You don't love us, was Vida's sudden cry as, for no reason he could determine, she gave her brother a shove. Hurt and bewilderment in her voice, as well as anger. It was someone's birthday. Raphael was certain it had not been his birthday. . . . He slipped away, restless and bored with their foolish games. Musical chairs and "The Needle's Eye" and charades and tag and hide-and-go-seek and . . . It wasn't true, that he didn't love them. It was simply the case that he never thought of them.

The pond quivered and glittered and trembled with its secret spirits. He wanted to know them. He would know them. Sleeping things, scurrying things, spiders, crayfish, milfoil, pennywort, tadpoles, ugly black bullheads in the muddy shadows at the very bottom. Tiny, near-microscopic lice clinging to underwater grasses; bubbles, popping to the surface, stinking of decay like the body's gases; bubbles that revealed themselves not as air, as nothing, but as living globules, the size of fleas.

Reflections of swamp sparrows, red-winged blackbirds uneasily perched on cattails, wings thrashing about in the willow leaves. Once, through a maze of insect-riddled pickerelweed, the great white-winged bird with its skinned head and pointed beak, flying far overhead, so distant that the sound of its flapping wings could not be heard.

(The Noir Vulture, they called it. In their furious befuddled mourning. What a commotion they made, with their noisy tears, their grief, their anger! Gunshots sounded from the swamp, from the lakeshore, day after day; but they returned empty-handed. Raphael hid, and observed, and slipped away from the house as quietly as possible, and of course he was not asked to accompany the men into the swamp.) REFLECTIONS OF AN eye, multiplied thousands-thousands upon thousands!-of times, in a single drop of water. Eyes reflecting eyes. The pond was, of course, more dizzyingly complex than a dragonfly's wings; more subtle than a bullfrog's papery shed skin; more slyly alive than the red midges. It was aware of him at all times, it lapped about his groping fingers, caressing, calculating, giving comfort. Eyes gazing into eyes gazing into eyes. Those long summer afternoons in which the very heat-haze seemed asleep, yet everything was alive, intensely alive, with thought. . . .

Reflections of flies, gnats, hummingbirds. Reflections of hungry pickerel, cast upward against the scummy pads of water lilies.

Reflections, too sudden and too bright (red, olive-red) of a cardinal and his mate, disturbing the tranquillity of Raphael's brooding.

If I could go down, if I could sink, if I could burrow my head into the dark warm mud, if my lungs were strong enough to endure pain . . .

Patience.

Stillness.

In the dim undersea of colored, dancing shadows, in the Rialto Theater, they had sat, a full row of them, delighted as small children with their new purchase. (Several downtown blocks of Rockland, to the west, in Eden County. Among the properties was an old movie theater with a sagging marquee and a vast, vaulted, cavernous foyer whose robin's-egg-blue ceiling was brushed with sequins that resembled fish scales.) They ate stale buttered popcorn-their popcorn-and devoured boxes of mints-and found it difficult to settle down, even when "The March of Time" showed such unspeakable sights. This was their property, Bellefleur property, the sandstone facade, the cheap plaster pillars, the worn, filthy "Oriental" rugs, the rows and rows of seats descending gradually to the stage; the faded scarlet curtains, fold upon fold of velvet; the ornate grimy molding at the ceiling; the screen with its criss-crossings of hair-thin cracks. What they did not own was the play of colored shadows on the screen, and so they settled back to watch: soon drawn, like the rest of the sparse audience, into the mysterious story set now in the cornfields of the Midwest, now in a tropical city, now in "Paris." There was a beautiful though hard-faced woman with platinum blond hair curled tightly under, too tightly under, so that she looked, to Raphael's skeptical eye, like a manikin. She wore gowns that clung to her breasts, even to her sloping pelvis. There was a girl, her younger sister, who appeared in only a few scenes, at the beginning of the movie and again at the end, when the woman returned to her hometown (though only briefly, because her mustached lover, her millionaire-pilot lover, pursued her across the continent), and this girl-with her frank pretty face and her shining wheat-colored hair and her soft melodious voice and her small smile-was so much more interesting than the woman, so much more attractive, that whenever she appeared on screen the audience's interest quickened; one could feel it, unmistakably. So small a role, and yet-wasn't that girl remarkable!

(But when Raphael leaned over to his mother, to say, Isn't that Yolande?-Lily pretended not to comprehend. Not even to hear. "Isn't that Yolande?" Raphael asked, raising his voice, and his family told him to be still-there were other people in the theater, after all. Afterward when the lights came on and the others left and the Bellefleurs remained sitting in their row, as if greatly moved, subdued by the screen's effortless miracles and its almost supernatural beauty, Raphael asked again about the girl-about Yolande-for certainly it was Yolande-and Lily said in a vague stunned voice, "No, it wasn't, I had that thought for a moment too but then I looked more closely, I suppose I'd know my own daughter if I saw her," and Vida snorted contemptuously, saying, "That actress is beautiful, and Yolande wasn't-she had an ugly nose," and Albert did no more than grunt in baffled amusement, and Leah said, squeezing Lily's hand, "Your daughter would be no more than fifteen, you know, and that girl-that young woman-was in her early twenties at least. She's probably been married and divorced a half-dozen times." Garth and Little Goldie, who had been sitting just across the aisle, holding hands and sharing a bag of peanuts and giggling, claimed not to have noticed the girl at all: a girl in the movie said to resemble poor Yolande . . . ? No, they hadn't noticed her at all.) And of course there was no "Yolande Bellefleur" among the actors' names.

"What a silly idea, Raphael," Vida whispered, staring at him. "You're getting strange. I don't know if I like you."

