He was taking the turn onto the old Military Road when something happened: it was as if he'd driven over an enormous sheet of metal, there was such a crashing deafening sound. His foot flew to the brake and the automobile began to skid, the rear wheels yearned to change places with the front, then he was rushing through a shallow ditch, then into some bushes, through the bushes and into a barbed-wire fence, through the fence, heaving and bucking, into a cornfield. He was thrown against the windshield, then against the door, and the door came open, so he found himself finally, after many confused minutes, on the ground, in the cornfield, dripping blood into the dirt. He groped about for Germaine. For his little girl. Where was she?-had she been thrown clear? (For he thought, irrationally, that the car would explode.) Germaine? Germaine? Germaine?

The Harvest.

And then, quite abruptly, on the eve of Germaine's third birthday (a still, airless, humid night of oddly varying temperatures, unilluminated by any moon or stars) an event took place that altered everything: the strike was averted; the fruit pickers returned to work (docilely, near-silently, and for their last year's wage); a bumper crop of peaches, pears, and apples was harvested; and Leah, after weeks of despondency, of being someone other than Leah, was wakened from her trance.

And all because of Jean-Pierre II.

When grandmother Cornelia, happening to glance out an upstairs window early in the morning (just before seven: the poor woman rarely slept later), saw her elderly, infirm brother-in-law making his way unsteadily toward the house, on a graveled walk that paralleled, at a distance of some twenty yards, the garden wall, she knew at once-without having seen, yet, the stained hog-butchering knife he carried close against his body-that something had happened. For he had, to her knowledge, never left the castle before. (No one had dared tell her of his appearance at Ewan's party.) And there was something about the mere sight of him, down there, in the early morning, italicized by his black frock coat and his starkly white hair against the damp green of the lawn, that struck her as unnatural.

She hurried immediately to Noel, and roused him from his heavy slumber. (For he had drunk himself to sleep, the night before-sick with worry about the hospitalized Gideon, and about the rotting fruit.) "You'd better go downstairs. I think. At once. I think. I can't tell you why," she whispered, pulling at him, thrusting his eyeglasses at him, "but I think . . . I'm afraid . . . , Your brother Jean-Pierre . . ."

"What? Jean-Pierre? Is he ill?" Noel cried.

"Yes, I think he must be," Cornelia said.

Hiram too saw him, from his bedroom window: for Hiram had been unable to sleep except in patches during the long airless night. His brain had churned with images of mounds of rotting fruit, and the spectacle of his family's public humiliation (there would be another auction, strangers would tramp mud through the downstairs rooms of the castle, this time even the buildings would be sold-and for a mocking pittance), and the horror of his only son's death, which he had not had time, yet, to completely grasp. (Thrown by the family's lifelong enemies into a filthy river, his wrists and ankles bound, like a dog!) And now with Gideon hospitalized in the Falls, with multiple fractures and a concussion . . .

In his underclothes, not yet shaven, Hiram peered out the window and adjusted his glasses as the dark figure hobbled into sight. At first he believed it must be a sleepwalker, a fellow sufferer: for the man made his way with such vague groping steps, his head tilted back as if he were making no attempt to see the ground at his feet. (And indeed he walked blindly. Now on the graveled path, now on the grass, now stumbling through the narrow border of phlox and coral bells.) It was some minutes before Hiram recognized his brother Jean-Pierre. And then, like Cornelia, he knew something had happened.

"I hope he didn't . . . That fool . . . !"

Young Jasper saw the old man, alerted by the nervous whimperings of his dog, who slept at the foot of his bed; and great-grandmother Elvira, who arose each morning promptly at six, and fussed about preparing, for her bridegroom (whom she had begun to refer to, secretly, silently, as "Jeremiah," though to his face she called him only "You") a breakfast of fresh peaches and cream, and honey toast, and good strong black coffee; and Lily saw him, going to the window to see what it was, down on the lawn, that so drew the interest of her little niece Germaine (for the child had crept out of bed, her curls atangle, her pudgy fingers stuck in her mouth, and now she knelt on the velvet window seat and stared and stared at her great-uncle who was making his way to the rear of the house, his head flung nobly back, something glinting in his hand); Raphael may have seen him, for the boy slept lightly, and was uneasy these days because his pond-lovely Mink Pond-had been invaded by the fruit pickers' children, who loved to splash and belly-dive and paddle in it, meaning no harm, of course, intending no serious harm, but trampling down the cattails and the flowering rushes nevertheless, and tearing out by the roots the lovely waxed water lilies; of course Raphael had avoided the pond for days, and could not hope to return until the intruders were banished, or went, at last, to work in the orchards. And some of the servants must have seen him. The kitchen help, and Edna, and Walton; though of course they were to say nothing, and immediately averted their eyes, when they recognized both Jean-Pierre II and what he carried in his right hand, half-hidden alongside his leg. Nightshade, however, sighting the old man from a distance, had both the wit and the audacity to hurry upstairs to his mistress's chambers: for she, he knew, must be told.

