The Ghost Orchid

by Carol Goodman

  “You’re still mad at me for what happened this morning. Honestly, Ellis, I didn’t realize Nat couldn’t take a little ribbing. And I was tired of hearing him and Beth ragging on you.”

  “I don’t need your protection,” I say, a little more coldly than I’d meant to . . . I can see the hurt in his eyes. “But I appreciate what you were trying to do.”

  “Nah, you’re still mad . . . but I’m going to make it up to you. You don’t have any floor plan like this,” he says, grinning. “And as for the garden—”

  He stops midsentence and lifts a finger to his lips. I hear it, too—the rusty latch of the French doors opening. Although I’m embarrassed to be caught “conversing” during writing hours, I’m startled by the violence of David’s reaction, which is to gather up an armful of blueprints and shove me into the narrow gap between the bookcase and the alcove wall. I can see Bethesda come in, take a book down from a shelf, and sit down in one of the Morris chairs by the fireplace. She doesn’t, however, open the book. Instead she stares into space, her eyes unnaturally wide, as if she’s holding back tears.

  I turn to David, who’s so close that his face is practically touching mine, and turn my palms up. What are we supposed to do now? I hope to convey by the gesture, There’s no other way out of the library.

  But David is grinning, his face at this close range disturbingly like the stone satyrs in the garden. He reaches around the back of the bookcase, as if feeling for a light switch, and suddenly the bookcase swings open silently on well-oiled hinges.

  I can feel my mouth open, gaping like one of the fountain satyrs, but luckily David has already disappeared into the dark passage and can’t see how ridiculous I look.

  “How did you find this?” I whisper when we’ve pulled the bookcase partially closed behind us.

  “I found it on one of the old plans for the house,” he says. “Here, hold these for a minute.”

  He passes over the heavy roll of blueprints and digs in the pocket of his corduroy blazer until he finds a flashlight. I can see all this in the faint light that seeps in through the cracks around the bookcase, but once he’s got the flashlight in his hand, he pulls the bookcase more firmly closed and the seams of light vanish. I picture the lid of a stone sarcophagus closing, the light rimming the narrow rectangular slab, and my throat constricts in panic. When David switches on the flashlight, though, I see that we’re surrounded by ample space, on a landing at the foot of a flight of stairs, which, while narrow, suggests there’s a way out.

  “Claustrophobic?” David asks, studying me closely.

  “Not really,” I lie. “Just afraid of the dark.”

  “And you’re writing a book about a medium?”

  I smile, considering whether I should tell him that it’s worse than that, that not only am I writing a book about a medium but I’m the daughter of one as well, and that I’d disappointed my mother early on by being unable to sit through her circles. But David is already pointing the flashlight up the stairs.

  “We’d better get you out of here, then,” he says. “You go first and I’ll hold the light.”

  I would rather hold the flashlight myself, but I start up the stairs, happy just to be moving, especially since I can see a door now at the top of the flight of stairs. When I put my hand on it, though, David lays his hand over mine and pulls it away from the door.

  “That opens into the central suite on the second floor,” he says, “Nat’s room. Listen. I think he’s gotten over our little morning spat.”

  I lean closer to the door and hear the clatter of typewriter keys. “He’s probably turning me into a nasty character already,” David says. “That is what you writers do, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes,” I answer. I notice that there’s another door across from it and wonder if it goes into my room.

  “Does anyone else know about this passage?” I ask, nervously imagining midnight intruders—or daytime intruders checking my laptop for signs of progress on my novel.

  “I don’t think so. There’s only one plan that included them, and you’d have to be an architect to even recognize them on the drawing.”

  “ ‘Them’?” I ask as we reach the door at the top of the second flight of stairs. I put my hand on it and try to push it open. Claustrophobic or not, I’ve had enough of this narrow space. The door doesn’t budge. David reaches over my head and releases a small metal catch that springs the door open into a room that, despite its northern exposure, looks positively incandescent to my light-starved eyes.

  “Oh, yes, there’s a whole network of secret passages,” he says, “and not just in the house.”

