The Ghost Orchid Read online

  “It’s a funny thing about that line you gave me,” he says as we cross the main hallway.

  “Gave you?” I ask. “But I was just repeating something you said.”

  Zalman pauses at the door to the library and looks up at me, blinking his kind brown eyes. “I don’t think so,” he tells me.

  “But you must have,” I say, trying to laugh it off. “I couldn’t write a line of metered verse if my life depended on it.” And then, before he can question me further, I enter the library.

  Nat and Bethesda are already there, lounging in the best Morris chairs by the fire. David Fox is standing above Bethesda, resting one arm on the broad oak mantel, another glass of scotch by his elbow. Nat, I notice, is glaring at the architect. Maybe he’s jealous, I think, or, I suddenly feel sure, he’s angry at David for drinking up all the single-malt scotch.

  “We were just talking about Aurora Latham,” David says, pointing above the mantel at the painting of Bosco’s former mistress leaning against a marble column, her bare shoulders and the marble the same shade of creamy white against the velvety black backdrop of a night garden in which pale statues glow dimly in the distance. She is standing on the terrace at the top of the fountain allée, one slim hand extended toward a spray of water erupting from beneath the hoof of Pegasus, as if she had just commanded the water to flow. The artist has depicted her as a Greco-Roman goddess guarding the sacred spring of the Muses.

  “That’s the portrait by Frank Campbell, isn’t it?” I ask. “It wasn’t finished because he died of a heart attack while he was working on it.”

  “You seem to know a lot about Aurora Latham,” Bethesda says. “Are you writing about her?”

  “I’m writing a novel based on certain events in Aurora Latham’s life,” I say.

  “A historical romance?” Bethesda asks, smiling, but at Nat, not me. I can feel myself blushing and for a moment can’t think of anything to say.

  “Of course there’s no lack of sensational elements in Aurora’s life,” Bethesda goes on. “I’m sure it’s hard to resist exploiting them.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Perhaps you two could share material,” Nat says. “After all, Bethesda has the cooperation of the Board and the Latham heirs.”

  “Yes,” Bethesda says, glaring at Nat before turning back to me. “Do you?”

  “Well, they know I’m working on a novel that takes place here at Bosco in 1893,” I say, swallowing hard. It’s the first time I’ve discussed my work with Nat and Bethesda and they’re already attacking me—or at least Bethesda is. I can’t tell if Nat is defending her or egging Bethesda on. “Isn’t that what she was famous for—inspiring artists? What was it Frank Campbell called her?” I falter, trying to remember the phrase. I’d read it somewhere . . . or had I? Then it comes to me.

  “Muse of Water. That’s what he called her.”

  Bethesda turns deathly white at the words, as if I’d stolen something from her. “I suppose it’s the Blackwell scandal you’re interested in,” she says angrily. “That’s all anyone ever cares about. Not Aurora’s artistic vision—this sanctuary she created for artistic expression . . .” Bethesda throws her arms open wide as if to indicate not just the library but the whole house, the crumbling gardens, the four hundred acres of pine forest surrounding them. “She’s been defined by that one malicious act against her instead of by all the good she did.”

  “Well, not for me,” David Fox says. “I just want to know if she planted her hedges according to Francesco Colonna or Donato Bramante.” He’s trying to divert Bethesda’s attention to save me from her tirade. “What’s all this about a black well, anyway?”

  “Corinth Blackwell,” I explain, gaining strength from David’s attention. It doesn’t quite make up for Bethesda’s disdain, but at least it’s something. “Milo Latham brought her to Bosco in the summer of 1893 at Aurora’s request to contact the spirits of their three children who had died the year before in a diphtheria epidemic. She was a medium.”

  “Ah, a spiritualist,” Bronsky says, “like Madame Blavatsky. You know Yeats attended her séances . . .”

  “She was a charlatan,” Bethesda says, “and a con artist. She and her partner, a man by the name of Tom Quinn who had gained access to the estate that summer by posing as the amanuensis of Violet Ramsdale, a writer of execrable nineteenth-century melodramas”—here Bethesda pauses and looks straight at me as if to make clear to what literary tradition I belong—“kidnapped Alice Latham, the only Latham child who survived the diphtheria epidemic.”

