when it comes to grief.
“Sometimes a spirit does get lost on its way to the spirit world. It gets confused. But we may be able to help it find its way.”
Aurora turns her hand over and grasps Corinth’s hand, squeezing the bones hard. “Yes, yes, that’s what I’m afraid of, that they’re confused. Milo thinks that I want to contact the children for my own sake, but that’s not it at all. It’s because I can still feel them wandering the halls and the garden paths . . .” Aurora pauses, and her gaze moves from Corinth’s face to the glass doors and the steeply terraced garden beyond. Yes, Corinth thinks, remembering how she became disoriented walking up the hill, a spirit could find itself trapped in that garden. How must it feel to have designed a garden so complicated that the spirits of one’s own children couldn’t find their way out of it?
“. . . and I worry, too, about Alice . . . about how their presences must affect her.”
Corinth looks over at the little girl, who has remained crouched in her niche below the bookcase. She has made herself so small and quiet that Corinth forgot that she was still there. Corinth realizes that in Aurora’s accounts of the children’s games Alice’s name has been absent. Indeed, the child has the look of the one left out, the one who lingers on the edges of the game to watch and listen. Has she been listening now? The girl looks pale and undernourished, but of perhaps even more concern is that picture she drew and the influence it seems to imply.
“We’ll help them find their way,” Corinth says, trying to make her voice sound reassuring. She’s rewarded by a small wan smile and the release of her hand. As Aurora rings for the housekeeper, Mrs. Norris, to show Corinth to her room, Corinth looks down at her hand and sees that Aurora’s fingernails have left four little half-moons in the dark blue leather of her glove.
Dinner has been delayed to give Milo Latham time to return from the city. The doors to the terrace are left open to let in a breeze and, as Aurora announces, so that the guests can enjoy the “music of the fountains” and the scent of the roses, which are at the height of their bloom. Tonight, though, the voice of the water is drowned by the sound of the wind and the roses can’t compete with the sulfurous exhalations of the springs that feed the fountains.
Mrs. Ramsdale rearranges the limbs of the tiny quail on her plate, unable to eat a mouthful. It’s not the reek of the fountains, though, that’s taken her appetite away. That smell she’d grown accustomed to while taking the water cures in Europe and here in America. It’s watching Tom Quinn watching the little medium that’s awakened a fresh bloom of pain in her stomach. He’s pretending to be drawing out Signore Lantini on points of garden design, but she can see that his attention is drawn to the new arrival. Of course, he can’t help but include her in the conversation, since she is sitting between him and the little Italian (while Mrs. Ramsdale has been seated next to the tiresome portraitist, Frank Campbell), but still . . . she can see the way his eyes come back to her while the gardener drones on about Bramante and axial planning and the importance of alternating sunny spaces with shaded and the proportion between terrace and green, between the height of a wall and the width of a path . . . Well, who could blame dear Tom for allowing his eyes to rest on the one thing of beauty in this room while the beauty of the garden is parsed and dissected like some mathematical formula?
And she is beautiful. Even more beautiful than when Mrs. Ramsdale saw her two years ago at Baden-Baden. The fine dark hair, touched with sparks of red, lifting from her clear brow like the wing of a bird . . . yes, that’s how she’d put it in one of her novels . . . her waist slim as a reed . . . Mrs. Ramsdale feels her own waist, which has been thickening this summer even though she lives on
“Sometimes a spirit does get lost on its way to the spirit world. It gets confused. But we may be able to help it find its way.”
Aurora turns her hand over and grasps Corinth’s hand, squeezing the bones hard. “Yes, yes, that’s what I’m afraid of, that they’re confused. Milo thinks that I want to contact the children for my own sake, but that’s not it at all. It’s because I can still feel them wandering the halls and the garden paths . . .” Aurora pauses, and her gaze moves from Corinth’s face to the glass doors and the steeply terraced garden beyond. Yes, Corinth thinks, remembering how she became disoriented walking up the hill, a spirit could find itself trapped in that garden. How must it feel to have designed a garden so complicated that the spirits of one’s own children couldn’t find their way out of it?
“. . . and I worry, too, about Alice . . . about how their presences must affect her.”
Corinth looks over at the little girl, who has remained crouched in her niche below the bookcase. She has made herself so small and quiet that Corinth forgot that she was still there. Corinth realizes that in Aurora’s accounts of the children’s games Alice’s name has been absent. Indeed, the child has the look of the one left out, the one who lingers on the edges of the game to watch and listen. Has she been listening now? The girl looks pale and undernourished, but of perhaps even more concern is that picture she drew and the influence it seems to imply.
“We’ll help them find their way,” Corinth says, trying to make her voice sound reassuring. She’s rewarded by a small wan smile and the release of her hand. As Aurora rings for the housekeeper, Mrs. Norris, to show Corinth to her room, Corinth looks down at her hand and sees that Aurora’s fingernails have left four little half-moons in the dark blue leather of her glove.
Dinner has been delayed to give Milo Latham time to return from the city. The doors to the terrace are left open to let in a breeze and, as Aurora announces, so that the guests can enjoy the “music of the fountains” and the scent of the roses, which are at the height of their bloom. Tonight, though, the voice of the water is drowned by the sound of the wind and the roses can’t compete with the sulfurous exhalations of the springs that feed the fountains.
Mrs. Ramsdale rearranges the limbs of the tiny quail on her plate, unable to eat a mouthful. It’s not the reek of the fountains, though, that’s taken her appetite away. That smell she’d grown accustomed to while taking the water cures in Europe and here in America. It’s watching Tom Quinn watching the little medium that’s awakened a fresh bloom of pain in her stomach. He’s pretending to be drawing out Signore Lantini on points of garden design, but she can see that his attention is drawn to the new arrival. Of course, he can’t help but include her in the conversation, since she is sitting between him and the little Italian (while Mrs. Ramsdale has been seated next to the tiresome portraitist, Frank Campbell), but still . . . she can see the way his eyes come back to her while the gardener drones on about Bramante and axial planning and the importance of alternating sunny spaces with shaded and the proportion between terrace and green, between the height of a wall and the width of a path . . . Well, who could blame dear Tom for allowing his eyes to rest on the one thing of beauty in this room while the beauty of the garden is parsed and dissected like some mathematical formula?
And she is beautiful. Even more beautiful than when Mrs. Ramsdale saw her two years ago at Baden-Baden. The fine dark hair, touched with sparks of red, lifting from her clear brow like the wing of a bird . . . yes, that’s how she’d put it in one of her novels . . . her waist slim as a reed . . . Mrs. Ramsdale feels her own waist, which has been thickening this summer even though she lives on
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