"Miss Leah! Miss Leah! Arouse yourself! Come quickly! Mr. Jean-Pierre has made his move!"

So the hunched-over little man whimpered and whined, rattling his lady's doorknob in a frenzy of concern, until, at last, after many minutes, after many minutes, during which he alternately begged and commanded her, and punctuated his words with spasmodic sobs, the door was unlocked: the door was actually unlocked: and a slack-faced blinking Leah stood before him.

(She had wakened from her hideous trance. Or had been awakened. And was soon to forget, with merciful completeness, its claustrophobic calm, its sickly peace. She would never suffer such an uncharacteristic episode again. Interpreting it, afterward, she would say, frowning, so that those sharp, rather poignant lines appeared between her anxious brows, that her "black mood" had been nothing more than premonitory. It had no reference to her, to her own life, certainly not to the Bellefleur affairs as a whole; it had reference only to Jean-Pierre's extraordinary behavior that August night. She had sensed something would happen-she had, somehow, known it would happen-but had been powerless to prevent it-like Germaine-for Germaine, too, "saw" things yet could not prevent them or even comprehend them-and so she had fallen into a black pit of a mood, quite helpless: but then of course she had been freed. Once the horror had taken place, once it was there, in the world, quite naturally she was freed.) DURING THAT NIGHT, or, more precisely, from about 2:00 A.M. until after six, Jean-Pierre II had managed, despite his palsied hands and his weak legs and the difficulties he must have confronted, wandering in the starless dark, in an unfamiliar corner of the estate, to slash the throats not only of Sam and his lieutenants, and the dozen or so men who most vehemently supported him, but some eight other people, seven men and one woman. (It was generally thought, afterward, that he had slashed the woman's throat in error, having mistaken her-she was hefty, a light down grew on her face-for a man.) In a faint feeble voice that trailed off Jean-Pierre said only that the workers were evil . . . they weren't penitent . . . they had to be dealt with immediately . . . they had to be prevented from further insulting their betters.

He had surrendered the hog-butchering knife at once to grandfather Noel, amiably. It was a wicked long instrument with a slight curve, and it seemed to have been recently sharpened. But it was, of course, badly stained and scarified, from all the use to which the old gentleman had put it. Noel took it soberly, a handkerchief protecting his hand.

"We must, I suppose," he said, licking his lips, "wake Ewan."

So one of them-it was Jasper, barefoot, bare-chested, wearing only white summer trousers-ran upstairs to Ewan's apartment. And rapped loudly on the door. (For, since Ewan did not arrive at his office in the Falls until 10:00 A.M., he generally slept until eight, and did not like his sleep disturbed.) When Jasper told Ewan what had happened, and that they had calculated, from the old man's incoherent murmurings, that anywhere from five or six to twenty or more people had been murdered, Ewan's great shaggy head shot forward from his shoulders, and his sleep groggy eyes, threaded with blood, opened and narrowed and opened again in a matter of seconds.

He asked Jasper to repeat what he'd said. How many . . . ?

Then he said, his chest heaving with a sigh, "I thought that's what you said, my boy."

It was as Nightshade had said: Jean-Pierre II had made his move.

BOOK FIVE.

Revenge.

The Clavichord.

