"Yes, yes, of course, a she, the baby is . . . the baby is a she," Hiram said, folding his arms behind his back. He moved a few feet away, to stare gloomily into Della's meager fire, where damp birch logs were burning with an acrid eye-stinging stench. He was a ruddy-faced portly man, handsome in profile, with waxed mustaches that gave off a synthetic odor, and one somewhat clouded eye. Always fastidiously dressed, with his gold watch chain across his vest, and his gold-and-ivory cuff links, he looked as incongruous in Della's shabby parlor as Leah. It amused Leah to see how uneasy Della and Hiram-sister and brother-were in each other's company. The curse of the Bellefleurs, she thought, was either to be uncommonly close (though that was a rarity these days) or estranged for life.

The silence between them grew embarrassing, so Leah chattered: about the Gromwell Quarry, about their plans for buying Chautauqua Fruits to join with Valley Products, about the mining operations at Contracoeur . . .

"Contracoeur!" Della said. "I didn't realize we owned land there."

"We've owned mineral rights there since 1873," Leah said.

"But what sort of mineral rights?"

"What do you mean, Mamma, what sort-?" Leah laughed. "Mineral rights are mineral rights. It's a highly complicated operation, however, and we need mining engineers, in fact Gideon is meeting with someone in Port Oriskany right now. He's been working very hard on this, hasn't he, Uncle Hiram? He's been trying very hard."

"Is he alone?" Della asked.

"No, Ewan is with him. And Jasper. It's remarkable how quickly Jasper is learning," Leah said, fumbling in her purse. "I wish Bromwell would take an interest in such things. . . . But of course he's still quite young, there's still time, I don't intend to push any of my children into anything. Don't you think that's wise, Mamma?"

Leah may have meant this ironically-for certainly Della had wanted to push her years ago, at least away from the Bellefleurs-but the moment passed. Della said softly, "And how is Gideon, Leah?"

"How is Gideon? Why, he's perfectly fine as always, he never changes," Leah said, shaking a cigarillo out of a package. It was the first time she had smoked one of these things in her mother's presence, and it rather pleased her-pleased and excited her-that Della was staring in undisguised alarm. But Leah chose to take no notice of her mother, and went on chattering in a bright amiable voice about the mining engineering firm in Port Oriskany, and the alterations she was planning in the house, and the renovations in the garden. "Of course we must move along slowly. There's the expense, for one thing, and Grandmother Elvira is naturally upset, and it is disorienting. But you'll be pleased to learn, Mamma, that I've had most of those ugly old statues hauled away. And wasn't it peculiar, Uncle Hiram, how parts of statues were found back in the woods-arms and legs and even heads-dragged back in the woods, or down to the lake, evidently by wild animals! The children kept finding parts for weeks, the younger children were always being frightened. . . ."

"Gideon's well, you say? And he's in Port Oriskany right now?" Della asked.

"Mamma, I just now told you," Leah laughed, picking a bit of tobacco off her tongue. "My husband is in superb health as always, and asks to be remembered to you. He's been working very hard lately. . . ."

"I see," Della said. She glanced over her shoulder, toward the doorway; but Garnet was not yet in sight. "Occasionally we hear rumors. In Bushkill's Ferry."

"Yes," Leah said, "Bushkill's Ferry always did hear rumors about Bellefleur."

"But as long as Gideon is well, and working hard . . ."

"Of course he's well," Leah said irritably.

". . . and then rumors have to be discounted," Della said, "especially when they show evidence of envy or spite."

"Did you hear about Yolande? Was that one of the things people were gossiping about?"

"One of the things, yes."

"Ewan and Lily have about given up on her," Leah said with a sigh. "It's obvious that she has run away and wants to stay away. . . . There was a fire in one of the barns, did you know? And she ran away that night. According to Lily all she took was a change of clothing and some jewelry and twenty dollars in cash, and-and this is touching, Mamma-a lock of Germaine's hair. She actually crept into the nursery and cut off a curl, just a tiny one. . . . Poor Yolande, I can't imagine why she ran away, why she hates her family so, can you? There was a fire in one of the barns, one of the unused barns, but I don't imagine Yolande had anything to do with it. The children are so secretive, though. It's very strange. Bromwell hadn't anything to do with it, of course, but I think Christabel did; but she won't talk about it. Imagine-a child Christabel's age, having secrets from her own mother!"

"Does that surprise you, Leah, really?" Della asked with a dry little twist of a smile.

"Oh, Mamma," Leah said, walking away.

She wandered into the sitting room, where the heavy velvet drapes were kept drawn; she felt quite agitated suddenly. There was something she wanted but she didn't know what it was. Something she wanted badly, and would have. But how would she acquire it? . . . She found herself staring at the old horsehair sofa with its scalloped back. And the matching chair in which her young cousin Gideon had sat. Staring at her. Staring at her and at Love, perched vigilantly on her shoulder. A wave of nostalgia swept over Leah and she felt, for a moment, close to tears.

O Love . . .

In the shantylike office building at the quarry she had been half-dreaming on her feet, but she couldn't recall the nature of her dream. How odd it was, how very odd, and unlike her. . . . As her body lost all interest in sexual feeling her mind labored to take it up, frequently out of a sense of obscure obligation, as a distracted Catholic might run his rosary beads through his fingers, and even move his lips in blank prayers, while his mind was empty. So Leah imagined illicit lovers in that smelly little building, lying on that inadequate cot, gasping and clutching at each other. O Love. How I love you. . . . And then Germaine had nearly toppled to the floor, and Leah had awakened from her trance.