REFLECTIONS DARTING THROUGH reflections. Faces swimming out of the movie projector's ghostly light, or taking shape out of the dark still water. (But there was not a single water, a single substance. Instead there were layers upon layers, currents entwined with currents, many waters, many spirits, unknowable.) How is it possible, Raphael wondered, with a small stab of fear, that we recognize one another from day to day, even from hour to hour . . . ? Everything shifts, changes, grows fluid, transparent. He saw the photograph of a tall stocky frowning man in the newspaper, and did not realize until he read the caption that the man was his own father. Once, not long before dawn, when he crept down from his room without waking the others, and ran barefoot across the lawn, his heart lifting with an absurd hope (ah, to get there!-to get safely there, as quickly as possible!-to make certain the pond had not disappeared in the night, like one of his strange dreams), he happened to see, some distance away, in the swampy area adjacent to the pond, his great-aunt Veronica hurrying toward the house. Like a sleepwalker she made her way with her arms extended and her head upright. Coils of graying hair had fallen loose on her shoulders so that she resembled, in the mist-threaded light, a very young girl. It was no more than two or three minutes before dawn, and red-winged blackbirds were singing stridently; and back in the swamp an owl called. How odd, how very odd, that she should be hurrying back to the castle, from the undrained marshy area below the cemetery, that she should walk-glide-so gracefully along, making no sound whatsoever, and not noticing her nephew as he stood, one hand raised in a shy, tentative greeting, no more than thirty feet away. . . . Raphael noted that the fluffy-plumed reeds barely stirred with her passing.

Yet a minute later, gazing into the colorless waters of his pond, Raphael could ask himself whether he had seen her-whether he had seen anyone at all. The swamp was nearly hidden in mist. Coils of fog blew indolently along the ground, as if alive. And anyway weren't other people, members of his family as well as strangers projected flatly on a movie screen, unknowable from day to day, unrecognizable . . . ? Perhaps they were all bodiless as shadows, all images, all reflections.

Rising out of the quivering, agitated water into which he stepped, barefoot, was a face: the face of a young boy: a child's ancient water-dimmed face, nibbled by invisible currents. As if framing it tenderly between two hands the pond held it aloft. A stranger's face, it seemed. With that curious hopeful expression . . .

But perhaps Raphael was mistaken and the expression was not hopeful. Perhaps it was nothing at all: simply water, simply light. For if the dark waters were not there, the face would not exist either. It would vanish at once. It would never have been.

The Wicked Son.

Even at the height of his fame and his power, in the very prime of his extraordinary life-even when it was quite plain that within a few years he could not fail to become a billionaire (for the first hops harvest of some four hundred acres had brought him profits far beyond his characteristically conservative estimation, and the second harvest, of more than five hundred acres, in a blessed conjunction with severe rainstorms that damaged plantations in Germany and Austria, and drove the world market price wonderfully high, brought him even greater profits), and he might exert his will more forcefully in politics (had he not almost convinced mistrustful Stephen Field that he was, despite his reputation for secrecy and stubbornness, and his unfortunate public manner, the very man for the office of governor during these troubled times)-even when the final additions to his magnificent estate were completed, the Roman bath with its priceless Italian tiles and the conservatory with its glass dome and the marble pagoda fronting the stables, and his hundreds of guests praised the manor in exalted language that would have embarrassed, had it been less than appropriate-even then, after a passage of time that, crowded with events as it was, should have exorcised the worst of his bitterness, Raphael Bellefleur often gave himself up to spasmodic outbursts of sheer rage, at the thought of his wicked son Samuel who had escaped him.

Of course Samuel had not "escaped" him. He was still in the castle, in the Turquoise Room, beneath his father's roof. And yet everyone behaved as if he had died, and Raphael went along with the fiction, for certainly the young man did not exist in the usual sense of the word.

Violet mourned the loss of her handsome young son but refused to discuss the matter with Raphael. We know what we know, she murmured, and of that we cannot speak.

Old Jedediah kept to himself as always, courteous, distant, his pale hazel eyes averted from Raphael's whenever they happened to meet. Unless Raphael imagined it, his aged father was ashamed on his account. To have lost a son like Samuel! A dashing young officer! And to have lost him in such a way-!

In the beginning, Samuel's young friends came frequently to visit. Raphael gave them food and drink but always excused himself from the drawing room; he could not bear to see the young men in their uniforms, none of them so tall and handsome and quick as Samuel had been. He overheard their murmurous conversation: Samuel would return, Samuel would reappear any day: and what stories he would tell! It was inconceivable that Samuel Bellefleur was dead. . . .

Of course he isn't dead, one of the lieutenants said. He simply chooses not to be with us.

Poor Lamentations of Jeremiah mourned the loss of his brother, going about in a melancholy daze, his inkwell eyes piteous to behold. Go away, go out of my sight, Raphael moaned, you must know you won't do. And the unhappy boy crept off to his room and locked the door.

RAPHAEL WOULD HAVE liked to withdraw from the world for a spell, in order to properly mourn the loss of his son. And yet-he found himself unable to keep from thinking about the world. The world. The world of time, and flesh, and power. For wasn't the world always there, always in turmoil, no matter that one closed one's eyes to it? The sanctity of the Chautauqua mountains, the eerie mist-shrouded solitude of Bellefleur Manor, which seemed, to many a visitor from downstate, and to Mr. Lincoln himself (who had first visited it in the late fifties, when the nation's movement toward war began to violently accelerate), to place the castle out of time, and to give it an otherworldly, an almost legendary aura, was soon lost to Raphael: for, after all, he owned the estate, he knew all the blunders and heartbreaking miscalculations that had gone into its creation, he alone was responsible for its upkeep. Like the God of creation he could not reasonably take solace in his creation, for wasn't it-after all-his?

So he could not withdraw. He could not turn his restless darting insatiable intelligence away from the world, though of course this was precisely what Samuel had chosen to do. Only to Jedediah did Raphael dare say a few words, not of grief but of befuddled anger: Do you comprehend, Father, what the boy has done!-he has-he has-he has wantonly and with full deliberation gone over to the other side, to the blacks.

But white-haired Jedediah, distant as always, as if his soul abided still in the mountains, merely nodded vaguely and turned away. It was his affliction-or perhaps his pretense of an affliction-to be nearly deaf. Father, Raphael cried, his heart knotted in his chest, my son has gone over to the blacks . . . !

The Mud-Devourers.

