He turns around and continues into the woods and I follow, unable to explain that my reaction has nothing to do with my writing aspirations or hopes of publication. Instead, I’m remembering how I became increasingly nauseated that day in the bog, how every step seemed to be dragging me deeper into the bog’s maw. I was haunted by the idea that I was walking over the bones of those sacrificial victims my mother had told me about. No, not bones but whole bodies, tanned in the peat like leather purses.
As we descend into the sloping bowl at the center of the bog, I feel the same sinking feeling that I’ve felt since I lost my way in the snow at the overlook. Nat, though, lopes ahead, sure-footed, his gaze on the overhanging spruce boughs, his hands reaching out to graze the rough fringe of blue-green needles as if he were greeting old friends. I can imagine him tromping through these woods as a boy, playing Indian scout, looking for old Indian graves.
He stops at a tamarack that has fallen across the path, its yellow needles staining the new-fallen snow. It must have fallen in the last storm. Nat kneels to inspect the dark red bark, which is flaking off in patches.
“Could that be the tree?” I ask, disappointed to think that the tree we are looking for might have so recently succumbed to age. Looking around, I notice that many of the trees here slant at precarious angles, their roots straining for purchase in the soft soil. Dead trees litter the forest floor, half sunken into patches of frozen water. We’ve come to the heart of the bog, where the soil is thick enough to nurture tamarack and spruce saplings but too unstable to support the grown tree, which falls back into the ground to nurture more seedlings—a cycle of growth, premature birth, and decay that strikes me as cannibalistic—as if the bog were a devouring mother eating its own young. I only hope that our tree hasn’t been eaten by the bog.
“I think that’s it down there,” Nat says, pointing down the slope to a gnarled tamarack leaning precariously over the frozen water. I follow him down the steep incline, struggling to keep my footing in the snow. At the bottom I find Nat running his hands up and down the rough bark with the same intent look that Mira would get on her face when she did a palm reading.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“Shhhh,” Nat hisses, as if he were listening for a heartbeat in the tree. “I think the bark has grown over the name,” he says a moment later.
It seems quite possible. The tamarack’s bark is gnarled and twisted, as if it had chosen to grow inward rather than upward and so escape the fate of its brethren that litter the mossy floor of the bog. Even so, it’s pitched over the frozen water at an angle that suggests it might at any moment dive into the pond. Nat’s hands come to rest over a swollen node, and he begins to pick away at the flaky bark. Peering over his shoulder, I see appear beneath the reddish bark a patch of white that is as hard and shiny as bone. I gasp, as alarmed as if he’d really cut through living flesh to the bone. An image of a body trapped beneath the reddish bark, buried alive within the tree, flits through my mind, but when I reach past Nat to touch the white surface, I recognize that it’s only bone china. A tiny thread of blue flows along the edge of the bark like a vein. We’ve found the petrified heart of the tree.
Nat takes a penknife out of his back pocket and uses it to scrape away more bark. The blue vein reveals itself to be the curling loop at the end of a cursive letter. As I watch Nat’s blade uncover the letters, I have the odd sensation that he’s carving them as they appear. But of course that’s not the case. This name has lain here, buried beneath the tamarack bark, for a long, long time.
“ ‘To tell one’s name the livelong June,’ ” I say aloud.
Nat looks over his shoulder at me, his eyes shining. “Not to be forgotten,” he says. “They left this here so she wouldn’t be forgotten.”
He turns back and brushes away the shredded bark from the porcelain plaque. It’s round and slightly concave. Written in a flowing blue script is a single name. Alice.
“I think it’s the bottom of a teacup,” I say, running my fingers over the smooth white porcelain surface. “If we could get it out, we might be able to see the manufacturer’s mark on the other side.”
I pry my fingers around the edges of the porcelain circle—it appears to have been wedged into a knothole that then grew over—but Nat lays his hand over mine.
“I don’t think we should remove it,” he says.
“Why not? I thought you wanted to know what happened.”