Contrary to rumor, and to her husband's embittered and reiterated conviction, it was not the Hayes Whittier episode that plunged Violet Bellefleur into a dreamy melancholy that ended with her taking her own life (for so the expression went: one "took" one's own life, as if one were "taking" another person's fur muff or an undeserved extra slice of fruitcake) one chilly September night; it was not even the neurasthenia brought on, or exacerbated, by her numerous pregnancies and miscarriages. Nor was it the unfortunate woman's perversity. ("Perversity" being her husband's term. Raphael came to employ it more and more frequently as the years passed, for it helped to explain, and to condemn, his sister Fredericka's passion for an imbecilic Protestant sect; his brother Arthur's inexplicable willingness to die-as indeed he did, at Charlestown, while attempting to kidnap John Brown's corpse so that it might be spirited away to the North where partisans planned on reviving it with a galvanic battery; the behavior of his sons Samuel and Rodman; the political climate of the era; and the oscillations of the world market for hops, which, when it favored him, was "healthy," and when it failed to favor him was "perverse.") Nor was it love. Not love in any commonplace sense. For love between a man and a woman not related by blood would necessarily have to be erotic; and there was no provision, in Violet's world, for erotic love outside marriage. And she was of course married. She was extremely married. She would not have thought, as a young girl in her parents' home in Warwick, that one could be so extremely married.

Tamas too was married-or had been. Though he looked so young, and had so naive, so uninstructed a manner. They said his wife had run away from him after their ship from Liverpool landed in New York (they had come to Liverpool from London, to London from Paris, to Paris from Budapest, where they had both been born); then again they said his wife had refused to sail with him, and had stayed behind. In one version overheard by Violet (who never, really never, eavesdropped on anyone, let alone her domestic help) the young woman had betrayed him with other men because she was ashamed of his "stammer." In another version, no less plausible, his "stammer" had been caused by her betrayal. Violet noted, without caring to interpret the fact, that in her presence Tamas's difficulties with speech were such that he appeared to be on the verge of strangulation, and went an alarming beet-red; so it was no wonder that he soon ceased to speak at all, and, if it was necessary to communicate with her about the clavichord he had been hired to build, he left notes, or inquiries with the servants. He never had the opportunity to speak with Raphael, nor did he see him more than two or three times, always at a distance, for of course Raphael had not directly hired him. It is probable to assume that the shy young man with his prominent Adam's apple and his tight-fitting clothes and, of course, the embarrassing stammer (though Violet's personal physician, Dr. Sheeler, believed it was a speech impediment) would have been terrified of the master of Bellefleur Manor. That he, Tamas, presumed to entertain certain feelings-certain unmistakable feelings-for the master's young wife: that he dared simply to think of her as he worked lovingly on the clavichord: all this would have been as outrageous to Tamas as to Raphael Bellefleur himself.

It was by way of Truman Geddes, the Republican congressman, and the man who shot, in Raphael's company and on Raphael's land, the last moose in the Chautauquas (in 1860-though of course no one knew at the time that was to be the last moose, or even one of the last), that Tamas came to Bellefleur Manor to build the clavichord for Violet. She had expressed, half-seriously, a desire for a musical instrument that might be "easy" to play. So Truman turned to Raphael and said that his wife and girls were enjoying themselves immensely pounding away at a curious tinkling instrument that was hardly more than a keyboard and strings, called, he thought, a clavichord. It was a pretty little thing, a work of art, built for them by a Hungarian boy who was in the hire of a Nautauga Falls cabinetmaker. Truman said he wouldn't dare sit down at the instrument, himself, because it was too delicate: it was a woman's thing. And, for all its beauty, it hadn't cost overmuch.

So Tamas was brought to Bellefleur Manor, to build a clavichord for Violet, and to add drawers, shelves, and cabinets here and there in the castle, in rooms Raphael considered still incomplete. When he first saw Violet Bellefleur he thought she was one of the household staff-if not a maid, perhaps a governess-for the young woman wore a plain gray shirtwaist with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a long skirt, and a pocketwatch on a chain about her neck, and her manner seemed shy, even childlike. She was slight; her face was almost too narrow, especially about the chin, to be considered pretty; her eyes were intense, and frequently showed a thin crescent of white above the iris. That she was indefinably, perhaps hopelessly, ill seemed somehow obvious, though in Tamas's presence (indeed, in the presence of any of the servants) she carried herself with a beautiful precision, and her voice, though low, never shook. It was rare to see her with her children, though they were grown and could not have taxed her strength. After Tamas learned that the mistress of Bellefleur Manor was a deeply spiritual person he believed he could see, in her face, perhaps even radiating about her hair (which was a quite ordinary brown, though fine and lustrous, worn in a fashionable French twist in which pearls, amber beads, and occasionally even lilies of the valley were twined) an aura of grace, of otherworldliness, quite unlike anything he had ever seen before, except in paintings by Botticelli or certain anonymous German artists of the medieval period.