She woke from her trance now and put all thoughts of Gideon and that beautiful spider Love out of her mind (for hadn't Love been killed long ago, reduced to black glutinous pulp no larger than her fist?), and strode back into the parlor where Garnet, her hands trembling, was about to serve tea. Seeing Leah she stepped backward, her thin foolish face stretched in a hopeful smile. "Mrs. Bellefleur . . . ?" she said, blinking. "Would you care for some . . ."

Leah bent over the cradle, and picked up Cassandra with such care, the baby hardly gurgled. A thick red-brown coil of hair had come loose on the back of her neck. "I think I'd like to bring Cassandra back with me to the manor," Leah said. "She'd have better care, you know. There would be more children to keep her company."

Garnet stared at her, speechless. All the poor thing could do was nervously pleat her apron in her fingers!

"I said," Leah murmured, her face flushed, "that I'd like to bring Cassandra back with me. At least for a while. You don't object-?"

"Leah-" Della said.

"Garnet, you don't object?"

Garnet stood behind the tea tray, staring, struck dumb. It was as much as Leah could do to brush her gaze across the skinny little thing without bursting into angry laughter. "She'd have much better treatment with me," Leah said. "You know that."

No one spoke. The fire blazed up fitfully, then died away. Perhaps the flue wasn't completely open-the room was filling with damp eye-searing smoke. Leah hummed into the baby's joyous face, but Garnet and Della and Hiram stood mute. And then Germaine began chattering: something about baby, baby, something about home, coming home: and Leah glanced briefly up at Garnet (still pleating her apron in her bony fingers) and knew that she had won. And was not at all surprised.

"The Innisfail Butcher"

Though Germaine's great-uncle Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II enjoyed the dubious honor of having his likeness sketched many more times than any other Bellefleur (even his grandfather Raphael, the surly butt of so many newspaper caricatures), and reproduced not only throughout the state but throughout the nation and Canada, and even (so a Bellefleur cousin discovered to his horror and chagrin when, opening the Times as he breakfasted in a Mayfair hotel, his eye snagged upon an ugly little headline that had to do with "mass murder" in the States-and saw, above the headline, an incongruously detailed, and even rather handsome, pencil sketch of the thirty-two-year-old "Innisfail Butcher") in England and France as well, and though the less vicious of these likenesses were actually kept, for a while, by the Bellefleur who was always most fond of Jean-Pierre, his aunt Veronica, in a scrapbook bound in white kid, the only representations of Jean-Pierre that were eventually allowed to remain in the manor were the charming pencil sketch on the nursery wall, and a pencil-and-charcoal sketch, equally charming, but perhaps even more romantic, made of young Jean-Pierre just before his embarkation for Europe at the age of twenty-four, for his abbreviated Grand Tour. (His mother was later to blame his father, most unfairly, for the fact that Jean-Pierre's trip abroad was truncated, and the poor young gentleman forced to return home before his education in culture was complete: He would not have drifted into a life of cardplaying and other forms of idleness, he would not have succumbed to the blandishments of his false friend from Missouri, he would not have been in the notorious Innisfail House on that fateful night, and would not subsequently have suffered his tragic fate, had Jeremiah been more judicious in his management of the farm, had he been more clear-sighted about the market for wheat . . . ! The sins of the fathers, Elvira raged in her grief, are visited upon the heads of the sons, and the sons are ground underfoot.) The sketch on the nursery wall, preserved nicely in a tortoiseshell frame, and rarely subjected to more than an idle glance on the part of the children, showed a sweet-faced child of indeterminate age (the artist must have been unevenly skilled, for all the children's lips looked alike, being feminine and rather bee-stung, while their Bellefleur noses varied, and their eyes-touched up with tiny white dots-looked in some cases preternaturally adult, in other cases so piously soft they threatened to melt into the coarse-grained paper): he might have been five, or seven, or eight: captured in prayer, his cheekbones prominent, his small but striking eyes cast upward above his fervently clasped hands and a near-imperceptible (or did Leah imagine it, having studied the drawing for so long) smirk. Hung for decades between a square-jawed Matilde and a fairly dour Noel, Jean-Pierre II most resembled his nephew Raoul; the only Bellefleur of either sex who was arguably more "beautiful" than Jean-Pierre was Gideon.

