“It was a stupid thing to do,” I say instead.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Nat says. “It got you in here, didn’t it?” With that, Nat turns and walks off toward the office. The air stirs at his leaving, wafting the little white puff against my face. It feels like damp gauze and smells of drugs and decay. I turn back to the house and find David standing in the open doorway.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” he says. “I just wanted to thank you again for saving me in the well.” He holds out his hand and I take it. For a second I shudder, remembering something from the well. When I felt myself being sucked into the whirlpool, it wasn’t the water that was pulling me down. It was David.
Chapter Eighteen
When she leaves Tom’s room, Corinth feels less than reassured. Despite his promise to leave after tonight’s séance, she saw the hesitation in his eyes. She also scented the sickly sweet odor of laudanum in the air and, while seated on his bed, noticed a pearl-tipped pin—the same kind she had noticed in Mrs. Ramsdale’s dress—sticking out of the bedspread. Not wanting to confront him, she buried the pin deeper into the mattress. So his employer visits him in his bedroom. She should not, she knows, be shocked, nor is she in any position to reproach him. And what choice does she have? She needs him to get away. What money she’s been able to save over the years she has sent to her sister (carefully keeping the girl’s existence a secret from Milo Latham). If she can reach her, then they can make some kind of life together—with or without Tom.
She pauses on the landing and hears once again the tune she heard in the cemetery and then on the terraces. Ashes, ashes . . . A pocket full of posies . . .
Her skin turns cold under her damp clothes and she begins to shake. The singing is coming from above her, from the children’s nursery in the attic. She considers going back to Tom’s room and begging him to leave now, but then she remembers his skepticism on these matters. He would tell her there is a logical explanation for the singing, and he might be right. The least she can do is find out for herself.
And so she heads up the stairs to the attic. She can hear along with the child’s voice the creaking of floorboards, as if the child were walking in a circle. Corinth is reassured that it sounds like one child’s voice and one child’s footsteps, and as she comes up into the attic, she sees only one child. Alice Latham, holding her hands out as if holding invisible hands, pirouettes inside a circle made up of two porcelain dolls with glass eyes, a carved wooden bear, a stuffed goose, and the rocking horse, draped in a red paisley shawl. On the last line of the rhyme she holds up her dress and plops down cross-legged on the dusty floor.
Corinth claps. “Very good,” she says, laying a hand on the rocking horse’s head. “Who taught you that?”
“Cynthia did.” And then, as if to answer a tacit question, she adds, “Last year, before she and the boys got sick.”
“You must miss her,” Corinth says, moving the horse aside so she can sit on the floor across from Alice, who regards Corinth with the same glassy stare as the dolls that sit on either side of her. She picks up one—the one with yellow hair and blue eyes—and holds it in her lap. The doll has better color in its cheeks than she does. Does this girl get any outside exercise? Everything about her bespeaks neglect, from the way her clothes are a little too small for her to the tangles in her waist-length dark auburn hair and the dark rings under her eyes.
“She had blond hair like this,” Alice says, fingering the doll’s hair, as if this were an answer to the question of missing her sister. “So did James and Tam. They said I had dark hair because I wasn’t really Mother and Father’s child, that they’d found me in the woods. A little Indian baby left to die.”
Corinth remembers Alice’s remark about “stinking savages” and guesses that this story was not made up by her siblings as a compliment.
“I think your hair is pretty,” Corinth says.
Alice sniffs, pretending, Corinth feels, not to be pleased. “You would,” she says. “It’s the same as yours.” Alice untangles a lock of her hair and leans forward across the circle to show Corinth, who stares at the coil of hair as if it were a snake about to strike.
“Take down your hair so we can see,” Alice orders in a peremptory voice that reminds Corinth of Aurora. “It’s all wet and messy, anyway.” Corinth reaches up and touches her hair, which is damper than she’d realized, and is beginning to take the pins out when she feels the air stir on the back of her neck.
“Alice, what are you doing on the dirty floor in your new dress? Your mother will be very angry.”