It was on the airless sultry eve of Germaine's second birthday, in the midst of a prolonged heat wave (of some twelve days' duration, with midday temperatures as high as 105 degrees, a record in the Chautauqua region) that Vernon Bellefleur, angular and impatient and bullying, in his "new" poetic voice, with his beard trimmed cruelly short so that it hardly resembled a beard and his long hair tied at the nape of his neck with a soiled red scarf, so antagonized a group of men at a Fort Hanna tavern that they turned upon him in drunken fury, and threw him into the Nautauga River to his death. Or so it must have been: for how could Vernon, his wrists and ankles bound with clothesline, Vernon who had, alone among the Bellefleur children, never learned to swim, prevent himself from drowning in those swift deep waters-?

The summer, the terrible heat, the busyness of the castle, comings and goings, the death of Cassandra, the surprise of Lord Dunraven's visit (and he had promised Cornelia that he would return, after his journey to the West Coast, to spend a few more days at the castle before leaving for England), Leah's and Hiram's and young Jasper's frequent trips to distant cities: too much, the older Bellefleurs murmured, simply too much was happening. There was the distressing change in Vernon, after the baby's funeral; there was Ewan's campaign for sheriff of the county, which he had begun lazily enough, with a cynical good humor, for certainly he didn't care-how could a Bellefleur care about such an office?-but which, as the weeks passed, came to seem more important. There was the problem of Gideon. (But, in Leah's presence, of course there was no "problem"-simply that he was frequently away, absent for days at a time.) There was the sharp disappointment of the rejection, from the governor's office, of Jean-Pierre's formal request for a pardon (and attached to the rejection was a hand-written, and entirely gratuitous, note to the effect that the "original sentence" was "lenient enough"-a remark that infuriated Leah, who vowed she would get her revenge on Grounsel someday.) There was the surprise of a peculiar (and not very literate) letter of many pages from the elderly Mrs. Schaff, addressed to Cornelia, complaining bitterly about her "headstrong" daughter-in-law who was "already exhibiting, at her tender age, the vices of her ancestors": Cornelia read certain selected passages to the family, who reacted with uproarious laughter, and then again with resentment, and still again with baffled rage. (Christabel, questioned by both her mother and Cornelia, claimed she hadn't any idea what old Mrs. Schaff meant. "Maybe because my knees hurt when we kneel for prayer, and sometimes I wriggle around, and once I snuck a rolled-up scarf to kneel on," Christable said, tears in her eyes.) There was the surprise, which should have been a pleasant one though in fact it greatly disturbed the family, of young Bromwell's good fortune-but perhaps "good fortune" was the wrong term: he had published a thirty-page essay in a magazine no one had ever heard of, The Journal for the Study of Time, an essay whose meticulous graphs, charts, formulae, data, and vocabulary attested to an extraordinary intellect (a biographical note on Bromwell spoke of him as the youngest contributor in the publishing history of the magazine). The only member of the family who even attempted to read the essay was Hiram. "The boy certainly shows promise," he said evasively. "There's probably little reason for me to continue tutoring him in mathematics. . . ."

A more pleasant surprise was Lord Dunraven's extended visit. He was, he claimed, absolutely enchanted by the mountains and the wilderness land and the innumerable lakes: it struck him as astonishing that the Bellefleurs lived in so paradisaical a world, and lived in it so . . . so . . . unself-consciously, so naturally. Noel took him fishing along the north shore of Lake Noir (ah, that lake, that sinister lovely lake!-there was nothing like it in all of England, or even in the Scottish highlands), and there were frequently little fishing and hunting expeditions on higher ground, though it was observed that Cornelia's cousin, while in every respect in excellent health, and certainly, at the age of forty-two, in the prime of life, and certainly enthusiastic, tired more easily than the other men; once he fell asleep, or slipped into a stupefied unconsciousness, on the walking horse Noel had selected for him, and they had to secure him to the saddle and the horse's neck with rope. But he loved, he said repeatedly, the mountains-how high were the Chautauquas?-and the air was so fresh, the mountain lakes so beautiful-at least in the wilderness land the Bellefleurs showed him (for of course, elsewhere, there were ugly razed acres, and streams fouled by mills and factories, some of them owned by the Bellefleurs themselves). Noel answered vaguely, not quite knowing what he meant, that of course the mountains were beautiful but they had been, he thought, somewhat higher in the past, during his boyhood: he didn't know, maybe ten thousand feet or so, the highest peak . . . ? "Ah, there is nothing like that in my country," Lord Dunraven said, smiling sadly.

Lord Dunraven was of somewhat less than average height, at least by Bellefleur standards, but he carried himself well. His good-natured face was frequently illuminated by crinkling smiles that quite changed his appearance: he was capable of looking, even with the bushy graying hair that receded so sharply at his temples, like a much younger man. His cheeks seemed permanently windburned, with an attractive ruddy blush; his eyes were clear and kind; his manner, though highly studied and self-conscious, was graceful. If the Bellefleur children mocked him behind his back (Dunraven's accent, they thought, was hilarious) they nevertheless came to like him a great deal, and Germaine was especially fond of him. (Poor Germaine!-not only had she lost her baby sister Cassandra, but her father was rarely home, and now even cousin Vernon, who had always spent so much time with her, was never around.) Lord Dunraven, Eustace Beckett, owned a large country estate in Sussex, and a town house in Belgravia; his fortune was modest by Bellefleur standards, but he had been his father's only heir, and lived comfortably. On the single occasion he managed to speak with Garnet, after the terrifying scene on the beach (about which no one knew, for of course Lord Dunraven respected the young woman's privacy, and her obvious sorrow) he explained to the unhappy girl that he was an "amateur" at life and sometimes felt, despite his age, and the frequency of deaths in his family, that he hadn't yet begun to live. And he smiled his tentative hopeful smile, and gazed upon her with such frank childlike tenderness, that Garnet turned away in confusion, and murmured an excuse-for she had to escape his presence-she could not bear his kindness, and the memory of that shameful scene on the beach. (After Garnet fled to Bushkill's Ferry Lord Dunraven made polite, casual inquiries about her, but of course no one told him about Cassandra; though they did allow him to know, obliquely, that the young woman's family background was somewhat common. Nevertheless Lord Dunraven wrote to Garnet, and even sent her flowers upon at least one occasion (so Della reported), and spoke of her with an unembarrassed warmth that indicated his ignorance of his own feelings. She had, he supposed, many admirers? . . . a girl of such quiet charm and beauty . . . a girl of such delicacy. Perhaps she was even spoken for? Well, said Cornelia flatly, perhaps.) IT WAS SHORTLY after Lord Dunraven departed for his journey by train across the continent (and it rather amused the Bellefleurs that their English guest hadn't any notion of how wide the continent was, and couldn't seem to grasp its dimensions even when they were explained to him), that Vernon was brutally attacked by a group of Fort Hanna men one Saturday night, in a tavern in the very worst waterfront area of the city.