"The mistress is always sickly," the housekeeper told him, with a droll smile, "and we know what that means."

"What-what does it mean?" Tamas asked.

"Oh, well, we know."

"Yes, but what?"

"Ladies who are always complaining of headaches and breathlessness-who wish to be allowed their private beds-"

Tamas turned abruptly away. And said, after a moment, in a voice so strengthened by anger that his stutter had virtually disappeared, "I refuse to listen to backstairs gossip."

And the housekeeper, of course, had been properly silenced.

IT WAS NOT to be a very defined love story, perhaps not a love story at all.

For love was not an issue. Between Violet and the young Hungarian love was not an issue since it was not a thought; it wasn't a thought since it had not been expressed as a word.

Violet must surely have sensed, in the young man's presence (she often visited his workshop at the rear of the coachman's lodge) that something-something was amiss. Something was unbalanced, and highly exciting. That he rarely spoke to her made the situation all the more peculiar. Of course he was polite, as courteous as anyone of her own social class, though he avoided her eye, and in showing her the plans he had drawn up for the instrument he stood well away from her, some four or five feet. It was as if something might suddenly happen: a strong breeze was about to fling a glass door inward, and smash it; a spider or a roach (for, unfortunately, even magnificent Bellefleur Manor had roaches) was about to declare itself, scuttling across an antique tapestry. Violet must surely have sensed Tamas's agitation but she gave no sign, visiting him in her plain shirtwaist dresses, bringing with her a scent of lily of the valley. She enjoyed watching his skillful hands (which were not slender, as she had imagined-had she been dreaming of them?-but strong, a peasant's hands, with square-tipped fingers and short blunt nails); she observed the instrument's slow construction with a strange subdued pleasure. Of course there were other musical instruments in the castle, many others, including a handsome grand piano, at which she might play the half-dozen salon pieces she knew; but the clavichord was to be hers. Tamas had asked her to choose the kinds of wood she wanted (cherrywood primarily, and birch for the inside; and the graceful curved legs of the instrument and its matching bench were to be covered in strips of veneered oak) and he had expressed, in his difficult way, great pleasure at her preference for a keyboard made of walnut rather than ivory. It would be most unusual, most unique. And would she like ivory, gold, and jet ornamentation . . . ? It seemed to please him immensely, and to excite him, when she told him he must do as he wished-that she knew very little, and wanted only what he wanted.

She came to his workshop, silhouetted in the sun-filled doorway, her slender figure outlined, her hair shining. Because Tamas was so silent, Violet, despite her customary reserve, felt inclined to chatter. She spoke to him about her love for small, meticulously crafted things made by artists like himself-European-born-with a respect for beauty-and knowledge of the sanctity of beauty. She spoke to him, not minding that he answered her only in inarticulate grunts, of her girlhood in the country-her father's modest estate-the music lessons she and her sisters had been given, despite the expense-her amateur's enthusiasm for Scarlatti, Bach, Couperin, Mozart, the nocturnes of John Field, and the "easier" pieces of Chopin. It was a pity, she said, that he had never taken music lessons himself, for obviously he had such a love, such a feeling, for the instrument he was building. . . . How fragile it appeared, how delicate, and yet she knew it would be extraordinarily strong for its size. A beautiful thing. A miracle, really, that anyone could create it with his hands: mere human hands!

Stooped over his workbench the young Hungarian paused, not quite looking at Violet, and murmured something that sounded like an assent. His thin lips stretched in a shy, unsmiling grimace, but he was obviously deeply moved.

So the days passed, and the weeks. And one day Violet suggested that the clavichord-which was now nearly completed-be moved to her drawing room, and that Tamas continue his work there, so that he could best judge the instrument's tone and strength in the place in which it would be played. She was so very eager, she said, to see it there. . . .

Tamas straightened, as if in alarm. Though his narrow, lately rather pale face showed nothing. He nodded, after a moment; of course he would oblige; this request too must have pleased him, for a slow deep blush spread from his face down to his neck. A tiny screwdriver slipped from his hands and fell in the pile of wood shavings at his feet.

