The Ghost Orchid

by Carol Goodman

  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.

  Chapter Five

  “The third line is the prisoner of the rhyme,” Zalman announces at breakfast.

  “Why is that?” I ask.

  “I should think it would be obvious,” Bethesda says, lifting the silver serrated spoon (part of the original silverware Aurora designed for Bosco when, at the end of her life, she was planning the estate’s conversion to an artists’ colony) from the edge of her grapefruit and pointing it in my direction. “It’s the first line that has to conform to one of the other lines. It has to rhyme with the first line if you’re writing an Elizabethan sonnet—”

  “And with the second if it’s going to be a Petrarchan sonnet,” Zalman finishes for her, beaming across the table at Bethesda. “You’re a fan of the sonnet, then, Miss Graham?”

  Bethesda saws a sliver of grapefruit onto her spoon and chews it
thoughtfully before answering. I realize I’m holding my breath, afraid that Bethesda will unleash one of her critical storms on poor Zalman, who looks so innocent, from his gleaming bald pate to the sprig of rosemary in the buttonhole of his pale blue Mexican wedding shirt.

  “When it’s done well,” Bethesda answers, when she has swallowed her mouthful of grapefruit.

  “I don’t see the point of it,” Nat says. “Why write in an antiquated form? Isn’t it a bit of an affectation?”

  “My teacher, Richard Scully, always said that there was a discipline to working within a form,” I say, anxious to defend Zalman.

  “Dick Scully?” Nat asks, taking a sip of his black coffee. “Is he the one who encouraged to you to write a gothic romance?”

  “I’m not—” I begin, not sure what to be more hurt by—the disparaging way he’s referred to my mentor or his calling my novel a romance.

  “Isn’t everything a form of some sort?” David Fox puts in. I give him a small smile, sure that he’s trying to defend me, but wishing he’d leave it. It’s foolhardy, really, considering he’s the only nonwriter at the table. In the first week of October all the artists and composers in the outlying cottages left; only the four of us writers and David Fox have remained in the main house for the winter residency. “The thriller, the gothic romance, the novel of manners,” David continues, “the angry-young-man bildungsroman? Isn’t that your genre, Nathaniel?”

  A deathly silence falls over the table that only Zalman, humming to himself as he butters his toast, seems oblivious of. Has David really just called Nat Loomis a genre writer? Although I know he’s only trying to speak up for me, I’m afraid he’s gone too far.

  Finally, after taking another sip of coffee and assembling his features into the patient mask of someone dealing with a very young and not very bright child, Nat answers. “Some writers are slaves to the form. They’re called genre writers. And some endeavor to explode the form. They’re called artists.”

  “I see,” David says, “and so what exactly in your novel Saratoga—”

  “Sacandaga,” Nat corrects, his hand trembling slightly as he puts down his coffee cup.

  “Yes, Sacandaga. What in Sacandaga explodes the form? If I recall, it’s about a boy staying at his grandfather’s cottage for the summer—”

  “You’ve read it?” Nat asks with barely disguised surprise. His voice is calm, but his hand, still touching the rim of his coffee cup, is trembling. I can hear the faint ring of china rattling against china and the wings of the bluebirds painted on the cup are fluttering. “I didn’t realize your reading extended beyond Burpee’s seed catalog.”

  “Boys,” Bethesda says reprovingly, but Nat and David both smile at her as if they each had no idea what her problem might be. They’re engaged in a friendly discussion, their faces say, but only a fool—or someone as innocent of envy and malice as Zalman Bronsky—wouldn’t feel the tension in the room. I can’t help but feel partly responsible, since David started this to protect me, and, oddly, I feel sorry for Nat. When he gets angry or scared, I’ve noticed, his ears quiver and you can imagine what he looked like as a kid. I can picture him as that boy in his first novel, hiding in the woods behind his grandfather’s cottage, scared of the old man and trying to get a moment to himself to read instead of having to go out again on those dreaded fishing trips. I can almost hear his grandfather’s stern voice calling him, Nathaniel—

  “Oh, I like a novel now and again,” David drawls. He’s from Texas, I’ve learned, but only sounds that way when it suits him. “And I liked yours fine. Especially the fishing parts. Only I don’t really see what makes it any different from any other boy-growing-up story, say The Catcher in the Rye, or Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories—”

  “I’d be happy to include myself in that company,” Nat says, his ears twitching. I get another clear picture of him as a boy, leaning against a tree, reading—

  “Of course,” I say, “those are classic influences. It’s not as if Nat modeled his book on the Hardy Boys—”

  A crashing sound cuts short my ill-conceived intervention. Nat’s coffee cup lies in its saucer, in a mess of blue and white splinters and black coffee. Nat himself is already out the door, Bethesda following close behind him. Zalman looks up surprised and then begins mopping up the black coffee with his napkin. David looks at me and laughs.