Everyone in the family remarked on how Vernon had changed, since the baby's death: after several days of lethargic depression, during which he had refused to eat, he emerged from his untidy room with his beard trimmed short, and his mismatched eyes glaring. The room stank of smoke-he had, he said, burnt all his papers-his old poems-notes for poems-even some of his books. All that was over.

He read them fragments of new poems, but his voice was so harsh and impatient, and the poems so jumbled-about the "fall" of God, the "divorce" between man and God, God's wickedness, God's ignorance, man's lonely lofty supremacy, man's duty to rebel, the stupor of the masses, the mud-devouring lot of the masses-that no one could follow, and the children, once embarrassed by their uncle's effusive goodness, were now embarrassed (and somewhat frightened) by his anger. At the very dinner honoring Lord Dunraven's departure, which Cornelia had planned with care, and which was held in the large dining room with its elegant murals, tapestries, and chandeliers, and the exquisite though rather heavy German furniture, Vernon distressed them all by insisting upon reading a poem-in-progress he had begun that afternoon, up in the cemetery. He stood at his place and read from scraps of paper that trembled in his hands, and then he looked up, fixing his gaze upon the ceiling, and recited from memory, all sorts of incoherent lines-some of them about the Noir Vulture, some of them about the baby's death, but many of them about unrelated things: God's betrayal of man, man's subservience, man's ignominious groveling nature, his selfishness, venality, cruelty, cowardice, and lack of pride. And some of the lines clearly alluded to a certain family who had, he said, exploited tenant farmers and servants and laborers, and the land, and must be stopped. . . .

"If that wasn't poetry the bastard was reciting," Ewan said, afterward, "I would have smashed his ugly face in."

In the days that followed the Bellefleurs learned, from a variety of sources, including a scandalized Della, that Vernon was wandering the countryside again-turning up at a Baptist church picnic in Contracoeur, at the old White Sulphur Springs Inn, in the village, in Bushkill's Ferry (where he evidently got hilariously drunk), as far away as Innisfail and Fort Hanna-eager to talk to anyone, young or old, who would listen. Where in the past he rarely drank, and then only shandygaffs (a drink beloved of many Bellefleur children, but only so long as they were children), now he tried to drink whatever other men were having-beer, ale, whiskey, gin-and paid for numerous rounds, as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life. With his newly trimmed beard and his jabbing forefinger and a dramatic, harsh urgency to his voice he commanded attention as he had never commanded it before, though when his audience discerned the nature of his words-when they realized he was no longer exactly nice, and they couldn't either laugh at him comfortably, or like him-they grew uneasy. What had happened to Vernon Bellefleur, the "poet"! Even the word love evoked a cynical curling of his eyebrows.

In Contracoeur he harangued his bewildered listeners on the subject of their servile natures: if they gave their immortal souls up to that fiendish God, why naturally they would be soulless! On the rotting veranda of the White Sulphur Springs Inn he read in a trembling voice of man's contemptible failure to realize his destiny in the flesh and in history, and alarmed several of his listeners-elderly retired smalltime farmers and merchants-who, not hearing altogether correctly, believed he was reading off a proclamation of war. In the very village itself, so close to the manor, and almost completely owned by his family, he spoke sardonically of the Bellefleurs, and chided the villagers for their passivity. Why, for decades, in fact for centuries, had they endured their lowly positions?-why did they allow themselves to be exploited? They were slaves-they were parasites-they weren't human. To the Bellefleurs' tenant farmers he spoke in a similar vein, and did not appear to notice his listeners' resentment. At Innisfail and Fort Hanna he read lengthy impassioned sections from a poem-in-progress called "The Mud-Devourers," which evidently accused the masses of men of complying with their own degradation, and of being, in fact, grateful for it: Any compromise, he thundered, so long as it brings a cessation of conflict! It was no wonder God treated mankind as He did, grinding the masses of men beneath His heel and exacting from them all sorts of groveling pious declarations of love. . . .

The tenant farmers were slaves, and the mill and factory workers were slaves. Their eagerness to sell themselves (and to sell themselves cheaply) made them subhuman; yet they hadn't the dignity of animals, and none of the healthy instincts of animals. The workers, if organized, could bring the owners to their knees if they tried, but of course they were too cowardly to try: their initial attempts at unionizing, some years ago, were such ghastly bloody failures they shrank back from even thinking of such things. Sometimes he spoke directly, stabbing at the air with his bony forefinger; sometimes he read or recited his poetry, which was not at all "poetic," but punctuated with harsh, ugly, frequently shocking images-jaws devouring jaws, wormlike men crawling on their bellies, tides of ants rushing into a stream to be swept away, creatures who devoured filth and declared it manna, the Son of God as a babbling idiot. In Innisfail, at a volunteer firemen's picnic, he so outraged a small gang of mill workers that it was only through the intervention of an off-duty state trooper (a boyhood acquaintance of Ewan's) that he was taken forcibly away, and saved from a probable beating.

But there was no one to intervene, no one to save him, when, on the following Saturday night, at the Fort Hanna tavern near the old drawbridge, he somehow got into a quarrel with a number of young men. (One of them was said to be Hank Varrell, another was a Gittings boy-though, afterward, no eyewitnesses officially identified them, or were even willing to offer descriptions.) How Vernon managed to get to Fort Hanna when he had been sighted in the Falls earlier that day; why he sought out that particular tavern, frequented by men who worked at the Bellefleur mill, and who had, at one time, been under his "management"; why he insisted drunkenly upon addressing the men in the most intimate and provocative terms (he referred to them as brothers and comrades), no one knew. "He talked like a preacher," someone said. "He was so certain of himself-he was even happy-right up until the end."

