Because Mahalaleel was so discriminating, it soon became a mark of good fortune if he curled up at someone's feet, or rubbed around someone's legs, making his throaty crackling noise. He had a habit of coming up behind both Leah and Vernon and thrusting his big head beneath their hands importunately, demanding to be petted; it was an extraordinary gesture, and never failed to astonish and delight Leah. "Aren't you bold!" she laughed. "You know exactly what you want and how to get it."

She and her niece Yolande brushed his thick cloudy coat with Leah's own gold-backed hairbrush, and tried to lift him in their arms, laughing at his weight. In the right mood he could tolerate a surprising amount of attention, but he always stiffened when the youngest children approached: Christabel was not welcome, nor were Aveline's noisy children, nor Lily's (except for Yolande and Raphael), and even cautious Bromwell, frowning behind his glasses, wanting only to "observe" and take notes on Mahalaleel. (He had already begun his journal, which was filled with minute observations, and measurements, and even the results of several dissections performed on small rodents.) Immediately after settling in the house Mahalaleel drove away the other tomcats, and made coquettish subordinates of the females; the household's six or seven dogs kept their distance from him. He was allowed to roam nearly anywhere he wished. At first he slept in the kitchen, on the wide warm stone hearth; then he chose a comfortable old leather chair in the room known as Raphael's library; then he spent one night in the first-floor linen closet, sprawled luxuriously on grandmother Cornelia's fine Spanish tablecloth; then he was discovered beneath the red velvet Victorian settee in a little-used drawing room, snoring faintly amid the dust balls. Sometimes he disappeared for an entire day, sometimes for a night; once he was gone three days in a row and Leah was heartbroken, convinced that he had abandoned her. And what a bad-luck sign that would be . . . ! But he reappeared suddenly, in fact at her very heels, making his hoarse guttural sound and butting with his head against her hand.

He made grandfather Noel nervous by coming up silently behind him, and staring with his wide-spaced tawny green eyes as if he were about to speak. He teased the kitchen help for food, and was rather shameless about his tricks: fed by one servant he nevertheless cajoled another into giving him food, and then another: and yet he never exactly mewed like a hungry cat, he never condescended to beg. He quickly became something of a household puzzle. How was it possible, the children asked, that Mahalaleel could be sleeping soundly by the fireplace in the parlor, but when you left the room or only turned your head he was gone-simply gone? Albert and Jasper swore they had seen Mahalaleel up a tall pine back of one of the logging roads, a mile and a half away. It was one of those pines with no branches or limbs for a considerable distance-seventy-five feet or more-and there was Mahalaleel perched on the lowest limb, absolutely motionless, his hair gray and indistinct, his enormous tail curved about to cover his paws, his wide staring intelligent face terrible as that of a great horned owl about to swoop down upon its prey. They wondered-how could a cat so large manage to climb that tree?-and was he trapped there, would he need help getting down? They called him but he did no more than glance down at them, as if he'd never seen them before. They tried to shake the tree, without success. "Mahalaleel, you'll starve up there!" they shouted. "Mahalaleel, you'd better come home with us!"

It was getting dark, so the boys ran home, intending to bring a flashlight back and some food with which to tempt him-but as soon as they burst noisily into the kitchen they saw that Mahalaleel was already there, washing his oversized paws daintily on the hearth. When did he come back, they wanted to know. Oh, a few minutes ago, Edna said. But he was trapped up a tree in the woods! He was trapped up a big pine and couldn't get down! they said, astonished.

Mahalaleel was an excellent hunter-the women of the house didn't want to know the number of wood rats he brought in his strong jaws to the kitchen door, nor the size of the rats; Leah was the only one to dare enter the dining room where, one freezing morning, Mahalaleel had produced out of nowhere a massive snowshoe hare which he was greedily devouring-in fact, most of the neck and the back of the head were gone, and raw strings of muscle glittered bloodily in Mahalaleel's teeth as he glanced up with an almost human leer-lying sprawled on the gleaming mahogany table Raphael had had imported from Valencia. "Oh, my God, Mahalaleel!" Leah cried. The sight of the half-eaten rabbit, and her beautiful pet's bloody muzzle, and the greenish frost-tinged eyes in which the black iris was greatly dilated made her feel faint. It was a terrifying sensation, as if she were losing her balance at the edge of a cliff. Yet even at that moment-reeling, half-blind-she wondered if perhaps she might be pregnant. Faintness was, after all, a symptom of pregnancy.

IT SOON BECAME Mahalaleel's custom to follow Leah upstairs in the evening, and to make his bed at the foot of Leah's and Gideon's enormous bed. Gideon was annoyed: what if the creature had fleas? "You have fleas," Leah said curtly. "Mahalaleel is absolutely clean." To humor his wife Gideon pretended to admire the cat; he even stroked its arrogant head, and tolerated its disdain. He could not block a sensation of absurd disappointment when it refused to purr for him.

Mahalaleel not only purred luxuriously for Leah, but flopped over onto his back, and allowed his pinkish-gray stomach to be tickled, and made playful kittenlike lunges at Leah with his paws and teeth. If he should forget he was playing, if he should unsheath his claws, and sink his teeth in her flesh-! Gideon lay listlessly against his pillows, watching Leah pretend to attack Mahalaleel, watching the giant cat squirm and gurgle and lash out and flick its plume of a tail, and it crossed his mind more than once that if the cat should wound his wife-why then he would batter it to death at once, with his fists if necessary. He hadn't a gun in this room. Or a knife: Leah pretended to abhor such things. But Gideon Bellefleur with his muscular arms and shoulders, his long supple fingers, could very easily kill a creature like Mahalaleel with his hands.

