“Good-bye, little one,” she said, realizing as she spoke that she hadn’t given the child a name. But it was too late. The baby’s face was already vanishing in the water, like a candle extinguished in the night.
The flickering lights of the fireflies have disappeared from the gardens at Bosco, replaced by the lights from the candles that the servants carry down the fountain allée to the grotto in preparation for the séance. Corinth checks that the wires are firmly tucked into her sleeve pockets and finds in one the hellebore root she dug up from the garden two days ago. The same root that she remembers removing from her sleeve and putting away in her toiletries case, but when she opens the case, she can’t find it, and the handkerchief in which she wrapped it is also gone. She examines the twisted root and then sniffs it, which causes her to sneeze three times. Her mother had told her that, ground and mixed in a drink, the hellebore root could make a man’s heart beat when it had stopped, but that too much of it would stop his heart for good. As she slips the root back into the toiletries case, she wonders why Aurora Latham would have planted it in her garden.
In the library Milo Latham opens the hidden shelf where he keeps his scotch and pours a glass for Tom Quinn. “Here,” he says, handing him the heavy cut-glass tumbler with its two inches of amber-colored liquid. “My private stock imported from the island of Islay off the coast of Scotland. I have to keep it locked up or else Aurora’s painters and gardeners would piss it all away.”
While Latham turns back to the cabinet to pour his own glass, Tom takes a sip and winces at the taste. Like drinking peat. When Latham turns around, though, he takes a larger swig and nods appreciatively. “That’s grand,” he says.
“Drink up,” Milo says, draining half a glassful in one swallow. “You’ll need some fortification for tonight’s show. Let’s try not to get anyone killed this time.”
“Like I told you, Mr. Latham, the arrow that killed Frank Campbell didn’t come from the bow you gave me. I didn’t even get a chance to use it; I was too busy putting frogs down Mrs. Ramsdale’s dress.”
“I bet you were,” Latham says, draining the last of his drink and turning to pour himself another. “Listen, I don’t care about Campbell; I’m glad to be rid of him and I squared everything with the doctor. But I don’t want any mistakes tonight. I’m paying you good money to make these séances convincing so my wife will be satisfied that the spirits of our children are at rest and we can go on with our lives. I’m sick and tired of living in a goddamned crypt.” He drains his glass and puts it down so forcibly that the crystal chimes against the ormolu tabletop. Then he crosses the alcove to a writing desk against the far wall, takes out a sheet of paper and a pen, and begins to write. Tom sees that his own glass is empty and, since Latham has left the bottle out, pours himself another.
“Pour me one, too, while you’re at it,” Latham calls from the desk. “I’m writing up a bill of sale for you, Mr. Quinn. I noticed that you admired my hunting cabin when we met there last month.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” Tom says, the scotch bottle poised over Latham’s glass. “The deal was cash.” Cash he’ll need, he thinks, if he’s going to take Corinth away from here.
“Well, I haven’t that much cash on me at the moment, Mr. Quinn. Real estate’s becoming quite valuable in the Adirondacks, especially with the state buying up land for their precious park. I think you’ll find that you can sell this parcel for more than the amount we agreed upon. Besides, I’ve been meaning to sell it for some time now—bad memories, you understand, from the trips I took there with the children.” Latham blots the ink and folds the paper in half. Turning, he finds Tom Quinn right behind him holding two glasses of scotch. He takes the one offered him and gives Tom the paper. “Good hunting,” he says, clicking his glass against Tom’s and bolting down another two ounces of the Laphroaig. Tom nods at the toast, not sure if his host is talking about the cabin now or tonight’s activities. Then he takes a sip of the scotch and finds that the taste has begun to grow on him.
Tonight there is no procession to the grotto. Corinth makes her way down the fountain allée accompanied only by the purl of the water and the rustle of the wind moving through the cypresses. Lonely sounds, certainly, but for now at least wholly natural. There’s no singing in the fountains, no sighing in the wind. Wanda Norris, standing outside the grotto with a candelabra held aloft to light her way into the passage behind the river god, looks solid and substantial and very human. There’s no mistaking her tonight for an animated statue. Corinth is determined that there be no magic, no stray whiff of spirit, in tonight’s proceedings. Aurora Latham, like half a dozen of the women she’s been employed by over the years, needs to say good-bye to her children just as Corinth said good-bye to hers. She has never in the ten years since she knelt by the water in the bog caught a glimpse of that tea-stained face, and she intends that after tonight Bosco will be as rid of its ghosts as she has been of hers.
