The catastrophe of the silver foxes; and the necessity to sign yet another of the two-year notes (for the extension of credit out of the largest Vanderpoel bank); and the necessity, at last, anticipated for so long, of auctioning off certain of their treasures. (And the paintings and statues and various art objects were treasures, as the appraisers declared: a pity that buyers found them not to their taste, and worth, on the auction block, in the remorseless clarity of a midsummer sun, less than one-third of their estimated price.) Not long afterward Lamentations of Jeremiah rushed out into a rainstorm, thinking that he would save his horses-no matter that Elvira begged him to stay inside, and Noel himself attempted to keep him there by force. He wanted, he yearned . . . It was an almost physical craving, that he rush out of the relative comfort of his father's house and into the violent storm, imagining that he heard the horses' screams, and that only he could save them from the rising waters. "Jeremiah! Jeremiah!" Elvira cried, trying to follow him through the knee-high muck, until he outdistanced her, shielded by the dark. Ah, how badly he wanted, he yearned, he must . . .

Swept away, the current sucking his feet out from under him, knocking his head against an uprooted tree stump, swept away in the raging storm (in intensity hardly different from the storm that ruined Leah's plans for great-grandmother Elvira's hundredth birthday celebration), he had time only to realize, before his consciousness was extinguished, that it was his pony Barbary he had been seeking out in the flooded stable: Barbary, his lovely gray-and-white dappled Shetland pony with the large shining eyes and the long thick almost woollike hair, Barbary the companion of his childhood, the companion of his innocent days as Felix. Yet still he wanted to plunge into the storm, he yearned to submit himself to it, as if only so violent a baptism, far from the rude claims of Bellefleur and blood, could exorcise his memory of the foxes and their hideous bloody jaws. I am not one of you, as you see, the drowning man pleaded.

The Assassination of the Sheriff of Nautauga County.

That final summer it did seem as if Germaine was losing her "powers"-she had no foreknowledge, evidently, of her great-uncle Hiram's death, and apart from a queer lethargy that gave to her small pretty face a somewhat leaden tone, and several sleepless nights preceding her fourth birthday, she seemed to have no clear sense of the impending catastrophe itself: the destruction of Bellefleur Manor and the deaths of so many members of her family.

On the morning of her uncle Ewan's assassination, for instance, she exhibited no signs of distress. She had even, it seemed, slept very well the night before, and woke in an excellent mood. At the breakfast table on the terrace Leah watched her daughter covertly, listening as the child prattled on to one of the servants about a silly little dream she had had, or was it a dream one of the kittens (according to Germaine) had had-kittens with wings who could fly, and if they wished they could paddle on the lake, and everything was buttercup-yellow, and someone was passing around cupcakes with strawberry icing-and it occurred to her that her daughter was a perfectly ordinary child.

Bright, and pretty, and somewhat willful at times, and given to spells of bad temper like all children; and of course she was somewhat large for her age. But, really, any stranger would consider her nothing more than a normal child: which is to say an ordinary child. Her eyes which had once seemed to hold an amazing light within them now seemed to Leah merely a child's eyes. And her rate of growth, so prodigious in the first two years, had certainly slowed, so that she was probably only an inch or two taller than the average four-year-old. It was true that she was unusually quick: she had taught herself to read somehow, and to do simple arithmetic, and she could, when she wished, reply to adult queries in an eerily adult manner. But her quickness, her intelligence, no longer struck Leah as exceptional. Set beside Bromwell, for instance . . .

Sensing her thoughts the child turned shyly toward her. The charming little story of kittens and flying and cupcakes died away, and the servant girl returned to the house, and for a moment mother and daughter regarded each other, wordless, unsmiling, with a certain caution. Germaine's eyes were pretty, Leah thought, that pale tawny-green, nothing like Gideon's eyes, or her own; and thickly-lashed. And usually bright with curiosity. But there was, she saw with a pang of dismay, nothing remarkable about them.

Uneasily, the child lowered her head while keeping her gaze fixed, still, upon her mother. It was a familiar mannerism, and seemed to Leah falsely and coyly submissive: an appeal to be loved, an appeal not to be scolded, when of course there was no likelihood she would be scolded (though the inane babble about the dream had been irritating), and of course she was loved.

Didn't she know, didn't the exasperating child know, how very passionately she was loved . . . ?

There must have been something in Leah's face that disturbed Germaine, for Germaine continued to gaze at her, lowering her head still more, and now bringing her fingers to her mouth to suck. Though this was a habit Leah angrily forbade.

"Germaine, really," Leah whispered.

The walled garden was absolutely still: no birds sang, there was no movement in the leaves, the placid filmy sky overhead showed no motion, as if the sky were nothing more extraordinary than an inverted teacup with here and there a fine hairlike crack. All the world hung suspended on this August morning while Leah and her peculiar little girl stared at each other in a silence that grew more strained as the seconds passed.

Then the creases between Leah's eyebrows deepened, and without knowing what she did she knocked the folded Financial Gazette off the table, and said, half-sobbing: "But what am I to do without you! What will I do with the rest of my life! And now I'm so close to-to-completing what I started- You can't desert me now, you can't betray me!"