"Be careful, Leah," he said. "You're playing too rough with him."

Leah jerked an arm away. The cat had snagged a claw in the sleeve of her silk nightgown, and there was a faint red line, hardly more than a hairsbreadth, on her forearm. "Gideon, your voice upsets him," she said irritably. "Must you speak so loudly when there are just the three of us in this room . . . ?"

After a short while Mahalaleel was not content with sleeping at the foot of the bed, curled up on the turquoise and cream-colored brocade cover (which he had already soiled somewhat, with his hairs, and dirty feet); during the night he made his way on tiptoe, walking with extreme delicacy for so large a creature, to lie between Leah and Gideon. Gideon was never certain when Mahalaleel made his move, but it was during a period of Gideon's deepest, most intense sleep, so that he was never awakened, and at dawn he would discover himself pushed far to the right side of the bed, crowded out by that damned Mahalaleel.

"Tonight he sleeps in the kitchen," Gideon said.

"He sleeps here," Leah said.

"He belongs in the barn with the other animals!"

"He belongs here," Leah said.

And so they disagreed, and quarreled frequently, but Mahalaleel continued to sleep with them, leaving his multicolored hairs everywhere-even, Gideon might discover to his fury, in his eyelashes, or in his beard. He had to excuse himself from a conference with his father, his uncle Hiram, Ewan, and a bank officer from Nautauga Falls, because something had worked its way in his eye and his eye was watering and tears were streaming down his cheek: of course it turned out to be a cat hair.

He recalled Mahalaleel's appearance, that rainy night. A rat, really. An opossum. With that skinny ugly tail. He might have stomped it to death right there in the foyer, and Leah could not have stopped him, and no one would really have blamed him. Now it was too late: now, if Mahalaleel disappeared, Leah would grieve over him. (She wasn't herself these days-hadn't been herself for months-too easily brought to tears, to rage, to a black dispirited mood.) Leah would know of course that Gideon had done it and she would never forgive him.

So Mahalaleel continued to sleep in their bedroom, and at dawn Gideon would wake with a start to see the cat gazing unperturbed at him, no more than six inches away. The creature's eyes were golden-green and flawless, like jewels; there was something fascinating about them. Gideon knew better, he knew that animals hadn't any grasp of their own being, they did not, after all, create themselves, yet he could not tear his eyes away from the cat's. The silky fur, soft and rising cloudily, revealing in a single ray of sunshine all sorts of amazing improbable colors-not only an eerie crystalline dove-gray, and an ivory-white, but saffron, and russet, and gold, and even a sort of lavender-green; the subtle misty design hidden in the layers of fur and fluff-vaguely tigerish, rainbow stripes of every variety of width and depth of coloring; the pert, rather snubbed grape-colored nose with its sharply defined nostrils (so sharp they looked, even at close range, as if someone had outlined them in black ink with a fine-tipped pen); the silvery-white whiskers which measured, according to Gideon's son Bromwell, nine inches from tip to tip, and were always straight and bristling with cleanliness; the tip of the tongue, so damp and pink, which often protruded slightly, just a fraction of an inch, between his front teeth in the morning-a sign of lazy contentment, of absolute satisfaction. Gideon's public attitude toward his wife's pet continued to be one of indifference or disdain: he was a horseman, after all, like his father, and had never fussed much over dogs, not even the finest hunting dogs on the estate. So he ignored Mahalaleel downstairs. But sometimes in private he almost admired the creature. . . . He stared at its calm unblinking uncanny eyes, and it stared back at him, showing the tip of its tongue, its big knobby oversized feet sometimes beginning a little dance: kneading at the very pillow on which Gideon's head lay: sheathing and unsheathing those great curved claws.

ONE MORNING GIDEON awoke very early to see Leah sitting up in bed, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, in untidy strands across her breasts. The cat lay slumbering between them, an enormous patch of warm shadow. Before Gideon could speak Leah reached out to grasp his shoulder, and then his forearm; her grip was surprisingly hard. He dreaded what she might tell him. And yet it turned out to be the best possible news: she was certain, she claimed, that she was pregnant.

"I feel something there. I'm not imagining it, I feel something, it isn't even like the other time, it's something quite different-quite distinct. I can feel that I'm pregnant. I know."

And so she was pregnant, indeed. And so Germaine came to be born.

Jedediah.

Jedediah: 1806. A pilgrimage into the mountains. In his twenty-fourth year. I will be a guide if necessary, he told his angry father, I will live absolutely alone for one full year, he told his skeptical brother, please don't worry about me, don't think about me at all.

Jedediah Bellefleur, the youngest of the three sons of Jean-Pierre and Hilda (who had fled her husband in 1790, and lived now in seclusion with her wealthy elderly parents in Manhattan), relatively slight-bodied for a Bellefleur, particularly for one who wanted to explore the western range by himself. No more than five feet six inches tall in his thick-heeled leather boots. No more than 130 pounds in weight, at the time of his departure. (When he returned-ah, when he returned!-he barely weighed one hundred pounds. But that was much later.) Unlike his brothers Louis and Harlan, and certainly unlike his notorious father, Jedediah was soft-spoken and reserved; his silence was sometimes mistaken for aloofness, even for contempt. He had a narrow triangular face surrounded by sprigs of dark electric hair which was always unruly, as if stirred by inordinately restless thought. Jean-Pierre had forced him to ride as a very small child and in a freakish accident (the normally tractable gelding had been panicked by the smell of blood on someone's clothes: it was November, it was pig-butchering time) he was thrown, and badly hurt, and as a consequence would walk with a slight limp his entire life. If he was bitter-but of course Jedediah was not bitter-if he even contemplated bitterness toward his father, he did not show it: he had learned shrewdly not to show anything of his secret life to his father.