“Yes . . .” Nat falters, looking uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “. . . but it seems that someone went to a lot of trouble to leave this name here. I remember finding it when I was a kid and thinking it had been left here just for me. I used it in a story once—an amateurish thing that I wrote in college—about a boy finding a name carved on a tree in the woods behind his house, only it’s his own name and he thinks it means he’ll die under that tree.” Nat smiles sheepishly. “I called it ‘The Namesake.’ Eventually when the boy’s an old man he hikes into the woods and finds that the tree’s been struck by lightning and his name is rent in two. He has a heart attack and dies.” Nat grimaces. “My writing teacher, Spencer Leland, said it reminded him of one of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories . . .”
“I love Edith Wharton,” I say.
“Yeah, but Leland didn’t. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.” Nat strokes the porcelain. “I think I forgot that the real name on it was Alice because I changed it in my story. It’s like I wiped out her name to write my own, which, when you come to think of it, is all writing is.”
“I thought it was croaking in the graveyard,” I say. “Jeez, Nat, you’ve got more reasons not to write than any writer I’ve ever known.” As soon as the words are out I regret them. Who am I, after all, to criticize Nat Loomis’s ideas on writing? But Nat is laughing, big booming laughs that echo in the bowl of the bog. I can feel the reverberations in the spongy ground and see them in the tamarack’s shivering bark. Then I hear a loud groan and realize that the tree is careening forward—straight toward Nat. I grab his arm and pull him out of the way just before the tree hits the pond, shattering the thin scum of ice on its surface. We watch as the tree slowly sinks into the dark water.
“Damn. If I’d written that in a story, Leland really would have lambasted it.”
I don’t say anything. In the patch of reddish brown soil that’s been upturned by the tamarack’s roots lie a handful of white shards. Like tiny bones. I remember then what I saw that day in the bog with my mother. At the edge of a pond I had bent to pick a white flower that I thought might be the orchid my mother was looking for and saw, staring up at me from the water, a baby’s face. Its skin tanned like old leather. By the time Mira found me retching into the reeds, the face was gone, but I believed I had seen the face of a child sacrificed to the bog.
Nat kneels and picks up one of the white fragments and turns it over. I see half a wing of a blue bird merging into the white background.
“It’s the rest of the teacup,” I say with relief. “It’s just like the ones that are at Bosco.”
We don’t talk much on our way back to the car. I sense that Nat is immersed in his memories of the childhood summers he spent here with his grandfather—perhaps reevaluating those memories in light of what he’s learned about his family history—just as I am drawn back to that day in the bog with my mother.
I remember Mira finding me by the edge of the pond, sick and frightened by the baby’s face I had seen in the bog water. She cradled me against her soft breasts and belly—it was like being hugged by a Bronze Age fertility goddess come to life—and told me that it was because I was a woman now (apparently Mira had known all along I’d gotten my period) and that this happened to the women in our family. They saw things. They saw people who were dead and sometimes they saw people who hadn’t been born yet. The thing I had to do was gain control of it before it gained control of me. We’d have a séance that night to confront the spirit that had frightened me in the bog. But the séance Mira held that night
hadn’t helped at all. All it had done was teach me how to close my eyes to the things I saw, to never let myself relax, to never trust myself entirely or allow myself to fall in love—a strategy that had worked fairly well until I came to Bosco.
“I may have some trouble getting the car turned around and up this hill in the snow,” Nat says when we get back to the Range Rover. “I’ll concentrate better alone. Why don’t you hike up the drive and wait for me at the top of the hill.”
I do what he says, but when I’ve reached the top of the hill, the sound of the Rover’s engine racing makes me turn around. The car is slipping backward, sliding toward the black maw of the pond, as if it were a mouth waiting to swallow Nat up into the bog. I realize that this is why Nat didn’t want me in the car: he knew it might be dangerous. I open my mouth to scream, but then the car comes to a halt and, in a burst of grinding gears and spraying snow, gains purchase and hurtles past me, skidding to a stop a few yards away. I stand for a moment looking back at the pond and the bog beyond the cabin, as if making sure that nothing is coming after us, but the only movement is the falling snow and the gentle swaying of the spruce trees.