The second drawing, taken down from the wall by one Bellefleur, hung again by another, taken down again and again hung, in different parts of the manor, at different stages of the luckless man's career in court-and kept, finally, when Germaine was a child, in Leah's boudoir-showed a handsome, rather foppish young gentleman with curled mustaches and hooklike curls on either side of his narrow forehead, his eyes fixed upon the viewer in an expression of tenderness, sincerity, and grave feeling. "The Innisfail Butcher," indeed-! One could not fail to be moved by the sweet set of his mouth, or the nobility of his slightly uplifted chin. This was the young man who was welcome in the finest drawing rooms and clubs in Manhattan, during the period when the Bellefleurs maintained a modest but attractive town house just off Washington Square; it was said of him by one Manhattan heiress (admittedly, her father's fortune was not immense) that she had never heard any young man of her acquaintance speak so sensitively about music. And during that single season when Veronica Bellefleur took her favorite nephew to the theater, and to the races, and to her friends' homes in the city and out on Long Island, when it had seemed not only probable but inevitable that he would make a "brilliant" match, he had behaved, according to all witnesses, with exquisite tact, modesty, grace, and charm at all times. If he had a temper, if he occasionally drank too much (and to the very end of his days as a free man, Jean-Pierre seemed incapable of calculating the effect of alcohol on his brain, though he had a great deal of practice), or flew into a tantrum over a creased collar or a mislaid cuff link or butter served too hard to spread, no one knew except the Bellefleurs and their servants. The only public trait about him that might be characterized as somewhat odd, which his Manhattan acquaintances remarked upon years later, at the time of the trial, was that he frequently joked about the "doom" of his name. Since no one there knew the first Jean-Pierre's fate, and since Jean-Pierre II had little to gain from discussing it in any detail, he would only say, with tantalizing melancholy, that his great-great-grandfather had died a noble but extremely painful death in the War of 1812. Surely you are not superstitious, young women said, sometimes touching his arm lightly in the emotion of the moment, when they were not quite aware of what they did, surely you don't believe that a mere name can have any effect upon your life . . . ? Of course not, Jean-Pierre would wittily reply, not a mere name: but what of myself?

It was not true that Jean-Pierre had not begun his career of cardplaying before the European trip, as Elvira liked to claim; but his activities at that time, as a young man in his early twenties, with aristocratic habits and pretensions, were fairly innocuous, undistinguished from those of most of his contemporaries among the well-to-do landowners in the Valley. He became a serious cardplayer in Europe when, marooned in a Swiss inn during a week of torrential rains, he acquired certain skills-they were not quite tricks-from a fellow tourist, a grandfatherly Englishman from Warwickshire, grandmother Violet's home. (But Jean-Pierre's friend claimed never to have heard of the Odlins.) Before that Jean-Pierre had gamely traveled about from country to country, with oscillating enthusiasm, and varying degrees of head and chest colds, being taken by train or carriage through Belgium, Holland, the Rhineland, Northern Italy, Baden-Baden, the South of France, Paris, Rome, the Algarve, Athens, Southern Italy, Luxembourg (a dizzying jumble whose names he could not keep straight, though he made every effort to record them in his diary, and to send postal cards back home giving his impressions-usually quite brief-of each place, and its art treasures, and "natives"), alone for the most part, and humbly dependent upon English-speaking hotel people and guides; but he was fortunate enough to make a few acquaintances, all of them Americans, and one of them a somewhat older San Franciscoan with whom he rode about on the delightful Brussels streetcars most of one day, in a kind of boyish bliss, shamelessly indulging in his nostalgia for their native land. (Jean-Pierre spent several days in the company of Mr. Newman, who had made a fortune in leather back home, and who was courteous enough to murmur that, yes, indeed yes, he had heard of the Bellefleur family by way of his associates in New York City. They had much the same tastes in art: either a piece of sculpture or a painting struck them at once, or it never did; they were bored with madonnas, and religious subjects in general; the notion of patina alternately amused and bewildered them. If something is merely old, must it be good? One fine October day they spent an hour or more admiring, from different angles, the impressive Gothic tower of the Hotel de Ville, and wondered if it might be possible to duplicate it back in the States: Mr. Newman knew exactly the place for it, on a Nob Hill avenue; Jean-Pierre argued for the Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Their somewhat forced intimacy came to an abrupt end when, in all innocence, Jean-Pierre suggested that the two of them visit a sumptuous brothel not far from their lodgings, and Mr. Newman drew away in silent consternation, clearly too shocked even to protest. (But how peculiar, Jean-Pierre thought, the man admitted to being thirty-six years old, a bachelor, in every respects "normal" enough!)) After that Europe seemed to deteriorate, almost daily, hotel suites were invariably disappointing, guides were clearly out to cheat him, "art treasures" began to repeat themselves (or had he, poor Jean-Pierre wondered, made a fatal error and reversed his journey, so that he was traversing the very countries he had imagined he was finished with forever?). Trains were delayed, or did not arrive at all. Bridges were washed out. There was a typhoid scare, and an influenza scare. (Jean-Pierre himself experienced a gonorrhea scare of fourteen hours, which left him shaken and chaste for many days.) While waiting out an incessant rain that everyone connected with the inn in which Jean-Pierre was trapped claimed was most unusual, he at least learned, from a similarly disenchanted Englishman named Fairlie, how to be extremely clever at poker, and even at bridge-a talent that was to serve him well in the Powhatassie State Correctional Facility.

And then his itinerary was cut short when an expected bank draft did not arrive, and an unexpected telegram of craven apology from his father did, and he returned home with far more relief than he showed (he made it a point of showing, to his family, extreme indignation-hinting that he had been invited to dine at one of the "oldest houses in Europe" just when the fateful telegram was delivered); and he settled in to apply himself to learning how to manage the complicated Bellefleur estate . . . though it was of course too complicated to be learned by anyone other than a financial wizard (Jean-Pierre's idea of a financial wizard was his brother Hiram, who had failed to be admitted to law school-who had, in fact, left Princeton without his bachelor's degree) . . . and what good did it do, he queried often, to know what course to take when the market fell or soared according to its own whims, and there were unscrupulous men manipulating it, and a man's fortune had little to do with his intelligence, or his moral worth? (For certainly no one was a finer, more tediously "moral" man than his father, yet no one in the Valley had failed, in recent years, so ignominiously as Lamentations of Jeremiah with his "fox farm." Even the Varrell trash could laugh at them now, Elvira said.) Jean-Pierre made sporadic journeys to Port Oriskany and Vanderpoel, sometimes not even giving as an excuse the matter of "family affairs"; he made infrequent trips to New York (for the tall narrow town house at Washington Square South had been sold years before); he began to make a great many trips to Nautauga Falls, Fort Hanna, and other rather rough river towns, and Innisfail-Innisfail, some eighteen miles from Bellefleur Manor as the crow flies, but considerably longer (at least thirty-five miles) if one took the usual route, the Innisfail and the Old Military roads, and then the unpaved Bellefleur Road up to the lake, as anyone but an Indian or a madman (so Jean-Pierre's attorney was to claim, foolishly) would do. And as for riding a horse through the pitch-black night, along an unfamiliar and dangerous terrain . . . when the rider is unskilled, and even fearful of horses . . .