Yet it was not his father Jedediah was leaving; nor was it-he was certain-his brother's young wife, about whom his thoughts circled obsessively. If he meant to run away from Germaine he might have gone anywhere, he need not have exposed himself to such hardship. (And in a sense Jedediah hardly saw his sister-in-law now. Hardly "saw" her after the wedding ceremony and the wedding party-held unwisely at the Fort Hanna Inn, a noisy brawling tavern on the river in which Jean-Pierre had invested some of his money, and which was ideally suited for all-night drunken parties from which, early in the evening, tiresomely respectable guests fled, and native Indians-Indian women, that is-might be welcomed in, immune from state and county laws governing their presence in establishments that served alcoholic refreshments; and, some days later, the housewarming party which the young couple bravely gave (for it was not only the groom's father who had gotten so shamefully drunk at the wedding party, and offered to fight the Fort Hanna Inn proprietor who, he said, was cheating him of "thousands of dollars of revenue," but the bride's father as well-an Irishman named Brian O'Hagan who made do in the wilderness by trapping beaver, and speculating in land rumored to be rich in silver and gold along the Nautauga River-"rumored," that is, by the very people who wanted to unload their land) in the handsome log house with its wide veranda and several fieldstone fireplaces the old man was giving them as a wedding gift-after these incidents Jedediah did not really "see" Germaine at all. He carried her image about with him, effortlessly, and helplessly, and at odd unanticipated times-while kneeling in prayer on the floorboards of his bedroom, while struggling to saddle the small-bodied but uncannily strong roan mare he intended to take with him on his pilgrimage, while washing his face at dawn, bringing pools of icy water against his sleep-seared eyes-he might sense her presence, as if she had come up quietly beside him, and was about to lay her hand on his arm.

Germaine O'Hagan was sixteen years old. Louis was twenty-seven. She was no taller than a child, quick and dark and lithe and very pretty, with self-consciously "gracious" movements she had learned from observing ladies at church; when in the presence of the Bellefleurs she stood very straight, her small hands clasped together just below her breasts, her eyes wide and dark and intense. She was not intimidated, though she might have been surprised, by Jean-Pierre's boisterous charm-his exaggerated compliments which always sounded mocking when addressed to women, and which were, indeed, viciously mocking when addressed to his wife; his airy theatrical mannerisms; his spinning out of farfetched "frontier" tales learned in private clubs in Manhattan, and around mahogany tables on Wall Street, in the feverish years of his "rise"; and his careless tactless familiarity with the country's ruling families, and with Washington politicians, generally known as contemptible but possessing devilishly admirable traits not unlike those attributed to Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, a duke's son after all, himself. She was not intimidated, not even alarmed, since her own father-! Ah, yes, her own father. Who was still trying to sell Jean-Pierre shares along the Nautauga. Who bathed twice a year-in May, and then again in September, before the first frost.

She was pregnant, after less than two months of marriage.

She was pregnant, a girl of sixteen who looked, even close up, like a child of twelve.

Jedediah had been planning to leave for years, he had been dreaming of the mountains, the high lake country, the solitude of balsam and tamarack and yellow birch and spruce and hemlock and tall white pines, some of them as thick as seven feet at the base, of surpassing beauty, and ageless: even before the most public of his father's disgraces (the others, those that had broken his mother, were certainly worse), even before his brother brought home the little O'Hagan girl he claimed from the first he intended to marry-no matter that Jean-Pierre had plans for him, as he had plans for all his sons involving heiresses of Dutch, German, even of French stock, before the newspapers hawked the secrets of "La Compagnie de New York," and even after: and then too, if he wanted simply to flee Louis and Germaine and the heart-stopping fact of their union, the fact that they shared the same bed night after night, now routinely, now without even self-consciousness (though Jedediah could not quite comprehend such an enormity) he might have followed Harlan out west, or settled in to work farmland along the Nautauga, since his father owned thousands of acres of land in the Valley and would have leased or sold it (he would not have given it, at least not until Jedediah married) very reasonably. But it was the north country he turned to. It was the north country he required. To lose himself, to find God. To ascend as a pilgrim, confident that God awaited.

I will be a guide if necessary, he informed his father, who was, at first, speechless with anger: for when the West Indies deal went through he would need men he could trust as overseers, who would not be timid about handling the slaves firmly. I will live absolutely alone for one full year, from one June to the next, he told his skeptical brother Louis, who was rather hurt-for he was extremely fond of Jedediah in his bullying negligent way, and it frightened him, initially, to contemplate life with the family so diminished. For family meant everything.

(First their mother had fled, after her nervous collapse. After their father had disgraced himself in public-or so it would seem, if one judged the situation not by the old man's casual remarks but by the highly vocal remarks of others: Jean-Pierre Bellefleur's second term as a congressman had ended abruptly, attended by charges of scandal and corruption, but it was never clear exactly what he had done since so many other men were involved, businessmen and politicians alike, what with inadequate laws and governors famously "pliant," as the expression went. After weeks of newspaper exposure of La Compagnie de New York, a shareholding organization for founding a New France in the mountains for titled French families dispossessed of their property by the Revolution, at three dollars an acre (Jean-Pierre and his partners had, of course, paid the state far less after this revolution, when great masses of wilderness land originally owned by the British or by British sympathizers reverted back to the government, and state land commissioners were authorized to sell as much of it as possible, in order to populate the north country, and to establish a buffer between the new states and British Canada)-after weeks of secret meetings-the presence of strangers in the Bellefleur household-Jean-Pierre's alternating panic and crude blustering euphoria-somehow it came about that no formal indictments were made. None. Jean-Pierre and his partners and La Compagnie were not even fined. But by then Jean-Pierre's marriage was over: though it could not be said that he missed his wife. And then, years later, Harlan had fled, taking with him a matched team of Andalusian horses, and wearing around his lean middle a money belt stuffed with cash and all that remained of their mother's jewelry.) And now Jedediah. Young Jedediah, who had always seemed so fearful of life.