  “What do you mean, not just in the house?” I ask.

  Instead of answering, David takes the blueprints from me and begins to unroll them across his unmade bed. I look around, nervously wondering what I’m doing here in David’s room. The last thing I need is to have it whispered that I spent my time at Bosco sleeping around—and I know how quickly rumors fly in the writing community. To make things worse, the furnishings exude masculinity, the drapes and rug a deep red, the bed so massive and rustic it looks as if some arboreal giant had uprooted the living trees from the forest to furnish his lair. The bedposts are rough, unpeeled birch logs topped with crudely carved bear heads. An enormous eagle spreads its wings across the top of the headboard. When he’s found the blueprint he was looking for, David pats a corner of the bed for me to sit down. I lower myself gingerly onto the very edge of the mattress, which creaks under my weight and releases a smell so woodsy and musky it’s as if the somber wooden bears guarding the four corners of the bed have awoken from their long hibernation and exhaled their stale winter breaths.

  “Look, this is a plan that Lantini drew up in the summer of 1892. The springs had already started failing and Aurora had commissioned him to create a new system of pumps to draw water up the hill to feed the fountains.”

  I lean over the unrolled paper to make out the faded drawing. I’m expecting a technical outline—a blueprint—but I’m pleasantly surprised to find a pen-and-ink drawing, washed over with pale watercolor and touched with white, black, and red chalk. It looks like a scene from Italy, complete with little figures dressed in nineteenth-century costumes strolling along the paths. Water cascades down the central fountain allée under the benign gaze of the Muses, gushing out of the mouths of satyrs and from the full breasts of sphinxes, finally falling in a great cataract beneath the hooves of the winged Pegasus.

  “Wow, did the gardens really look like this?”

  David laughs. “Well, they did to Lantini. I believe he may have been embellishing a bit. This was his idea of what the gardens would look like when he completed them.”

  “Completed them? You mean they weren’t finished by 1892?”

  David shakes his head. “No, they were never finished. Aurora was always adding another statue or commanding Lantini to design more giochi d’acqua, and then, after Milo Latham’s death and the decline of the lumber business, her money began to dry up.”

  “Like the springs.”

  David smiles. “You find it hard to resist a simile, don’t you?”

  I smile back and settle myself more securely on the bed. “Yeah, my writing workshop was always telling me to pare down on the figurative language, but to me it’s the really fun part of writing—the way something becomes something else. It’s like . . .”

  “Magic?” David asks.

  I blush, more embarrassed at what I’ve given away about myself than at sitting on the rumpled bed of this strange man. “I don’t mean to sound all mystical. More often than not, the end result doesn’t live up to my original vision.”

  “No, it never does. I think that was Aurora Latham’s problem,” David says, turning back to the drawing. “The vision she had of the garden far exceeded what Lantini could create for her out of marble and water and shrubbery. Look at the plantings in this picture: the trees and underbrush are practically tropical, and the cascading water looks as if Niagar
a had been let loose on the hillside.”

  I look more closely at the drawing. David is right. There’s something disturbing beneath the calm facade of this garden. The trees and bushes, lush and overgrown, seem to be encroaching on the marble terraces and graveled paths, looming over the heads of the couples strolling through the garden. The statues peer out of the dense underbrush like hunters lying in ambush, and the water rushes down the hill with so much force it appears as if the whole scene will be swept away at any moment.

  “It looks,” I say to David, “as if the garden were about to self-destruct.”

  “Yes, exactly! And it practically did. When the springs started to dry up, Aurora ordered Lantini to tunnel into the hill to tap deeper springs and build stronger pumps to draw more water up the hill. She practically excavated the whole hill! Look at this—” David unrolls a fragile piece of tracing paper from the pile of blueprints. “When I first found this, I wasn’t sure what it was because it had been separated from the drawing it was supposed to go with.” He holds up the paper so that I can see it. The paper is divided diagonally into halves; the upper triangle is empty, the bottom half is filled with a pattern of lines that look like the kind of maze you’d find on a diner place mat to entertain bored children. There’s even a circular pit of some sort at the bottom of the left-hand corner that could be the lair of the Minotaur.

