"No," said Yolande. "No. It's all right. I'll go with you."

"You'll go with me?"

"Christabel," said Yolande, in an unnaturally high voice, "take the baby home. Take the baby home and stay there. It's all right. I'll go with him. It's all right. . . . Honey, please stop crying. It's the best way, doing what he says. Then everything will be all right. Do you understand?"

She understood. She seemed to understand. Though Germaine was clearly too heavy for her, she even tried to carry her for a few yards; then she lowered the baby to the ground and walked her along. Smiling, her face wet with tears, Christabel waved goodbye to Yolande and the boy. And Yolande waved back. The boy was standing close beside her, his fist still closed in her hair. He was very tall. He had pulled the cap down so tightly on his forehead that his head looked too small for his body. Christabel was to remember that cap-it was gray, with a faded initial-black, or deep red-and its visor was frayed. She was to remember the boy's queer twitching grin and his moist eyes and the agitation of the air about them, as if they were standing on a violently rocking surface. And Yolande's posture, so stiffly erect. And her calmness. Could it be possible-her calmness! Jaws set rigid so that her teeth would not chatter, eyes opened wide in a doll's paralyzed stare- "Goodbye! I'll be along in a while! Take care of Germaine! Stop her crying! It's all right! It's all right!" Yolande shouted.

OF COURSE CHRISTABEL ran for help, dragging the baby along. She ran to the lake, where the boys had been swimming; now most of them were on the dock, partly dressed. Garth was the first to hear her screaming.

It seemed that someone had hurt Yolande-or was with her now-trying to throw her in the creek?-drown her? Or were they in one of the barns-?

The boys ran along the creek, found no one at the cove, climbed the hill to the barn, and discovered, there, Yolande and the boy-Yolande's dress was ripped from her shoulders, her small white breasts were exposed, her face was contorted, she shouted Stop him! Help me! Help me! She pushed her way free of the boy, who cowered back, his face sagging with astonishment: he stared at Garth and Albert and Jasper and the others as if he could not believe what he saw. Garth recognized him as one of the Doans-the son of one of the Bellefleurs' tenant farmers-and stooped at once to pick up a sizable rock. Don't let him out! Kill him! Kill him! Yolande was screaming. Though Garth would not have required her help she seized his arm, tore at him, pushed him forward, even struck his shoulder with her fist. Oh, kill him! she screamed, her snarled hair in her face, Don't let him live!

Which is what happened.

WITHIN TEN MINUTES the barn was in flames. One of the boys tossed a lighted match, and the barn exploded in flames. (But which of the boys did it? Jasper claimed to have seen his brother Louis strike a match, Louis denied it but claimed to have seen Garth, Garth was certain he'd seen Dave, but Dave, turning his pockets inside out, claimed that he never carried matches in his trouser pockets, only his shirt pocket, and his shirt was back on the dock: he halfway thought he'd seen Albert throw the match.) They bombarded the Doan boy with rocks, yelling and hooting, two of them at the doorway of the barn, the others at the windows, pelting him with rocks (some of them so heavy they could barely be thrown) and stones and pebbles and chunks of dried mud and cow manure, and even branches, and old rusted parts from farm machinery, anything they could get their hands on, anything that might have weight enough to give pain. Yolande, in a frenzy, the bodice of her dress still hanging torn about her hips, ran from window to window, throwing rocks, screaming in a voice no one had ever heard before. Oh, kill him! The filthy thing! The filthy thing! He doesn't deserve to live!

Bleeding from the forehead and cheek, whimpering, the Doan boy instinctively ran to a corner, and crouched there, his hands protecting his neck, his entire body shaking; but Garth, leaning in a window, was able to bring something down on his back directly-something rusty and pointed-and a stream of blood leapt out and soaked through his coveralls. And then, within seconds, the barn was in flames. It was odd, it was very odd, afterward a number of the boys considered how odd it was, that they hadn't run into the barn after him-for some reason they had stayed outside-they had contented themselves with attacking him at a distance-as if they had known it might be dangerous to follow him into the barn.

The boy tried to escape from the burning barn, on his hands and knees, in the very doorway of the barn he crawled, and they pelted him with rocks, jeering and hooting, and he fell back, disappeared, and walls of flame hid him from view; and the very air crackled with heat; and from out of nowhere (unless the creature had been sleeping up in the loft, and had hidden there during the stoning) there appeared, again in the doorway, a skinny yellow hound, maddened with terror, its fur licked with flames, a mutt none of the boys had ever seen before, obviously a stray, and quite spontaneously they stoned it, and drove it back, and they could see it bounding, in flames, from side to side, and they could hear its pain-crazed cries for some minutes-until at last it was silent.

They backed away from the burning barn, suddenly exhausted.

"That dog," said Yolande tonelessly. "Where did that dog come from. . . ."