"One year!" Louis laughed. "You really think you'll stay up in the mountains one year! My friend, you'll be back home by the end of November."

Jedediah did not defend himself. His manner was both humble and arrogant.

"Suppose you stay too long, and the passes fill up with snow?" Louis said. "It will go to fifty-seven degrees below zero up there. You know that, don't you?"

Jedediah made an indeterminate gesture. "But I must withdraw from this world," he said softly.

"Must withdraw from this world!" Louis crowed. "Listen to him talk-sounds like a preacher! Be sure you don't withdraw altogether," he said.

Jedediah tried to explain himself more systematically to Germaine. But the girl's staring tear-filled eyes distracted him.

"I must-I want-You see, my father and his friends-Their plans for cutting down timber-Their plans for building roads and bringing in tenants-"

Germaine stared at him. "Oh, but, Jedediah," she whispered, "what if something happens to you? Up there in the mountains all alone . . ."

"Nothing will happen to me," Jedediah said.

"When the first snowfall comes, what if you can't get out? As Louis said-"

Jedediah had begun to tremble. It alarmed him that he would remember-he would see-this young girl's face even after he had fled her. "I want to-I want to withdraw from the world and see if I am worthy of-of-God's love," he said, blushing. His voice shook with a fanatic's frightened audacity.

The girl made a sudden helpless gesture, as if she wished to touch his arm. And Jedediah drew back.

"Nothing will happen to me," he said curtly.

"But if you leave now-if you leave now-you won't be here when the baby comes," Germaine said. "And we thought-Louis and I thought-We want you to be the godfather-"

But Jedediah withdrew, and escaped her.

IN HER YOUNG husband's arms she lay sleepless and dazed, and surprisingly bitter, for the first time since their marriage. "He doesn't love us," she whispered. He was running off and leaving them, he was going to risk his life in the mountains, maybe turn into one of those deranged hermits you sometimes hear about: men gone mad from too much solitude. "He doesn't want to be our baby's godfather," Germaine whispered. "He doesn't love us."

Only half-hearing, Louis nuzzled her neck and murmured Now, now, Puss.

"Just when our first baby is coming," Germaine said.

Louis laughed, and tickled her, and buried his warm bearded mouth in her neck. "But he'll be back for the second, and the third, and the fourth," he said.

Germaine did not want to be consoled. Open-eyed, sleepless, she found herself rather angry. It was not like her: but then no one in this household really knew her: they thought she was a sweet docile little girl. And so she was, when it suited her. "He won't be back for any of them," she said. "He is abandoning us."

Like several of her Dublin relatives-her female relatives-little Germaine prided herself on being, from time to time, but always unpredictably, clairvoyant-gifted with second sight. So she knew, she knew. Jedediah would not only not return for the birth of their other children but he would never see his nieces and nephews-never in this lifetime.

"Oh, how do you know, Puss!" Louis laughed, rolling his burly weight upon her.

"I know," she said.

"Powers"

Leah with her immense swollen belly. At five months she looked as if she were already nine months pregnant, and the baby might force its way out at any moment. What odd feverish dreams she endured, half-lying on pillows, the muscles of her legs now packed with soft plump flesh, her slender ankles swollen, her eyes rolling back into her head with the violence-the queerness-of her ideas! Were they hers, or the unborn child's? She felt the creature's power, her head aswim with dreams that left her panting and feverish but utterly baffled. She could feel the unborn child's spirit but she could not see in her mind's eye what it wished of her, what it craved.

I am going to accomplish something, she thought frequently, opening and closing her fists, feeling her nails press against the palms of her hands. The soft pliant eager flesh. . . . I am going to be the instrument, the means by which something is accomplished, Leah thought.

And then again days passed and she thought nothing at all; she was too lazy, too dream-befuddled to think.

Her hair lay loose on her shoulders because it was too much trouble for her to plait and roll it, or even to have one of the girls tend to her. She lay back against her pillows, yawning and sighing. Her puffy hand caressed her midriff, as if she feared nausea and must remain very, very still: for at the oddest, least expected times she was overcome by a spasm of retching that quite unnerved her. Until now she had never been sick to her stomach-she prided herself on being one of the healthy Bellefleur women, not one of the sickly self-pitying ones.

Leah holding herself still, very still. As if listening to something no one else could hear.

Leah wild-eyed and sly as if she had just arisen from love, a forbidden love, her mouth fleshier than anyone remembered, curved in a slow secretive smile.

Leah in her drawing room, on the old chaise longue, in a dream-stupor, her lovely eyes heavy-lidded, a teacup about to slip out of her fingers. (One of the children would catch it before it fell; or Vernon would lean forward on his knees, on the carpet, to take it gently out of her hand.) Leah ordering the servants about in her new voice, which was petulant and shrill and rather like her mother's-though when Gideon said so, perhaps unwisely, she angrily denied it. Why, Della did nothing but whine the livelong day, wasn't Della famous in the family for her monotonous mournful self-pitying dirge-!

