Violet Ramsdale, who has been sitting looking out her bedroom window since Dr. Murdoch left her a half hour earlier, watches Corinth climb up from the garden onto the terrace. The medium’s hair and dress are soaked, and a halo of mist is falling around her like a moiré silk shawl. She is humming to herself. A few minutes later Tom Quinn emerges from between two cypresses on the west side of the fountain allée. Had they been together?
“Assisting Lantini with some engineering problems” is what he said last night when she asked him what he was doing in the garden yesterday. “It feels good to work with my hands again.”
“Isn’t that what you are in my employ to do?” she asked, laying her hand over his and feeling, as she always did, a shiver of pleasure at the smoothness of his skin, the tautness of his flesh. “To work with your hands?”
He’d turned his hand over and grasped hers, squeezing a little too hard and then letting go, his hand escaping from under hers so quickly she didn’t even see it go, the long white fingers a blur, like the wings of a white dove released from its cage.
“I used to do more with my hands than take down someone else’s words,” he said.
“Of course,” she cooed, trying to draw him back. “I remember your act. How could I forget how brilliant you were on the stage. I’ve always said that if you wished to go back—”
The color rose beneath his marble-white skin, and she knew she’d said the wrong thing. He was already up, buttoning his shirt, striding toward the door, saying he needed some air and would take a walk around the garden.
“But aren’t you afraid,” she called out to him, “after what happened to Mr. Campbell tonight?”
He turned and smiled at that. “Frank Campbell was an ass,” he said. “He only got what he deserved.” And then he was gone and he didn’t come back all night. Punishing her for bringing up his act, no doubt. The Great Quintini! Of course he’d never go back after what happened.
It was a shame, because he was the most brilliant magician she’d ever seen . . . well, certainly the handsomest. What he had was promise. In time he could have surpassed even the great Robert-Houdin, whom she’d seen perform in Paris when she was a child.
She’d seen Tom Quinn perform for the first time in New York at the Odeon. She’d gone because she was gathering material for her next novel, in which the villain was a magician, but she’d gone back, again and again, because she’d become mesmerized by the handsome young magician. Tom had the quickest hands she’d ever seen. Plucking scarves and flowers out of thin air, conjuring orange trees and brightly colored birds from ether.
“He don’t stay with the standard stock-in-trade,” the Odeon’s manager, Jimmy Priest, told her when she asked to be introduced. All in the name of research, she’d told herself. “He’s ambitious, that one, always adding something new to the act to make a few extra dollars, but he don’t spend it like the rest of the performers. He’s got a girl somewhere, I think.”
When she met him in his dressing room, he told her he was experimenting with escape acts. He’d gotten the idea from a medium’s act he’d seen upstate. The girl had been bound to prove she was not producing her effects with her hands or feet, but he had noticed that because she had extraordinarily slim wrists and ankles she was able to slip out of the ropes when the lights went out.
“I think what the audience liked best of all,” he told Violet, “was seeing her all tied up.”
Yes, Violet could imagine that. In her books she always made sure that there was at least one scene in which the villain tied up the heroine, preferably in a high tower or a dark dungeon. There was something undeniably titillating about confinement. She had asked him to show her how he tied his knots—for research purposes of course—and, after feigning a blush or two, agreed to tie his wrists and ankles together so he could practice releasing himself.
“Aren’t you afraid that one of the gentlemen in the audience will know how to tie a knot you can’t free yourself from?” she asked. “Hadn’t you better . . . um . . . enlist the aid of some colleague?”
“You mean use a plant?” he said, laughing at her euphemisms. “Not a bad idea.”
She was in his dressing room when Jimmy Priest approached Tom with a proposal. The rope trick was getting old, he told Tom; there was a magician at the Regent who had himself tied up and sealed in a trunk, and one in England who had himself thrown in the river in leg irons. Couldn’t Tom do something like that? They could stage the whole thing off the piers.
“But the river’s frozen,” Violet pointed out.