NOW THE CLAVICHORD was nearly finished, placed in the shallow bay window overlooking the walled garden where, illumined by sunlight passing through antique glass with its subtle distortions and near-microscopic bubbles, it took on an unearthly, almost a ferocious beauty. How the cherrywood gleamed! And the walnut keys! And the gold and jet! Tamas accepted the many compliments uttered in his presence with a wordless, chastely polite bow of his head; if it was sometimes suggested, by the insensitive housekeeper, or one or another of the domestic staff, that he was certainly taking a long time with that dainty little thing, he turned away, and made no reply. Indeed, he had all but given up speech in recent weeks. And despite the skill of his hands, and his ability to work tirelessly for long hours (for as many, at times, as twelve, without a break), he was obviously not altogether well. His skin had grown translucent, and appeared to glow, as if with heat; he had lost a shocking amount of weight, so that his clothes hung loose on his tall, stooped frame; when he was not actually working on the clavichord his hands were observed to tremble. The kitchen staff joked that he hadn't any appetite and they thought they knew exactly why.

He arose at dawn, and went immediately to the drawing room, where, in the light that flooded from the southeast, the clavichord gleamed with its extraordinary beauty. It stood no more than three and a half feet high, and the bench would necessarily be a low one, and as delicately beautiful as he could make it, set upon graceful curved legs that were to give the impression of being covered, but very subtly, in grapevines, all of veneered oak. A prodigious amount of work. . . . And it had struck him the other day, covertly noting his mistress's small hands, and estimating that she probably had a reach of no more than a seventh, that the entire keyboard would have to be done over: each key would have to be reduced in size, and beveled, so that she might have (he grew suddenly ambitious, even bold) a reach of a tenth. Weeks of meticulous toil, yet necessary.

When he conveyed this message to Violet, by way of a carefully-composed letter, she surprised him by glancing up, at him, in alarm. And saying, very nearly in a stammer of her own: "But-but-but I thought, Tamas, that my clavichord was nearly finished-I had thought it might be completed this very week-"

He shook his head impatiently, blushing.

She stared at him. For a moment she could not think what to say: the young Hungarian, who was always so docile, so amiable, stooped over his work with such concentration that one realized it was an unearthly, a sacred task, now looked defiantly angry. His Adam's apple jerked, he swallowed and licked his dry lips, his high pale forehead gleamed with perspiration. He shook his head. No, no, no. No. No.

"But I-I'm only an amateur musician-I play for my own pleasure," Violet said, clasping her hands before her as if imploring him, "and of course I haven't any genuine talent-only a love for-for the sound-for the activity-for the purity of-of- If I can't reach a note I simply skip it or jump to it, you know, and it really doesn't make any difference-really it doesn't- Why, I hardly intend to play for anyone other than myself. Not even close friends, or-"

Tamas began to speak, but his words were strangled, and his eyes protruded alarmingly out of their dark shadowed sockets; so he merely shook his head again, stern as a schoolmaster whose pupils have disobeyed.

"But Tamas, the clavichord is so beautiful-I'm so eager to play it-And how will I explain to my husband, who thinks it's nearly-"

Tamas withdrew the letter from her trembling fingers, and wrote in a stiff, unusually large hand: MUST BE PERFECT. NO COMPROMISE. OTHERWISE-SMASHED WITH THE AX!!!

So Violet acquiesced, and did not tell Raphael. And the labor of creating the new keyboard was begun.

THE WEEKS PASSED. The new, small keyboard appeared, and was as beautiful, perhaps more beautiful, than the other; and after each of the keys was set into place, and strung, Tamas asked Violet to sit at the instrument and play it, so that he could determine precisely where the metal wedges must go. Violet had thought that a professional tuner would be employed, and murmured her surprise, her pleased surprise, that Tamas could tune the instrument himself. He had, evidently, perfect pitch.

She ran her fingers over the keys, self-consciously. Of course this wasn't a piano keyboard and, unless she pressed down emphatically, no note would sound, or it would arise muffled and indistinct. So she played a scale or two, with girlish enthusiasm, and uneven speed, while Tamas fussed with the metal wedges. "It's lovely," Violet said, "isn't it lovely! I can't thank you enough-" But Tamas took no heed of her chatter. He was adjusting the strings with such concentration that a bead of sweat ran to the very tip of his thin, waxen-pale nose, and hovered there for a long moment before dropping off.

