This morning, after a lovely breakfast of poached eggs, toast, and fresh fruit, we went back to our room and changed into bathing costumes covered up with the plush robes the hotel provided. We followed the stone path from the back door of the hotel to the springs. It took us to the edge of the yard, to a small pool lined in granite, perhaps ten feet by ten feet. What struck me first was the smell: a sharp, mineral tang tinged with the rotten egg stench of sulfur. Will wrinkled his nose. “Smells haunted,” he joked. I gave him a reproachful glare. Birds chattered from the nearby trees. One of the peacocks came close and gave a screech, but there were no other bathers in the water—we had the pool to ourselves. The water was black! So dark that it seemed to take our reflections and pull them into the darkness, making us disappear. I was actually frightened to get into that obsidian water. Will must have sensed my apprehension, because he put his hand on my arm and said, “We don’t have to do this.”
Was I imagining the nervousness in his voice?
“Of course we’re going in. That’s why we’re here!” I said, slipping off my robe and shoes. I got to the edge and lowered myself in. The water stung the fresh scratches on my ankle. The cold was a shock! So frigid it was painful. I gasped. “I can’t feel the bottom,” I told Will. I held my breath and went down, trying to touch it, but could not. I resurfaced, teeth chattering. The pain of the cold was replaced by numbness. I could not feel the tips of my fingers and toes.
Will slid into the water. “Good God!” he exclaimed.
We swam in quick circles, moving our arms and legs to keep warm, teeth chattering. “You’re beautiful when you’re freezing to death,” Will told me.
The water had weight to it—Will said it was the minerals. As I swam, I felt as if fingers were touching my skin, wrapping themselves around my arms and legs, holding me up then trying to tug me down. After five minutes, we could take no more and got out. We were toweling off when I looked down at my ankle. I blinked in disbelief. The scratches I’d made last night were gone!
A funny little gasp escaped my lips as I rubbed at the unflawed skin.
“Are you all right?” Will asked.
“Ye-yess,” I managed. “Just cold.”
“Your lips are blue, darling wife,” Will announced. His were, too. His skin looked shockingly pale. Suddenly, his eyes focused on the pool, and he asked, “Did you see that?”
“What?” I asked.
He stared down into the dark water, frowning. “Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing. A trick of the light.”
I was sitting in the rose garden beside the hotel when I was approached by Eliza Harding, who waved and smiled as she walked over, greetingme like an old friend she was overjoyed to see. She wore a cheerful blue dress and had her lips painted the perfect shade of red. “May I join you, Mrs. Monroe?” she asked.
I nodded and moved over to make room on the wrought iron bench. “Please call me Ethel,” I said. She sat close by my side, our legs touching.
She pulled a silver cigarette case from her black leather purse and held it open to me. I shook my head. She took out a cigarette and lit it. “You mustn’t tell Benson,” she said. “He thinks it’s vile for a lady to smoke. I love him dearly, but he’s a bit of a wet blanket at times.”
I smiled. “It’s our secret.” I had the same feeling I’d had when I stepped out onto the balcony: an instant sense of familiarity. Like Eliza and I were old friends. Kindred spirits.
“Other than the springs, this rose garden is my favorite place,” she confessed, exhaling a thin blue stream of smoke. “I designed it myself.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. The beds form three concentric circles bisected by the four paths perfectly aligned by directions: the north/south path and the east/west path. It was all very carefully laid out—months and months of planning and sketching.”
“All your work paid off beautifully,” I told her. “It’s simply stunning.”
She smiled. “It’s odd, really. Trying to impose order on nature. The garden is a living, breathing thing; sometimes I’m quite sure it’s got a mind of its own.”
She could name all the varieties of roses: Aurora, Snow Queen, Persian Yellow, Maiden’s Blush.
“Such lovely names!” I said.
She nodded. “Aren’t they, just? I’ve had some shipped over from England. It’s how I survive the winters here,” she confessed. “Planning, poring over flower catalogs.”
She told me she grew up in Brandenburg, on the back side of the hill where the hotel stands. “My family is there still. It’s lovely to be so close to them.”
She shared such fanciful stories—stories about the springs and the miracles the waters brought. The lame and crippled being able to walk again, soldiers from the war coming home with all sorts of injuries and being cured by the springs. “A soldier, a local boy from town named Ethan, came home. He’d been shot in the head over in France. When he got back, he wasn’t able to speak. Didn’t seem to recognize his own mother and father. It was like everything that made him who he was had been erased by that bullet. But his parents, they put him in that water, and the very next day he woke up begging his mother to make him his favorite dinner—chicken and dumplings. He works over at the quarry now as a foreman.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“I’ve seen it myself, over and over again,” Eliza told me. “My uncle Raymond, he lived down in St. Albans. He was left blind after an accident at the foundry there. He came back here, took a dip in the springs, and his sight was restored. I swear it.”
“My husband, Will, he’s a doctor. He thinks perhaps there must be antiseptic properties in the minerals.”
She smiled. “Perhaps.”
