Corinth learned fast. The nimble fingers that could pick apart knots now learned to make tiny, almost invisible stitches in the leather. In a few more days she was well enough to sit with the other girls in the yard and, soon after that, to take walks with Tom in the meadows that sloped down from the McGreevey house to the edge of the millpond. She told him about the town she grew up in—a lumber town with the same name as hers. She mentioned the name of the man who owned the lumber mill, and he said he recognized it from one of the bigger glove factories in town. A shadow had passed over her dark eyes then, but Tom hadn’t asked her to explain. He remembered it, though, later.
He told her about the orphanage in Brooklyn, the apprenticeship, and then his exploits on the stage. He did simple tricks for her: producing a bouquet of wildflowers from behind her ear and walking coins across his knuckles. He asked her to show him how she slipped her wrists and ankles out of the ropes during her séances.
“How did you know about that?” she asked.
“You can’t trick a fellow magician,” he told her. She showed him the knots she knew and how to release them, even though, he knew, she hated touching the ropes.
They found a stone icehouse on the other side of the pond, its wide-planked floor covered with the sawdust used to store the ice in winter, which was cool even on the hottest days and held in its old stones the smell of snowmelt and the mountains. Lying side by side on the sawdust-cushioned floor, she told him the names of the rivers and streams that flowed out of the mountains. Saranac, Raquette, Moose, and Chateaugay. Shroon and Black, Beaver and Salmon. All the tributaries and rivers that carried spruce logs from the heart of the mountains down to the Big Boom at Glens Falls. The Saint Regis and the Oswegatchie, Mill and Trout Brooks, Otter Creek, and the Sacandaga, which flooded the marshes of the Big Vly, where her mother’s people came from. While she named the rivers, Tom traced the lines the sun made, shining through the slats of the roof, on her skin. Turning to him, her dark hair falling over her bare shoulders, the light rippling over her breasts and hips, she was like a river herself. Making love to her was like being pulled into a strong current.
When the grass in the meadow began turning purple, he asked her if she wanted to travel with him. They’d make a great act together. But she said no, she didn’t want to ever go onstage again after what had happened with Oswald. More than anything, she wanted to stay in one place so that if her soul ever left her body again, it would know where to come back to.
It had been her idea to stay in Gloversville.
He reminds himself of that now, coming out of his memories to find himself staring at the blank and featureless face of the little nymph. The plan was to save enough money to start their own glove shop—only he’d seen a way to do it quicker. He had an engagement in New York City that fall. He’d keep it and make enough money to get them started. He’d be back by Christmas.
He left her safe in the bosom of the McGreevey family—in that circle of white-dressed girls sewing beneath the viburnum tree, the blossoms of which had turned tea-colored and rattled in the wind like dry paper when he kissed her good-bye. It was true that he hadn’t made it back by Christmas—the engagement in New York had lasted longer than he’d expected and then he’d gotten sick—but he had written to explain. It was March before he made it back to Gloversville, and by then she had left the McGreeveys and gone to work at Milo Latham’s factory. He’d gone to look for her at the dormitory where she’d lived since late December, but one of the girls said she’d left the week before—taken in one of Mr. Latham’s carriages.
Tom pats the little statue on the head and gets up. He stands at the hedge for just a moment, listening for voices, but the servants have come and gone, carrying the body of Frank Campbell up to the house on a stretcher. Milo and Corinth have gone back to the house as well.
He slips behind the statue of the river god into the grotto and finds it empty. There’s a dark stain on the stone bench and splotches of white where the paint from the hand marks on the ceiling has flaked off. A damp footprint near the dark stain. Latham must have stood there and inspected the marks. He was a thorough man, one who liked to make sure personally that any job he commissioned was done to his satisfaction. He paid well enough to see that it was. In the end, Tom can’t really blame Corinth for tossing in her lot with him. He kneels down by the stone bench—like a man come to this pagan shrine to do homage to the resident god of the place—and reaches under the bench, where he finds a telescoping rod and a bow. He pushes both implements farther under the bench and then, flattening himself against the cold stone floor, crawls into the tunnel.