That day the temperature had climbed above 100 degrees, and an airless stagnant heat seemed to radiate out of the earth itself. Though the tavern was on the Nautauga River, the river at this point was unspeakably filthy, and gave off a sulfurous stink that burnt the eyes. There had been a rumor for weeks, still unsubstantiated, that the mill might be closed down, and naturally the men were angry, and naturally they queried Vernon about it; but he denied that he was a Bellefleur, he denied that he knew anything, and insisted upon charging the men with their own predicament. They had destroyed the river, they had destroyed their own souls . . . ! "And I don't exempt myself from you," Vernon cried passionately. "I am of the same species as you! I too have devoured mud and called it manna!"

How the men managed to drag Vernon off, and to tie his hands and feet together with clothesline (clothesline stretched between two scrubby trees in a backyard adjacent to the tavern), without exciting the attention of anyone who might have called the police, how they managed to carry him up the steep, debris-cluttered hill to the road, and onto the bridge (which was fairly busy on a Saturday night), no one was able to explain. Evidently he put up a violent struggle, kicking and thrashing about, so that one of the young men suffered a badly cut lip, and another a cracked rib; evidently, at the very moment they dropped him over the side of the railing, he was screaming defiantly at them. It was said that he fell like a shot, sank, surfaced again some distance downstream, still screaming, wildly pumping his arms and legs, and, in the midst of a ferocious outcry, again disappeared from view. It was said that, afterward, as the young men ran away, wiping their hands, laughing, one called out to the others, "That's what we do to Bellefleurs!" and another, unidentified, said, "That's what we do to poets."

BOOK FOUR.

Once Upon A Time . . .

Celestial Timepiece.

Serendipity and Felicity and All-Hallows-Eve and Wonder-Working Providence and Celestial Timepiece were the names of the massive wool-and-feather-lined quilts Germaine's aunt Matilde made. The quilts grew slowly as Germaine watched, very slowly, square by square, as aunt Matilde talked with grandfather Noel and Germaine, her stubby fingers working constantly. Months passed, and years. Glass Garden and Gyroscope and The Dance (a dance of merry skeletons) and The Bestiary and Noir Swamp and Angels. They grew square by square, eventually spilling to the floor and hiding aunt Matilde's feet.

"Why do you take Germaine over there, to that woman's house," grandmother Cornelia asked irritably. "Matilde is hardly a good example, is she?"

"An example of what?" Noel asked.

"Leah doesn't like it," Cornelia said.

"Leah hasn't time to know about it," Noel said.

Yet they came often, to Raphael Bellefleur's "camp"-a half-dozen log cabins on the lake shore, many miles from Bellefleur Manor. Family legend had it that Matilde had moved there long ago out of sheer spite: she had failed to be a Bellefleur, had failed to attract a suitable husband, and so she simply withdrew into the woods. But grandfather Noel told Germaine that that wasn't true. Matilde had moved across the lake because-because she had wanted to.

"Can I live here too?" Germaine asked.

"We can visit," grandfather Noel said. "As often as we like."

Germaine rode her new pony Buttercup, and Noel rode his high-headed but lazy old stallion Fremont. And they did come almost as often as they liked.

Great-aunt Matilde was a large-boned woman who sang as she worked, and had a habit of talking to herself. (Sometimes Germaine heard her: Now where did I put that spoon, now what are you devils doing on that table!) If she was lonely at the camp she never indicated it: on the contrary, she was the happiest Bellefleur Germaine knew. She never raised her voice and she never threw anything down in a rage and she never strode out of a room weeping. The telephone never rang-there was no telephone; letters came rarely; though the family strongly disapproved of Matilde they let her alone. (She was "strange," she was "headstrong," the Bellefleurs said. She was "stubborn" because she insisted upon her solitude, and making quilts and rugs for a living. Social gatherings did not interest her, not even weddings and funerals!-and she insisted upon wearing trousers and boots and jackets, and in the old days, as Lamentations of Jeremiah's daughter, she had even insisted upon working with the farm laborers; an eccentricity for which the female Bellefleurs never forgave her. She should have been born a man, they said contemptuously. She should have been born a dirt-poor farmer living on the side of a mountain; she doesn't deserve the name Bellefleur.) But they let her alone. Perhaps they were afraid of her.

So she worked on her quilts, happy in her solitude, and grandfather Noel brought Germaine over to visit, and they spent wonderful long afternoons: Germaine was allowed to help Matilde sew, and Noel settled by the fire, his boots off and his stockinged feet twitching with pleasure, a pipe clamped between his teeth. He loved to gossip about the family-the schemes Leah had!-the woman was ingenious-and Ewan's behavior-and Hiram's problems-and what Elvira said to Cornelia-and what Lily's growing children were up to: the children were all growing up so quickly. Matilde laughed, but said little. She was deeply absorbed in her work. Noel complained of the swiftness of time's passing but Matilde could not agree. "Sometimes I think time hardly passes at all," Matilde said. "At this end of the lake, at least."

The quilts, the enormous wonderful quilts!-which Germaine would remember all her life.

Serendipity: six feet square, a maze of blue rags, so intricate you could stare and stare and stare into it.

Felicity: interlocking triangles of red, rosy-red, and white.

Wonder-Working Providence: a galaxy of opalescent moons.

Made for strangers, sold to strangers, who evidently paid a good price for them. ("Why can't we buy one of them," Germaine said to her grandfather, "why can't we take one of them home?") Celestial Timepiece was the largest quilt, but Matilde was sewing it for herself-it wasn't to be sold: up close it resembled a crazy quilt because it was asymmetrical, with squares that contrasted not only in color and design but in texture as well. "Feel this square, now feel this one," Matilde said softly, taking Germaine's hand, "and now this one-do you see? Close your eyes." Coarse wool, fine wool, satins, laces, burlap, cotton, silk, brocade, hemp, tiny pleats. Germaine shut her eyes tight and touched the squares, seeing them with her fingertips, reading them. Do you understand? Matilde asked.

