the name of art. Now, if Miss Blackwell were an artist”—here she allows her gaze to drift admiringly over Campbell’s portrait, suggesting the gulf that exists between genuine art and the kind of rude theatrics practiced by entertainers such as Corinth Blackwell—“I’d be the first to forgive the eccentricities and the irregularities of her upbringing. I’ve heard it said, by the way, that the reason she is able to so convincingly reproduce an Indian guide is that she herself is a half-caste.”
“No!”
Mrs. Ramsdale shrugs. “I think it’s quite possible, but that’s not what’s really important. We both want to protect our patron, but more than that, I think there’s something larger at stake here.” Mrs. Ramsdale lifts her eyes to the garden spread out below them—to the water cascading down the central fountain allée, the white marble statues glistening in the sun—and then finishes by resting her eyes on the painted moonlit garden in the background of Campbell’s portrait. “If Aurora’s vision of Bosco as a haven for true artists is to be fulfilled, we can’t allow it to become a circus of freaks and mountebanks.” She picks up a tube of white paint from Campbell’s paint box and slips it into the painter’s pocket. “I believe that the spirit guide’s hands belong to Miss Blackwell. That during the séance she somehow manages to slip her hands free of the circle to roam among the guests. Perhaps she does it with a false set of gloves. So, if you were able to smear a bit of white paint on Miss Blackwell’s hands . . .”
“Won’t she notice the feel of paint on my hands?”
“You can say you’ve just used some hand cream to ease your chapped skin. In fact I’ll make a show of loaning you some. At the worst, she’d be afraid of using her hands and then the séance will be ‘a blank’ and Aurora will think she’s unable to contact the children. But if she does use her hands, the evidence of her touch will be all over the room. When we turn on the lights, we’ll unmask her duplicity and Aurora will ask her to leave in the morning. What do you say, Mr. Campbell? Shall we do it for the sake of Aurora and Bosco?”
Corinth follows Aurora up the west stairs, trying to regain her equilibrium. It’s been years since she had a spell like the one she just had in the breakfast room. As a child she had them quite frequently. In fact, it was her spells that led her to her life as a medium.
The first time it happened she was six years old, sitting at the kitchen table while her mother and two other women from the Vly, Mary Two Tree and Wanda White Cloud, played cards and smoked their pipes, which meant it was a night her father was out, because he objected to the sight of women smoking. A dirty Indian habit, he called it. Corinth loved the smell of the women’s pipes, though, an altogether different smell from what the men smoked. The women used an herb that her mother gathered from the edges of the cranberry bogs when they traveled in the summer to visit her people at Barktown, the settlement on the Big Vly, the marshy lands west of the Sacandaga River. The smell reminded her of the way the grass smelled when the men from Barktown burnt the fields for autumn hunting, the smoke mingling with the fogs that rose over the marshes and bogs.
Her mother had been the daughter of an Iroquois chief. She left Barktown to marry the white logger named Mike Blackwell. They came to this mill town just before Corinth was born, after Mike had broken his leg on a log drive on the Sacandaga. A curse, some of the other rivermen said, for marrying an Indian. But in the stories the Barktown women told, it was the Indian women who were cursed for the lovers they chose.
Mary Two Tree told a story about the daughter of a chief who was planning to marry a white man. When the chief found out, he poled himself and his daughter out into the bogs on a spruce log raft and then, after binding himself to his
“No!”
Mrs. Ramsdale shrugs. “I think it’s quite possible, but that’s not what’s really important. We both want to protect our patron, but more than that, I think there’s something larger at stake here.” Mrs. Ramsdale lifts her eyes to the garden spread out below them—to the water cascading down the central fountain allée, the white marble statues glistening in the sun—and then finishes by resting her eyes on the painted moonlit garden in the background of Campbell’s portrait. “If Aurora’s vision of Bosco as a haven for true artists is to be fulfilled, we can’t allow it to become a circus of freaks and mountebanks.” She picks up a tube of white paint from Campbell’s paint box and slips it into the painter’s pocket. “I believe that the spirit guide’s hands belong to Miss Blackwell. That during the séance she somehow manages to slip her hands free of the circle to roam among the guests. Perhaps she does it with a false set of gloves. So, if you were able to smear a bit of white paint on Miss Blackwell’s hands . . .”
“Won’t she notice the feel of paint on my hands?”
“You can say you’ve just used some hand cream to ease your chapped skin. In fact I’ll make a show of loaning you some. At the worst, she’d be afraid of using her hands and then the séance will be ‘a blank’ and Aurora will think she’s unable to contact the children. But if she does use her hands, the evidence of her touch will be all over the room. When we turn on the lights, we’ll unmask her duplicity and Aurora will ask her to leave in the morning. What do you say, Mr. Campbell? Shall we do it for the sake of Aurora and Bosco?”
Corinth follows Aurora up the west stairs, trying to regain her equilibrium. It’s been years since she had a spell like the one she just had in the breakfast room. As a child she had them quite frequently. In fact, it was her spells that led her to her life as a medium.
The first time it happened she was six years old, sitting at the kitchen table while her mother and two other women from the Vly, Mary Two Tree and Wanda White Cloud, played cards and smoked their pipes, which meant it was a night her father was out, because he objected to the sight of women smoking. A dirty Indian habit, he called it. Corinth loved the smell of the women’s pipes, though, an altogether different smell from what the men smoked. The women used an herb that her mother gathered from the edges of the cranberry bogs when they traveled in the summer to visit her people at Barktown, the settlement on the Big Vly, the marshy lands west of the Sacandaga River. The smell reminded her of the way the grass smelled when the men from Barktown burnt the fields for autumn hunting, the smoke mingling with the fogs that rose over the marshes and bogs.
Her mother had been the daughter of an Iroquois chief. She left Barktown to marry the white logger named Mike Blackwell. They came to this mill town just before Corinth was born, after Mike had broken his leg on a log drive on the Sacandaga. A curse, some of the other rivermen said, for marrying an Indian. But in the stories the Barktown women told, it was the Indian women who were cursed for the lovers they chose.
Mary Two Tree told a story about the daughter of a chief who was planning to marry a white man. When the chief found out, he poled himself and his daughter out into the bogs on a spruce log raft and then, after binding himself to his
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