Corinth walks up the fountain allée two steps behind Milo Latham and the doctor, who have ceased discussing Frank Campbell’s cause of death and gone on to more interesting topics: the effect of the current drought on the logging business, the legislature in Albany’s creation of the Adirondack Park and that bill’s effect on logging, and the threat that further legislation might curtail logging on state-owned land. In short, the body borne before them on a canvas stretcher (an implement generally used in the Latham household to transport firewood) might as well be made of wood as far as the two men who precede Corinth onto the terrace are concerned.
They are greeted by the lady of the house, in a subdued fawn-colored robe, her red hair hanging in two long braids over her shoulders. The déshabillé, to Corinth’s eye, is carefully calculated. A man has died in my house, it says, and I won’t stand on ceremony. The dark circles under her eyes also speak of the effect the painter’s death has had on her, but beneath the pallor of her skin, Corinth senses a tremor running through her hostess’s thin frame that is closer to excitement than nerves.
“Thank you for coming so quickly, Dr. Murdoch. We are grateful for your assistance in these dreadful circumstances.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Latham. It must have been quite a shock to you.”
“I only wish I could have prevented . . .”
“You mustn’t blame yourself. It is clear from Mr. Campbell’s color and physique that he suffered from a congenital weakness of the heart.”
“So it wasn’t the arrow—”
The doctor purses his lips together and pushes out a puff of air. “A mere child’s toy that barely pricked the gentleman’s shoulder. It was the shock of the thing that killed him. Of course, in the excitement of the moment and in the poor lighting of the grotto, some of your guests might have thought they saw an arrow protruding from the dead man’s chest, but that would have been a delusion, as I’m sure they will all see in the calm light of morning. And I hope,” the doctor continues, his voice acquiring the patronizing tone he uses with recalcitrant patients, “they will also see the folly of such experiments.”
Aurora inclines her head and lowers her eyes demurely, an attitude of humility Corinth has never seen her hostess adopt before. Her deference to the doctor’s words gives Corinth some hope. If Aurora chooses not to pursue the séances, Latham might be forced to let her go, after all.
“Would you mind,” Aurora asks, lifting up her head, “seeing to one of my guests? Mrs. Ramsdale, whom I believe you met when she stayed here last year, was quite undone by the incident. Her health is not the best to begin with . . .”
“Of course,” Dr. Murdoch replies. “I’m an admirer of Mrs. Ramsdale’s work. I’ll be happy to look in on her.”
Milo escorts the doctor into the front hall and up the stairs to the second floor, their conversation as they go progressing from logging to hunting and a promise from Latham that he’ll take the doctor up to his camp on the Sacandaga in the fall. The servants, at Aurora’s instruction, carry Campbell’s body to the east parlor, where he will await the arrival of the undertaker. Corinth would like to slip into the house and up to her room, but Aurora catches her at the doors to the library and pulls her back out onto the terrace.
“I’d like a word with you, Miss Blackwell,” she says. “Will you walk with me in the garden so our voices don’t disturb the other
guests? I’m afraid that the tragedy has taken a particularly heavy toll on Mrs. Ramsdale.”
Corinth bows her head at her hostess’s suggestion, taking a cue from her hostess’s humble bearing before the doctor, and they walk together down the steps to the second terrace and from there along the shaded arbor bordered by a marble trough into which water trickles from the wide-open mouths of satyrs.
“I usually find the sound of water soothing,” Aurora says when they have walked for several minutes in silence, “but this morning even Bosco’s fountains fail to calm me. I feel . . . I feel . . .”
“It was a horrible thing,” Corinth interrupts. “Of course you’ll want to discontinue the séances—”
“Discontinue the séances!” Aurora wheels around to face Corinth, her glossy red braids whipping around like snakes. Her face—white and openmouthed—looks exactly like that of a statue of Medusa that Corinth remembers from a gallery in Florence. “When we made such progress last night? I heard my dear, sweet children’s voices. I felt their little hands on my face—” Aurora lifts her own hands and places them on either side of Corinth’s face. Her fingers are ice-cold, but when she pats Corinth’s face it feels, for just a moment, the way a child’s hand—no, an infant’s—strokes its mother’s face. Corinth has to bite her lip to keep from striking the woman’s hands away from her.