The fire burnt noisily, great billowing clouds of smoke rose into the air, and the orangish flames towered above the tallest of the trees.

"I didn't see any dog," one of the boys said.

"There was a dog. A dog in there. That was a dog. . . ."

"I saw a dog. I don't know where the hell it came from."

They backed away, panting, wiping their faces. In all the vast landscape there was nothing so mesmerizing, so eerily beautiful, as the flaming barn.

"The stupid dog, to be in there with him," one of the boys muttered. ". . . deserved it."

"I didn't see any dog," another boy said.

"Oh, he was in there, all right," another said. "He's still in there."

BOOK THREE.

In the Mountains . . .

In Motion.

In that twelve-foot-high granite tower three storeys above the garden (which, in the autumn, was noisy with the labor of workers) Bromwell chattered absentmindedly to his baby sister, not showing the queer half-painful excitement he felt when she so avidly, so eagerly, aped his words and even his gestures (as if, at the age of fourteen months, she were already greedy for knowledge-for his knowledge-and her very hunger stimulated a hunger in himself): and many years later as he rose from his seat, unconsciously pressing his somewhat bent wire-rimmed glasses against the bridge of his nose, hearing enumerated, in an English quaintly and brusquely accented, the dimensions of his "prodigious" (an adjective from the popular press, one Bromwell would have scorned had he even known of it) achievements in the young field of molecular astronomy, he was to see again, and to hear again, for a fraction of a fraction of a wondrous second, the night sky cold as a knife blade above Bellefleur Manor, and his own high-pitched rambling voice. Cassiopeia, Canis Major, Andromeda. And there is Sirius. (And the baby would repeat, almost accurately, Sirius.) But only in our language, Germaine. And only in our galaxy. And only from this position in our galaxy. Do you understand? Yes? No? Of course you don't understand because no one does. And here: Ursa Major. (Ursa Major, said the child, her eyes and hands grabbing at the air.) In that crude tower above the garden (whose stained, crumbling statuary was being hauled away, heaped in the back of a truck, at last-what an eyesore that crowd was, Leah exclaimed, what a graveyard) Bromwell, surprisingly, "watched" his baby sister; and competed with Christabel for the opportunity. "But he's no fun, he doesn't play with her, he never takes her outside, even," Christabel said angrily; "it's always that damn old telescope of his, and those skeletons, and butterflies, and twaddle he's fished out of books-do you even know what it smells like up there, Mamma? Why don't you go and investigate!"

Leah, of course, had no time for such things. And since the day when Jasper and Louis broke into Bromwell's laboratory to release the muskrats, mourning doves, grasshoppers, frogs, and garter snakes he'd been keeping there for experimental purposes (his old laboratory on the second floor, that is, years ago), Bromwell made certain, through an elaborate system of locks, wires, and levers, and a secret "eye" in the steelbound oak door, that no one could intrude, whether to vandalize or merely investigate. "Your son is growing increasingly eccentric," aunt Aveline told her brother Gideon, of whom she had once been extremely fond. "Don't you and Leah care that he hides himself away from everyone, that he's experimenting on live creatures, and mixing chemicals, and looking through that microscope all hours of the night?" Gideon, who had taken to ignoring most of his family now, with the exception of his brother Ewan, shrugged one shoulder in passing and said, "Telescope. Not microscope. You half-literate bitch."

Though Bromwell was ill at ease in the presence of the other children, he chattered away companionably with Germaine, despite-or perhaps because of-the difference in their ages. He enjoyed bringing her up to the third floor, to the tower on the northwestern corner he had had one of the servants help him weatherproof with strips of old asbestos siding they had found in an untidy heap in one of the barns; he enjoyed watching her walk in her quick, halting, thought-absorbed manner, her pudgy arms extended like a sleepwalker's, her eyes glittering with that peculiar ravenous yearning, as if she knew (as Bromwell surely did) that the visible universe was filled with wonders greatly nourishing to the soul-if only the soul opens itself, unresisting.

The mystery of the world, one of Bromwell's early masters said, is its comprehensibility.

So Bromwell puttered about, sketching in pencil the trajectories of certain planets and comets and runaway stars; making notations in his neat, rigorous, spidery little hand; describing flagelliform orbits that crossed and recrossed the familiar solar system with a whimsicality of their own. (From which Bromwell learned, as the years slowly passed, audacity as well as humility.) Though Germaine was hardly more than a baby, and certainly too young to understand, he was buoyed along by her very presence, and by the greediness of her listening, and spoke aloud any number of things as they came to mind: How can the rest of them remain satisfied with what the eye can seize, unmagnified! How can they live so crudely! Never asking the most obvious questions, Are the past and the future contained in the sky, is there a "single moment" throughout all the galaxies, will it be possible someday to measure God (when the proper instruments are available), why does God delight in motion, is God contained not only in the Universe as it exists at this moment, but in its past and future as well . . . ? Never asking, Where does the Universe end, when did it begin, if it's an island what surrounds it, if it began 20 billion years ago what preceded those 20 billion years, is it dead or is it alive, is it alive and pulsing, do its components mate with one another, can I contain them all in my mind . . . ?