Leah more beautiful than ever, with her healthy high-colored complexion that put the other women to shame (winter bleached their cheeks, gave them a listless dead-white skin), her deep-set eyes that seemed enlarged with pregnancy, a very dark blue, almost black, keen and thick-lashed and usually glittering, as if flooded with tears-tears not of sorrow or pain, but of sheer inchoate emotion. Leah's laughter ringing out gaily, or her robust full-throated girl's voice, or her suddenly warm, faintly disbelieving murmur when she was struck with gratitude (for people-neighbors, friends, family, servants-were always bringing her little gifts, fussing over her, inquiring about the state of her health, staring with an unfeigned and most gratifying reverence at the mere size of her). Only her husband was a witness to her body's amazing elasticity, which rather frightened him as the months passed: her lovely pale skin stretched tight across her belly and abdomen, tight, and tighter still with each week, each day, an alabaster-white, astonishing. Whatever was growing inside her was already alarmingly large and would grow even larger, stretching her beautiful skin tight as a drum, tighter than a drum, so that Gideon could do no more than murmur words of love and comfort to her, while staring, or consciously not staring, at that remarkable mound where her lap had once been. Had he fathered twins again, or triplets . . . ? Or a creature of unprecedented size, even in a family in which hefty infants were quite common?

"Do you love me," Leah murmured.

"Of course I love you."

"You don't love me."

"I'm faint with love for you. But intimidated."

"What?"

"Intimidated."

"What does that mean? Intimidated? Now? Why? Really?"

"Not intimidated," Gideon said, stroking her belly, leaning down to kiss it, to press his cheek gently against it, "not intimidated but in awe, somewhat in awe. Surely you can sympathize. . . ."

He pressed his ear gingerly against the tight-stretched skin, and began to hear-but what did he hear, that so immobilized him, that drew the irises of his eyes to mere pinpricks?

"Oh, what are you chattering about, I can't hear you, speak up, for God's sake," Leah would cry, seizing him by the hair or his beard, and tugging him up so that he would be forced to look at her face. At such times she might burst unaccountably into tears. "You don't love me," she said. "You're terrified of me."

Indeed, she was to grow colossal with her pregnancy so that, in the final month or two, her very features appeared gross: the mouth and the flared nostrils and the eyes visibly enlarged, as if a somewhat ill-fitting mask had been forced upon her. Her lips were often moist, there was spittle in the corners, a certain feverish breathlessness that enhanced her beauty-or was it the curious power of her beauty-and made Gideon look away, stricken. She was his height now. Or taller: standing barefoot she could gaze quite levelly into his eyes, smiling her perverse, secretive little smile. And Gideon was of course an exceptionally tall man-even as a boy he had had to stoop somewhat to get through doorways in ordinary houses. She was his height now or a little taller, a young giantess, beautiful and monstrous at the same time, and he did love her. And he was terrified of her.

THAT WINTER LEAH was the uncontested queen of the household. There was no disputing her authority: Lily kept prudently to her part of the manor, though it was ill-heated and shabby, and cautioned her children (who, smitten with Leah, disobeyed her) not to cross her tyrannical sister-in-law's path; Aveline was uncharacteristically silent in her presence, and deferred even to her brother Gideon; aunt Veronica, appearing for a few minutes in the evening, if Leah was still awake, or briefly in Leah's cozy drawing room just before dinner, when the warm flames of the fireplace were reflected in the darkened windows, and the lovely great cat Mahalaleel might be dozing at Leah's feet, would stand silently gazing upon her nephew's young wife, her placid sheep's face showing only a curious impersonal interest-though she gave Leah a number of small, charming gifts that winter, and was to give the infant Germaine an antique rattle that had once belonged to her own mother, and which had considerable sentimental value. Even grandmother Cornelia began to defer to her, and did not answer back when Leah spoke insolently; and great-grandmother Elvira, often too weak to come downstairs for days at a time, was continually asking how Leah was, and sending servants and children back and forth with little messages and admonitions. Della Pym moved back into the manor to be with Leah in the final weeks of the pregnancy, despite her son-in-law's quite explicit lack of enthusiasm, and brought with her Garnet Hecht, who was not exactly a servant but a "girl who helped out"-and even Della, closemouthed and stubborn, was observed backing down before her daughter's demands. And of course all the men of the household were entranced by her. And nearly all the children.