  “Is it the plan to the maze?” I ask, remembering how David had led me through the winding paths so confidently.

  “No, it’s the wrong shape. I thought at first that it might be a plan for a maze that Aurora and Lantini never got around to executing, but then I realized what the shape reminded me of.” He lays the transparent paper down over the drawing of the garden and the lines fit perfectly into the slope of the hillside. I can’t, at first, understand what they’re supposed to represent. It looks like a nest of snakes slithering beneath the surface of the gay fountains and luxuriant foliage. Then I notice that each “snake” is attached to a jet or cascade of water.

  “Is it a plan for the pipes?” I ask, proud to have figured it out. I was never very good at those place-mat puzzles, having often been forced to leave Theseus lost midway in the labyrinth when my grilled cheese and chocolate milk arrived.

  David smiles. “Almost,” he says. “It’s a plan for the tunnels.”

  Chapter Six

  “I’ll need something that belonged to each of the children,” Corinth tells Aurora at breakfast.

  Her hostess takes a sip of tea and lifts her pale blue eyes to meet Corinth’s gaze. In the silence before she answers, Corinth has time to notice that her eyes look, if possible, even paler this morning, their color less like the blue in the teacup that she raises to her lips than the spaces where the blue has bled onto the white background. Flow blue, as an English countess once told Corinth that kind of china was called, a mistake, she added, in the firing process which you Americans have grown so fond of that our manufacturers now purposely produce it to send to your shores.

  If only all mistakes looked so lovely, Corinth thought at the time, admiring the softly blurred pattern, like a landscape in a fine rain. Looking now at her hostess’s eyes, she imagines that the grief of losing three children has leached her eyes of their color and she regrets asking for her children’s belongings so abruptly.

  “Do you mean to practice psychometry?” Mrs. Ramsdale asks. Aside from Mr. Campbell, who is up early to catch the morning light, she and Corinth are the only guests at breakfast. Milo Latham left the house before dawn to travel upriver to his lumber mill, and Signore Lantini, according to Aurora, is already at work in the garden effecting some adjustments to the fountains. No one has mentioned the whereabouts of Tom Quinn.

  “Psychometry?” Frank Campbell asks, pronouncing the word as if it were some kind of unmentionable disease. “What’s that?”

  “The belief that inanimate objects retain latent memories,” Mrs. Ramsdale answers. “I once saw a medium evoke a dinosaur from a lump of coal. Perhaps Miss Blackwell could conjure the Chinaman who painted this teacup,” she suggests, holding up the flow blue cup, her long, elegant fingers curled around the delicate china, “or the ox whose bones were crushed to make the china?”

  “Does it matter what objects?” Aurora asks, pushing away her teacup abruptly, as if it were tainted with blood.

  “Something special to the child . . . a favorite toy or piece of clothing . . .”

  “Really!” Mrs. Ramsdale exclaims. “Is it necessary to torture a grieving mother in this fashion?”

  Aurora lays her hand over the novelist’s hand. “Violet, remember that Miss Blackwell is here at my request.”

  “Is she? If I remember correctly, Mr. Latham was the first to mention Miss Blackwell’s name,” Mrs. Ramsdale says, looking in Corinth’s direction with a meaningful gaze. But meaning what? Corinth wonders. What does she know? She doesn’t believe that Tom would have told his employer about her history with Milo Latham, but Mrs. Ramsdale has keen powers of observation and she had been at Baden-Baden when Corinth and the Lathams were also in residence. She and Milo had been discreet, but the novelist may have picked up some whiff of scandal. In her experience, artists and writers often share something of the psychic gift.

  “I’m sure that when Mr. Latham mentioned the popularity of Miss Blackwell’s circles in the city,” Frank Campbell, buttering his toast, interjects, “he had no intention of suggesting that she be brought here. In fact, if I remember correctly, he was against the idea.”