Noel complained that Celestial Timepiece made his eye jump. You had to stand far back to see its design, and even then it was too complicated-it gave him a headache. "Why don't you just sew some nice little satin comforter," he said. "Something small, something pretty."

"I do what I am doing," Matilde said curtly.

Sometimes, back in the castle, Germaine shut her eyes and called back Matilde's cabin. She saw the white leghorns picking in the dust, and the single dairy cow with the white face; and Foxy the red-orange cat, so much more gentle that the castle toms. (Mahalaleel's offspring were everywhere, underfoot, and though they were extraordinarily handsome cats even the females were short-tempered. You could not help petting them-they were so alluring-but you risked being scratched.) Matilde had a pet cardinal, kept in a wicker cage; he twittered and scolded like a tame bird. Germaine saw, in her mind's eye, his bright red feathers-his chunky orange beak. And the hollyhocks at the rear of the kitchen garden. And, in the washing shed, the wooden washtub with a "pounder"-a long tin tube, flared at the bottom. There was a stoneware churn with a wooden dasher. A spinning wheel. A loom, which Matilde used to weave her rugs, in yard-wide sections, out of balls of dyed rags. (Weaving was hard work, harder even than sewing quilts. It was especially difficult to get the correct number of balls for each stripe.) In the living room there was an aged wood-burning stove, made of iron; and Matilde's bed, a plain four-poster with white ruffled skirts, a cornhusk tick and feather bed on top, and one of Matilde's quilts for a counterpane. The high hard goosefeather pillows were covered with starched white cases edged with handmade lace. Germaine often napped on this bed, with Foxy curled up close beside her.

"Why can't we come to aunt Matilde's to live," Germaine asked querulously.

"You don't want to leave your father and your mother, do you?" grandfather Noel scolded. "What kind of talk is that!"

Germaine put a finger in her mouth, and then another; and then another. And sucked on them defiantly.

Nightshade.

Superstitious Bellefleurs spoke of Nightshade as a troll (as if anyone had the slightest notion of what a troll was!) but it is more reasonable to assume, as Leah, Hiram, Jasper, Ewan, and other "reasonable" Bellefleurs did, that he was a dwarf. Not altogether an ordinary dwarf of the kind one might find elsewhere-for surely Nightshade, hunchbacked as he was, and with his wide, thin, near-lipless mouth that stretched fully across his face-was unusual. For one thing he was distressingly ugly. If you wanted to like him, or simply to "take pity" on him, his oversized but wizened face with its chiplike colorless eyes, and the queer indentation on his forehead (as if, it was observed, someone struck him long ago with the blunt edge of an ax), and that maddening unslackening joyless wide smile, were so repulsive, you turned away in alarm, your pulses racing; and the things Nightshade carried about in his numerous leather pouches and boxes (they were rumored to be bits of dried animals but were probably only medicinal herbs, like boneset, heal-all, henbit, dogbane, and, indeed, nightshade) gave off a sickish odor that intensified in humid weather. Bromwell estimated that Nightshade would have been about five feet tall had he been capable of standing upright: but he was so badly deformed, his spine bent and his chest so caved in, that he stood no more than four feet nine. Isn't he sad, people said when they first saw him; isn't he pathetic, they murmured upon subsequent sightings; isn't he hideous, isn't he unspeakable, they finally said, when neither the poor thing nor Leah was within earshot. (It was to be one of the most nagging of the Bellefleur mysteries, Nightshade's appeal for Leah. For surely he came to acquire an extraordinary value in her imagination, during Germaine's third and fourth years, and a remarkable intimacy as well-an intimacy, alas, that, though it never overstepped the affectionate but formal relationship of a woman and her favored manservant, nevertheless provoked, in the ignorant, all sorts of cruel, foolish, spiteful, and obscene speculation.) Nightshade came to dwell at Bellefleur Manor quite by accident-through, in fact, a series of accidents.

After the tragedy of the infant Cassandra's death, a number of Bellefleur men, joined, at various times, by friends and neighbors and visiting relatives (among them Dave Cinquefoil and Dabney Rush), sought, with shotguns and rifles and even a lightweight multiple-action gun of Ewan's, the Noir Vulture, which was believed to inhabit the deepest reaches of the swamp; but their expeditions were fruitless. They shot and killed, or shot and left for dead, any number of other creatures, in their understandable disappointment-deer, bobcats, beavers, skunks, hares, rabbits, raccoons, opossums, muskrats, rats, porcupines, snakes (copperheads, ringnecks, water moccasins), even turtles, and even bats; and a great variety of birds, primarily herons, hawks, eagles, and egrets, who somewhat resembled the deadly vulture-but they came away, exhausted and bitter, without the object of their hunt. Gideon, who had shown little interest in hunting, in recent years, was especially determined to kill the Noir Vulture, and led nearly all of the expeditions into the swamp; even when feverish from snakebite he insisted upon joining the other men. He never spoke of Cassandra, still less did he speak of Garnet, but he often spoke of the Noir Vulture and how he would hunt it down-how he wouldn't rest until it was killed. (Bromwell frequently told his father that there must be, of course, more than a single bird, though legend had it that only a single Noir Vulture existed-for how, otherwise, the primly courteous boy inquired, could the creature reproduce itself?) But each of the hunting expeditions ended in failure, and Gideon became increasingly bitter. He once suggested that the entire swamp-some sixty or seventy acres-be firebombed: couldn't Ewan (who had just been elected, by a narrow margin, sheriff of Nautauga County) acquire the necessary equipment . . . ? But Ewan laughed away the notion, which must have been a joke. We'll kill the thing eventually, he said. Don't worry, it won't escape us.

Yet the weeks passed, and the Noir Vulture was not even sighted, let alone shot.