After the fifth month Leah was immobilized much of the time. It was too awkward for her to climb stairs so she began to spend nights in the drawing room that overlooked the garden, half-sitting and half-lying against goosefeather pillows on a handsome old chaise longue. This room, sometimes called Violet's Room by older members of the household (though Violet Bellefleur, Raphael's unhappy wife, had disappeared into Lake Noir many decades ago and would surely never return, and even Noel and Hiram, her oldest grandchildren, could barely remember her), was an exceptionally attractive room, beautifully decorated with crimson silk wallpaper and oak wainscotting and alabaster lamps with white globes, and in one corner was a clavichord built for Violet by a young Hungarian cabinetmaker, a small, delicate-appearing, but quite sturdy instrument made of numerous woods: the jewel of the room though it was cracked on top and no one played it any longer. (Leah had tried; flushed with the excited, audacious complacency of her condition she had actually tried, remembering only dimly, and in fragments, the rudimentary piano lessons she had had at La Tour many years ago, and had resisted sullenly at the time-but her weight was nearly too much for the bench with its slender legs of veneered oak, and in any case her oversized fingers were too clumsy for the delicate walnut keys. She tried to play "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and the scale of C-major and a nameless boisterous square dance tune but the sounds that came out-tinny, jerky, shrieklike-were embarrassing. In the end she brought her fist down on the keys, which protested faintly, and closed the instrument, and forbade the children to play it, though Yolande's touch was reverent and sensitive and she could almost play a recognizable tune.) The carpet was still fairly thick, a mazelike design of crimson, green, creamy-white, and very dark blue; there were numerous old chairs, some of them generously overstuffed, and a horsehair sofa the children loved to bounce on; and an armoire with mother-of-pearl fixtures and a dramatic carving of the Bellefleur coat of arms (a falcon volant, a snake draped about its neck); and a seven-foot fireplace made of fieldstone. Violet's portrait had hung above the mantel for some time, but in recent years had been replaced by a rather dark, badly cracked landscape painting of indeterminate origin, thought to be "Italian Renaissance." About the room were curious things brought in from other parts of the house by the children-a ferocious tiger (thought to resemble Mahalaleel) carved from a whale's tooth, brass prickets with aged candles that would not burn, a queer distorting mirror about three feet high with an ornate ivory-and-jade frame that had been in the drawing room for years, but no one had troubled to hang-so that it was merely propped up against the wall and, because of its odd, oblique angle, sometimes reflected things perversely, or did not reflect them at all. (Once, gorging herself on chocolate-covered cherries and walnuts, and allowing greedy Mahalaleel to lick her sticky fingers, Leah had glanced across to the mirror and was startled to see, framed by sallow ivory and lusterless jade, absolutely nothing at all-neither herself nor Mahalaleel. And when one of Lily's boys, Raphael, leaned forward to accept a chocolate from her, he was reflected only in a vague muddy haze. Another time sweet-faced Vernon, entering the room, was reflected as a narrow, twisted column of light; and once, though Leah and Mahalaleel and the twins were quite normally reflected in the mirror, aunt Veronica, passing before them, was not only not reflected at all but blotted their images out as well, so that only the corner of the room remained.) There was a parquet-topped table where Leah and the children and Vernon played cards that winter and spring, and the chaise longue-once an extremely beautiful piece of furniture, with carved mahogany legs and a sumptuous gold brocade covering-upon which poor Leah lay with increasing frequency, as the months passed and the child she carried grew larger and distinctly heavier. At first Leah had tried discreetly to hide her swollen belly, especially when friends came to visit-Gideon's closest friend Nicholas Fuhr, who was unmarried, and who had always been-or so Leah thought-halfway in love with her; and Leah's friend from girlhood, Faye Renaud, now married and the mother of several young children herself; and older friends of the Bellefleurs, and neighbors-with shawls, comforters, quilts, and even drowsy Mahalaleel himself, or at any rate his enormous fluffy plume of a tail. She troubled to arrange folds in a decorous fashion, to drape herself in shapeless dark gowns, even to loop strands of pearls about her neck, and to snap on oversized earrings-for, as grandmother Cornelia said, such tricks drew the eye upward. And the sight of her belly was disconcerting. (Even Gideon's cousin Vernon, a year or two older than she, and so clearly and painfully infatuated with her-the poor gangling young man liked nothing better than to read poetry to her on those dreary afternoons when the sun set at three o'clock, or failed to appear at all, Blake and Wordsworth and certain of Hamlet's soliloquies, and lengthy, incoherent, passionate poems of his own that put Leah in a comfortable stupor, her great eyes half-closed, her slightly swollen fingers clasped together over her belly as if securing it, one of the twins-usually Christabel-frankly napping nearby: even Vernon with his eager shy smile and his hopeful gaze and the reverent, melodic dipping of his voice as he read, or recited, God appears and God is light / To those poor souls who dwell in night / But does a human form display / To those who dwell in realms of day, appeared to be intimidated by the very fact of her, and if she groaned with sudden discomfort, or pressed a hand in alarm to her belly, feeling an instant's terrifying pain, or even made a good-natured allusion to her condition-which did make certain routines of life, like washing one's hair, and indeed bathing at all, and going to the bathroom-extremely difficult, poor Vernon would blush at once, and stare at her face with somewhat widened eyes as if to emphasize his not looking elsewhere; and smile his childlike perplexed smile, hidden in his beard. Though he was a Bellefleur himself, he never knew when the Bellefleurs were joking, or when they were being deliberately coarse in order to unsettle him, or when they were-as, upon occasion, they certainly were-utterly without guile.) As the months passed, as the long winter months slowly passed into a cold, drizzly spring, Leah's appetite, never modest, became voracious. Around Christmastime her favorite foods were rum puddings and goat's cheese, and then she developed a near-insatiable craving for mashed apricots, and Valley Products stewed tomatoes, and pepper ham which she ate with her fingers to Cornelia's amazed disgust; and then, as the dead-white skin of her belly tightened over the swelling mass, and her poor ankles and knees grew bloated, and her breasts that had always been fairly small for her frame, and young and hard, grew larger almost daily, and began to ache and leak milk, to Leah's distress, and even her neck thickened so that, though still lovely, and columnar, it must have been the size of Ewan's, she began to devour raw beefsteaks, chewing for long minutes at a time, and grew nauseous at the very sight and odor of the food poor Edna prepared for the rest of the family, even Edna's famous boysenberry cream pie which Leah had always loved; and then, to her husband's surprise-for Leah made much of her disdain for men who drank, or for anyone who showed such a contemptible weakness-she habituated herself to glasses of wine in the early afternoon, and two or three bottles of Gideon's and Ewan's favorite dark ale as the day progressed, and some Scotch, and perhaps in the evening, while she played checkers or Parcheesi or gin rummy, some more Scotch (she soon acquired a taste for grandfather Noel's favorite liquor, and he rather liked drinking with her-Leah is the only woman with sense enough to understand a joke, and to laugh at it, he often said, flushed with his success with her: for she was a queenly young woman, beautiful despite her size, and bathed in a warm, lightly damp, erotic glow), and then, in the late evening, when even the most stubborn of the children was in bed, she ate chunks of Gorgonzola cheese and drank in large mouthfuls some very old heavy red Burgundy lately discovered in a recess of Raphael's cavernous wine cellar, long since thought depleted, and sipped at Spanish liqueurs, and creme de menthe, and a labelless brandy in which specks of genuine gold floated, and at midnight she fell into a stuporous doze from which no one could have awakened her, not even Gideon, so that she simply remained in Violet's drawing room, and they covered her with quilts, and tended to the fire, and brought a fresh saucer of cream for Mahalaleel, who slept at the foot of the couch on those nights-which were less frequent as spring approached-he chose to remain in the house.