He listened to her rather hesitant playing from various corners of the elegant room, and even from the doorway, and the corridor. He was grave, intense, perhaps somewhat feverish. (Because he ate so rarely, and had lost so much weight, his breath had, unfortunately, turned sour; but Violet tried to take no notice.) Sometimes he hurried to her, to strike a note himself. He pressed his long blunt finger down, and held it on the key, with such pressure that all the blood ran out of the finger's tip, and a rosy half-moon appeared beneath the nail. At such moments Violet shivered in the heat of his intensity: she could feel it, she could feel it radiating from him, frightening her, exciting her as she could not recall having been excited before. She did not know if she felt disappointment, or relief, when Tamas muttered, hardly opening his mouth, "Not right. Not right."

HE TOOK TO prowling about the house at night, making his way through the servants' wing into the Great Hall, and into the drawing room. There, he drew the heavy velvet drapes (as if fearing the night watchman or the gate-house keeper or one of the dogs would see the light, and expose him), and worked, undisturbed for hours, on the clavichord. One morning Violet herself, still in her dressing gown, discovered him, and was astonished to see how pale the poor young man had grown, and how strange: he must have weighed little more than a hundred pounds, and his hair was plastered to his damp forehead, and his thin lips were tightly pursed as if he were resisting the impulse to scream. His hooded, rather weary eyes flashed to her, and he attempted a wan smile: but clearly he was unwell.

"Tamas," Violet cried, "why are you doing this? Why are you destroying yourself!"

He turned away, though not discourteously, and, with a tiny screwdriver, proceeded to adjust something on the inside of the clavichord.

That morning, Violet insisted upon feeding him bouillon, toast, and bacon rind, which she brought to her drawing room herself, on a silver tray; she made certain the door was closed behind her so that no inquisitive servant could peer in. Tamas ate, though reluctantly. It was clear that he ate only to please her; he kept glancing at the clavichord (which looked, in the brilliant morning light, more beautiful than ever), and his fingers involuntarily twitched. Violet asked him what was wrong-why was he so often unhappy-melancholy-was it thoughts of his homeland?-his wife? (She spoke in a near-whisper, trembling with her own audacity. But Tamas seemed not to care, or even to hear. Homeland? Wife? Unhappy? He merely shrugged his shoulders, and his eyes drifted back to the clavichord.) "Ah, but it is beautiful!" Violet cried. She rose, unsteady, and went to the clavichord, and struck a bold chord, using all her fingers. And struck it again, her heartbeat crazy and light as a butterfly's. "Isn't it beautiful, haven't you produced a wonder!" she whispered, in triumph.

When she looked back at Tamas he was gazing at her, and at the clavichord, with an expression of simple, mute adoration. Droplets of perspiration, or tears, ran down his thin cheeks, and he was, she could see, perfectly at peace. He fairly glowed with a still, calm, inviolable ecstasy.

IT WAS ON a fine, clear, sunny May morning that Violet entered her drawing room to see the clavichord finished. She knew Tamas had finished it because he had laid, on the bench, the green brocaded cushion Violet intended to use.

"Ah, how lovely," Violet said, approaching the instrument. She depressed a note and it sounded, remote, but bell-like, with an indescribably sweet tone.

She sat, and played a scale or two, and part of a simplified rondo, really a children's piece, which she knew by heart. It seemed to her that the clavichord's tone was even more beautiful than she remembered. What had Tamas done with it, overnight . . . ? She leaned forward to inhale the odor of the fine polished wood, and could not resist touching her cheek against it. A master craftsman had fashioned this exquisite instrument for her. He had thought enough of her taste to allow her to choose the woods, and the ornamentation; he had made a keyboard scaled to her delicate hands. Not one of Raphael's costly gifts (the sable opera cloak, the new phaeton, the diamonds, pearls, and rubies, even the manor house itself) meant as much to her as Tamas's clavichord which wasn't, strictly speaking (for of course Raphael was paying for it) a "gift" from the young Hungarian at all. . . .

In her satin dressing gown with the kimonolike sash Violet sat at the little instrument, playing her pieces one by one. Tamas would enter the room at any moment. She could imagine him making his way along the servants' hall . . . into the Great Hall . . . pausing at the door of the drawing room, his hand on the knob, listening to this delicate, simplified mazurka . . . a haunting dancelike tune written by Chopin at a very young age. It was not quite suitable for the clavichord, nor were Violet's little fingers agile enough, but the tone, the tone! . . . it was so exquisitely beautiful that tears started into Violet's eyes.