The night of the multiple murders at Innisfail House, the largest and probably the most disreputable of the taverns in the area, Jean-Pierre claimed to have shared a carriage with several passengers, including his new acquaintance from Missouri, Wolfe Quincy, on the trip from Nautauga Falls to Innisfail. He claimed to have gotten a ride back-back, that is, to the village of Bellefleur-with a peddler whose mule-drawn wagon was heaped with all sorts of goods, but who specialized in barbed wire. (The peddler was never found, unfortunately. The driver of the carriage claimed not to remember Jean-Pierre on that particular trip, though he'd seen him previously, on other trips; nor did the other passengers remember him. But Jean-Pierre's fervent story was never to waver.) What precisely happened at Innisfail House between the hours of midnight and two-thirty Jean-Pierre Bellefleur simply did not know. He simply did not know.

Eleven men were murdered, one after another. Several were shot at close range, several others were stabbed, and their throats viciously slashed; two who died of bullet wounds were also subjected to throat-slashings. How it happened-how a single murderer was able to do so much, so superhumanly much-no one knew. There must have been time for a number of the men to defend themselves, yet it seemed that they did not defend themselves; even Wolfe Quincy died without putting up much of a struggle. (That it was unlikely Jean-Pierre was responsible for the killings was underscored by the fact that his friend Quincy was among the victims. Jean-Pierre was extremely fond of Quincy, and dependent upon him as well, for Quincy could hold his liquor far better than Jean-Pierre, and when they were involved in ambitious all-night games he watched over Jean-Pierre with an almost maternal solicitude. He was a broad-bellied, good-natured man of about forty, originally from Massachusetts, lately from Missouri, an excellent drinking and gambling companion whose only fault was a tendency toward boasting of his exploits in the War: how many men he'd killed, how many horses he had stolen, how many bullets he had survived (and judging from the scars he proudly showed the squeamish Jean-Pierre, there were at least half a dozen). Quincy was the last man, the last human being on earth, Jean-Pierre's attorney claimed, Jean-Pierre would want dead.) Which sounded, in the antiquated courtroom with its faint dry echo, not quite right.

JEAN-PIERRE WAS FOUND guilty of murder in the first degree, despite his innocence, and sentenced by Judge Phineas Petrie to life plus ninety-nine years . . . plus ninety-nine years repeated ten times. Evidence was no more than circumstantial; the only witness-the tavern-keeper's malicious wife-admitted that she was nearly fainting with terror when she saw, from an upstairs window, a single rider galloping away into the night, along a narrow trail leading into the foothills. She could not see the figure, could not of course identify the murderer, but she claimed that "of course" it was Jean-Pierre Bellefleur who had, within her hearing, loudly and drunkenly threatened lives in the past, and had had to be ejected from the tavern more than once, because of his wicked temper. All this was slanderous, of course. And Jean-Pierre protested. He had left Innisfail House before midnight and was home by three in the morning. Because he was so exhausted he had slept in a hayloft . . . he hadn't wanted to disturb his family . . . perhaps he was somewhat drunk . . . the events of the night were badly confused. He knew only one thing: that he was innocent of the heinous charge brought against him. And that the "Innisfail Butcher"-how quickly the newspapers had hit upon that vile epithet, and how widely Jean-Pierre's lean, anxious, hawkish face was known throughout the state!-remained a free man, given license to murder again, while he, Jean-Pierre, a victim of grotesque circumstances, was condemned.

The tavern-keeper's wife simply repeated her imbecilic story. The rider on the horse headed in the direction of Lake Noir, by way of the foothills; the dark horse with three white stockings and a close-cropped mane and tail; Jean-Pierre Bellefleur's belligerence and general rowdiness. He was like a child, the woman said, wiping at her eyes. A child pretending to be an adult man, and fooling people into accepting him as such. . . . But also like the Devil. When he drank, he was like the Devil. He just went wild, he had to be dragged out onto the veranda by his friend from Missouri, slapped around and maybe splashed with cold water; and even then he wasn't always all right. (But when Jean-Pierre's attorney, cross-examining the woman, asked her with a droll twist of his mouth why she and her husband allowed such a "devil" into their establishment, she could only stammer: "But-you see-so many of them are-so many of the men-They're all like that more or less-" A ripple of laughter ran through the packed courtroom.) Nevertheless, he was found guilty. By twelve jurors who had seemed, at first, to be just and upright and unprejudiced men. (Though of course no one in the Valley could be "unprejudiced" about a Bellefleur.) It is said that jurors, filing back into court with a verdict of Guilty, do not look at the defendant; but the jurors at Jean-Pierre's trial certainly looked at him. They eyed him, studied him, stared quite frankly at him as if they were in the presence of a venomous but fascinating insect.