I trudge toward the Range Rover, my eyes on the lowering sky that hovers over the black spruce trees that line the drive. It’s like looking down a dark tunnel spanned by a marble arch. As I stare into it I sense that something is coming down the drive. I squint into the swirling snow and see, at the end of the drive, a dark shape detaching itself from the spruce trees. I feel the boggy ground beneath my feet pulsing in a steady pattern that could only be horse hooves striking the ground. And then I see it. The black carriage driven by a man cloaked in black, a glimpse of the red interior—like a beating heart—a woman’s head craning out the window to look at . . . what? She seems to be looking straight at me.
Then it’s gone. The shadows resolve into trees and one large, raucous blackbird that takes flight into the overhanging sky and passes low over my head. I see something drop and bend to pick up what I think will be a feather, but instead when I open my hand I find that I’m holding a white flower. A bog orchid, crushed but still retaining the faint spicy scent of vanilla. The charm my mother and I had looked for in vain years ago. I slip it into my coat pocket, along with the pieces of the broken teacup, and get into the car.
Chapter Twenty-six
The fog is so thick that the only way Corinth knows they’ve reached the camp is the smell of peat in the air. Alice must sense it, too, because when the coach pauses she opens the door and jumps down.
“I’ll race you to the cabin,” she calls over her shoulder. “I know a shortcut.”
Corinth calls after her to tell her not to go, that she’ll get lost in the fog, but she’s already vanished and Corinth has no strength to follow her. She barely has the strength to prop her elbows on the coach’s windowsill and stick her head out to look for Alice. The fog lies thick on the spruce boughs overhead, like a mirage of winter. At the end of the long colonnade of trees she sees a shape emerging from the fog that must be Alice, only then Alice herself leaps out from the woods just beneath the coach window. She’s holding a flower up, which Corinth just manages to grasp before Alice runs back to the woods. She looks back up the drive to where she saw the figure coalescing in the fog, but what looked like a woman a moment before now grows wings and takes flight. It’s only a large blackbird whose plaintive caw as it flies overhead so startles Corinth that the flower Alice had given her—a white orchid—slips from her fingers and falls beneath the wheels of the carriage, leaving behind only a fleeting scent of vanilla.
Tom carries her into the cabin, Alice close at his heels chattering happily about the cabin’s peculiarities and special features. She knows how the woodstove works and where the tea and sugar are kept in special sealed tins to keep the mice out. Does Corinth want her to make her a cup of tea to revive her from the journey? (She recites the offer like something she must have overheard.) Corinth nods weakly, more to give the girl something to do than from any great longing for tea. So far the child seems unperturbed to be here with two nearly total strangers, but surely she’ll start asking questions soon. What, Corinth wonders as she leans back on the bed, will they tell her? Should she tell her that Aurora Latham, who never treated her as a mother should, was not, in fact, her real mother? And what should she tell her about Wanda—the one person who treated her with any kindness?
Corinth closes her eyes and once again she is back in the well. At first she thinks Wanda must be dead, because it is so silent, but then she hears a harsh hiss, like air being slowly let out of a pneumatic tire, and she realizes that Wanda is conserving her breath as Corinth had toward the end, and as Corinth had, she is turning each exhalation into a shushing noise to silence the children. Only it’s not just the restless stirring of the dead children she silences but the muttering of the spring itself. The water is moving more slowly, drying up; soon it will cease to flow altogether. Wanda is cursing all of Bosco with her dying breath.
“Here’s your tea.”
Corinth opens her eyes, more grateful for the sound of Alice’s voice than the proffered cup. She’s poured the tea into her own cup—the flow-blue cup with her name at the bottom. Corinth reaches for it, but her hand is shaking too hard to hold it.