The table has been set up just as last night, close enough to the stone bench so that one of the circle can sit there. They’ve left that seat for her. The men of the party rise as she enters, and Tom moves his chair so she can sit down on the stone bench, next to Milo Latham and directly across from Signore Lantini. Aurora sits next to her husband, Mrs. Ramsdale next to Tom. When she’s seated, Corinth looks up and for a moment, instead of men and women, she sees the circle assembled earlier today in the attic by little Alice: the two dolls in the place of the women, the carved wooden bear and stuffed goose in Milo Latham’s and Signore Lantini’s places. Only Tom’s eyes meet hers with human warmth instead of a glassy stare. She blinks her eyes and the members of the circle regain their human features.
“Let’s begin,” she says, taking Tom’s hand first. When they’ve all joined hands, Corinth closes her eyes and tilts her head back far enough so that she can see through the narrow slits between her eyelashes. She counts in her head to a hundred and then, lowering her voice, she calls the names of the three children. “James. Cynthia. Tam.” She pronounces each name separately as if reciting a recipe, while to herself she pronounces, over the name of each of the children, a word for something inanimate. Stone. Water. Wood. It takes a tremendous amount of concentration to say one word while thinking another; it takes up all the space inside her head, which is exactly what she wants. She doesn’t intend to leave any space for the children to find their way in.
Checking through the slits of her eyes that no one is looking, she frees her right hand from Tom’s and slides a wire beneath the table, gently guiding Tom’s forefinger over the wire so that he can feel it, so he’ll believe she’s taking him into her confidence. She feels his hand startle for a moment, but then he grips her wrist to steady her hand as she rocks the table up and she feels a shiver of pleasure at the pressure of his skin against hers. “James,” she says, thinking stone while picturing in her head a round white stone, “is that you?” The table rocks two times. “Are Cynthia and Tam with you?” Water. Wood.
Two knocks come from beneath the table. Through her slitted eyes she sees Aurora’s face tighten, her brow furrowed and her jaw drawn back as if in pain. “My babies,” Aurora says, “I want to see my babies.”
“You mean the children,” Milo Latham says, his head tilting toward his wife’s voice. Even with his eyes closed Corinth can imagine the impatience that always flickers through his eyes when someone gets something wrong—a waiter brings a wine that’s turned, or a bellhop the wrong valise. She’s seen him at recitals striking phantom keys when the pianist makes a mistake. He is a man used to having his world ordered to his liking and will correct anything amiss. “James, Cynthia, and Tam,” he says, and then, in a low hiss: “You don’t want the others.”
“No!” Aurora spits in a deep, guttural croak that raises the hairs on the back of Corinth’s neck. “You can’t replace one for the other. They’re not dining room chairs that have been broken or figures in a ledger to be moved from one column to another. I want my babies back, my swee
t babies, the way they were when I nursed them.”
The table lurches beneath Corinth’s hand and she’s not sure if she moved it or if Tom did. “It’s James,” Aurora cries, her eyes flying open and looking straight at Corinth. “You must tell him to be quiet. He would never be quiet even when the others were sick, even when he became sick himself.”
“James,” Corinth says, thinking stone, only this time instead of a round white stone she pictures the marble of a statue. “Your mother will say good-bye now and then you can be free. The others can be free, too.” She looks across the table at Aurora. “Tell him good-bye,” she says.
“Go!” Aurora screams. “You must let the others rest.”
Milo opens his eyes and, letting go of Corinth’s hand, turns toward his wife. “That’s quite enough. I’ve had enough of this foolishness. I had her brought here to give you some peace, but it isn’t peace that you want.”
By now Mrs. Ramsdale has opened her eyes and is watching the scene with evident interest. Only Signore Lantini keeps his eyes closed.