. . . And how do you find the defendant?

. . . We find the defendant Guilty as charged.

Guilty!

Guilty as charged!

When of course he was innocent, and could do nothing more than scream and tear at the sheriff's men who were restraining him. No! You can't! I won't let you! I'm innocent! The murderer is at large! The murderer is among you! I am not the murderer!

If only the tavern-keeper's spiteful wife had been killed along with the others: then there would have been no witness. But in the pandemonium the woman was overlooked.

If only . . .

FOR A WHILE he could not be certain he had heard correctly. What did the words mean, Guilty as charged . . . ?

Perhaps when the prosecuting attorney had queried him about the old feud of the 1820's-whether he felt any "ill-will," whether he had ever craved "revenge"-he should have answered more carefully, more thoughtfully, instead of uttering, through tight pursed lips: "No."

(For there were, among the eleven dead, two Varrell men. One in his mid-fifties, the other about Jean-Pierre's age. It was his claim that he hadn't known they were Varrells, which was somewhat unlikely; for, as the tavern-keeper's slanderous wife pointed out, everyone knew everyone else in the Valley. And Bellefleurs and Varrells always knew one another.) He could only repeat his story: leaving the tavern early, getting a ride with the peddler, sleeping in the hayloft because he didn't want to disturb his family. (His father Jeremiah suffered from insomnia, his mother Elvira suffered from "nerves.") When the sheriff and his men came to arrest him at dawn, dragging him out of the barn and knocking him about until his nose bled onto his filthy, already bloodied shirt, he couldn't imagine why they were there; he couldn't make sense of anything they said. They must have had a warrant for his arrest but he didn't remember seeing any warrant.

Ah, if he had stayed a companion to Mr. Newman, if they had followed through on their scheme to duplicate the tower of the Hotel de Ville in the States! How profoundly and beautifully innocent their partnership would have been!

But through an excess of boyish enthusiasm he had irrevocably offended the older man, and now his life was ruined. He was only thirty-two years old and his life was ruined. The Lake Noir district had been notorious in the past for lynchings, murders, arson, and theft, and continual harassment of Indians; but there had never been anything quite so lurid as the "Innisfail Butcher" with his handsome, boyish, aggrieved face. He was in all the newspapers, out to the West Coast, the "Innisfail Butcher" who had murdered eleven men and claimed not to remember anything, claimed to be innocent, absolutely innocent: and how certain he was! The newspapers naturally resurrected old stories about the Bellefleur-Varrell feud though Jean-Pierre had made clear, in open court, repeatedly, that he hadn't even been aware that two Varrell men were in the tavern that night. . . . But no one believed him, and his young life was ruined.

For a stunned moment he could not believe the sentence old Judge Petrie had passed. Life plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus . . . Individuals in the courtroom burst into applause. (For it was felt throughout the community that a death by hanging-a death that would involve, at the most, ten minutes of agony-was far too merciful for Jean-Pierre.) "But I am innocent, Your Honor," Jean-Pierre whispered. And then as the sheriff's men tugged at him he began to shout: "I tell you I am innocent! The murderer is still at large! The murderer is among you!"

So Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II, the grandson of the millionaire Raphael Bellefleur (who came so close-so heartbreakingly close-to political prominence), was incarcerated in the infamous state penitentiary at Powhatassie, there to serve a sentence of life plus 990 years.

He fainted at the sight of its massive walls-fainted and had to be slapped back into consciousness-whimpering, still, that he was innocent, he was innocent of the charges brought against him, a terrible mistake had been made- Yes, yes, the guards chuckled, that's what you all say.

THE POWHATASSIE STATE Correctional Facility housed, at the time of Jean-Pierre's incarceration, about 1,500 men, in a space originally designed for 900. Prisoners customarily fainted or screamed at the sight of its great stone walls, which were slightly over thirty feet high and stretched, so it seemed, for miles, marked at regular intervals by six-sided turrets topped with Gothic cupolas, in which guards armed with carbines and rifles spent their days. The prison, modeled after medieval French prison-castles that had exerted a curious spell, for some reason, on the architect hired by the state to design the facility, was built on a rugged promontory overlooking the dour Powhatassie River, at the very spot at which, according to legend, the water had run red with the blood of Bay Colony pioneers who had ventured too far west and were massacred by Mohawk Indians. Built in the late 1700's, the prison was in visible decline (everywhere walls were crumbling, exposing rusted iron rods), but possessed, still, the ugly nobility of a medieval fortress; and its huge dining hall, with columns, arches, and heavy wrought-iron grillwork on its windows, reminded poor Jean-Pierre of nothing so much as his grandfather's pretensions. There was a curious religious aura to the horrific place.

He seemed to know beforehand that his appeals-made to the State Supreme Court, and argued faultlessly-were doomed, for he sank almost immediately into a state of apathy, and maintained a Bellefleur detachment from his surroundings that infuriated, at first, his fellow inmates, and certain of the guards. That his first cell was five feet by eight, that the "toilet" was a hole, uncovered, that the food was inedible (indeed, it was indefinable), that he was issued unlaundered clothes several sizes too big for his graceful frame, that his mattress was filthy and infested with bedbugs, and the single cotton blanket issued to him stiff with filth and dried blood-that there were cockroaches and footlong rats everywhere-and the majority of his fellow prisoners were evidently ill, physically or mentally, and sat on their cots or the floor, or walked about, with the spirit of zombies-that since a riot five or six years ago in which seven guards were killed and twelve inmates "committed suicide" the guards were exceptionally cruel: none of this stirred him.