When the young Hungarian entered the room Violet was going to rise from the bench, and hold her arms out to him. For a long worldless moment they would stare at each other. And then he would close the door gently behind him, and . . .

Her fingers were so clumsy, she exclaimed aloud. Ah, how frustrating, to be unworthy of this exquisite thing! But she would practice. She would honor it as Tamas had honored it, knowing the clavichord was something from another world, only entrusted, in a manner of speaking, to her. One day she would play not only her simple girlhood pieces but ambitious, brilliant, heartstopping pieces by Scarlatti and Couperin and Bach and Mozart, perhaps she would even have a kind of salon, and invite intelligent, cultured men and women-not Raphael's acquaintances, not his contemptible political associates!-and Tamas would be the guest of honor-he might live at the manor as long as he wished-he would become famous throughout the state-a builder of clavichords and harpsichords-a master craftsman whose instruments were extremely costly but, as everyone acclaimed, more than worth their price: he had built, everyone would say, Violet Bellefleur's clavichord, and there was never a more lovely, a more indescribably beautiful thing. . . .

Violet broke off her playing, having heard something odd. She turned but there was no one in the room. Her own portrait, painted some years earlier by a flattering society portraitist, was, in its position above the marble fireplace, the natural place for her glance to alight; but she looked away at once, vexed and obscurely ashamed of its sleek, pretty, falsely rosy tones-what had Tamas thought, working for so many months in this room, forced to see, whenever he glanced around, that conventionalized image!-Tamas who was himself so superb an artist? He must have been secretly contemptuous not just of that portrait, and of Raphael's matching portrait (which hung in the Great Hall), but of most of the Bellefleur acquisitions.

I realize now what I must do, Violet would say to the young man when he appeared, having grasped the principle of beauty embodied in your work: I will have to remake this room, to suit it. To make a kind of shrine for it. Beginning of course with the removal of that insipid portrait-!

(But perhaps he would recoil in surprise. Not wanting the painting to be discarded. He would ask, shyly, if it might be given to him. To hang in his room. But where was his room? In the servants' wing. What a fuss there might be. . . . Too much whispering and speculation. . . . And if Raphael learned . . . But of course he would learn, at once. . . . ) Violet saw by the clock on the mantel that it was getting late, nearly midmorning. Where was Tamas? He was usually hard at work by now. In another minute or two a solicitous servant would rap gently on the door and ask Violet if she wanted her morning coffee, and if Tamas then appeared, why the moment would be quite botched. . . .

Perhaps he was ill? He had looked so worn, so exhausted, the day before. In fact for a number of days. He had refused even to drink the hot bouillon she had brought him yesterday, though she had thought that might have developed into a routine, a small pleasant ritual.

Tamas?

Are you ill?

Aren't you coming?

By and by a servant did knock, and Violet sent her away, irritably, to find Tamas. It was very late. What could he be thinking of! It was inconsiderate of him, it was rather cruel, to so deliberately keep her waiting, since he knew very well she would be seated at the clavichord, like a child with a new toy. Unlike Tamas, Violet thought, to be affectedly modest.

But Tamas was not in his room. Nor could they find him anywhere.

"What do you mean," Violet said in dismay, rising from the bench, "have you looked? Of course you haven't looked everywhere!"

So they searched the house, each of the floors and the basement; they searched the grounds and the outbuildings; they inquired of all the servants, and the groundsmen and the farmhands and even the itinerant help housed down by the swamp; and they reported to Miss Violet that Tamas was nowhere to be found. The bed in his little room was neatly made as always, and his clothing and toiletries appeared to be undisturbed.

"But surely there is a note?" Violet said, stricken. "He- We- My husband- The clavichord has not even been paid for-"

They searched for him in the woods, using hounds, for he had been distracted for so long (except when working at the clavichord) that it was altogether possible he had wandered away and was lost. But they could not find him; the dogs could not even locate his scent. Violet wired the Nautauga Falls cabinetmaker for whom Tamas had worked, but the man had no knowledge of him; he claimed not to have heard from Tamas for nearly a year.

"How could you do this to me!" Violet whispered. Her heart pounded so strangely, she thought she would faint. She was so angry, and so frightened, and so vexed, like a child who has lost her closest playmate: and there stood the clavichord in the window, the lovely matchless clavichord, meant to be shared, meant to be exclaimed over in his presence, and played for him: and he was gone.

Gone, as it turned out, forever.