A dust grain turned infinitesimally in the sunshine and revealed to Bromwell's astonished eye a miniature galaxy, diamond-faceted. It might have been the glittering eye of a fly, magnified innumerable times; or the great sun itself, diminished. At such times he began to breathe lightly and shallowly, and his frail body quaked. (Indeed, throughout childhood Bromwell was subject to shivering fits, even when the temperature was mild. Your son is too high-strung, he's too easily excited, members of the family told Leah and Gideon, disapprovingly; he isn't much of a boy, is he.) He was hardly three years old before it became evident that his eyes were weak and he needed glasses, rather to his parents' shame. (For they, of course, had perfect vision. Their handsome eyes would never require corrective lenses.) One winter, he and his somewhat older cousin Raphael traded a cold back and forth, like pups or kittens in a single litter, greatly worrying their mothers (for what if, in those days before snowmobiles and helicopters, when the castle was snowbound a month or more every winter, one of the children came down suddenly with pneumonia?)-for both had the look of children fated to die young, without protest. Gideon said roughly of his son that he'd outlive all of them; there was no need for the women to fuss. "He just wants answers to his questions," Gideon said. "Give him answers to his questions and he won't need any medicine." But there wasn't a Bellefleur, unfortunately, not even cousin Vernon, who could give Bromwell the answers he required.

(In secret, in his tower, fastidiously polishing the lens of his telescope as he talked to Germaine, Bromwell pushed to the very periphery of his mind the subject of family. The subject of Bellefleur. His imagination simply went dead, his prim little mouth settled into an ironic twist. Family and blood and family feeling and pride. And responsibility, and obligations, and honor. And history, Bellefleur history. The New World Bellefleurs were founded, you know, back in the 1770's, when your great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jean-Pierre, settled in the north country. . . . How impatient Bromwell was with such palaver, even as a small child! He wriggled with embarrassment, hearing grandfather Noel drunkenly reminisce, listening to great-grandmother Elvira recall Christmas celebrations, horse-drawn sleigh races on Lake Noir, weddings (at which memorable things invariably happened) between people long dead, of whom no one had heard for decades, about whom no one cared. Even more embarrassing were his own mother's strident claims: Bellefleur this, Bellefleur that, where's your ambition, where's your sense of loyalty, where's your pride? Bromwell once fidgeted so in her presence that she took hold of him by the shoulders of his jacket to give him a little shake, and he shook himself free, wily and graceful as one of the cats, by wriggling out of the jacket and bounding away, leaving Leah with the bodiless jacket in her hands. . . . Why, Bromwell, what are you doing, what are you thinking of! she had cried, astonished. Are you disobeying me?

His embarrassment shaded gradually into contempt, and his contempt into a profound, listless melancholy, for he could not escape Bellefleur without escaping history itself; he might belong, then, to a world, but he could never belong to a nation. And then again Bellefleur was passion: passions of all kinds. He had no need to spy on his parents to comprehend the nature of the bond between them. (For didn't he observe, frequently enough, in nature, such "bonds"-male and female mating, and mating, and again mating, their striving bodies locked mechanically together, one usually mounted upon another's rear?-didn't he hear, all too often, smutty tales of stud horses, bulls, hogs, roosters?-and he had been oddly disturbed by the men's overloud laughter when someone told of a Steadman ram that had broken into a penned-off flock of ewes and impregnated, within five or six hours, more than one hundred of them. . . . If sex was a fascinating subject to the other boys it was a rather chilling subject to Bromwell, who approached it as he would approach all things, clinically and fastidiously, with the aid of books acquired through the mail. What was sex? What were the sexes? What did "sexual attraction" mean? He read of certain creatures-quahogs, whatever they were-who begin life as males, and who turn into females in order to mate; he puzzled over other creatures who had the ability to change sex within a matter of minutes, male to female to male again, in order to mate; and then there were the hermaphrodites who, possessing both male and female organs, might mate at any time . . . and in some cases continuously, for the life of the organism. There was a microscopic creature, at home in the warmth of human blood, in which the female lived encased within the male, in perpetual copulation: if Nature held no resistance, the extraordinary thing-it was a fluke, aptly named-would populate the world. The sexual eccentricities of oysters and sea hares and fish in general were not really eccentric, nor was it a matter of alarm that so much sperm was "wasted"-over one hundred million sperms in the ejaculation of the human male, fifty times more in the stallion, eighty-five billion in a single ejaculation of a boar!-for each of these evidently wished to populate the world with its own kind. When Bromwell stumbled upon his uncle Ewan straining and heaving and grunting with one of the laundresses in a closed-off downstairs room, or when he happened to see, quite by accident, through his telescope, his own father cupping a young woman's head in his hand, and bringing it roughly to his big-pored face (this on a hill above the lake, a mile away), or when his cousins showed him the pronged bone of a raccoon's penis (they had trapped the creature down by the creek and castrated it), asking him if he had any books that would explain such a strange thing-or was it, in the raccoon, normal?-Bromwell told himself once again that the details of sex were of no significance, for wasn't life on this planet clearly a matter of a metabolic current, unstoppable, a fluid, indefinable energy flowing violently through all things from the sea worm to the stallion to Gideon Bellefleur? Why, then, take Bellefleur as central in nature? He much preferred the stars.) I began by hiding in Nature, Bromwell was to write in his memoir, decades later, but Nature is a river that carries you swiftly along. . . . Soon your world is everywhere, and there's no need to hide, and you can't even remember what you were fleeing.