For some time the only emotion he felt was a deep shame-shame that he had been the cause of his family's fresh humiliation-that it would be many, many years before the Bellefleurs regained their dignity. (As his brother Noel said, weeping with exasperation, the fact that he was innocent somehow made it all the more intolerable. . . . When Harlan was arrested, after all, he had been guilty, and very publicly guilty, of several murders, and every word of his, every gesture, must have been enhanced by the noble melancholy of his predicament. He had killed, he had exacted revenge as, indeed, he was forced to-and then he had died. In every respect he had acted heroically. By contrast poor wretched Jean-Pierre, who was innocent, was ignominious as a trapped muskrat: his fate was merely outrageous.) To anyone who would listen, to guards who greeted him with a routine, unmotivated elbow in the chest, Jean-Pierre spoke quietly of his innocence. His manner was courteous and reasonable. He had long given up shouting. If a penitentiary is a place of penitence, he said, and if an innocent man is wrongly incarcerated, how can he do penance . . . ? Isn't the very foundation of the penitentiary undermined by such injustice . . . ? The considerable sums of money Jean-Pierre received each month (which he was later to increase through poker and bridge games in which, occasionally, guards would participate) allowed him to purchase cigarettes, candy, sugar (no sugar was provided by the institution, and cold oatmeal, alternately watery and glutinous-and sometimes dotted with the remains of weevils-was served every morning, every single morning), and other small favors, and naturally he tipped his guards, as he would tip any servant not in his own hire, so the rough treatment gradually stopped; but it was to be some time-in fact, years-before Jean-Pierre would acquire a more spacious cell, for him and his bodyguard-companion (there was to be a series of such young men over the decades, some fifteen or twenty in all: each would be injured or killed by his successor, another husky young ambitious prisoner eager to serve Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II). But it took time for Jean-Pierre to acquire this sort of power, especially because his manner was so subdued, his voice so hollow and seemingly apathetic, and his insistence upon his innocence-which, as the guards remarked, was universal-detracted from his natural distinction. So when he reiterated his plea, his listless comical logic, If a penitentiary is a place of penance, and if an innocent man is wrongly incarcerated . . . more than one guard burst into rude laughter, and butted him all the more cruelly in the chest.

(Later, a friendly prisoner warned Jean-Pierre against "talking crazy." Because if he talked crazy, no matter how quietly, how politely, he might be diagnosed as crazy. And if he was diagnosed as crazy-by a state psychiatrist who visited the prison on alternate Thursdays, in the afternoon, and made judgments and prescribed medicine from his office, going by scribbled reports handed him by prison officials-he would be sent across the yard to the Sheeler Ward; and that would be the end of him. The Sheeler Ward! Jean-Pierre had heard of it: it was named for Dr. Wystan Sheeler, a physician who had taken interest in the mentally ill in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and had prescribed a radical, and sometimes successful, method of dealing with "madness" through sympathetic immersion in the patient's delusions. Family gossip had it that Dr. Sheeler had attended Raphael Bellefleur for a while, and even lived at the castle. . . . But the Sheeler Ward, which comprised an entire building made of concrete blocks, was simply the hole into which troublesome prisoners-whether "sane" or "insane"-were thrown, and once committed to the ward there was little likelihood that a man would get out. Some years ago a gang of prisoners there had seized a guard, and one of them had torn out his throat with his teeth; and though the prisoners involved in the uprising were, of course, beaten to death by guards, there was still a tradition of punishment in that ward. There was no sanitation, individual cells were no longer used, everyone was kept in a single dormitory room, a vast warehouse of a room, which was unheated, and said to be littered with unspeakable filth. Since the uprising no guard would venture down onto the floor: from time to time they patrolled the ward from a catwalk, and it was from this catwalk that cafeteria workers (gagging, their faces averted, their eyes shut) dumped food once a day, for the men to scramble for. There were men in that ward, Jean-Pierre was told, who were in the tertiary stages of syphilis, quite literally rotting; there was every kind of sickness; and when a man died-which was of course frequent, since the other prisoners were quite vicious-it might be several days before prison officials hauled away the corpse. So, Jean-Pierre's companion said quietly, you don't want them to send you there.) "I CAN'T BELIEVE that the family has given up on this man," Leah said. "I can't believe you've done so little."

They tried to explain to her about the appeals, and the many thousands of dollars spent; one or two attempted bribes-that is, gifts-which were unfortunately offered to the wrong officials; and of course other family difficulties; and Jean-Pierre's apathetic manner. He had, for instance, never applied for parole. Not once in thirty-three years. While at first he seemed mildly happy to see visitors he soon changed, and frequently refused to enter the visiting room; once, while Noel presented an earnest, enthusiastic case for the probability of his verdict being overturned by the Supreme Court, he leaned forward slowly and spat against the glass partition that separated them. Never in his life, Noel said afterward, had he been so thunderstruck.

"The poor man must have fallen into despair," Leah said. "Everything I've heard about Powhatassie has been vile, incredibly degrading, it's a place for animals, not human beings. . . . Perhaps he's ill? Does anyone know? Cornelia says he has never answered his mail, and he's never answered my letters; but then of course he doesn't know me. I don't suppose he even knows Gideon. Does he remember any of you? When is the last time anyone has visited him?"