“Even better,” Jimmy said, grinning around the stub of cigar in his mouth. “A fellow went into a frozen river out in St. Louis. Makes for more drama. We’ll drill a hole and toss him in, and he’ll be out in three minutes at most. If he doesn’t come out on his own, we’ll fish him out. He’s young.” He slapped Tom on the back. “He’ll survive.”
She told Tom not to do it, but when Jimmy told him how much he thought he could get for the act with the right backing, she saw Tom’s eyes widen and then draw inward, thinking, she guessed, of that girl he had tucked away somewhere.
The medium, Violet thinks, rising from her seat at the window and crossing her room to her Saratoga trunk. Hidden behind a loose corner of the lining are several posters that she had found in Tom’s old valise and saved out of sentimentality. She loved the pictures of Tom in his magician’s garb and the ones of him bound in ropes about to be sealed in a trunk or lowered into the river, but the one she’s looking for now is from before they met, a program for July 9, 1882, at the Lyceum Theater, Gloversville, New York, advertising “The Great Quintini, Master of Disappearances.” She reads through the other acts and finds her. The little medium. Corinth Blackwell. So it had been for her that Tom was willing to risk everything in that foolhardy exploit.
While Jimmy Priest papered the city with posters—THE GREAT QUINTINI DEFIES THE FROZEN DEEP! MOST SPECTACULAR WATER ESCAPE EVER DARED BY MORTAL MAN—Tom practiced holding his breath and she timed him. He was up to three minutes when the day came. New Year’s Day. Tom had wanted to do it the week before Christmas, but Jimmy had insisted that New Year’s Day would draw the bigger crowd. And besides, they had to make sure the river was frozen “because,” Jimmy explained, “you’ve promised your public ‘the frozen deep.’ ”
The ice on New Year’s day stretched clear across to New Jersey, gleaming gold in the noonday sun. Only the hole ten feet off the pier where the ice had been sawed away was black, a dark eye surrounded by a corona of fire.
“You don’t have to go through with this,” she whispered to him as the throng of men and women on the pier parted to let them through. But when Tom turned toward her, his eyes were as dark as the black pit in the ice. It was as if he’d gone into some kind of trance to ready himself for his submersion and he was already far away from her, already in the black water under the ice. The crowd swept him away from her, pulling the fur cloak she had lent him from his bare shoulders, the men tying his arms behind his back.
“They’re your men,” she whispered to Jimmy, “the ones tying the ropes?”
“Of course, ma’am, do you think I want a dead magician on my hands?” Jimmy answered, exhaling rank cigar smoke into the cold, bright air.
She looked at the men and women in the crowd and saw that their eyes were all fixed on Tom as he was shackled. Tom had been right—the audience loved to see the ropes go on. It didn’t have to be a girl captive; Tom’s young flesh would do.
Closing her eyes against the glare of the sun off the frozen river, Violet felt herself transported to a little mountain village in Tuscany that she had passed through on her way to the baths at Saturnia (whose healing powers, an English friend had promised her, would put an end to all her pain). A boy, his hands and feet bound together, was tied to a statue in the town square’s fountain. To appease the nymph of the spring, the tour guide had explained, pointing to the statue the boy was tied to, a half-naked girl whose arms reached up out of the fountai
n’s spray to pull unsuspecting passersby under the veil of water. So that the spring will never run dry. It’s considered an honor for the boy. The ladies of her party had insisted on offering him food and drink and begged the village men to let him go, but the men of the village had only laughed and the boy had refused all their offerings. Still, the women had hovered around the square, stealing glances at the boy where his flesh pressed against the cold, wet marble.
She heard a splash and opened her eyes to see the dark water lapping over the ice. She looked down at her watch and drew in her own breath. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t draw breath until he did, but after two minutes she had to. She’d timed him before at three minutes. He had time.
When three minutes passed, she pushed through the crowds and grabbed Jimmy’s arm. “Pull him up,” she said. “It’s been too long.”
They hauled up the rope, but there was nothing at the end of it.
“He must have come untied from it while he was getting out of his bonds and the current took him downriver.”