By a happy coincidence there arrived at the manor, after an absence of many years (no one could quite remember how many, not even Cornelia), Gideon's brother Emmanuel, who had been exploring the Chautauquas in order to map them thoroughly: for even at the present time maps were crude and unreliable. Emmanuel reappeared in the kitchen one afternoon in his sheepskin jacket and hiking shoes, carrying a weathered knapsack, and asked the cook, in his softspoken, rather inflectionless voice, if he might have something to eat. The cook (newly hired, since the debacle of great-grandmother Elvira's birthday party) had no idea who he was but saw the Bellefleur nose (in Emmanuel it was a long straight beak of a nose, with unusually small nostrils), and was shrewd enough to serve him, quietly and without fuss. He was an extremely tall man, perhaps Gideon's height, with silvery brown hair that fell to his shoulders, and tanned, leathery skin that glinted with something metallic-salt, mica-and long, narrow, impassive eyes in which the dark iris floated like a tadpole, with a tadpole's tiny curl of a tail. It was difficult to say how old he might have been: his skin had so weathered that it looked ageless, timeless: he must have been about Gideon's and Ewan's ages but looked much older, and at the same time perversely younger. A servant ran to get his mother, and soon the whole household was alerted, and though most of them crowded into the kitchen Emmanuel continued to eat his beef stew, chewing each mouthful slowly, smiling and nodding in reply to excited questions.

It was evidently the case-much to his family's surprise-that he was not home for good; he planned to stay at the manor only a few weeks. The cartography project was not completed. He said, softly, in response to an exclamation of Noel's, that it was far from being completed, it would require years more of exploration. . . . Years more! Cornelia said, trying to take his hands in hers, as if to warm them, what on earth can you mean! Emmanuel pulled away, expressionless. If his face seemed to have an upward cast, a half-smiling air, it was because of his long, curling eyes; his lips were quite immobile. He explained quietly that the project he had set himself was a difficult, even a merciless one, and though he'd already covered many thousands of feet of parchment with his mapping and notations, he was really nowhere near finished for, for one thing, the land was always changing, streams were rerouting themselves, even the mountains were different from year to year (and even from day to day, he told the family, solemnly, they were eroding: Mount Blanc was now only about nine thousand feet high, and lost a fraction of an inch every hour), and a fastidious cartographer could take nothing for granted, though he had once charted, judiciously enough, all that he knew. But is that important, Noel broke in, laughing uneasily, I mean, you know, an inch here, an inch there-! Isn't it time you began to think, Emmanuel, about marrying-settling down-taking your place here with us-(It might have been at that precise moment that Emmanuel decided not to stay at the manor as long as he'd planned; but his face was impassive as he listened to his father's remarks. He was to leave home again on the morning of the fourth day of his visit, explaining to one of the servants that the manor was too warm for him to sleep comfortably, and the closeness of the ceilings oppressed him. And a certain gully at Lake Tear-of-the-Cloud nagged him, for he was convinced, suddenly, out of nowhere, that he had charted it incorrectly.) But before he left he was able to answer Gideon's questions about the Noir Vulture. From out of his heavy oilskin knapsack he took a roll of parchment which he opened, carefully, spreading it on a table, explaining that this crude and really quite inadequate "map" was meant to cover the desolate swamp- and marshland to the south of Mount Chattaroy, which he had first investigated as a boy (indeed, hadn't Gideon accompanied him on one of his expeditions?), and again a few years ago, but without entirely satisfying himself that he knew it. However, he said, pointing with a forefinger (the nail of which curved wickedly, like an eagle's talon), I'm reasonably sure that the bird you want inhabits this region here. And he indicated an area of lakes and islands some twenty miles north of Bellefleur Manor.

Gideon stood leaning over the map, careful-for his brother seemed rather nervous-not to touch it. The intricate meandering lines were dizzying; he had never seen a map quite like this; and the few words that were included were obviously Indian names, no longer used, faded from memory. But he could, he thought, make his way to the Noir Vulture's habitat without difficulty. . . . Evidently they had underestimated its distance from the lake.

He straightened, smiling. He halfway wanted to seize his brother in his arms, and embrace him; but he mastered the impulse. That bird, that thing, that devilish son of a bitch, he laughed, won't escape us.

WHILE THE IGNOMINIOUS failure of the earlier expeditions had not dampened Gideon's ardor, but seemed, rather, to have increased it, the other men-Ewan in particular, who was busy with his new responsibilities-were somewhat discouraged; and the weather was growing chillier day by day. (After the terrible heatwave of late August a wall of cold air moved downward from the mountains, and brought a premature frost on the very first day of September.) So Gideon was able to cajole only Garth, Albert, Dave Cinquefoil, and a new friend named Benjamin (who shared Gideon's fascination with cars) into joining him on the hunt.

They took one of the pick-up trucks from the farm, and drove some fifteen miles north, along dirt roads and lanes and logging trails, until they were forced to give up and walk; at that very moment a light chill rain began to fall though the sky appeared cloudless. Gideon passed his flask of bourbon generously about but drank very little himself. He was almost desperately anxious to press forward. At first the others tried to keep up with him, then they gradually allowed themselves to fall behind. Garth was the only person who had actually sighted the Noir Vulture: he had seen it, or something closely resembling it, while hunting white-tailed deer as a boy of twelve. Albert had never seen it but believed fervently in it. Young Dave Cinquefoil and Benjamin Stone of course hadn't any idea what they were hunting-only that it had carried off and devoured an infant, and must be killed. Gideon had convinced himself that he had once seen the bird, many years ago, but the creature in his mind's eye was shimmering and indistinct, a fabulous bird composed of steaming vapors, with a glaring red eye and a daggerlike beak. It was a monster and must be killed. It had, after all, carried off a Bellefleur child . . . it had carried off his child.

His long desperate strides carried Gideon away from the others, but he took no notice. A dangerous way to hunt, but he took no notice. In the distance he heard a curious sound: at the very first it put him in mind of bowling (for he frequented the bars of certain roadside bowling alleys where, over the months, he had made interesting new acquaintances); then he thought it must be thunder, low and rumbling; then he wondered if it might be a waterfall. He was climbing a ridge, the marshy land to his right, and it was altogether likely that a small river or creek lay ahead. He thought there might be a waterfall-he believed he had once hunted this area, many years ago.

The thunderous sound rose and fell, and went silent. But it had come from somewhere close by. Gideon, panting, climbed the ridge as the sun began to shine with a sudden summery warmth. The swamp to his right gave off a rich brackish odor of decay and the tall pale oatlike grasses through which he plunged smelled of moisture and heat. He was suddenly very excited-he heard laughter ahead-he raised his gun and touched his trembling finger lightly against one of the triggers.