Corinth turns and looks up at Mrs. Norris, who is scowling not at Alice but at her.
“What does it matter if I’m not allowed to attend the séance tonight anyway?” Alice replies, getting to her feet and slapping at her skirt in a way that smears the dirt deeper into it rather than shakes it off.
“Go straight to your room and I’ll be down to give you a bath,” Norris tells her. “And put that doll away,” she adds, pointing to the doll that Alice is still holding. “It’s not yours to play with.”
Alice’s face turns as bright pink as the doll’s painted cheeks. “It’s my fault,” Corinth says. “I asked her to show me some of Cynthia’s toys.” Corinth takes the doll from Alice and combs her fingers through its blond hair. Real hair, she realizes with a shiver, remembering that the girl with the pink ribbon who led her to the cemetery had blond hair as well. But no, they wouldn’t . . . As Alice slips out behind Mrs. Norris, she turns and gives Corinth a shy smile, and for an instant the sulky face is transformed into something almost pretty. Corinth risks a small smile, but it’s quickly squashed by Norris’s scowl.
“Leave the child alone,” she says when Alice has gone down the stairs. “You were brought here for the others, not her.”
“Someone ought to be brought here for her. Why doesn’t the child have a governess?”
“I do for her,” Norris says. “I nursed her through the diphtheria last year and she was the only one to survive it.”
“You were always a powerful healer, Wanda White Cloud,” Corinth says, pronouncing the housekeeper’s Abenaki name formally and bowing her head slightly to honor her. She would rather count Wanda as a friend than an enemy. She will need all the help she can get tonight. Wanda lifts her chin at the sound of her Abenaki name, and for a moment Corinth glimpses the strength in her jaw and her black eyes, the strength of the warriors she is descended from, but then the eyes narrow and the jaw trembles. “You still blame me for your lost one,” she says. “You think I could have saved it.”
Corinth shakes her head. It’s not what she meant at all, but as Wanda stretches her hands out, she sees the two of them in the bog behind Latham’s camp, Wanda’s hands outstretched to take her lifeless child from her, and she has to admit that Wanda’s right. She did blame her. At that moment on the bog she hated Wanda so much that she could not hand her dead child over to her.
This time, though, she hands the doll to the housekeeper, noticing as she does that the doll’s porcelain cheeks are so pink because someone has drawn stripes of war paint onto the delicate bisque.
Corinth stays in her room through dinner, sending down word to her hosts that she must prepare herself for tonight’s séance by meditating. She wouldn’t call what she does meditating, though. She sits at her window and watches the garden grow dark and the fireflies emerge out of the deepening shadows. The moving lights remind her of a château she stayed at once in France. For a fête, her hostess had ordered candles affixed to the backs of turtles that were then released into the bosquet to roam at will to create the illusion of fairies flitting between the trees. It was a pretty effect, but near the end of that summer Corinth found one of the creatures sealed in its own shell by the dripping wax. It had suffocated under the wax carapace, a victim of its mistress’s aesthetic whimsy. How long, Corinth wondered then, before she fell victim to a similar fate, before she was sealed within the role she played?
It had
been an easy role to play at first: conjurer of voices, message bearer between two worlds. Her patrons were satisfied with so little. The men wanted to know their mothers had loved them, the women that their children forgave them their inability to save them. More and more over the years it had been the children whom she was asked to contact. It was her specialty. Corinth knew what the mothers wanted to hear. I’m happy here, Mother. There is no pain. I’m with Grandmama (or Grandpapa or Aunt Harriet . . .). I want you to be happy. I am always with you.
As if the beyond were an extended holiday and these were their children’s cartes postale! She hadn’t needed to summon any obstreperous ghosts (whose demands of the living were not so easily satisfied as the living’s demands of them); she merely had to recall her own reluctance to pass her child over to Wanda to understand why these women clung to their lost children.