She grew negligent-or was it contemptuous-and thought, Why be ashamed of the way I look? Why not take pride in myself? And so she stopped bothering with pearls and earrings, which only made her nervous anyway, and if she could have pulled her wedding ring off her thickened finger she would have done so, and instead of dark, drab, discreet clothing of the kind her mother always wore (insisted upon wearing, for Della was perpetually "in mourning" for her young husband whom the Bellefleurs had killed), she began to wear, not only for special occasions when the Steadmans or Nicholas Fuhr or Faye Renaud stopped by, but on quite ordinary eventless mornings, brightly colored gowns, some of them floor-length, with wide rakish sleeves, or decorative beads or feathers, or handmade Spanish lace: and sometimes the dresses had open necklines, so that Leah's full ripe astonishing breasts were partway revealed, and Vernon, entering the drawing room hesitantly, carrying his ledger filled with scribblings (he was quite vain, and yet embarrassed about his "scribblings," his poetry, and would read it only to Leah and certain of the children, making sure that Gideon and Ewan and his father Hiram were nowhere near: a rhapsodic singsong invocation of his masters Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Heraclitus, mixed in with interminable reflections (which poor Leah, whose head swam these days when she did so much as leaf through one of Bromwell's science encyclopedias, or even one of Christabel's simple readers, could make no sense of-it was difficult enough for her to restrain great torso-shuddering yawns as Vernon read in his tremulous, reedy, rather oracular voice, which was his special "poetry voice") on family legend of dubious authenticity: the meaning of the Bellefleur curse; how Samuel Bellefleur was seduced by spirits that dwelled in the very stone walls and foundations of the manor; how Raphael really died; why he had insisted-not only perversely, but uncharacteristically, for throughout his lifetime he had scorned unconventional behavior-that his cadaver be skinned, and the skin tanned, and stretched across a drum; why the house was haunted (and Leah had to admit that it probably was haunted, but like the rest of the family she simply stayed out of the most troublesome rooms, and saw to it that the most dangerous room of all was kept locked, even padlocked, against the inquisitive children who would nose out any secret, however terrifying) and in what odd ways, throughout the generations, it had been haunted; what Gideon's brother Raoul's fate would be (though in Gideon's presence Vernon would certainly not dare to approach that painful subject); why Abraham Lincoln had chosen to spend his last years in seclusion, on the Bellefleur estate; what had really happened to great-grandfather "Lamentations of Jeremiah"; why his own mother Eliza had disappeared without warning; why the family was doomed unless-but on this point the poetry drifted into an even more puzzling obscurity, and Vernon tended to mumble, and Leah had only the imprecise idea that salvation lay with Vernon or what he represented, and not with the other Bellefleur men or what they represented-Vernon, alas, touchingly eager for an hour or two with Leah, during the afternoon when all of the men, Leah's husband in particular, could be relied upon to be absent, and only the gentlest, the most civilized of the children-Bromwell, Christabel, Yolande, Raphael-might be present, and fairly engrossed in their books or games, or trying (with minimal success) to interest Mahalaleel in the most comely and spirited of his new brood of kittens, would stare at her bosom, at the smooth, glaring-white tops of her enormous breasts, and freeze where he stood, and stammer a greeting, too stricken even to blush for a minute or two. . . .

But why be ashamed of the way I look, Leah thought angrily, though in fact she was somewhat ashamed, or at the very least painfully self-conscious (for she remembered how, as a girl, she had pitilessly scorned the very idea of having a baby, and had vowed that she would never find herself in so disgusting a condition); why not take pride in myself as I am.

"Vernon, for Christ's sake," she would say impatiently, reaching out to him, to squeeze his cold, timid, boneless hand, "sit down, I've been waiting for you, I've been bored all morning, Gideon's all the way to Port Oriskany and won't even be back tonight, he's negotiating for something so complicated, and so tedious, I didn't even make a show of asking about it-some granaries?-something about the railroad? Oh, your father would know but don't ask him, let's not give a damn about such trivia! Read me what you've written since yesterday. Pour me some ale first, and have some for yourself, and could you pass those nuts-unless the children have gobbled them all up-and sit down, please, right here, right by the fire. Sit down."

And so, bedazzled by her, his knees somewhat weak, Vernon Bellefleur would sit only a few feet from Leah Bellefleur, his breath scanty, his nervous skinny fingers tugging at his beard. And he might begin by reading, in a self-conscious, heightened voice, some lines of Shelley, or Shakespeare, or Heraclitus (This cosmos none of gods or men made; but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures), whom he clearly thought to be brothers of his, and while at times it was all Leah could do (for she was a well-mannered young woman, in principle) to resist snorting with laughter at his vanity, at other times she found herself so deeply moved that a tear might trickle fatly down her cheek and her little boy might say, with that disconcertingly clinical edge to his voice, "Mamma, why are you crying?"

"I have no idea," she would say stiffly, wiping her face on her sleeve like one of the children.

Gideon was away, Gideon was so frequently away, on business, on his father's and Hiram's business, and so Vernon came to visit (for handsome Nicholas Fuhr, whom Leah might very well have married-might have married, once marriage struck her as inevitable-certainly could not drive over, nor could Ethan Burnside, or Meldram Steadman, out of fear of Gideon's jealousy), Vernon who was not much different from the women, and whom Leah was very fond of, though she sometimes nodded off not only when he was reading to her but when he was speaking to her; and Gideon, if he knew, was not at all jealous. Contemptuous, perhaps. But not jealous.