  “They never proved that Corinth Blackwell was responsible,” I point out. “Both she and Quinn disappeared. Some people think that Quinn might have been the kidnapper and set up Corinth Blackwell.”

  “Ah, so that’s your angle.” Bethesda smiles at Nat, but he doesn’t smile back. “The medium as heroine. Don’t tell me—you’re calling your novel Entranced.”

  I’m about to tell her that there’s already a novel called Entranced by Nora Roberts, but then I’d be admitting to either reading Nora Roberts or having done an Internet search for the title, because I had thought of using it. But then Nat interrupts.

  “Hey—Muse of Water—isn’t that what you’re calling your book, Bethesda?”

  Although I wouldn’t have thought she could grow any paler, Bethesda turns a face so drained of color toward Nat that for a moment she looks more like one of the stone-cold statues in the garden than a living girl. Then without another word she rises and leaves the room.

  “What’s wrong with her?” David asks. “Why was she so hard on Ellis?” He’s approaching the decanter of scotch, but Nat reaches it before him and empties the last inch into his own glass.

  “It’s because you nabbed her title,” Nat says, pointing his glass in my direction—almost as if he’s toasting me for the feat. “Muse of Water. She found the phrase here last summer in a letter Frank Campbell wrote to Aurora, and she’s kept it to herself since then. Since he wrote the letter the day he died, Bethesda thought it was probably the only appearance of the phrase. Where in the world did you come upon it?”

  “I don’t know. I must have read it somewhere,” I say, although the truth is I have no idea where I first encountered the phrase.

  Later in my room I lie awake cursing myself for provoking Bethesda Graham’s anger. She’s a major reviewer, after all, famous for her scathing dissections of hopeful new novelists. I should have known that the phrase Muse of Water came from her. It’s not, I realized after checking the pamphlet and my research notes, anything I’d read or heard before. No, I heard it for the first time tonight, in the library, spoken as if someone had whispered it into my ear. Just as I heard the first line of Zalman’s poem and David Fox’s secret wish to leave the garden in ruins. Just as I’ve heard voices all my life that issue forth from no human lips. Sure, other writers may talk about hearing their characters speak to them and finding their voice, but I’m beginning to suspect they don’t hear the kind of voices I do.

  As if in mockery of my unhappiness, a girl’s laugh suddenly rises from the garden below my window. I get up, pulling my T-shirt down over my panties as I cross the cold floor to the half-opened window. For a moment the moonlight on all that white marble is blinding. All I can see is the terrace that wraps around the first story of the house. The paths that lead into the garden and down the hill, the crumbling fountain allée, the statues that stand on the ledges, all fade into the shadows of the cypresses, the dense ilex branches, the deep overgrown boxwood hedges, and, beyond the boxwood maze at the bottom of the hill, the deeper blackness of the pine forest. As I peer into the impenetrable gloom trying to find the source of the laughter, a light wind stirs the tops of the trees and carries with it, along with a scent of pine and copper, that same sweet odor of vanilla and cloves I’d caught on the terrace earlier. Something white sways just beyond the western edge of the terrace, and I realize it’s just the statue I saw earlier today, only someone must have draped a scarf around i
ts neck, because I can see the girl’s drapery floating on the breeze. Thank goodness, I think, the last thing I need is to add visions to my voices. I’m about to turn from the window when I see a white hand reach out to grasp the fluttering drapery and draw it close around her. A coppery taste pools in my mouth like blood, and I hurry back to bed before I can see anything else.

  I pull the covers over my head, but I can still hear the wind as it sweeps down the hill, skirts the Muses’ drapery, pushes into the open mouths of satyrs and sphinxes, swirls around the overgrown parterres of the rose garden, solves the puzzle of the boxwood-hedge maze, and finally settles into the grotto dug into the hillside where the stalactites still drip with the last drops of the last spring. There I can feel the wind go to ground, its voice muffled at last by the webs the tunnel spiders spin in the underground pipes of the old fountain.

  Tomorrow, though, it will rise again, carrying voices with its coppery breath, and even Bosco’s legendary silence won’t be able to still the voices in my head.

  Chapter Two

  “It’s a long walk to the top, miss. My instructions are to take you up to the front door.”

  “I want to see the fountain first,” Corinth tells the driver. “It’s what the house is famous for, isn’t it?”