“—I can feel them now, all around us.” The two women have come to the end of the arbor, to the semicircular bench in the ilex grove, where Corinth remembers seeing on her first day—was it really only the day before yesterday?—a seated statue. There’s no statue now. Aurora sits on the bench and draws Corinth down beside her. “I believe you have awoken them. I must speak to them—there’s something I must explain. You see, I’m afraid I wasn’t always the best mother. I was sometimes impatient with them when they would play their games and hide from me in the garden or refuse to take their medicine when they were sick. James, especially, was very, very willful. Like his father. When my husband sets his mind on a thing . . . At times I had to be quite strict with him—James, of course, not Milo—for his own good. But then he would convince Tam and Cynthia to join him in his little rebellions.” She lowers her voice and leans closer to Corinth, her lips only inches from Corinth’s face. “He’s doing it even now,” she says in a whisper that Corinth feels on her skin, “using the other two to do his little tricks. I believe he’s keeping them from their salvation. So you see how vital it is we contact Cynthia and Tam alone, without him. Can you do that?”
Corinth stares at her hostess, unable at first to grasp what she means. Then she does.
“You’re asking me to separate the children?”
“I knew you would understand,” Aurora says, rising from the bench with the satisfied air of a mistress whose orders have been comprehended by a not particularly bright servant. “I told my husband I must have the best medium because I knew that he always gets what he goes after. There’s no time to waste. We’ll have to have another séance tonight.” She stands for a moment, waiting, no doubt, for Corinth to rise, too, but when she doesn’t, Aurora smiles. “Of course, you want to commune with their spirits here to prepare yourself for tonight. I can feel them, too.” Her eyes dart around the encircling trees with a hectic glance, and then, before Corinth can stop her, she flees down the arbor like a deer that’s heard the huntsman’s horn.
After she goes, Corinth sits in the grove, as rooted to the bench as that statue she imagined seeing here. She’s had peculiar requests in her day: a countess in Marienbad who wanted to contact her dead spaniel; a doctor’s wife who came to her circles at the hotel in New York for three weeks in a row to contact her daughter, who, Corinth learned when the doctor finally paid her a call, was alive and well and living in Paterson, New Jersey; and of course there was Mr. Oswald, who wanted forgiveness from his dead son for torturing the boy’s mother. Most of the people who come to her to contact a lost loved one do so because they have unfinished business with the dead. But this . . . reaching into the darkness to sever the children’s ties to one another . . . Even if she didn’t find the idea sickening, she can’t imagine how she could perform such a delicate operation. She doubts that anyone—even the best medium—could.
She smiles in spite of herself. The best medium. Yes, Milo Latham certainly gets whatever he goes after. He got her—but then, she wasn’t all that difficult a quarry. The first time she resisted, that time he found her alone in the mill, sweeping sawdust off the floors. He came up behind her and touched her hair. “Indian hair,” he said, moving his hand from her hair to her breast and pulling her by the hips toward him, “but with sparks of fire.” She’d wheeled around so quickly that the broom handle hit him in the stomach, and while he bent over in pain, she ran out of the mill and all the way home, where she found Wanda White Cloud helping her mother bake bread in the kitchen. When she told what happened, Wanda White Cloud said it was only a matter of time. He’d spoilt near a dozen girls in the town. What could anyone do? He owned the town.
“You should let Mike take her to that revival show like he’s been wanting to,” Wanda said. “At least she’d be out of harm’s way.”
Six years they’d been on the road before Gloversville. Who would think a man like Latham would even remember who she was. But he had.
