The Ghost Orchid (25 page)

“Norris,” Alice answers, “but only because mother told her I had to be punished for throwing rocks in the well, only I swear I didn’t do it. So I’m being punished for lying as well.”

Corinth kneels on the floor and begins to pick at the knots, but they are too intricate even for her. “I’ll have to get a knife to cut the rope,” she says.

“Tam’s carving knife is in his night table,” Alice says. “It’s the second one from the closet.”

Corinth retrieves the knife, marveling at the girl’s calm. She’s been sitting tied up in a dark closet and yet she’s not even crying. Her calm is somehow more chilling than hysteria, as it suggests it’s not the first time she’s been punished in this barbaric fashion.

“Are you often punished like this?” Corinth asks as she saws at the thick ropes.

“Only when I’ve been particularly bad, not half as often as James and Cynthia, but”—she pauses, and from behind, Corinth can see the girl tilt her head as if she were considering a difficult arithmetic problem—“more often than Tam, I think. Tam was usually very good unless James
made
him be bad. At first, mother wouldn’t punish him at all, but then she said one day”—again the girl tilts her head up to the ceiling, as if she were trying to remember a line of verse she’s memorized—“that James’s punishment would be to see Tam punished. It bothered James awfully, and for a while he tried very hard to be good— Ow! you’ve cut me!”

The knife has indeed slipped in Corinth’s hand while she’s been listening to Alice’s account. It’s only scratched the girl’s wrist, though, and at least the ropes are free now. Corinth takes out her handkerchief and wraps it around Alice’s wrist, holding both of the girl’s hands in hers for a moment as she crouches in front of her. “Alice,” she says, looking into the girl’s black eyes, “your mother stopped punishing your brothers and sisters when they got sick last year, didn’t she?”

“Of course,” Alice says, looking surprised. “Mother nursed them all herself; she loved them all so very, very much.” Alice yawns as if she were repeating a lesson she’d learned by rote. Corinth helps the girl up out of the chair and to the bed closest to the closet while Alice continues her account. “She made them all special teas and poultices so that they’d get well. Can I tell you a secret?”

Corinth nods while smoothing the covers over the girl and Alice whispers in her ear, “Norris gave my tea to the others and made me her own teas to keep me well and a charm to ward off the evil spirits that made James and Cynthia and Tam sick. An Indian charm! And that’s why I didn’t get sick, only”—she falls back down onto the pillow and crinkles up her forehead—“only I lost it. Now I’m frightened that I’ll die like the others.”

“Did the charm look like this?” Corinth asks, loosening the buttons of her dress and drawing from around her neck the leather pouch her mother gave her so many years ago.

“Yes! Only it didn’t have this pretty beading on it. Oh, please, may I have it?”

Corinth slips the necklace off and hands it to Alice. Immediately the girl plucks at the drawstring holding closed the pouch. “Does it have special charms to keep me safe?”

“Yes,” Corinth answers, “sweet gale to ward off snakes and rosemary to help you remember your way home—”

“And a feather!” Alice exclaims, drawing from the pouch a black, red-tipped feather.

“From the red-winged blackbird. My mother said that women of her tribe believed that the red-winged blackbird warned them of approaching danger, and see”—Corinth holds up a strand of Alice’s hair in the moonlight—“you have hair just like the red-winged blackbird—black with tips of red—so it will work for you, too.”

Alice smiles and snuggles deeper into the covers. “So I’ll be safe,” she says.

Corinth nods, unable to speak around the tightness in her chest that feels like ropes binding her. She leans down and presses her lips against the girl’s forehead. What possible help will a handful of feathers and herbs be against a monster like Aurora Latham? But what can Corinth do? She’s not the girl’s mother.

When she raises her head, she sees that Alice is already sleeping. Corinth tucks the leather pouch under the girl’s pillow and quietly steals out of the attic.

She takes the path on the west side of the hill down to the rose garden—both to avoid being seen on the fountain allée and to avoid seeing again that unnatural spectacle of water flowing uphill. She keeps her eyes to the narrow path, ignoring as best she can the rustle of leaves all around her. It sounds as if the woods are full of birds, and she finds herself thinking about the story her mother once told her about the red-winged blackbird that she’d mentioned to Alice.

There was a girl of the Haudensosaunee people who, while gathering cranberries in a bog, came across a blackbird trapped in a thorny bush. The girl freed it, but still it could not fly away because its wing had been torn by the thorns, and so the girl bound up the bird’s wing with moss and leatherleaf and carried the bird in her gathering basket for many days, always giving the bird water and letting it eat the berries she gathered. When the bird’s wing was finally healed, the girl held it up to the sky to let it go, but before it flew away the blackbird spoke to the girl.

