merely graze the underside of her wrist, but Corinth feels a wave of heat course up her arm and across her chest.

“Bravo, Mrs. Latham. You have indeed recognized your husband’s handiwork,” Tom Quinn says, taking his hand away from her wrist.

When Corinth looks up, she sees Mrs. Ramsdale watching her and her pain is so apparent in her eyes that Corinth feels it herself—a twinge deep in her womb, just where life first quickens, but this sensation has nothing to do with life.

As soon as she gets back to her room Corinth strips off her leather gloves and lets them fall to the floor in a crumpled heap. She leans back against the door, closing her eyes and willing her heartbeat to slow. She’d known that she might have a problem with the mistress of the house, but she hadn’t anticipated having to deal with Tom Quinn or his jealous employer. When she opens her eyes, she is calmer, but still warm. She steps toward the window, but then, noticing the delicate pale green gloves on the floor, and remembering how much they cost, she picks them up. A slip of paper, folded into quarters, falls out of one.

Corinth unfolds it and reads the message written in the familiar handwriting.
Meet me in the Grotto . . .

She stretches the gloves over the wooden forms she’s set up on the dressing table, smoothing out their wrinkles, and then leans across the glass perfume bottles and leather cases to open the window above the table, craning her neck to let the cool, moist air touch her face. It’s not enough. She needs to feel the air on her throat, her breasts . . . she feels trapped in her clothes. Sitting down at the table, she takes out a buttonhook from one of the leather cases and starts undoing the buttons down the back of her dress. Aurora had offered her the use of her maid, but she declined, explaining that she required a great deal of solitude to nurture the trance state. She peels the dress down to her waist and lets the breeze from the garden bathe her overheated skin.

When she feels cooler, she opens her toiletry case and checks to see if the root she dug up in the garden is carefully hidden. Then she pulls out of the case the wad of spider silk she took from the hedge. She stretches it between her fingertips and holds it up to the window to watch the fine silken threads move in the breeze. She lets it brush against the underside of her wrist, but instead of the crawling sensation she experienced when she stepped through the web in the garden, she remembers the feel of Tom’s fingers on her wrist.

Yes, she says to herself, pushing away the thought, this will do nicely for ectoplasm. She has only to let a thread of it loose at an opportune moment during the séance. Of course it would be easier with a partner.

She stuffs the spider silk into a corner of the Florentine leather case and snaps the lid shut, closing, too, the image of Tom Quinn’s face that briefly appeared in her mind. No, he can’t be trusted. That was only too clear from what happened in Gloversville.

Besides, she was perfectly capable of operating on her own. For reassurance she slips one of the flexible wires out of her corset and fits it into the long narrow slots sewn into her dress cuffs and, wrestling her arms back into the narrow sleeves, practices levitation. She has to make several small adjustments to the bend in the wires, but on her third try the little dressing table rises from the floor to a height level with the windowsill, its burden of cut-glass perfume bottles and silver-backed brushes gleaming in the moonlight, the gloves on their wooden forms hovering like disembodied hands. She keeps it there a moment to see how steady she can hold the table, but when she lifts her gaze to the window and sees the woman standing below in the garden looking up at her, the table drops with a loud crash.

Mrs. Ramsdale, in the room next to Corinth’s, hears the thump. A certain amount of disruption is to be expected, she thinks, having a medium next door. Perhaps she should ask Aurora to change her room, but then, it’s one of the very nicest suites in the house, with a large bedroom facing the garden and its own sitting room at the eastern corner of the house, from which she can see the drive and all the arriving guests. She’s often wondered why Aurora doesn’t take it for herself, but Milo prefers one of the rooms facing the forest to the north and Aurora’s room must, of course, adjoin his. No, if anyone should move, it ought to be the little spiritualist.

Wincing at the pain in her side as she shifts in her bed, Mrs. Ramsdale tries to go back to the scene she’d been making in her head, but instead of picturing her heroine, Emmaline Harley, she thinks of the
thump
and pictures the twined columns of the Queen Anne bed in the room next door hitting the wall between the two rooms. She pictures that fire-flecked dark hair spread out on the white sheets, a slim hand (she noticed, at dinner, the medium’s unusually long fingers, a sign, she has always believed, of a rapacious nature and a tendency to thievery) grasping the bedpost, then covered by a larger, masculine (but still beautifully molded) hand. Tom Quinn’s hand, which she has watched for so many hours as he turns her spoken words, things of air, into written ones, the ones that last.