“You brought her here so you could bed her in our own house, in the house where our children died, because I wouldn’t let you foist your dirty children on me anymore. She’s my replacement, just as James and Cynthia and Tam were replacements for the ones who died. Look what you’ve brought into your home to replace your own—a stinking savage!”
At the word savage the grotto shakes and something cracks. Signore Lantini’s eyes fly open. “Dio mio, it’s an earthquake.” He gets to his feet and runs out of the grotto.
Milo Latham throws back his head and laughs. “There, you see what you’ve done? You’ve scared your little gardener away. I, for one, have had enough spectacles for one night.” He takes a cigar out of his pocket and lights it using the candle in the center of the candelabra. Then he gets up, bending stiffly at the waist for a moment as if he had a cramp. “I’m going to bed. Mrs. Ramsdale, perhaps you will attend to my wife?” He precedes the rest of the party out of the grotto, Tom directly behind him, then Mrs. Ramsdale, who’s left Corinth to help Aurora to her feet. At the mouth of the grotto Milo bends over, draping his arm around the shoulder of the river god, as if he were doubled over in laughter and sharing the joke with the marble statue. Then he slides to the ground.
By the time Corinth is able to free herself of Aurora Latham’s grip and squeeze herself out of the grotto’s narrow entrance, Tom and Mrs. Norris are kneeling on either side of Milo’s body. Wanda is keening a chant, while Tom leans over, pressing his head against Milo Latham’s chest. He looks up at Corinth and shakes his head, and Aurora begins to scream. Corinth turns away from the sound and her eyes fall on the statue of the river god, the one that represents the Sacandaga. The marble has been cleaved in two, from the top of the shaven skull to the bottom of one moccasin-clad foot, and a quail-feathered arrow is sticking out of the crack in just the spot where the river god’s heart would be.
Chapter Nineteen
So much snow falls in the last weeks of November that I am forced to give up my plan of driving across the state to Lily Dale for Thanksgiving. I console myself by remembering that it’s not a very important holiday for Mira, who, once Halloween is over, focuses all her attention on the approaching winter solstice or, as she calls it, beating back the rising dark. I would have liked a break from Bosco, though, and I considered asking David to make the drive with me, but then I couldn’t quite make up my mind to do it. Since the incident in the well, I’ve felt uneasy in his presence. I’ve seen Bethesda watching me, noticing how tongue-tied I am around him, and I’m sure she thinks it’s because I have a crush on him. She would be half right. I am drawn to him, but I’m also afraid of him—or maybe afraid of how he makes me feel. Truth be told, I have felt this same sense of unease before at the onset of a relationship. I felt it when I began seeing Richard Scully, and as the aftermath of that affair abundantly proved, I would have been wise to heed my instincts.
I’d meant it when I told Nat that having an affair with my writing teacher was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t know how stupid until a month before graduation, when I realized my period was five days late. I made the mistake of telling Richard that I thought I might be pregnant. “Of course it’s up to you,” he’d said, “but I’d hate to see your promise as a writer swallowed up in the drudgery of child-rearing.” I’d known in that instant how little our “affair” had meant to him. I could have the baby, but I’d be on my own. I’d go back to Lily Dale, the way my mother had gone back pregnant with me. I knew she’d take care of us both. I’d have a midwife-assisted childbirth in a birthing tank surrounded by a chanting spirit circle. And I’d grow old there—alone—just as my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before me. A line of women who seemed cursed to live without male companionship. By the time I realized I wasn’t pregnant, I was finished with Richard. I wasn’t even angry at him. I was only angry at myself for having chosen so poorly.