They could not remember, exactly. Noel believed he had visited Jean-Pierre for the last time some thirty-two years ago (the Sunday of the spitting incident, in fact); Hiram believed he had tried to see him more recently-perhaps twenty-five years ago-but wasn't certain whether Jean-Pierre had condescended to appear in the visitors' room. (A hideous place, all concrete and wire mesh and armed guards, and such a din!-for the prisoners and their visitors had to shout at one another, and there were usually upward of fifty people in the room, all shouting helplessly at the same time. And, Hiram said with an angry flushed face, he was once beside a backwoods woman come to visit her husband, sentenced to Powhatassie for life: the pathetic woman was weeping and moaning, and had no more shame than to unbutton her dress to show her lardy, sagging breasts to her husband.) Their mother had visited him for the last time approximately twenty years ago; when she returned home she went at once to her bedchamber, where she remained, weeping, for several days. Aunt Veronica had never gone, since she left her rooms only after sundown, and visiting hours were from two to five; Della had gone once or twice, and Matilde only a few times. (It was thought that Matilde's reclusiveness began at the time of Jean-Pierre's trial. She turned away all suitors, frequently dressed in men's clothing (but not nice men's clothing, Cornelia said; farmhand sort of clothing), spent more and more time out at the old camp, and finally moved there permanently, pretending that a life of raising hens, growing vegetables, and making quilts, samplers, and silly little "artistic" things like carvings was any sort of life for a Bellefleur.) Lamentations of Jeremiah had visited his son as often as Jean-Pierre would allow, which wasn't often because, to perpetrate Elvira's myth, he liked to claim that the telegram summoning him home had ruined his life-he had been nearly engaged to an Italian marchesa whose family dated back to the twelfth century, and Jeremiah's latest financial debacle had brought the whole house of cards tumbling down. And then of course Jeremiah had died in the Great Flood of twenty years back. So Jean-Pierre hadn't had a visitor from the outside world in twenty years.

"I will visit him," Leah said. "My little girl and I will visit him."

"Oh, but you couldn't take a child," Cornelia cried.

And Hiram said, twisting the ends of his mustache nervously, "The one thing, dear, you know, that's been a kind of stumbling block . . . or perhaps there are two . . . or many. . . . Well, to be frank: his story about the peddler, a peddler allegedly driving a mule-drawn wagon along the Innisfail Road at night . . . in the pitch-black . . . a peddler never glimpsed before or since . . . the story is, isn't it? . . . somewhat strained. And there was the matter of Folderol covered with sweaty scum, and her ankles badly scratched, and her hooves all muddy. . . ."

"Folderol-?" Leah cried, staring at him. "What in heaven's name are you talking about, Uncle?"

"Folderol was the name of-"

"But you just don't want to help him, do you!" Leah said, pressing her hands to her cheeks as if they were burning. "You think that the ignominy has been lived down simply because people have forgotten. But they haven't forgotten-not really! Suppose Christabel, for instance, fell in love with a-a Schaff, or a Horehound-or one of those old Vanderpoel families-I mean with the son of one of those families-do you think they would countenance a match with a Bellefleur, as things stand?

"We must think ahead," Leah said, shaking a cigarillo out of a package. "Didn't Raphael once say-it isn't possible to think too far ahead-"

"Christabel is maturing rapidly," Cornelia murmured.

Noel threw up his hands in angry despair. "But if you visit my brother, dear, what precisely will you talk about? It isn't as if you know him, after all. I doubt that I would recognize him myself. We tried so often to press him into applying for parole, and in the end he was really quite abusive; in fact I had the distinct impression that he'd settled in, at Powhatassie, as he never had out here. The men are allowed to play cards, you know, and according to the warden (at that time-I'm afraid I don't know the current warden) there was always a game going out in the yard, or in the recreation hall, and Jean-Pierre had taught the other men a dozen kinds of poker, and gin rummy, and casino, and euchre, and even bridge-We had hoped he might at least apply for parole, despite Judge Petrie's admonition to the state, but he never did; perhaps he didn't want to risk another humiliation, then again perhaps he didn't want to risk being freed."

"I don't want a parole," Leah said impatiently. "I want a pardon."

"A pardon?"

"From the governor. A pardon. Exoneration."

"A pardon? For Jean-Pierre?"

At that very moment Germaine ran into the room and clambered up on Leah's lap. She had something very exciting to tell her mother-something about one of the cats being treed by a Minorca rooster-but Leah quieted her, and brushed her hair back from her overheated forehead. Perhaps to give the older Bellefleurs time to recover (for Leah, despite her impetuousness, was keenly sensitive to others' feelings) she turned her attentions to her daughter, wetting a forefinger to wipe away some dirt, kissing the child's flushed cheek. "Aren't you a pretty girl," Leah whispered. "Aren't you blessed."

And finally, after a long silence, Cornelia said weakly: "But at least don't take Germaine, dear."

The Elopement.