“I’d better help you,” Alice says, bringing the thin china rim to Corinth’s lips. She tips the cup and Corinth sees the letters at the bottom of the teacup—only now instead of Alice’s name she sees the name she gave to her own child.
The tea must have some kind of calmative herb in it because, while Tom is tucking Alice into a bed on the other side of the woodstove, Corinth falls asleep watching the light fade from the little window above her bed. When she wakes up, much later, the window is dark and the only light in the cabin comes from the dying embers in the woodstove. Tom is lying next to her in the narrow bed, asleep, but the moment she stirs he’s awake. He gets up and stokes the fire and boils water to wash her wound and then rebandage her shoulder.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he says. “I think I should get a doctor for you.”
“It’s too risky,” Corinth says. “They’ll find us and take Alice. I’ll be fine.” She’s far from sure that she’ll be all right, though. Along with the loss of blood, she feels she’s left some part of herself back in the well at Bosco—a part that Wanda is holding on to as she dies. That she is being silenced by Wanda’s dying breaths just as the children and the spring are being silenced.
“It’s too risky to keep her with us,” Tom says. “We could leave her someplace safe where she could be returned to her mother—”
“No!” Corinth says, surprising herself with the strength she’s able to summon. “Whatever happens, you must promise never to let Aurora get her hands on her. If something happens to me—” Tom starts to interrupt, but Corinth places her hand over his mouth and goes on. “If anything happens to me, take her to my sister in Buffalo. The address of the family she’s with is in my diary. I’ve been sending money for years—enough for them to take care of Alice, too. Please, Tom, promise me.”
She sees something cloud in his eyes. “You haven’t had much reason to trust my promises in the past,” he says, “and there’s something I think I should tell you before I make any more.” She tries to lift her hand to silence him, but he clasps her hand and brings it to his lips. “I wasn’t at Bosco only as Violet Ramsdale’s employee,” he says. “I was working for Milo Latham as well. He approached me in New York and said he had need of my ‘skills as a conjurer.’ That’s how he put it. He said he was bringing a medium to his home at his wife’s request to contact their dead children, but that he wanted to make sure his wife was satisfied with the results of the séance. So I agreed to . . . augment the effects of the séance . . .”
“Tom, I know . . .”
“No, you don’t know everything. I knew you were to be the medium. I knew you were Latham’s mistress. I agreed because I wanted to get back at you for not waiting for me in Gloversv
ille. I was going to plant the tools I used in the false séance in your room and then unveil you as a fraud—Violet would have been only too happy to help.”
“But you didn’t,” she says. “You didn’t go through with it.”
“The minute I saw you again I knew I couldn’t. But still, I faked the séance—”
Corinth begins to laugh, but the motion hurts her shoulder too much. “If only Milo knew! There was no need to fake anything. His children’s spirits are only too real. He found that out too late . . .” Corinth’s voice trails off.
“You mean he died of fright?”
“No,” Corinth says, shaking her head, “or at least, not fright alone. Aurora put hellebore in his scotch. It can kill a man if his heart is weak.”
“Then I’m lucky my heart’s not weak: I had two glasses of Latham’s scotch last night.”
Corinth looks out the window by her bed and sees the great shaggy shadows of spruce trees emerging out of the darkness and hears the call of a red-winged blackbird. It’s almost dawn. She looks up at Tom, his face bathed in the pale light, and then looks toward the bed where Alice is sleeping, the girl’s dark eyelashes fringing her pale cheek, which is pillowed on her long, slender fingers.
She lays her hand on Tom’s chest. “No,” she says, “you have a strong heart.”
She’ll have to tell him that Alice is his daughter, she realizes, but tell him in a way that will leave no doubt, so that he’ll protect her no matter what happens. She takes her hand from his chest and reaches for his hand, wrapping her fingers around his wrist, and pulls herself up to a seated position. The blood swims from her head, but she bites the inside of her cheek to keep from fainting.
“There’s something I have to show you,” she says, “before Alice wakes up. It’s only a short walk and I’m feeling much stronger.”