“Put the rope back down,” Jimmy shouted at his men, “so he can see where the hole is.”
Violet looked down at her watch. He’d been under the water for four minutes. He’d never held his breath this long. She scanned the river, looking for other breaks in the ice where he might have surfaced, but the ice was as smooth and unbroken as the lid of a marble tomb. She pictured the white marble limbs of that Italian spring nymph, waiting beneath the ice to pull Tom to his death . . .
Then she heard a shout and the men were hauling up the rope and pulling something out of the water. Later Tom would tell her that when he lost sight of the hole, he’d found that between the ice and the water there was a gap of several inches where he was able to draw breath, that he’d kept alive that way, but when they dragged him out of the water his limbs, free of the ropes, were as white and lifeless as a statue’s. It was long months before he was well again, but she took care of him. Only for those few weeks when he went away that March was he away from her, and then he returned looking more frozen than he had when they fished him out of the river.
She looks at her watch—the same watch she held in her hand while Tom was under the river—and sees that it’s after ten. Twenty minutes now since Dr. Murdoch left, saying as he did, “I’ll leave you now to accustom yourself to the gravity of your condition.” The gravity of her condition! As if the years she’d spent in all the best clinics and water-cures of Europe hadn’t accustomed her to the shocks and indignities the human body had to offer. She didn’t even have recourse to her green bottle after he left. The only thing she wonders is whether she should tell Tom about Dr. Murdoch’s diagnosis now or later.
She opens the panel behind the bookcase and takes the secret passage up to the third floor. Aurora showed her the passage several summers ago. She always put Tom in the room on the third floor facing north, the one decorated in the rustic style that William West Durant was making so popular: bear rugs and furniture made from unpeeled birch logs, a massive headboard carved in the image of a great eagle. A room for a young Jupiter, Aurora said when she first showed it to Violet, but Violet thought instead of Ganymede, whom the god, in an eagle’s guise, had snatched away, and it has always made her nervous that Tom sleeps there.
She knocks on the panel and Tom opens the door for her.
“I saw you in the garden,” she says, holding up her skirt to fit between a chair and a dresser, both carved out of rough-hewn logs that, she well knows, will tear the good silk of her dress, “and wondered if you had heard anything more about Campbell’s death. They’ve removed his body from the grotto, have they not?”
“Yes. They’re saying he died of a heart attack.” He sits down at the desk, where several blueprints are laid out beneath stone paperweights. The only place to sit, besides the unmade bed, is the rustic chair, which will surely tear her dress to bits, and so she sits on the edge of the bed.
“A heart attack?” She tilts her head and tries to coax Tom with a smile, but he looks away. “And the doctor is going along with that?”
“Apparently. No doubt the doctor is in Mr. Latham’s copious pocket.”
“All the same, perhaps we should cut our stay here at Bosco short. I can’t afford to be mixed up in a scandal. My readers—”
“Your readers would like nothing better. But perhaps you’re right. Should I make arrangements for us to leave tomorrow?”
“Why not leave today?”
“Today?” His full lips part as if to smile, but the corners of his mouth appear frozen.
“Yes, why not? There’s nothing holding us here at Bosco.”
“I thought you were collecting atmosphere for your next novel.”
“I think I’ve collected all the atmosphere I need.”
“But won’t Mrs. Latham be disappointed? I believe she plans to go ahead with another séance tonight.”
“Really? Who told you that? The medium?”
Tom looks down. She can see the shadow of his long dark eyelashes on the pale skin beneath his eyes, and the shadow of a blue vein at his temple. Its pulse, under his fair skin, reminds her of the river that day, rushing darkly under the smooth ice. What are you up to, Tom? she asks herself. What trick are you working now?
“I overheard Mrs. Latham talking to the medium in the garden. She wants her to try again to reach the children. She wants her to try again tonight.”