One fine autumn morning when the last of the leaves-the golden maples-were blazing with light, and the sky was so coldly pellucid a turquoise-blue that it resembled stained glass, Garth and Little Goldie ran off together, in Garth's new Buick, leaving behind only a scribbled note (in Little Goldie's childlike hand) slipped under Ewan's and Lily's door: Gone to get marri'd. They sped southward, crossing the borders of several states, until, breathless, they arrived in one that would marry them within three days; and so they were married. Because of the circumstances of their surprise elopement they had time to heap in the rumble seat of the Buick only a few of Little Goldie's dresses (she had so many-for her new-adopted family was very generous with new things as well as cast-off but still perfectly wearable things-it would have been impossible to choose: so she and Garth merely grabbed an armful out of the closet), the single suit of Garth's he found tolerable to wear, for brief periods (it was made of brown mohair-and-cotton, with a modest lapel and many brass buttons; its trousers were too short but in other respects attractive), and the old Swiss music box from the nursery. They had also taken a half-dozen items from the Great Hall whose value they couldn't have guessed; instinct guided them as blindly toward a rare sixteenth-century German bell metal mortar and pestle as toward a crystal knickknack from Victoria's England, or a "snowstorm" paperweight of undetermined origin. Raiding a few rooms during the very early hours of the night, whispering and giggling, on tiptoe, barefoot, they accumulated about $2,300 in loose cash taken, in such irregular amounts, from the pockets of coats and jackets, from out of drawers, from between the pages of books (in Raphael's library they found a great deal, though some of it was in currency that "looked funny"-so they left it behind), and even from piggy banks, that the money was never to be missed. And of course Garth had some money of his own.

The previous day, something very peculiar had happened between Garth and his uncle Gideon, which was never to be satisfactorily explained.

It seemed that several of the children-Little Goldie, Christabel, Morna-were in the old garden room, playing with the twin ginger kittens everyone adored (though they were not kittens any longer, really, being about five months old now, with long slender bodies and very white whiskers, and unusually large feet), when Mahalaleel, the kittens' father, appeared suddenly at one of the windows, mewing to be let inside. In an uncannily human gesture he brought one paw slowly down against the glass, unsheathing his claws, and the children looked around, startled. (For Mahalaleel had been gone from the manor for nearly two weeks, and Leah had about given up on him.) So the children let him inside, and were delighted at his interest in the kittens, whom he began to groom with all the assiduity of a mother cat. In the posture of a sphinx he reclined before them, gripping them both between his front legs, washing now one, now the other, with his rough pink tongue, his eyes half-shut with pleasure. And the kittens (who did appear to be kittens again, suddenly diminished beside their magnificent fluffy-haired father) pressed against him, purring loudly. Little Goldie had not seen Mahalaleel close up. She knelt to watch him wash the kittens, her brown eyes fixed upon him with a curious intensity. How beautiful Mahalaleel was, though tiny cockleburrs were sticking to his fur-how silky, how luxurious, with the roseate highlights of his thick coat, and the pattern, so intricate as to be almost vertiginous, of its myriad colors: gray and pinkish-gray and orange-and-bronze and frosted black! And his pale green eyes with their black, somewhat dilated centers. . . . Little Goldie murmured that she had never seen a cat like Mahalaleel. She leaned closer, staring. Her long hair fell slowly forward, framing her small face.

"Do you think I could pet him?" she said.

"Oh, no, I wouldn't-he doesn't know you yet," Christabel said.

"Oh, go ahead, he's friendly," impish Morna said.

So Little Goldie quite innocently reached out to touch Mahalaleel. And whether because the creature was genuinely startled by the movement of her hand, or whether because he imagined she meant harm to the kittens-or whether he was simply outraged that a stranger should presume to stroke his head-he snarled and lashed out at her. And in that single instant he scratched the poor child's forearm quite badly-the tender inside of the arm, near the elbow. Blood sprang out from four distinct slashes and ran quickly down her arm to drip onto the floor.

"Oh! Oh, look what he did!" Little Goldie cried in astonishment.

She was more surprised than frightened, but the other girls screamed for help (Christabel in particular, since the sight of blood terrified her), and they were fortunate enough to attract the attention of one of the adults-Gideon-who was just passing by. He hurried inside, saw what had happened, clapped his hands angrily to frighten the hissing Mahalaleel away-Mahalaleel and the kittens as well-and dropped to his knees to examine Little Goldie's wound. "Now don't cry, you'll be all right," he murmured, wrapping a handkerchief around her arm, soaking up the bright blood. "You shouldn't have gotten near that bastard of a cat. But you'll be all right: these are only scratches."

It must have been the case that Garth was also nearby, perhaps dawdling in the corridor; because he too heard the girls' screams, and ran into the room less than a minute after his uncle. He came to a stop abruptly, staring at Gideon and Little Goldie, who were both kneeling on the tessellated floor. The girls told him what had happened-how naughty Mahalaleel had been-but he did not seem to hear. "What happened," he asked in a queer strangled voice, "what happened to her-"

Gideon glanced around at him, and said, "Go get Lissa, will you, and say there's been a little accident-one of the cats has scratched Little Goldie-we need bandages, and some disinfectant-"

"What happened, what are you doing," Garth said.

He towered above them, six feet tall, his jaw suddenly slack, his long thick arms hanging loose. Gideon repeated what he had said, but Garth heard nothing; he was simply staring at them.

"For Christ's sake, Garth-" Gideon began: but Garth suddenly seized him and wrenched him away from Little Goldie, and threw himself on top of him, shouting incoherently. His fists rose and fell, he kneed his uncle in the chest, tried to close his fingers around his throat. It all happened so quickly that the girls stared in amazement, too surprised even to call for help for several seconds. What was happening! Had Garth suddenly gone mad!