He was right about one thing: I would have hated giving up the opportunity to write this book at Bosco, especially now that it’s going so well. I’d thought that after discovering the bones, and Zalman breaking his leg, and David almost drowning, and all the talk of ghosts, I wouldn’t be able to work at all, but on the contrary, I awake each morning with the voice of Corinth Blackwell in my head practically dictating the next scene. I go straight to my desk and write through breakfast, scurrying downstairs after noon to collect my lunch box, which, I notice, seems to be the pattern that everyone else is now following. The lunch boxes, once collected soon after breakfast, sit in a row outside the dining room waiting for the guests to take a break from their work to claim them. Quiet hours, which used to end at five, have been extended by tacit agreement to six, when we all drift down to dinner in the dining room. There the silence lingers through the meal, as if we were each reluctant to leave the world of our own work. Or maybe we’re afraid of acknowledging out loud what’s going on. I would have thought that after everything that came out in Zalman’s room, someone would have left, but I suspect that if my fellow guests have found the atmosphere as conducive to their writing as I have, then it will take more than a few “water tricks” to make them leave.
After dinner we all drift into the library, where we sit around the fire and drink Bosco’s seemingly endless store of single malt. Diana has given up portioning out the scotch, since all the guests seem to have developed a taste for the eighteen-year-old Laphroaig (only Zalman, because of the painkillers he’s taking, abstains). “It’s a little bit like drinking potting soil,” David says one night when he fills everyone’s glasses (somehow he has become the default bartender).
When I take my first sip of the evening, I picture David’s hands plunging into black soil and shiver as the warm liquid rolls down my throat. Nat talks about the bogs around his grandfather’s cabin and how in the fall his grandfather would make a bonfire out in the bog and the smell of burning leaves would be mixed with the smell of peat. “He’d always make some joke about there being Indian bodies in that peat,” he says. “He’d tell all these stories about pregnant Indian girls who’d thrown themselves off cliffs and drowned themselves in the bog . . .”
“Hm,” Zalman says, “I’ve been thinking of writing a poem about one of those legends.”
“Well, I’m sure you’d give the subject better treatment than my grandfather. He’d always end those stories by sniffing the peat smoke and saying, “ ‘Can’t you smell ’um, son? Roasted Injun.’ ”
“What a lovely man, your grandfather,” Bethesda says.
“Yeah, he was a real bastard,” Nat replies.
Often we all conjecture on whether Corinth Blackwell ever went to the cabin and, if so, with whom? Did she meet Milo Latham there? Or did she and Tom Quinn flee there after the second séance? By my second glass, I’m not sure if we are talking about fiction or fact anymore. It seems as if we are each telling a part of a story that happened a very long time ago to all of us, only we all remember it a little differ
ently. I fall asleep at night with all of their voices in my head, but when I awake, with the taste of peat still on my tongue, I hear only one voice: Corinth’s.
Until one morning in early December, a morning of heavy snow and galelike winds, when I get to the scene of the second séance. I still hear Corinth’s voice, but all she will say are three words: stone, water, wood. Repeated over and over again like one of Mira’s mantras. It feels, maddeningly, as if my muse has had a stroke, and I wonder if my scotch consumption has finally eroded my own brain cells. I stare out the window at the steadily falling snow and feel as if my brain is muffled in the same thick white fleece that covers the garden. Finding the right words is suddenly as hard as making out shapes under the snow. What looks like a hedge might be a statue, and what looks like the shape of a body lying in the giardino segreto might only be a snowdrift sculpted by the wind. A moment later the body seems to take flight, and I see that what I had thought was a snowdrift was actually a flock of the pale gray mourning doves that winter in Bosco’s hedges.
I will myself to see, in the shifting snow, Corinth Blackwell in the center of the séance circle with Tom Quinn on her right and Milo Latham on her left. Her old lover and her married lover: the two men fate had placed her between. But when Corinth opens her mouth, instead of “James, Cynthia, and Tam,” the words “Stone, water, wood,” come out.
I squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate until the image in my head says the words she’s supposed to and then, just as the rest of the scene is coming clear, a noise outside my door makes me jump.
“Ridiculous,” I say aloud, crossing the room. “I’ve scared myself with my own story.”
When I open the door, I’m relieved by the homely sight of the old-fashioned tin lunch box. I look at my watch and see that it’s almost three o’clock. Mrs. Hervey must have decided to bring it up when I didn’t come down for it at noon. I look down the hall and see that Nat’s and Bethesda’s lunch boxes have been left outside their doors as well. Apparently I’m not the only one who’s absorbed in his or her work today—although I may be the only one who’s spent an entire day writing only three words.