“Since you have helped me, my kind will always warn you of approaching danger. Keep this feather in your hair so we will always recognize you.” And when the bird flew away, a single black feather that was tipped in blood from where its wing had been torn fell into the girl’s hair.

Many years later the girl’s tribe were at war with the Abenaki people. Among the prisoners they took was one of the black robes, a shaman who had come from his land to teach the people about his gods. The girl took pity on him, though, and thinking about how she had rescued the blackbird, she untied his bonds and helped him to get away from the camp. Because he was much injured and weakened, she took him to a sacred spring by a cave and there she washed his wounds and gave him water to drink until he was healed. They spent three nights by the spring, sleeping in a cave nearby, until he was well enough to travel, and by then the girl had fallen in love with him. He told her that shamans of his people could not take a wife, and so, although he said he loved her, too, and lay with her as a husband for three nights, he told her that she could not live with him as his wife. At first she was very angry that he had not told her this earlier and she thought about betraying him to her people, but on the fourth day she let him go just as she had once let the blackbird fly away. This time, though, she felt as if something had been torn inside of her and when she plucked the blackbird’s feather from her hair she saw that it was bleeding.

She became known among her people as Ne’Moss-i-Ne, She Who Remembers.

Corinth has reached the edge of the maze. She stops and listens to the rustle of leaves in the hedges and wonders if she had forgotten the name of the girl up until now or has she made it up and given the girl in her mother’s story the name of the statue in the maze? She can’t tell. Her head is full of the sound of wings beating all around her as she follows the downward sloping path to the center of the maze, remembering the rest of the story.

Once a year, on the longest day of the year, the girl’s tribe camped at the spring by the cave to drink the water and so gain strength for the coming year. The woods around the spring were full of birds and animals come to drink at the spring, but it was not permitted to kill a bird or an animal at the spring, and so for the three days the tribe camped here the people and the animals lived side by side as friends. On the third day of her tribe’s visit, Ne’Moss-i-Ne was sitting by the spring surrounded by her friends the blackbirds when suddenly the flock rose to the sky as if possessed of one spirit, the sound of their wings like a great wind. Ne’Moss-i-Ne looked up and saw the sun blackened by their flight, and a drift of feathers fell to the earth, each one stained with blood. She shouted out a warning to her people, but they did not listen to her. Soon the air was thick with the arrows of their enemies and the screams of their women and children. In the middle of this chaos Ne’Moss-i-Ne saw the black robe and knew that it was he who had betrayed the location of the spring to her people’s enemy.

She was taken prisoner by the Abenaki, but later that night the black robe came to her and untied her hands and legs. He swore he hadn’t known what would happen when he led the Abenaki to the spring, and he begged her to forgive him and come back and live with his people now that her own people were all dead or taken prisoner, but Ne’Moss-i-Ne only turned from him and ran into the woods. He followed her, but she ran faster, heading for the high cliff above the Sacandaga River. When she reached the edge of the cliff, she turned back to look at her lover one last time and he saw that her eyes had become two blackbird wings, spreading across the sky. When she jumped, he could hear the sound of wings all around him. Indeed he heard the sound of wings for the rest of his life.

Corinth has come to the center of the maze. She kneels beside the statue of Ne’Moss-i-Ne and, looking into her shadowed marble eyes, realizes just how cursed this place is. How can she leave that poor child here? She lifts her hand to wipe away a tear and feels something brush her face—something that she thinks are wings until she strikes out at them and they turn into hands clasping her own hands. Looking up, she sees a figure standing above her, and for a moment she’s not sure if it’s Ne’Moss-i-Ne’s betraying priest or the ghost of Milo Latham, but then the man’s arms slip around her and she recognizes Tom.

“It’s okay,” he says as he leads her out of the maze. “I’m taking you out of here.” At the gate behind the rose garden, at the same spot where she told the driver to stop when she first arrived at Bosco, she sees the brougham with the cloaked coachman seated on the box. She catches a glimpse of the man’s face in the moonlight as Tom helps her in and recognizes him. He’s the same man who took her to Milo’s cabin ten years ago and who came each week with supplies while she stayed there with Wanda—he is, Corinth realizes for the first time, Wanda’s son. She tries to tell Tom as the brougham lurches out the gate, but he doesn’t understand.