ALONE AMONG THE Bellefleurs his baby sister intrigued him.

Leah had forbidden him to experiment with Germaine, but in private he did exactly as he wished. He examined her thoroughly, taking note (though he had no theory to explain it) of the curious scar tissue on her upper abdomen, an irregular oval of about three inches in diameter; he tested her eyesight (and was sadly pleased to discover that it was far, far keener than his own); he tested her hearing, weighed her, made pencil diagrams of her hands and feet, kept a fastidious record of her growth (which he seemed to know beforehand would be prodigious-as his assuredly was not); spoke with her as he might have spoken to an intelligent adult, enunciating his words carefully, giving her time to repeat them after him, moon, sun, star, constellation, Cassiopeia, Canis Major, Andromeda, Sirius, Ursa Major, Milky Way, galaxy, universe, God. . . . "You learn fast, don't you," he said in satisfaction. "Not like the rest of them."

He was pious and methodical in his experiments, and there was always an air of reverence about him-a child who appeared to be, at least at a distance, a somewhat undersized ten, in a knee-length white laboratory coat, his hair cropped short and shaved up the back, his thick-lensed glasses fitting snugly on his nose as if he'd been born with them-even when what he did was illicit, and would have enraged his mother. Forbidden to dissect animals he nevertheless continued to dissect them, though his interest in biology was quickly ebbing, as his interest in the stars blossomed; forbidden to experiment with what he called his sister's "powers" he nevertheless experimented with them, sometimes allowing into his tower, as a control, sweet Little Goldie (who represented, to Bromwell, the "average" intelligence) and even the hoydenish, rapidly growing Christabel (subdued for weeks after the curious and unexplained incident of the barn fire out by Mink Creek, but naturally somewhat restless, and impatient, and likely to taunt her twin if he surrendered, even for a moment, the natural power his superior intelligence allowed him: but Bromwell needed her since she represented the "slightly above average" intelligence) since she had been born of the same parents as Germaine, and presumably shared genetic inclinations. He oversaw three-hand casino among the girls, though Christabel and Little Goldie thought it ridiculous, to be playing cards with a baby!-and noted how frequently Germaine won, or would have won had she known how best to play the cards she received. He had Little Goldie sit across the room and stare without blinking at full-color illustrations in his Elements of Biology, and he queried Germaine, patiently, about what she "saw" Little Goldie seeing; or he instructed Little Goldie to run somewhere and stare for five full minutes at a distinctive, sizable object (a water tower, a tree, one of the new cars) while Germaine, in the tower, twitched and whimpered (and frequently soiled her diapers) and tried to say what Little Goldie saw. Her fists paddled, her chin was wet with baby spit, she stammered, and squirmed, and caused the very floor of the room to vibrate with the intensity of her emotion-and much of the time (according to Bromwell's calculations 87 percent of the time) she really did "see" what the other child saw. And after Germaine pointed excitedly, one morning, at an empty beaker on a windowsill, not more than five seconds before the beaker was blown off and shattered on the floor, Bromwell instructed her to push off the sill, by her own "powers," a similar beaker-and would have kept the poor child there for hours (for he had the reptilian patience of an adult to whom time possesses no value except in proportion to what it might reveal, what meager nugget of truth it might suddenly cast up) had not she reverted, after the first hour, to infanthood, and began screaming and thrashing about so violently that he feared the entire household would rush up his private stairs and break open the locks to his private tower. And then Germaine, whom he needed, upon whom he was so curiously dependent, would be taken from him forever. . . . And of course he would be soundly whipped by one or the other or both of his parents.

"Don't cry! It's all right. It's all right," he mumbled, embarrassed.