FROM THIS TIME afterward Violet lived sunk within herself, and only appeared to come to life, albeit fitfully, while seated at the clavichord. Years and years and years were to pass, and Tamas was not to be found, nor did anyone receive word of him. Raphael thought the entire incident was extremely suspicious. He had never heard of a workingman or tradesman or carpenter or whatever the young fool called himself who had declined to present his bill, and it upset him, for years, that services done for him should remain unpaid: that wasn't the Bellefleur way of doing business.

Violet played the clavichord, at first for brief periods of an hour or less, then for two, three, four, and even five hours at a stretch. She refused to accompany her husband on his most ambitious campaign journey about the state, and Raphael afterward blamed her, quite unreasonably, for his poor showing. It was not uncommon for the mistress of Bellefleur Manor to descend to her drawing room immediately upon rising, and, in her dressing gown, with her hair all atumble down her back, quite indifferent to the demands of the household, and even, frequently, to the presence of household guests, seat herself at the clavichord and play for hours, the door locked behind her. Once, discovering the door unlocked, her son Jeremiah, then an ostensibly grown man; entered the room shyly, and stood listening for some twenty or thirty minutes to his mother's frantic, feverish playing, in which he could discern from time to time (but with difficulty, for Jeremiah had never been musically inclined, and had received no training) sudden queer sounds-airy, light, muted, faint-of unutterable beauty. The clavichord was not an easy instrument to play, Jeremiah judged by his mother's exertions, and the frequently flat, tinny notes she struck, it seemed at times hardly more than a glorified lyre or guitar, but from somewhere there arose, unpredictably, with eerie force, a voice-an almost human voice-or perhaps it was the echo of a voice-frail and all but inaudible-thin with pain, and distance, and loss. It is lovely, Jeremiah thought. And understood, or almost understood, his mother's devotion.

Once, in Jeremiah's presence, Violet stopped playing suddenly. Her arms fell loose, and her head sank forward onto her bosom. Jeremiah wondered if he dared approach her; she appeared to be sobbing soundlessly. But when he whispered, "Mother?" she turned to him with a look of chagrin and anger, and denounced him for spying on her. "You wouldn't understand, any of you," she said, closing the keyboard roughly, "he was an artist, he completed his task and scorned to ask for payment, how could any of you understand! His art is defiled by your mere presence."

Raphael, of course, was less patient with his wife. He engaged Dr. Wystan Sheeler to treat her, for it seemed to him altogether obvious that Violet was suffering from a nervous disorder of some kind (was it brain fever? anemia? a female complaint to which no medical name might be given?). When Dr. Sheeler failed to cure her, or even to satisfactorily diagnose her malady, Raphael ordered him from the house-and it was to be some years before the celebrated physician forgave him, and returned, at Raphael's plea, to treat Raphael himself.

Why did she hide herself away on the loveliest of summer days, to play that wretched instrument? Why did she ignore her houseguests, her husband, even her lonely, aimless son? Raphael charged her with-with-he knew not what-he knew not how to express it. That she was unfaithful to him, and gloated in her behavior, seemed to him obvious, and yet-and yet-he had no proof-and in more rational moments wondered precisely what he meant. He dared not accuse her, for of course she would deny it, she might even (since in recent years his demure young bride had hardened somewhat) laugh contemptuously at him. Unfaithful! Unfaithful to him! In the privacy of her own drawing room! Alone! With her clavichord-with her clavichord! Yes, she might very well laugh, and he would be defenseless against her scorn.

In the end, shortly before Violet walked into Lake Noir and drowned herself, "taking her own life" in the least obtrusive of ways (for the body was never found though the lake was dredged), the clavichord was irreparably damaged.

Standing one morning outside the drawing room door Raphael had been convinced he heard a stranger's voice inside the room-beneath, or behind, or arising within the music. He threw open the door and rushed inside and though he found no one-no one beside a terrified Violet-he was so infuriated, so frustrated, he brought his fist down hard on the top of the clavichord, and cracked the fine wood. Several strings broke-a high, faint, incredulous shriek sounded from inside the instrument-and though it was repaired afterward (indeed, Raphael was thoroughly ashamed, and baffled that he should so wantonly damage his own goods) the clavichord was never quite the same again. Its tone was flat and tinny and dead though of course it remained, and was, still, in Germaine's time, an exquisitely beautiful piece of furniture.

God's Face.