  “What’s so funny?” I say.

  “Don’t you see?” he says. “Nat’s just exploded his form!”

  I head outside after breakfast. I feel that I need a breath of fresh air after the altercation between Nat and David, but it’s colder than I expected. Indian summer, which had lingered through the first weeks of October, has come to an abrupt end. The ilex trees are still green, but much of the surrounding foliage has turned color and fallen. Having grown up in northwest New York, the abruptness of autumn shouldn’t surprise me and yet, when I first saw the gardens in all their overgrown greenery, I imagined them staying like that throughout the winter. Now, though, there are denuded spots in the hillside where statues that lay hidden through the summer peer out, their lichen-stained faces and broken limbs appearing trapped in the tangle of bare branches. I remember the demonic face of the Green Man that David showed me weeks ago and wonder what else lies beneath the underbrush waiting to be uncovered.

  Although it’s definitely too cold to work outside in the garden today, I can’t bear the thought of going back to my room. It’s a perfectly nice room—certainly the most luxurious one I’ve ever slept in—but I’ve been feeling increasingly uneasy in it, especially in the mornings, when the sound of Nat’s manual typewriter beats a maddening rhythm in my skull and the image of him at his desk seems to invade my room. I especially don’t want to listen to it today after what happened in the breakfast room. Nat must hate me now, I think, heading down the path on the west side of the hill. What on earth possessed me to mention the Hardy Boys?

  But then I know what it was. The picture of young Nat I conjured up, hiding in the woods. He’d been reading one of the Hardy Boys stories. Surely it was a detail I just plucked from the air—maybe it was even in Nat’s novel—but no, I remember now that along with the vision I had I heard Nat’s grandfather calling him. He called him Nathaniel, not the name of the narrator in the novel. And when I heard the voice, what I felt was that I understood why Nat hates to be called Nathaniel, because he called him that. Maybe if I could explain to Nat . . . what? That I heard voices? That I felt his pain. I could just imagine how he’d react to that.

  “I swear I didn’t tell her.”

  The voice comes from around the next bend in the path. I freeze and wait, willing the voice to go away. I’ve heard enough voices this morning. But it continues, “Why on earth would I even talk to her? She’s a hack! And a plagiarist! She stole my title.”

  No, this isn’t a voice in my own head. It’s Bethesda Graham. And although I’d certainly guessed what she thought of me, I’m stung by her words. Hack, plagiarist. I turn around and walk quickly back up the hill, but the words pursue me. I know I’ve put too much distance between us, but it’s as if I can still hear their condemnation. Phony, fake. In my eagerness to get away from them, I head off the path. The sound I make crashing through the dry underbrush is deafening, but I can still hear the insults, only they’re no longer in Bethesda’s voice. I can’t recognize these voices, there are so many, a throng of them, as if in a crowded auditorium, jeering at me. Charlatan, fraud, witch. Thorns drag at my clothes like hands plucking at me, trying to drag me down.

  When I break free from the brush, I’m scratched and breathless. I struggle up onto the terrace and head for the French doors that lead into the library. A gust of wind snakes in at my heels as if it had been coiled in the shrubbery, only waiting for an opportunity to gain entrance to the house. When I finally close the doors, I lean my back against them and breathe in the silence. The two Morris chairs by the fire are empty, the cushions on the side divans still fresh and undented from the morning
housekeeping rounds. Standing on the threshold, I have a sense of relief that seems to go well beyond the good luck of getting the library to myself. It’s as if real pursuers had chased me up the hill and I have come here seeking refuge from danger, instead of just a quiet place to get some work done. Then I hear a rustling from the alcove and realize I’m not alone after all.

  Coming farther into the room, I see David Fox, ensconced at the library table in the alcove, drawings and blueprints spread out on it and every available nearby surface.

  “Oh, I guess I’d better find someplace else—” I begin, but before I can finish my sentence, David has sprung up from his seat, scattering sheets of paper to the floor.

  “No, don’t go,” he says. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to show you.” He pulls me to the desk and begins riffling through a thick pile of blueprints. There must be a dozen of them, each as large as a full New York Times page, stretched out on the mission library table and held down by an assortment of smooth white stones. When he moves the stones back from the edge of one, it springs into a roll, like a pill bug curling into itself, only the paper, which is old and dry, snaps like a small firecracker. I look over my shoulder nervously, sure that at any moment we will be rebuked for breaking the sacred silence of Bosco.

  “It’s in here someplace,” David says, apparently unconcerned about the “no talking” rule. “I thought it would help you in following the movements of your characters.”

  “That’s okay,” I tell him. “I have a floor plan of the house that I’m working with and I’ve made a rough sketch of the garden. I should really be getting back to work—” I take a step backward, but David still has a hold of my hand.