It was one of his schemes that, by leading Germaine through a labyrinth of possibilities, reading off the names of villages and towns and cities and rivers and mountains, perhaps even moving her hand about on a large map spread across the floor, perhaps even blindfolding her, he might discover the whereabouts of his missing cousin Yolande (missing now for several weeks) . . . and what a coup that would be, how seriously, then, the family must take him, after the failure of numerous search parties and the family's private detectives! But at the very sound of the word Yolande Germaine became agitated and would not cooperate.

"Maybe you should limit yourself to experimenting with your mice and birds," Christabel said, looking about the messy tower with her hands on her hips. "Cutting up that poor puppy . . . I remember that poor puppy. . . . Maybe you should let me take Germaine downstairs. She'd rather play with me, wouldn't you, Germaine?"

"That puppy was born dead," Bromwell said quietly. "It was the runt of the litter, it was born dead, it would only have been buried, I did not inflict pain upon it, I did not cause its death. . . ."

"Then you should have buried it, you shouldn't have picked around in its poor little chest," Christabel said. "Come on, Germaine, honey! It's too noisy in the garden, they're bulldozing in the garden, maybe we could go down to the lake. . . . Or do you want to stay with him? He isn't tormenting you?"

Germaine stared up at her, wordless.

Christabel was now more than a head taller than Bromwell, and much more solidly built. Her face was tanned and strong-boned; her breasts had begun to develop; her legs were lengthening. She carried into the tower an airy flyaway slapdash good humor that exasperated her brother. "Oh, do you really want to stay with him! But what-what-" She gestured carelessly and overturned Bromwell's cardboard map of the solar system, as poor Bromwell reached weakly forward. "-what good does it do?"

MIGHT THERE BE, Bromwell wondered aloud, staring deeply into his baby sister's eyes, fairly drowning in that tawny-green fathomless gaze, a universe simultaneous with this universe in which a world like ours is propelled about its orbit, now at the aphelion, now at the perihelion, and again at the aphelion, century after century, a shadow-world, a mirror-world, in which, even now, I stand with my hands pressed between my knees, bending over a child said to be my sister, gazing into her eyes, wondering aloud. . . . Might there be, there, exact replicas of everything we have here, and would never see, here, without the reality of that other universe, the lead backing of our mirror . . . ? And then of course why would there be merely one universe simultaneous with this? Why not a dozen, three hundred, several thousand, several billion? Begun in a terrible explosion and now flying away from one another, flying faster at every moment, each identical with the others; linked by the identity of material (dust, sand, crystals, organic compounds of all kinds) and "life" itself. . . . And might there not be, granted the identity of these innumerable worlds, a way of slipping from one to another. . . .

Germaine held his gaze. She gave him no affirmation, she did not rebuke him.

Bromwell woke from his mild trance to hear a horn sounding nearby. Bellefleur noise, Bellefleur "emergencies"-a day could not pass without the excitement of a laborer's injuries, or good news from Leah (back from one of her trips), or a fight among the children, or a visit from friends or business associates or relatives; or perhaps it was simply someone tapping at the horn of the new Stutz-Bearcat, for the pleasure of making noise. "Ah, well," Bromwell sighed. "Our universe began with an explosion of immeasurable violence . . . so it's natural for the human species to rest, so to speak, in violence . . . that is to say, in motion."

Haunted Things.

The cherrywood-and-veneered-oak clavichord Raphael had ordered built for his wife, Violet, with its walnut keys and ivory, gold, and jet ornamentation: an instrument of astounding beauty which no one (not even Yolande, who had taken several years of piano) could play. It was not that the keys stuck, or failed to sound; or even that the clavichord was out of tune. But anyone who sat before it to play was disturbed by its quivering air of hostility: for it did not want to be played, it did not want to make music. Or perhaps it was simply the Bellefleurs it detested. "We should sell this thing, or give it away, or at least store it in another part of the house," Leah once said, in the days when she tried to play the musical instruments she found in the manor. "It sounds so awful. It sounds so spiteful." But her mother-in-law merely closed the keyboard, and said: "Leah, dear, this is Violet's clavichord. It's too beautiful to move out of this room." And so it was, and so it remained.