At first, though, she had been glad enough of Wanda’s help. When she returned from the overlook to the brougham and found Wanda waiting for her, she remembered what her mother had said about her: A good healer, no matter what anyone else says about her. Corinth had shut out from her mind those other things when Wanda placed her firm, capable hands on her and half lifted her into the carriage.
“You shouldn’t be wandering in the fog, especially in these woods. This is where that girl who was pregnant with a white man’s child jumped to her death. She waits here, hungry for other women’s babies. You didn’t see her, did you?”
Corinth shook her head, but when she looked up, Wanda pinned her with her black eyes and Corinth nodded.
“Don’t worry,” Wanda said, “we’ll burn an offering for her tonight to send her spirit on its way.”
“Where are we going?” Corinth asked.
“To Mr. Latham’s camp on the Vly. Land that belonged once to my people. It will be a good place to wait for the baby.”
The camp on the Vly was not far from the overlook, but the carriage had to go slowly because of the fog that came off the river and filled the surrounding valley like a preview of the floodwaters that rose in the spring. Passing through it, Corinth imagined they were deep beneath a lake and the white mist was the clouds seen through the water. Where the Vly Creek flowed into the Sacandaga, they turned west away from the river, crossing flat meadowlands bordered by marsh and bog. Barktown, the settlement where Corinth’s mother had grown up, was to the south. Corinth knew the bogs from the summers on the settlement when her mother would take her collecting for the plants that grew there. They collected spongy sphagnum moss to stuff mattresses and make diapers for babies, and bog rosemary and leatherleaf for making tea. Her mother taught her to burn sweet gale to ward off mosquitoes and how to make a wash from reindeer moss that would soothe a colicky baby. She showed her the white bog orchid that girls collected for a love charm and told her stories about the girls who came back to the bogs to drown themselves when that love went bad. Their bodies would sink in the bog, but their skin and hair would never dissolve, only turn the color of tea and float in that limbo between earth and water for all time. That’s what happens to spirits who take their own life; they can never be free of this earth.
When the carriage left them at the camp on the edge of the bog, Corinth wondered if she had jumped off the overlook after all and this was her limbo. While Wanda carried to the house sacks of food (flour, potatoes, salted meat—enough for a month, although Wanda told her that the carriage would return once a week to bring them fresh food), Corinth made a fire, but its heat didn’t stop her shivering. The fog wrapped around the cabin like a winding sheet. The sound of water dripping from the fancifully carved eaves (Corinth later saw something like them at a chalet in Switzerland) made her feel as if they were underwater, that the house had already sunk into the depths of the bog. That night she dreamed of women’s faces, stained the color of tea, pressing against the windows.
In the morning the fog had lifted, and after a breakfast of Wanda’s griddle cakes and bacon, she felt strong enough to take a walk. Wanda cautioned her to watch her footing in the snow, but under the trees nearly all the snow had melted. She found moss that had survived the winter and, in sheltered places, bog rosemary and leatherleaf that she gathered and stuffed into the pockets in her sleeves, in which she used to keep wires for levitating tables. As she walked over the damp earth, she could feel the water trapped beneath the ground and feel, too, the baby, slippery as a mink frog, stirring in its own pool of water beneath her skin. Little bog baby, she said to herself, lifting her face to the watery sunshine.
For the first time since Tom had left she allowed herself to feel hope. Although Wanda White Cloud might not be the best company, she was a good midwife and baby nurse. By the time the baby was born, it would be summer. She’d stay here until she had her strength back, nursing herself on the teas and plant remedies her mother had taught her about, and then she would travel down the Hudson River to New York City, where she’d find Tom. Opening her eyes, she saw, lifting its head up through a thin scrim of snow, a white bog orchid, its pale petals trembling in the sunlight. Her mother had another name for the love charm. Ghost orchid. Because of the girls who drowned themselves when their love went wrong. Corinth bent to inhale its spicy vanilla scent, but left it where it grew. It didn’t matter, she told herself, if she found Tom. What mattered was the baby growing inside of her. As long as it was safe she’d take whatever else fate had in store for her.