"Sit down," Leah would say, stifling a yawn, "and read what you've written since yesterday. I've been so dull and heavy-headed and lonely all morning. . . ."

Though Vernon was not yet thirty his brown hair was graying, especially at the temples; and his skimpy beard was nearly all gray. What a pity, Leah thought, that he hasn't a wife-hasn't a wife and never will have one-since she might take him in hand, and trim that beard, and the stiff little hairs in his ears, and see to it that he doesn't wear the same baggy trousers five days running, and that greasy little vest. He needs kisses to liven up his complexion. . . .

Vernon, leafing through the ledger, fumbling with the oversized pages, glanced up at Leah as if-but of course it could not be possible-her stray, whimsical thoughts had the power to communicate themselves to him. He stared at her for a long uneasy moment. She blushed, gazing at the young man's thin, sallow face, and his slightly mismatched eyes (one was pale blue, the other pale brown: it was the blue eye that seemed to have the correct vision, and confronted things directly; the brown eye peered off a fraction of an inch to the left), and the tangle of his eyebrows, which were as thick as Gideon's. Vernon had the Bellefleur nose-long, straight, Roman, waxen-pale at the very tip-but in other respects, about the mouth, and about the eyes especially, he must have resembled his mother. His forehead was narrow and high, creased with years of brooding; there were premature lines, like parentheses, framing his mouth; the shape of his face was queerly triangular, since, though his forehead was narrow, his chin was quite small, and looked, from the side, as if it were melting away to nothing. Yet there was something attractive about him, something appealing. Though he was not manly, he was certainly nothing like Gideon or Ewan or Nicholas Fuhr, still, Leah thought with sudden conviction, he was warmly attractive, as a child or a beast might be attractive, in its very vulnerability. And then there was the young man's shy eagerness, his gentle manners, and the way-once he began to read-he forgot his surroundings and became increasingly passionate, so that his thin, rather reedy voice began to take strength, vibrating with intensity. Leah knew nothing at all about poetry-she had memorized poems at La Tour, for her English and French classes, but even at the time she grasped very little of what she memorized, and forgot it all as soon as the school year was over-but she admired Vernon's obstinate devotion to his craft, especially in the face of ridicule. (Ah, ridicule! What he hadn't had to bear, since he first became infatuated with words-not their meanings, not even their sounds, but their very weight and texture-as a child of nine or ten, poring over the leather-bound "classics" in old Raphael's library.) She could not really resist feeling something of the contempt for Vernon that most of the family felt, since the poor man had failed so miserably, and so frequently, at one after another of the tasks Hiram had set him (the last in the series of failures took place in the Fort Hanna sawmill, where Vernon had had a "managerial" position, but rumor had it that he mingled with his men, even ate lunch with them, and sought them out in taverns after work, where in his quavering hopeful voice he read them incantatory poems in long heavily stressed iambic lines on such subjects as-the very men themselves, sawmill workers with little or no formal education, the sons of impoverished farmers or day laborers or men who had joined the army to fight in the last war and had never returned, men who, in Vernon's feverish imagination, celebrated the "dignity and mystery" of honest physical labor unclouded by thought, uncontaminated by the obsession with personal gain that characterized the property-owning class: all this, this apotheosis of unfurrowed brows, swelling gleaming muscles, the very nobility of the Animal-in-Man, declaimed in lengthy and heavily stressed poems the men could not follow, and had no wish to follow-when they wanted only more money from the Bellefleurs, and preferred to deal with Ewan or even the old man himself, who cared nothing for them as men but would not, at least, embarrass and anger them by composing sentimental poems in their honor. And so in the end the Fort Hanna workers jeered poor Vernon out, and might even have roughed him up one night in a riverside tavern if they had not been apprehensive of Ewan's or Gideon's revenge: for the Bellefleurs were famous in exacting vengeance). Since coming to live at the castle as Gideon's wife, Leah had been only peripherally aware of Vernon, and then primarily as Hiram's son. She knew of the comical Fort Hanna episode, though not its humiliating details, and it crossed her mind more than once that perhaps the episode wasn't laughable as everybody (especially Hiram) thought-perhaps it was most unfortunate-even tragic. She wondered: Had Vernon run off somewhere alone and cried? Was he the sort of man who might allow himself to cry?

He was still staring at her, his lips parted in a queer half-smile. She could see a fine film of perspiration on his forehead.

". . . did you ask? If I cried?" he said hesitantly.

"What?"

"I didn't exactly . . . I didn't exactly hear, Leah. You were saying something about . . ."

"I wasn't saying anything," Leah murmured.

"Just now when I sat down, I thought I heard you say . . ."

"But I didn't say anything!" Leah cried, her face burning. "I said only Sit down, sit down and stop squirming around and pour us both some ale, that's all I said, didn't I?-Christabel?-Raphael? You've been here all the time, you've heard everything I said-"

Vernon's fuzzy blue eye remained fixed on her. It was a most unnerving moment. Leah's usual brash confidence failed her, she found herself pleating her skirt, staring down at her nervous fingers. "What's this nonsense about crying!" She laughed. "I never said anything about crying."

"You didn't, that's true," Vernon said slowly, "and yet I . . . I seem to have heard . . . I seem to have heard you . . . your voice. . . . It was very distinct, Leah. But . . . but . . . I know you didn't say anything," he finished lamely.

"I certainly didn't. I've just been sitting here, dying of thirst, trying to get comfortable. Raphael, hon, will you pass us that bowl of nuts? I'm famished, I feel faint."