“Poor Aurora. It is her idée fixe. Very well, then, we’ll stay one more night, but then let us be ready to leave tomorrow.” She stands up to emphasize her determination, but the effect is ruined by one of the pins in her skirt catching on the bedspread. She pulls at it impatiently, tearing the silk after all her precautions. “Unless, of course, you’ve made any other engagement?”
“Other engagement?” He looks up, the blood coursing through his face.
“I mean with Signore Lantini,” she says, waving at the blueprints laid out on his desk. “I see you’ve been helping him with the fountains.”
“Oh,” Tom says. “I think we fixed the problem with the fountains.”
“Good, you’re free, then.”
“Free?” he asks, smiling. This time the corners of his mouth curve, but his lips don’t part. “I am always at your command.”
Violet bows her head at the compliment, thinking, Good. She decides to leave her news until tomorrow and turns to leave, but at the entrance to the secret passage she turns back and takes the rolled paper out of the pocket of her skirt. “By the way,” she says, “I found this piece of old memorabilia I thought you might like to have.” She hands him the bill from the Lyceum Theater. “For remembrance’s sake.”
Not five minutes after Violet has left his room, Tom hears a knock at his door and, answering it, finds Corinth, damp and bedraggled, leaning against his door frame. He pulls her into the room before one of the servants can see her. Her skin, under her wet dress, is cold as ice.
“What’s happened,” he asks, dragging a fur throw from the bed and draping it over her shoulders.
“The children . . .” she begins, and then, taken by a fit of shivering, collapses onto his bed. He takes her hands and begins to chafe them to bring the blood back, but when he touches the scars on her wrists, she looks up at him, her black eyes so full of pain that it’s like looking into cold water. Like looking into that hole in the ice the day he was thrown into the river.
“I have to leave here tonight,” she says in a voice that seems to come from faraway, like her voice last night at the séance. Was it her real voice, or something she put on to convince her audience that she had entered a trance?
“Tonight? I don’t see how we can get away without anyone seeing us before dark. Doesn’t Mrs. Latham want you to conduct another séance?”
She nods, bowing her head, not asking him how he knows about tonight’s séance. She has the same resigned look she had when he asked her ten years ago to wait for him in Gloversville when he went back to New York City. How c
ould he blame her for not waiting when he had taken so much longer to get back? Still, he has always felt that with all her medium’s skill she should have known what kept him from returning to her. When he had been under the river, sinking into the cold water, he had felt her hand on his, leading him up to the narrow margin between ice and water where he was able to breathe. Then he had seen a long white shape swaying in the water and, when he swam toward it, had found the rope hanging through the hole in the ice. If he goes with her, he must know, once and for all, if she knew why he was delayed and still left him for Milo Latham. He has to know whether she’s a real medium or if it’s all an act.
“I say we leave after the séance,” he tells her now. “I’ll send you a note later to tell you where we should meet.”
Chapter Seventeen
I stop at the office long enough to tell Daria to watch Zalman, and then I rush down the hill toward the children’s cemetery, following the shortcut I learned yesterday. When I enter the crypt, I think at first that it’s empty. I notice a pile of white rocks on the floor beside the broken statue beneath the well, and when I kneel to inspect them, I see that the floor is wet and covered with a whitish slurry. I pick up a handful of the stuff and let it sift between my fingers. Three blue beads fall to the floor and dance there for a moment, vibrating; then I hear the sound of someone humming and look up to find Bethesda sitting on the steps.
“Where’s David?” I ask.
She shrugs and keeps on humming. It’s a children’s nursery rhyme, “Ring Around the Roses,” a rhyming game that my mother once forbade me to play because she said it was about death. An odd restriction, I thought at the time, for someone whose business was contacting the dead. “Bethesda,” I say, louder this time, “do you know where David is?”
“He was in there clearing out the stones the children threw in the well, but I suppose he got tired of it. It’s very hard to find someone to do proper work . . .” Her voice drifts off and she starts humming again. I notice that she’s fingering one of the pearl-tipped pins, sliding it in and out of her sweater sleeve. And then I see it’s not the sleeve she’s piercing. It’s the skin of her wrist.