DAMP MISCHIEVOUS KISSES floating in the air, planted firmly against lips at unpredictable times: once as Lamentations of Jeremiah was drifting off to sleep in the rolled-up featherbed Elvira had allowed him (she had shoved him out of their bed, insisted he sleep on the floor, forbade him to seek out another room since the rest of the family would know they had quarreled), so that, startled, wildly elated, he erroneously believed his wife had forgiven him, and was inviting him back not only to her warm bed but to her warm embrace; another time as the thirty-year-old Cornelia, locked in Raphael's gloomy library with her stepbrother from Oneida, who was a Presbyterian minister, spread out before her on a desk the scribbled notes she'd taken, usually late at night, accusing the Bellefleurs-these terrible people she had, in all innocence, married into-of unspeakable insults and lapses of taste and crudenesses not to be believed: not a single kiss but many, grinding and sucking playfully all about her face and shoulders and bosom, so that the poor distraught woman went into hysterics and fainted; still another time as Vernon, walking on the promontory above the lake, in a lovesick trance, his arms crossed behind his back, his head bowed, tried out impassioned singsong lines O Lara my love, O Lara my soul, how can you wallow in another's arms, how can you deny my spirit's chaste love . . . and would have fallen into the lake fifty feet below, had not the kisses, angry and hissing and stinging as bees (and at first poor Vernon believed they were bees) awakened him.

Sixteen-year-old Della's sapphire ring, a birthday gift from her grandparents, disappeared from her finger one night only to reappear, days later, in a brown hen's egg cracked open by the wife of one of the farm laborers, in their wood-frame bungalow at the edge of Noir Swamp. And there was the matter of Whitenose, young Noel's bay gelding (whom Noel had acquired from a stud farm with all the cash he'd saved from birthdays and Christmases, and had broken-with great courage and stubbornness-himself), who so very clearly saw and shied away from and occasionally reared back from invisible creatures of a menacing nature, that Noel could not reasonably discipline him; the inexplicable soughing noises in certain rooms of the manor, as if winds were blowing through invisible cornfields; an odor of fish, rank and irremovable, on the fifteenth-century French embroidered altar frontal Raphael had acquired on one of his rare trips to Europe, and considered-for hadn't it cost a great deal, at auction in London?-exquisitely beautiful; and of course there was the matter (which, outside the family, became the inspiration for many a cruel, spirited gibe in opposition newspapers throughout the state) of the "phantom" voters in certain areas of Nautauga, Eden, Clawson, Calla, and Juniper counties who had turned out in the hundreds to defeat (by a narrow margin) Raphael Bellefleur's third and last bid for political office. . . .

Jedediah, long ago, was so beleaguered by mountain spirits (and mountain spirits are the most capricious) that he soon accommodated himself to their presence, and spoke to them with the half-impatient, half-affectionate concern one might give to troublesome children; but he was still susceptible to vivid, alarming, entirely convincing dreams that would have him sinfully bedded with his brother's young wife, and these caused him unremitting distress. (Which he was to feel well into his 101st year.) And Louis's wife Germaine, miles away, down in Bushkill's Ferry, was susceptible to annoying ticklish dreams that had dimly to do with her brother-in-law (whom she hadn't seen for many years, and whom she did not really remember), and which caused her, one night, to unwisely call out Jedediah!-thereby waking Louis, who shook the poor woman until her eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets. Felix-that is, Lamentations of Jeremiah-was to complain throughout his life that he was tormented more by "real" things than by spirits, and that he alone among the Bellefleurs was singled out for absolute defeat: he had said, after the bloodbath of the fox cannibalism, that he'd half-known on the very eve of the event that something terrible was going to happen, that he and his partner would lose all they had invested in the vicious little creatures, but (for such was Jeremiah's apathy) he had felt only resignation-for what could one do to thwart a fate that began so many years ago, when his own father had, if not disowned him, unbaptized him? You talk of haunted things, Jeremiah had said sadly, but what of those of us who know themselves haunted things-haunted things in human form?

And there was Yolande who appeared, evidently, at the very same moment in the dreams of a number of the slumbering Bellefleurs-Garth and Raphael and Vida and Christabel and Vernon and Noel and Cornelia and Gideon and Leah and (so it was believed, since she woke babbling a name that resembled Yolande) Germaine, and of course Ewan and Lily: Yolande in a long dark dress with loose sleeves, a sort of robe, her arms at her sides, her head flung back so that her lovely wheat-colored hair tumbled down her back, her expression sorrowful but not contrite, not at all contrite, so that her father, the next morning, brought his enormous fist down hard on the breakfast table, cracking the glass, and said; "She has run off with a man, I know it! And just to spite me! And it's obvious she is still alive!"

Tiny drops of blood, in the children's milk and in the cream bowl, for days after the cedar of Lebanon was felled by chain saws one shrieking afternoon (for though the tree was more than one hundred years old, and of course very attractive, and of course it had a sentimental value to the older Bellefleurs, the landscape architect Leah had hired from Vanderpoel insisted it must come down since it took up too much space in the garden and would have to be propped up anyway with unsightly boards), and a sense of agitation throughout the house, as if the giant tree's spirit, pain-maddened, were running loose: a most unpleasant episode that did not really end until, some weeks later, the November storm evidently swept the spirit away. But that was hardly a blessing, since the storm was to bring with it a worse problem.

