Read Online The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Carol Goodman
Tags: Fiction
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perfume bottles and leather cases to open the window above the table, craning her neck to let the cool, moist air touch her face. It’s not enough. She needs to feel the air on her throat, her breasts . . . she feels trapped in her clothes. Sitting down at the table, she takes out a buttonhook from one of the leather cases and starts undoing the buttons down the back of her dress. Aurora had offered her the use of her maid, but she declined, explaining that she required a great deal of solitude to nurture the trance state. She peels the dress down to her waist and lets the breeze from the garden bathe her overheated skin.
When she feels cooler, she opens her toiletry case and checks to see if the root she dug up in the garden is carefully hidden. Then she pulls out of the case the wad of spider silk she took from the hedge. She stretches it between her fingertips and holds it up to the window to watch the fine silken threads move in the breeze. She lets it brush against the underside of her wrist, but instead of the crawling sensation she experienced when she stepped through the web in the garden, she remembers the feel of Tom’s fingers on her wrist.
Yes, she says to herself, pushing away the thought, this will do nicely for ectoplasm. She has only to let a thread of it loose at an opportune moment during the séance. Of course it would be easier with a partner.
She stuffs the spider silk into a corner of the Florentine leather case and snaps the lid shut, closing, too, the image of Tom Quinn’s face that briefly appeared in her mind. No, he can’t be trusted. That was only too clear from what happened in Gloversville.
Besides, she was perfectly capable of operating on her own. For reassurance she slips one of the flexible wires out of her corset and fits it into the long narrow slots sewn into her dress cuffs and, wrestling her arms back into the narrow sleeves, practices levitation. She has to make several small adjustments to the bend in the wires, but on her third try the little dressing table rises from the floor to a height level with the windowsill, its burden of cut-glass perfume bottles and silver-backed brushes gleaming in the moonlight, the gloves on their wooden forms hovering like disembodied hands. She keeps it there a moment to see how steady she can hold the table, but when she lifts her gaze to the window and sees the woman standing below in the garden looking up at her, the table drops with a loud crash.
Mrs. Ramsdale, in the room next to Corinth’s, hears the thump. A certain amount of disruption is to be expected, she thinks, having a medium next door. Perhaps she should ask Aurora to change her room, but then, it’s one of the very nicest suites in the house, with a large bedroom facing the garden and its own sitting room at the eastern corner of the house, from which she can see the drive and all the arriving guests. She’s often wondered why Aurora doesn’t take it for herself, but Milo prefers one of the rooms facing the forest to the north and Aurora’s room must, of course, adjoin his. No, if anyone should move, it ought to be the little spiritualist.
Wincing at the pain in her side as she shifts in her bed, Mrs. Ramsdale tries to go back to the scene she’d been making in her head, but instead of picturing her heroine, Emmaline Harley, she thinks of the thump and pictures the twined columns of the Queen Anne bed in the room next door hitting the wall between the two rooms. She pictures that fire-flecked dark hair spread out on the white sheets, a slim hand (she noticed, at dinner, the medium’s unusually long fingers, a sign, she has always believed, of a rapacious nature and a tendency to thievery) grasping the bedpost, then covered by a larger, masculine (but still beautifully molded) hand. Tom Quinn’s hand, which she has watched for so many hours as he turns her spoken words, things of air, into written ones, the ones that last.
A fresh pain blooms in her side and she reaches
When she feels cooler, she opens her toiletry case and checks to see if the root she dug up in the garden is carefully hidden. Then she pulls out of the case the wad of spider silk she took from the hedge. She stretches it between her fingertips and holds it up to the window to watch the fine silken threads move in the breeze. She lets it brush against the underside of her wrist, but instead of the crawling sensation she experienced when she stepped through the web in the garden, she remembers the feel of Tom’s fingers on her wrist.
Yes, she says to herself, pushing away the thought, this will do nicely for ectoplasm. She has only to let a thread of it loose at an opportune moment during the séance. Of course it would be easier with a partner.
She stuffs the spider silk into a corner of the Florentine leather case and snaps the lid shut, closing, too, the image of Tom Quinn’s face that briefly appeared in her mind. No, he can’t be trusted. That was only too clear from what happened in Gloversville.
Besides, she was perfectly capable of operating on her own. For reassurance she slips one of the flexible wires out of her corset and fits it into the long narrow slots sewn into her dress cuffs and, wrestling her arms back into the narrow sleeves, practices levitation. She has to make several small adjustments to the bend in the wires, but on her third try the little dressing table rises from the floor to a height level with the windowsill, its burden of cut-glass perfume bottles and silver-backed brushes gleaming in the moonlight, the gloves on their wooden forms hovering like disembodied hands. She keeps it there a moment to see how steady she can hold the table, but when she lifts her gaze to the window and sees the woman standing below in the garden looking up at her, the table drops with a loud crash.
Mrs. Ramsdale, in the room next to Corinth’s, hears the thump. A certain amount of disruption is to be expected, she thinks, having a medium next door. Perhaps she should ask Aurora to change her room, but then, it’s one of the very nicest suites in the house, with a large bedroom facing the garden and its own sitting room at the eastern corner of the house, from which she can see the drive and all the arriving guests. She’s often wondered why Aurora doesn’t take it for herself, but Milo prefers one of the rooms facing the forest to the north and Aurora’s room must, of course, adjoin his. No, if anyone should move, it ought to be the little spiritualist.
Wincing at the pain in her side as she shifts in her bed, Mrs. Ramsdale tries to go back to the scene she’d been making in her head, but instead of picturing her heroine, Emmaline Harley, she thinks of the thump and pictures the twined columns of the Queen Anne bed in the room next door hitting the wall between the two rooms. She pictures that fire-flecked dark hair spread out on the white sheets, a slim hand (she noticed, at dinner, the medium’s unusually long fingers, a sign, she has always believed, of a rapacious nature and a tendency to thievery) grasping the bedpost, then covered by a larger, masculine (but still beautifully molded) hand. Tom Quinn’s hand, which she has watched for so many hours as he turns her spoken words, things of air, into written ones, the ones that last.
A fresh pain blooms in her side and she reaches
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