  A sound emerges from the driver’s throat, but whether a cough or a laugh, Corinth can’t tell. His face, shielded by his broad-brimmed hat so that Corinth has been unable since he picked her up at the train station to see anything of his features, isn’t giving anything away. “One of the things it’s famous for,” he says, cracking his whip against the sweat-soaked backs of the horses. Then he leaves Corinth there at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the garden.

  The fountain is behind a hedge wall. Corinth can hear it murmuring to her, beckoning her through the arched opening carved out of the boxwood. It was the sound that made her tell the driver to stop, her heart beating against her tightly laced stays because it was the sound she’d been hearing for weeks now—ever since she’d agreed to come—a voice, heard just below the voices in the parlors, the shops, even the shouts on the city streets, muttering insistently in her ear, warning her not to go.

  But if she listened to all the voices she heard, she’d never get out of bed in the morning. Another voice—the one that was forever counting the change in her purse, adding the bills, weighing the tea and sugar in their sacks, and measuring the distance from her comfortable, well-heated hotel suite to the street—told her it was too much money to say no to. And when had she ever said no to any money at all?

  She’d managed to ignore, then, the murmurer, as she dubbed this new voice, until she heard it again at the gates of Bosco. This time the voice was unmistakably outside of her own head.

  “What is that?” she asked the driver.

  He told her it was the fountain, which she then remembered was, according to Milo Latham, the estate’s most famous attraction.

  It’s only water, she thought, the voice that’s been whispering in my ear all these weeks and ruining my sleep. It’s only water. She was so relieved that she decided to get out and have a look for herself.

  Now, though, as she stands outside the hedge wall listening to the fountain, she finds that she’s afraid. She! The famous Corinth Blackwell who has summoned spirits from the maw of hell for the entertainment and enlightenment of crowned heads of Europe and persons of quality and discernment everywhere! Afraid of a little water!

  Well, not for long. Corinth steps through the arch and finds herself facing a ten-foot-tall wall of greenery. She’s wandered into a maze.

  My wife, Aurora, enjoys puzzles, Milo Latham told her when he made the proposal for her to come and spend the summer at Bosco. I try to keep her entertained, but there’s only so much that I can do. She’s asked for you especially.

  So I’m to be an . . . entertainment?

  Think of yourself, rather, as a diversion.

  She closes her eyes, listens to the water, and turns left.

  Last summer at the Prince’s villa in Viterbo the guests devised an amusing test for her—a diversion for a summer evening. They blindfolded her and let her loose in the hedge maze. She could have pointed out that her abilities as a medium had very little to do with those used to navigate a maze, but then that wouldn’t have been sporting. Instead, she had a little talk with the head gardener, during which several coins passed from the little pocket in her sleeve into his rough glove, and learned that most mazes follow a few simple rules.

  Within five minutes she’s solved this one and finds herself at the heart of the maze: a parterred rose garden, its crimson rosebushes in full odiferous bloom, with a circular fountain at its center.

  So this is who’s been whispering in my ear all these weeks. It’s a bit of a disappointment, really. After all the fountains she’s seen in Europe—Bernini’s muscular river gods in the Piazza Navona, the Alley of the Hundred Fountains at the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, the Fountain of the Deluge at the Villa Lante—she expected something grander. After all, Aurora Latham’s been to all those places, too, and with the money to buy some of the real articles. She’s even been known to “buy up” the sculptors and landscapers as well—one of whom, a master of fountain installation and water “effects,” is staying here at Bosco even now.

  Corinth expected more than this lone figure of a girl kneeling at the center of a circular pool, her hands cupped together to catch the spray from a single jet of water. The girl’s face is hidden by her loose hair, so Corinth walks around to the front of the fountain and is startled when she meets the girl’s gaze. From beneath a fringed headband, the girl looks up like a wild animal that’s been caught. Her clothes, which at first glance appeared to be Grecian drapery, are animal skins, fringed and beaded, which cling to her body. She reminds Corinth of a statue she saw only last fall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—certainly not of the real Indians that she used to see at the settlement on the Sacandaga Vly.

  More imposing is the statue that stands in a boxwood niche behind the fountain, of a youth of regal bearing and somewhat feminine features, wearing a sort of fringed toga. Carved into his pedestal is the name Jacynta.