And there were, of course, innumerable other vexing things, more and less mysterious, haunted closets and baths and mirrors and drawers, and even a corner of Aveline's boudoir, and the dust-coated drum made of Raphael's skin that sometimes made light tapping sounds as if invisible fingers were drumming on it restlessly, and the lavender silk parasol, badly faded and frayed, said to have belonged to Violet, that rolled of its own accord across the floor, as if angrily kicked-but how seriously were they to be taken? For, after all, as Hiram frequently said, with his bemused skeptical smile, These absurd spirits batten on our credulity. If we stopped believing in them, if, together, unified for once, the entire family stopped believing . . . why, then, they would be powerless!

Cassandra.

One chilly sunny day in early November Leah acquired another baby-another girl of questionable parentage-for the Bellefleurs.

It was a long, ambitious day, which began with a visit to the Gromwell property on the far side of Silver Lake. Though Leah had of course seen the property before, and claimed to have made a thorough study of its financial situation (which was quite poor-the quarry had been losing money steadily for the past six years), she insisted on being driven over in the new Rolls-Royce limousine, accompanied by Germaine and Hiram, and a young woman just hired to help with Germaine (her name was Lissa: she had been hired to replace Irene, as Irene had been hired to replace Lettie). It was a gusty day, and despite Hiram's disapproval (he was always fussing and clucking and disapproving of Leah's whims, like an aging husband) Leah had bundled her little girl up for winter and taken her along. The child loved rides, she loved to perch atop her mother's lap and point and chatter and ask questions, which Leah answered patiently. It was very important, Leah believed, for a child to learn as much as possible-to see as much as possible-even at a very early age.

"And the important thing is, Germaine," Leah said, as they were driven through the gate, "that we own this. All this. This is a sandstone quarry-I'll have to ask Bromwell to explain to us, exactly what sandstone is-and it takes in sixty-five acres, all the way to the Sulphur Springs Road, and we own it now. The papers were signed just last Friday and now it's ours."

They were driven about the property, along rutted lanes, for nearly half an hour; at one point Leah insisted upon getting out and climbing halfway down into a pit, poor Hiram, stumbling beneath Germaine's weight, in tow. ". . . not much to look at," Hiram said irritably. "You'll have a hard time explaining this purchase to Mr. T."

"Nothing I do calls for an explanation," Leah said sharply, turning her fur collar up. "I'm not a child."

She unlocked the manager's office and went inside, bringing Germaine with her. The place was not so dirty as she had feared. An old pulltop desk, its pigeonholes crammed with yellowed papers, a tacked-down strip of linoleum tile, an army cot, pillowless, with a soiled blanket tossed over it. . . .

"Well, Germaine," she said heartily, "here we are! You wanted this."

Germaine did no more than glance at her.

"The Gromwell Quarry. We have acquired the Gromwell Quarry," Leah said. "And now-? Well, Germaine, are you pleased? Did I do well?"

Germaine began to chatter, as if she were a small child, and Leah, not knowing whether to be vexed or amused, waved her away. She ran and leapt and stumbled about the room, greatly excited, while Leah contemplated the situation. It had cost far more than she had anticipated, but the Gromwell Quarry was now theirs; and soon they would acquire another tract of land, adjacent to this; and then another; and another; until the original holdings were united once again. perhaps it would take most of her lifetime, Leah thought, and Germaine herself would have to complete the task. Then again, perhaps it would only take a few years, with her luck. There was no doubt about it, Leah had "luck"; she was possessed by it; she could make no mistakes.

Germaine had clambered on top of the desk, rowdy and naughty as any little child, and was threatening to jump-and perhaps would have jumped, had Lissa not hurried into the room to grab her.

"Oh, silly Lissa!" Leah said, laughing. "You behave as if Germaine might hurt herself! But you should know, my girl, that this child is blessed."

ON THE WAY back to Bellefleur Manor they stopped at Della's house, since Leah had not seen her mother for some time, and both she and Hiram felt an obligation to look in upon poor Jonathan Hecht (who was, unfortunately, asleep or in a kind of coma during their visit, so that he hadn't any awareness of Leah and Hiram peeking in at him: how ill and jaundiced he looked, and how shrunken his eyes had become!-it's remarkable, Leah whispered to Hiram, that he has lived so long); and she was curious, too, about Garnet Hecht's baby girl. "But what a strange name, Cassandra," Leah said, poking a finger at the baby, which the baby promptly seized, gurgling and smiling happily, if rather cross-sightedly, "however did poor Garnet hit upon that?"

"The name was my choice," Della said.

"But wasn't it some barbarian princess or someone," Leah laughed, keeping her voice low so that Garnet (who was in and out of the little nursery, flushed, muttering to herself, all in a flurry over Leah's and Hiram's unannounced visit), "someone who was mute, or was she murdered-or both? Or did she foretell the future, and no one would listen, and she was murdered anyway?"