A fresh pain blooms in her side and she reaches for the little green bottle on the night table. It’s only her imagination, she thinks, taking a sip straight from the bottle, her overactive imagination, which is both the novelist’s curse and blessing. Even though a blind person could have told they’d met before (she’s never bought that story about the impoverished schoolmistress-mother from Gloversville), that doesn’t mean there’s anything between them. She takes another sip and now when she closes her eyes, she sees only swirls of color: turquoise and jade and violet, the colors of the sea below the cliffs of the Villa Syrene, where her heroine has been imprisoned by the mysterious Prince Pavone. As she falls asleep, she imagines herself drifting above the cliffs, high over the water, free of pain at last.

Even after Corinth has gone down into the garden and stood in front of the statue whose gaze had so startled her before in her room, she still doesn’t feel easy. She is not the nervous sort. She has sat through séances while ropes of ectoplasm disgorged from the mouth of a twelve-year-old girl and hideous apparitions floated overhead. She’s had chairs and other articles of furniture pitched at her by putative ghosts and not-so-putative landladies. Once, at a revival on the outskirts of Buffalo, a snake handler tripped over her leg and spilled from his burlap sack into Corinth’s lap a six-foot-long boa constrictor. She had stayed perfectly still, staring straight into the snake’s yellow eyes, while the handler coaxed his charge back into its sack, and she hadn’t felt anything like the dread she’d felt ten minutes ago meeting the gaze of this inanimate piece of marble.

There’s certainly nothing threatening about the statue, which stands just below the main terrace to the west of the fountain allée. A young girl, draped in Grecian robes, one arm folded in front of her breasts, her empty marble eyes cast upward as if listening to the fluttering wings of a descending god. She’s probably one of those silly girls who are seduced by a god in disguise. Corinth has seen dozens like them in the gardens of Italy and France. In fact, the statue’s antiquity suggests that the Lathams looted it from some impoverished European noble—making it the foolish girl’s second abduction. No doubt it was the girl’s upward-tilting eyes and a chance moonbeam that gave Corinth the impression that she was staring at her window. She follows the statue’s gaze back to the house and is startled to notice a girl in a short white chemise standing at one of the windows.

Corinth draws her dark cloak around her and steps behind the statue into the shadows of the ilex trees. When the girl’s gaze doesn’t follow her, Corinth assumes she hasn’t been seen. Still, she chides herself for not being more careful. Instead of taking the central path by the fountain allée she slips into the densely planted grove and, keeping her cloak tightly wrapped around her, makes her way down the hill.

She finds the secret entrance to the grotto just where he wrote it would be, behind the left knee of the reclining river god—the one representing the Sacandaga. She follows the narrow passage, trying to keep her cloak from brushing the damp rock walls, and emerges onto a shallow ledge behind the waterfall. She expected it to be dark, but instead she is dazzled by the light that at first she thinks is coming from the water. A hundred phosphorescent fish seem to be swimming in the underground cave, but then she realizes that the light comes from candles set in niches recessed into the grotto walls, their light reflected in the water and cast back up onto the domed ceiling, which is glazed in ceramic tile and encrusted with jeweled sea creatures: spiny lobsters and hook-tailed sea horses, urchins and long-tentacled octopi. Reclining on a shallow bench that is carved into the rock wall is a robed figure, who might be another river god, only Corinth is in no danger of mistaking Milo Latham for a god of any sort.

“Did anyone see you come?” he asks, already pushing away her cloak and pulling her down into his lap.

She thinks about the girl in the white chemise but tells him no, because it’s what he wants to hear. He’s holding her breast with one hand and with the other parting her legs. Corinth straddles him and lowers herself down, letting out a gasp that Milo takes for pleasure but which is really the pain of her knees scraping against the rough stone bench. She braces her hands against the wall to lift herself up and feels herself soaring above him—she is the winged god swooping down to take whatever she needs—but when she closes her eyes, she sees the girl in the white chemise standing at the window. No, no reason to tell him about her. The window she was standing at was Corinth’s own. Corinth stretches her arms high above herself on the wall, finds a crack in the stone, and digs her fingers into it until she can feel the stone scraping away her skin.