  My wife makes up stories for the children, Milo Latham told her, all about a mythical hero named Jacynta and a beautiful Indian maiden named Ne’Moss-i-Ne.

  Corinth scans the marble rim of the fountain to see if the girl’s name is inscribed there, but it isn’t. She notices, instead, the low, dark-leafed shrub that grows around the pool. She kneels and breaks off a leaf, sniffs it, and then digs in the loose soil until she’s unearthed the roots and, still wearing her gloves—which are of such a fine, supple leather that her fingers are as agile in them as if they had been bare—slips a piece of the root into the sleeve of her dress. When she’s done, she quickly scans the garden, but the only eyes on her are the blind marble eyes of the girl in the fountain, who, she notices now, is bound to the rustic plinth on which she kneels. The straps, cleverly carved to look like leather, seem to press into the girl’s soft white breasts—an effect so realistic that Corinth feels a sympathetic constriction in her own chest. She turns away from the statue, reflecting that whoever ordered those restraints carved out of marble took more delight in their bondage than their release. Nor can she help but feel, as she leaves the rose garden, that she’s stepping straight into a net fashioned of threads stronger than the leather thongs that bind poor little Ne’Moss-i-Ne.

  In fact, as she steps through the arched opening in the hedge that leads out of the maze and toward the path that goes up the hill to the house, she feels something brush against her. These threads are thinner and lighter than the leather thongs binding the Indian maid, but no less resistant. Even through the thick serge of her high-necked dress she can feel them unspooling across her breast and down her left arm. Another thread brushes against her cheek, and one clings to her mouth with a touch faint and insistent as a baby’s cry.

  Like walking through a ghost.

  Corinth fre
ezes on the path and traces the thin gossamer thread to where the spider has spun a cone-shaped web deep in the branches of the boxwood. Then she checks to see if she can be seen yet from the house. Directly in front of her is a waterfall cascading in thick sheets into an oval pool. A winged horse stands above the cascade, one hoof poised to strike the ground, its wings spread for flight. On either side of the fountain two nude males recline, the sprawl of their thick limbs echoing the sweep of the marble staircases that circle up to the next terrace. Corinth can see the path beyond the spreading wings of the horse, but not the house, and so she assumes it’s unlikely that anyone in the house can see her. The only figures on the path above the waterfall are pale white statues that guard the marble terraces.

  Still Corinth feels watched. It may be the statues of the river gods, or the satyrs who line the terraces and spew water from their gaping mouths, or even the spider who burrows deeper into her silk tunnel as Corinth steps closer to the hedge, but she doesn’t think so. It’s a feeling she’s had before.

  She looks behind her once, as if checking to see that the crouching Indian maid hasn’t escaped her bondage and sprung out of her pool, and then twirls a gloved finger into the middle of the web, like a child scooping icing from a cake. She tucks the spider silk into her sleeve and then, without turning again, mounts the stairs above the river gods and takes the path to the house.

  It’s a long, steep climb up three terraces, not counting the main one that circles the house. At first Corinth takes her time. She notices the horseshoe-shaped stones around the fountain of the flying horse and, recognizing them as giochi d’acqua, carefully steps around them. She doesn’t have time for tricks and she doesn’t want to show up at the house soaking wet. She examines the statuary. On each terrace there are three females in Greek drapery, who, Corinth soon guesses, are meant to represent the Muses. One carries a sextant, one wears a smiling mask above a weeping face. One is flanked by a peacock and a tortoise. Several hold musical instruments. In the center of the path runs a stream of water down a marble channel much like the cascade at the Farnese Palace, but instead of dolphins rimming its edge there are leaping trout—one of a number of native touches. Stone beavers and bear cubs frolic among the gape-mouthed satyrs and full-breasted sphinxes. A crouching panther peers out from behind a pine trunk. The wooded slope of the hill is populated with these sculpted figures, all murmuring with the same voice—the sound of water cascading down the hill in a hundred rivulets—an effect that Corinth begins to find tiring as she ascends the second terrace from the top. She turns down the arbored path, thinking to rest for a moment on the little marble bench in an ilex grove at the end of the path, but stops when she sees that someone’s already sitting there. She’s more annoyed than relieved when she realizes it’s just another statue—another Muse she guesses from the box-shaped instrument in her lap. She goes back to the main path and pauses for a moment to look up at the house, which has now come into view.