"The odd bits and pieces of things you remember from La Tour," Della said contemptuously. "It might have been better, as I thought all along, for you to have stayed home. Since you did end up someone's wife, after all. And what good has that expensive education done you?"

"Now, Della," Hiram said quickly, "you didn't pay for it. It didn't come out of your allowance."

"And you've never let me forget it, have you! You and Noel," Della said, waving rather rudely at her brother.

So the visit began awkwardly, and Leah was forced to make cheerful conversation, speaking of anything that flew into her head. Despite her mother's sour mood, and the faint stench that wafted across the width of the house from Jonathan Hecht's sickroom, and Garnet's annoying fluttery manner (the silly creature was too distracted to do anything more than mumble Thank you, Mrs. Bellefleur when Leah handed her a gift for the baby, she set it down on a cabinet without opening it, a darling crocheted sweater Germaine had outgrown so quickly it was good as new), and despite the chill she'd had out at the quarry, Leah was in excellent spirits. Cassandra was a beautiful if somewhat undersized baby (and were her eyes crossed, or was Leah imagining it?), and there was nothing so delightful as leaning over the crib of an infant once again. . . . Those dark curls! That damp little smile! Delightful too was the way Germaine was talking to the baby, cooing and burbling in baby language.

"Cassandra is a handsome baby," Leah said, "and she seems to be very healthy, Garnet, aren't you pleased . . . ? She was a few weeks premature, wasn't she?"

"I don't know, I really don't remember," Garnet said, blushing painfully. "I . . . I wasn't well. . . . Afterward, for a while, I had a fever. . . . My memory of that time isn't very good."

"It was an ordeal, a baby so premature," Della said. "Of course you had a difficult time. But you're fine now, and so is Cassandra."

"Do you think so, Mrs. Pym?" Garnet said uncertainly.

"Oh, of course," Leah said, taking both her hands. (Such tiny, limp, cold-fish sort of hands! It was no wonder, Leah thought, the girl couldn't find a husband.) "You've always been rather thin, you know, I don't think you look much different than before, and your hair is lovely, if maybe you did something with it up here, on your forehead, otherwise it tends to fall in your eyes . . . and your eyes are lovely, Garnet, you shouldn't hide them . . . you shouldn't always be looking down. But you feel well? You've recovered?"

"I . . . I think so, Mrs. Bellefleur," Garnet said slowly.

And then she was off again, imagining she heard the teakettle. She put Leah in mind of nothing so much as a startled rabbit. "Why in Christ's name is she always running," Leah whispered to Della. "It must make you nervous, you always claimed I made you nervous. . . ."

"Garnet is a good girl," Della said stiffly. "She has suffered."

"Oh-suffered! We've all suffered," Leah said. She checked to see that Germaine was not hurting Cassandra-she was leaning over the crib trying to "kiss" her-and went to a nearby mirror to remove her hat. ". . . but I've been negligent, you know, I seem to have forgotten all about Garnet," she said, "and the poor thing obviously needs help. Since the father of the baby is nowhere to be found. . . . She would make some man an excellent wife, don't you think? We should have married her off before this. What a pity! And what a surprise! Sweet little Garnet Hecht, getting herself pregnant like that, and so skinny she didn't even show until the seventh month . . . isn't she sly, really. . . . Of course it was just one time, I'm sure: some farmboy who took advantage of her: or maybe someone from the village. Has she told you, yet, who it was? Or is she still hysterical about the subject? . . . As if we were going to interrogate her!"

"No one is going to interrogate her," Della said.

"Certainly no one is going to interrogate her," Leah said, removing the last of her hatpins. "Her tragic little love affair is her own business entirely. And it isn't as if she were a Bellefleur. . . . Of course she's a cousin of mine, a distant cousin . . . she is, isn't she? . . . But then everyone is related to everyone else around here, and it means very little. I wish she would trust me, though. She never looks me in the eye, she never seems to be listening, exactly. It's always been like that between us and I can't imagine why."

Leah was amused to see in the mirror, as she turned, her mother and Hiram exchanging an enigmatic glance.

"She is a very brave young woman," Della said, folding her hands in her apron in a gesture that maddened Leah, it was so falsely meek, so hypocritically subservient. "I doubt that you're capable of comprehending all that Garnet has gone through."

"My pregnancy with Germaine was far worse," Leah said. "Ten months-more than ten months! And her baby was born early-"

"It is a very sweet baby," Hiram said, clearing his throat. "Now don't you hurt it, Germaine. You don't want to play so rough-"

"Germaine, stop that, come over here," Leah said. "You're not a little baby any longer and you can't climb into that crib-why, you'd crush the poor thing! She isn't an it, Uncle Hiram, she's a she. You ought to know better," she said, nudging him in the ribs.