And the baby seemed to thrive those last three months at Milo Latham’s camp. Maybe it was Wanda’s cooking or the teas she brewed from the plants they both gathered or the moisture that filled the air around the cabin. Corinth felt her skin soaking it up, drawing sustenance from the very air just as the sphagnum moss swelled in the spring rains. She was squatting in a patch of the emerald green moss when the first pain rose up as if out of the ground and toppled her off her heels. She felt the ground quake beneath her and a stream of water flood down her leg into the soft, absorbent moss. It was as if the bog were giving birth to her, she thought, sinking back into its clasp. Every spasm that rocked her was absorbed in the rocking of the matted ground, every gush of blood soaked up by the moss. She might have lain there until the baby came if Wanda, walking down to the road to meet the weekly arrival of supplies, hadn’t heard her screams. Wanda managed to get her to her feet in between pains, but by the time they got to the cabin, the pains were coming so fast Corinth barely had time to put one foot in front of the other before the next one swept through her.
“It’s coming too fast,” Wanda said, getting her into bed. She made her drink a cup of bitter-tasting tea and threw a handful of sweet-smelling grass on the fire. “Breathe this,” Wanda said, holding a switch of the burning grass close to Corinth’s face. Looking up, Corinth saw that Wanda had tied a red shawl across her mouth and nose. Her eyes above the cloth were like two black stones at the bottom of a clear stream. Corinth tried to lock her eyes onto them as the pains rocked through her, but the water grew cloudy and she lost sight of them. She could hear the rush of water all around her, carrying her on a strong current. When she closed her eyes, she saw Tom as she’d last seen him in her dreams, trapped beneath the ice in the river, looking for her, but when she reached out for him, he grabbed hold of her and pulled her deeper into the water. Then she saw that it wasn’t Tom at all, but the girl on the overlook, her black eyes dissolving into the water, her body shredding in the current just as Corinth felt her own skin ripping apart, her mouth opening to scream and filling up with black water. Just before the black water swept over her, she pried open her eyes and she was looking straight into Wanda’s. Wanda was holding the baby, a slippery thing covered by a fine film of reddish brown stain. She had given birth to a bog baby after all, Corinth thought, and then Wanda waved another bundle of burning grass across her face and the black water rose up and swallowed her.
When she awoke, Wanda told her that the baby had breathed its last breath while she, Corinth, slept. When she heard the words, she closed her eyes and let the black w
ater close over her again. It was broad daylight when she awoke the next time, but whether it was the same day or the next or the one after that, she had no idea. Every time she opened her eyes the light was too bright. Wanda gave her more tea and she would fall back to sleep until one time when she awoke and Wanda said to her, “It is time.”
When she got to her feet, she could feel a current of blood flood out between her legs into the moss that Wanda had padded there. She could feel it leaking out of her with every step she took out of the cabin and into the bog as each step sunk deeper into the cushiony ground. She’d never walk out of here, she thought when they reached a place of open water. Corinth leaned against a tamarack tree to keep herself from falling. Wanda placed into her arms a swaddled bundle that was so weightless Corinth was sure her arms must be numb. “You must say good-bye to her,” Wanda said, “or its spirit will never be at peace and it will follow you wherever you go.”
Corinth looked up through the tight-bunched needles of the tamarack tree and said the words that Wanda told her to say. When she was done, Wanda held out her hands to take the baby back, but Corinth shook her head. She knelt by the side of the pond and, cradling the baby, bent over until the water reached her shoulders and her arms, and only then, when her skin and the child’s were both stained the color of parchment and old lace, did she look into her child’s face. But it was like looking at something that had happened a long time ago.
She felt how easy it would be to bend over just a little more and sink to the bottom of the bog, where her flesh and her child’s would cling together for all time. She felt Wanda’s eyes on her back. Not stopping her.
But then she remembered what her mother had said about the girls who took their own lives and how their spirits were never free. She imagined herself caught for all time in this place, her unhappy spirit dragging the child’s down into the muck. Better to let it go free.