The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman Read Free Book Online Page B

Muses?”
    “It’s Pegasus,” David answers.
    “But this horse doesn’t have any wings.”
    “They were broken off . . . vandals, I suppose . . . It’s shocking how the gardens have been allowed to deteriorate. Hopefully my report to the Garden Conservancy will generate interest in restoring them.” I glance at him, looking for any suggestion of what I sensed last night on the terrace—that he’d prefer to leave the gardens in ruins—but he appears genuinely devoted to the garden’s restoration. It must have been my imagination. “They were an engineering feat,” he goes on. “Aurora not only hired Italian sculptors and gardeners, she brought the most renowned fontanieri in all of Europe to design the fountains.”
    “ Fontanieri ?”
    “Hydraulic engineers skilled in creating not just fountains but elaborate water effects. Giacomo Lantini—whose journal I’ve been reading—was a genius, especially in creating giochi d’acqua —water jokes. For instance, this fountain, the Pool of Pegasus, what does it remind you of? Remember that we started with the Fountain of Memory.”
    I look up at David, but the sun, nearly overhead now, blinds me. I feel suddenly nervous at how much time is getting away. Time I’m supposed to be using for writing, not answering mythology trivia questions. But then I realize what he’s getting at. “The spring on Mount Helicon, home of the Muses—Pegasus strikes the ground with his hoof and the water gushes up. Poets were supposed to drink from the spring for inspiration.”
    “Exactly—the Hippocrene Spring, it was called, or the Horse Well. So of course it makes sense that Aurora, with her love of the arts, would commission a fountain that celebrated the wellspring of creativity. The water that feeds all these fountains is pumped up the hill from the Fountain of Memory. But she didn’t stop there. Look at the stones that pave the path leading to the fountain. . . what do you notice?”
    The stones are broken in places, grass and weeds growing between the cracks. There’s a pattern, though, beneath the layers of moss and dirt. “Horseshoes, how clever . . .”
    “That’s not all. When the fountain was intact, all you had to do was step on one and a jet of water would shoot out, drenching you.” David kneels down by one of the horseshoe shapes in the stone, takes a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, and pries loose the horseshoe. Beneath it is a round copper ring—a pipe leading down into the bowels of the fountain. I crouch down next to it and hear a sound like that of someone drawing breath, as if someone were buried deep in the tunnels beneath the hill, waiting for us to let in the air.
    And then I hear a voice.
    “The eloquence of water fills this hill.”
    I look up at David but he lifts a finger to his lips and mouths a name— Zalman— and I understand. The poet must be standing above one of the fountain pipes reciting the first line of his poem for something like the two hundredth time today, only now I hear him exhale—a sigh that seems to reverberate through the hill—and the poem rushes out of him as fluid as the jets of the old fountain.
    “The eloquence of water fills this hill,
    its history as winding as a maze,
    and influential yet, from vanished days
    that echo in the present, lingers still
    like ripples in a river, work their will
    in suppleness of sculpture, stone eyes’ gaze;
    the symphonies of water, sound’s sweet haze
    seduce a genius time could never kill.
    And yet one hears, while strolling past, a sigh,
    as if lamenting sudden loss of love;
    how beautiful the stone, but lost the art
    when sculptor and his subject have to part.
    Perhaps the water speaks, or else above
    a spirit floats, a soul that will not die.”
    With the sound of Zalman’s voice still echoing through the hollow hill, I suddenly know how I’ll write the first scene of my book. Corinth will visit the Fountain of Memory first—I can easily have her make the driver let