It was three weeks after Tom Quinn had left Gloversville to go to New York and two weeks after she’d realized she was pregnant. She’d woken up every morning for the last week in Mrs. McGreevey’s boardinghouse sick to her stomach and scared, until finally, on this morning, she’d gotten up before dawn and written Tom a letter. He’d have to come back for her sooner than Christmas, she explained in her letter. She couldn’t expect Mrs. McGreevey to keep her. For all her kindness, all she ever talked about was the respectability of her establishment and the marriageability of her four daughters. She couldn’t do that to them. She had to know if Tom would marry her or . . . or she’d have to make some other arrangements.
She wondered, while walking the three miles into town, what those “other arrangements” could possibly be. She walked across the fields where she and Tom had lain that summer, the long purple grasses brushing against her skirts with a dry papery sound like women whispering. She thought of the McGreevey sisters sitting in their white dresses beneath the viburnum tree and it was like a childhood memory she’d left behind a long time ago. She thought of her mother in a grave in a strange place and her baby sister growing up with strangers. What had it mattered, she wondered, that she’d gotten away from Milo Latham six years ago if she’d ended up coming to the same thing? She was still wondering as she walked up the steps to the post office and heard the voice behind her. “Indian hair,” it said—a voice that made her scalp prickle, “but with sparks of fire.”
She turned around slowly this time, and when she saw Milo Latham standing below her on the steps of the Gloversville Post Office, she wondered if she were dreaming. The edges of his black coat were blurring in the morning sunlight, the rustle of dried grasses was deafening. She remembered that her mother always said that a ringing in the ears was bad luck. Then she was watching herself from above, a stupid girl fainting on the post office steps.
She came to on a green velvet couch in a room with purple drapes. Milo Latham was sitting in a chair across from her, smoking a pipe.
“You really must take better care of yourself, Miss Blackwell. A life on the stage has not been kind to you.”
“I’ve left the stage,” Corinth said. “I make gloves now.”
“Even worse,” he said, “for a woman of your talents. You should allow me to take care of you.” He got up and joined her on the couch. Ran his hand through her hair, which someone had loosened from its pins. She knew she had to get up off the couch—and part of her did. She watched the man touching the girl, unbuttoning her dress, pushing her skirts up, and thought, if the other one doesn’t come back, she can tell this one the baby’s his.
In the ilex grove Corinth pushes the heels of
her hands into her eye sockets and wills the memory away. She would like to think that she succumbed to Milo Latham in a moment of weakness, not a moment of cold-blooded calculation, but why then hadn’t she mailed the letter to Tom, after all? Hadn’t she decided even then that being a rich man’s mistress might be easier than being a poor man’s wife? Who is she, after that, to judge Aurora Latham? To judge anyone? She made her plans and, as it turned out, she’d been wise. When Tom didn’t come back at Christmas, she went to Latham’s factory, and because he was away for the holiday, she’d taken a job there and waited for him. Even after Latham returned she waited to see if Tom might still show up, but when she couldn’t wait any longer she went to Latham and told him she was pregnant with his child, and he was true to his word. He took care of her.
She opens her eyes and spots of color swim across her vision: blooms of orange and red that waver like flames in the glossy green foliage and then, dying out, spark the thicket like fireflies. When her vision clears, she is staring into the face of a little girl standing on the edge of the grove. She’s wearing a white dress with a pink ribbon in her hair and she’s holding a smooth white stone in one hand. The girl turns and melts into the bushes, looking once over her shoulder to see if Corinth is following her.
Chapter Thirteen
I take the poster back to my room and tack it to the window frame above my desk. At first it’s hard to get back to work. I’m unsettled by the fact that both Diana Tate and David—and Bethesda, if David’s right—think something’s going on between me and Nat. I’d sworn to myself that I’d never let this happen to me again when rumors started circulating last year that I was having an affair with Richard Scully. I’d promised myself that I’d be more careful in my choices, but apparently I have a knack for being drawn to exactly the wrong kind of man. Damn—Nat Loomis wasn’t even nice to me (then, neither, in the end, was Richard Scully). The worst thing is that if Nat heard the rumor, he might think I’d actually encouraged it!