And then-and then, at the top of the grassy knoll, he found himself staring down in astonishment at a group of children. They were playing in a meadow. The grass was short, and extremely green; it was close-cropped enough to be pastureland, but Gideon was certain that this land wasn't used for grazing. The children were playing rowdily, shouting at one another, emitting high-pitched squeaking laughter. They were bowling-lawn bowling-it must have been a schoolhouse picnic-but why were they trespassing on Bellefleur land, and who were they?-and where was their teacher? The sound of the wooden balls (which were about the size of croquet balls) striking the clubs was disproportionately loud, as if the noise echoed in a small room, ricocheting off a low ceiling. Gideon flinched. The children's high-pitched laughter was also extremely loud. Though ordinarily Gideon liked children and even the idea of children it struck him suddenly that he didn't like these children and would take pleasure in running them off his land. . . .

So he descended the slope, shouting at them. They turned in amazement, their faces screwed up in angry, belligerent expressions, and he saw that they weren't children-they were midgets-some fifteen or twenty midgets-or were they (since their heads were oversized and their bodies misshapen, some of them quite grotesquely, with humps between their shoulders and crooked, caved-in chests) dwarves?-but why were they trespassing on his property-and where had they come from- Gideon recklessly approached them, and though he saw, to his mild alarm, that they weren't backing away, that they were staring at him, in fact, with queer frozen expressions-grimaces so contorted they appeared to be involuntary, as if facial muscles had locked in spasms-eyes half-shut or screwed up in malevolent mocking winks-ugly little grins in which the preternaturally wide mouths were held shut and the thin, pale lips were stretched tight against the teeth-still he continued down the hill, slipping and sliding, though the safety lock wasn't on his gun and what he was doing was extremely unwise.

The force of the first wooden ball, striking him on the shoulder, was enough to nearly fell him; and in his pain and surprise he actually dropped the shotgun-but in another instant, acting before he had time to think, he snatched it up again. By then, however, the dwarves were upon him. Shouting and jabbering and squeaking, obviously furious despite their frozen screwed-up faces, they swarmed up the hill, like a pack of wild dogs, exactly like a pack of wild dogs, and one seized Gideon by the thigh and another climbed up him and seized his hair, knocking him over by the sheer weight of his body (which, though stunted and undersized, was remarkably heavy), and before Gideon had time to cry out he felt teeth sink in the fleshy part of his hand, and there was a terrible paralyzing kick to his groin, so that he nearly lost consciousness, and the high-pitched squeaking was exactly like that of shrews devouring prey-even other shrews-and even in the midst of his wild desperate struggling (for he wanted, ah, how he wanted to live) Gideon knew that they were going to kill him: these ugly misshapen creatures were going to kill him, Gideon Bellefleur-!

But of course it was not to be, for Garth had come up behind Gideon, and, at that unearthly sight, simply fired into the air; and the little men, terrified, scrambled off Gideon. Even in his consternation Garth was a cautious enough hunter to aim away from his uncle-he had time for only one more shot, so he turned to fire at a dwarf who had been jumping about at the edge of the commotion, tearing at his dark coarse hair with both hands, in a paroxysm of excitement. The buckshot tore into the hideous little creature's right arm and shoulder, and brought him down at once.

The other dwarves fled. Though panicked, they had prudence enough to snatch up their bowling balls and clubs, and not one was to be found afterward; but the meadow was so badly chewed up, it was not difficult to ascertain that a peculiar game of some kind had been played there. . . . By the time Albert, Dave, and Benjamin arrived, out of breath, the other dwarves had disappeared, and only the one Garth had shot remained. He was groaning and writhing about, bleeding from innumerable little wounds, his great misshapen head flailing from side to side, his clawlike fingers plucking at the grass. In silence the men gazed down upon him. They had never seen anything quite like him. . . . Not only was the creature hunchbacked, but his spine had curved so brutally that his jaw was mashed against his chest; he looked (the image flew into Gideon's mind, though he was staggering with pain and exhaustion) like a young April fern, coiled up, so tightly coiled up you would never think it might grow straight and flare out into its extraordinary beauty. . . . But, this creature, how ugly!-how repulsive! His shoulders appeared to be muscle-bound, and his neck was as thick as a man's thigh; his hair was coarse and shaggy and without luster as a horse's mane; there was an indentation on his forehead, a mark deep in the bone itself, and the skull had grown about it asymmetrically. As he whimpered and groaned and begged for mercy (for his queer gibberish, which sounded part Indian, part German, part English, was quite intelligible) he opened his mouth wide, as if grinning, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the mouth extended almost fully across his broad face, traversing the muscular cheeks. He flopped over onto his belly and began to crawl, dragging himself, toward a patch of higher grass and weeds, like a wounded turtle. The sight of his oily blood on the ground went to Albert's head; he drew out his long hunter's knife and begged permission from Gideon to cut the thing's throat. Just to put him out of his misery! Just to shut up that babbling! But Gideon said no, no, better not. . . . But didn't he lay hands on you, Albert said, didn't he touch you! And he ran over, fairly dancing with excitement, to the patch of weeds in which the dwarf lay, clutching frantically at the soil and grass, and seized hold of the dwarf's hair, and lifted his head in triumph. Gideon, please, he begged. Gideon. Gideon. Just this once. Ah, Gideon . . .

No, better not, Gideon said, adjusting his clothing, sucking at his wounded hand, after all the thing is human.

THEY CALLED HIM Nightshade because it was a patch of purple nightshade he had dragged himself into, and they noted with what desperation, and what remarkable skill, he was crushing leaves and berries and mashing them against his wound. Within a few minutes the worst of the bleeding had stopped. And so efficacious was the nightshade juice that the creature did not afterward suffer any infection, and within a few weeks appeared to have totally forgotten his injury.

Long afterward Gideon was to regret not having allowed his nephew to slit Nightshade's throat: but, after all, how could he have foreseen the future, and how, in any case, could he take it upon himself to condemn even so repulsive a creature to death? Killing in the heat of a fight was merely killing, but killing in such a manner was murder. . . . No Bellefleur has ever committed murder, Gideon said.