  Campbell seems oblivious of not only the veiled glances exchanged between Aurora and Mrs. Ramsdale but of Corinth’s presence altogether. In fact, Corinth has the sudden impression that she herself is no longer in the room. As Mrs. Ramsdale and Mr. Campbell debate the point of whose idea it was to invite “the medium” to Bosco, she can feel herself growing cold, her toes and fingertips and the top of her scalp tingling, as if her body were being drained of blood, but instead of flowing downward, she can feel something—some vital essence—rising upward, quitting her body and then hovering a few feet above the breakfast table, where she regards her own body as a thing of no more substance or import than the china teacup it holds in its hand. She can feel her personality merging with the surrounding air, seeping into the atmosphere in the same way that the cobalt glaze on the teacup flows over the bounds of its pattern . . .

  And then she’s back in her body, spirit smacking into flesh so violently that she drops the teacup in her hand and it shatters in an explosion of blue and white shards, like sparks from a fire.

  “What a shame,” Mrs. Ramsdale says, rising from the table and shaking a few pieces of china from her lap. “Aren’t those the cups you had ordered especially from England for the children?”

  Aurora nods, and Corinth notices that in the china cabinet behind Aurora’s chair there’s a row of the flow blue cups, each settled into its matching saucer like a bird brooding on its nest.

  Mrs. Norris, who came silently into the room during Corinth’s trance, kneels with a broom and dustpan to collect the fragments.

  Frank Campbell rises from the table and follows Mrs. Ramsdale out of the breakfast room. Only Aurora and Corinth remain seated.

  “You’d better come with me to the children’s nursery,” Aurora says, lifting a shard of china impaled in the soft white flesh of her boiled egg, “to select the objects yourself.”

  After quitting the breakfast room, Mrs. Ramsdale follows Frank Campbell out onto the terrace and, leaning against the balustrade, watches him set up his easel and mix his paints. This gives her an excellent view, as well, of the main paths through the garden, just in case Tom Quinn has decided to take an early morning walk. It’s not like him to sleep so late, unless something kept him up late last night. The only person she sees in the garden, though, is the little Italian, who is crouched in front of one of the satyr fountains on the west side of the second terrace, his right arm buried up to its elbow in the satyr’s mouth. He pulls his arm out and produces a long curv
ed knife—a scythe—and uses it to cut back a vine that’s grown into the satyr’s mouth. Even from here Mrs. Ramsdale can hear Lantini lavishing elaborate Italian curses on the foliage that threatens to choke up his plumbing. Behind him, in the ilex grove, another marble face peers out of the underbrush as if overseeing the engineer’s progress with his brethren.

  “I’m surprised that Aurora has time to pose for you today,” she says, snapping open her parasol and angling it to protect her complexion from the morning sun and shield her face from anyone who might be looking from the house, “what with all the excitement of tonight’s entertainment.”

  “I have the background to work on,” he replies. “I’m nearly done with the figure of Mrs. Latham, anyway. Today I’ll be working on her.” He points to one of the Muses just below the edge of the terrace.

  “Ah, a model who knows how to remain still,” Mrs. Ramsdale observes. “You must be glad of the change.”

  “Mrs. Latham is a most cooperative model,” Campbell says in that prissy tone that Mrs. Ramsdale has come to recognize as the one he uses when he wishes to distinguish his position from hers. I am an artist, the tone implies, while you are of that damned mob of scribbling women writing trash for filthy lucre. As if he weren’t just as much a slave to his wealthy patrons as she is to her readers.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Ramsdale says, giving her parasol a twirl. “If there’s one thing Aurora is good at, it’s staying still. Like a cat stalking a mouse.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very apt analogy at all,” Campbell says, stroking his brush along the curve of the Muse’s breast. “Mrs. Latham possesses the stillness of eternity, not the cunning of a wild beast.”

  “Oh, yes, I know, she’s your Muse of Water.”

  Campbell waves his brush, splashing white paint on the balustrade. “You can mock if you like, Mrs. Ramsdale, but if you were a true artist, you would appreciate what she has created here. Her vision of Bosco as a haven for artists embraces the future, which is why I am so opposed to tonight’s ‘entertainment,’ as you call it.”