SOME EIGHTEEN HOURS later, in the bedroom of Rosalind Max's twentieth-floor apartment in the new Nautauga Tower, Ewan was surprised in his sleep by gunfire, and could not defend himself against an unknown assassin who shot, at a distance of less than ten feet, seven bullets into his helpless body. Five passed through his chest, one through his right shoulder, and one lodged in the very top of his skull. Rosalind, who happened by a propitious accident to be in the bathroom at the time, and hid there in terror during the shooting, emerged to see her burly lover sprawled sideways at the very head of the bed, completely still, and covered with blood.

Just as Germaine's pleasant little dream foretold nothing of the violence her unfortunate uncle was to experience, so did Ewan's own dreams foretell nothing. He slept, as always, deeply, in a near-stupor, his breath rattling as he both inhaled and exhaled; one could not imagine, observing so utterly blissful a sleep, that the sleeper might be much troubled by anything so immaterial as dreams, or thoughts of any kind. Which was, indeed, the case. If Ewan dreamt he forgot his dreams promptly upon waking. It could not be said, even by those who loved him, that he was one of the more intelligent Bellefleurs, but he felt nevertheless an almost patrician contempt for the superstitions of certain family members. Don't regale me with such backcountry crap, he frequently said, jocularly or angrily, depending upon his mood. He was most disrespectful to his wife, whose fears-fears "for your life," since he became sheriff-bored him. (As Lily herself bored him. If she had been jealous of Rosalind, Ewan complained to Gideon and his friends, if she had shown some healthy angry curiosity, why then he might not have minded: but her long mournful face, her sighs and tears and foolish "premonitions" about his safety merely antagonized him. Of course he loved her-all Bellefleur marriages were strong ones-but the more she grieved, the more he stayed away from home: and when he did come home he often flew into a rage, and knocked the silly woman against the wall. Why do you test my love for you! he shouted into her dazed face.) Ewan was a thick-bodied ruddy-faced man in the prime of life when he met Rosalind Max in a Falls nightclub, and introduced himself to her despite the fact that she was in the company of a political rival whom Ewan knew to be contemptible. He soon dropped his other women, and he and Rosalind were seen about town two or three or four times a week, a striking couple, not exactly attractive, though of course Rosalind was harshly and defiantly pretty (she spent an hour or more spreading onto her full, solid face a patina of bright make-up that left her skin glowing and poreless, and her dyed red hair was flamboyantly and blatantly artificial, razor-cut to give a gypsy effect; her lips were a flawless scarlet). It was commonly known about town that Ewan was crazy about her, though comically suspicious as well, and that, over a period of months, he had given her a number of costly gifts: the eye-striking blue Jaguar E-model with the dyed rabbit-fur upholstery and silver fixtures and a built-in telephone, and an emerald ring said to be a family heirloom (which the careless Rosalind promptly lost while sailing with a friend on the river), and a freezer stocked with filet mignon, and an ankle-length sable coat, and a twenty-five-foot sailboat with purple and green sails, and any number of smaller items. The penthouse apartment in the new apartment building overlooking the river was, of course, in Ewan's name; but then the building itself was owned by his family. The more uneasy he was about her, the more generous he became.

"Of course I don't really love her," he told Gideon once or twice, when the brothers still confided in each other, "she's a-" and he uttered a word at once so obscene and so clinical that Gideon didn't know whether to be disgusted, or amused. And Ewan frequently said, too, that he couldn't possibly love her: she wasn't worthy of his name.

Nevertheless he gave her the apartment with its magnificent view of the river and the Falls and Manitou Island to the east, and he gave her the innumerable costly gifts, like any lover, like any befuddled excited lover, and he even arranged-exactly why, Rosalind did not know-for each of them to sit for a portrait, to be painted by an artist who moved about the fringes of Nautauga Falls society, and who had painted, for absurdly high fees, portraits of a U.S. senator from the area, and the mayor of Nautauga Falls, and the millionaire owner of the racetrack, and several society women, wives of businessmen and philanthropists, whom Ewan dismissed as far less attractive than his flame-haired Rosalind. The portraits had been completed by Christmas of the preceding year, and were hanging, at the time of the assassination, in the living room of the apartment: Rosalind's was theatrical, rather stiff, but conventionally glamorous; Ewan's showed a beefy, jowled, arrogantly handsome man of middle age, with eyes narrowed in merriment, or perhaps in meanness, and the soft pudgy flesh of his chin creased against his collar. It was almost an insult, that portrait, and indeed Rosalind had had to plead with Ewan not to attack the artist physically, but if one studied it long enough to become somehow attractive, even charming. The oddest thing about it was (as everyone attested who examined it long enough) that the portraitist had, whether knowingly or not (he claimed not) created a dull almost imperceptible aura about Ewan's head so that it looked as if the notorious sheriff of Nautauga County had a halo. Which was, of course, vastly amusing to Ewan and Rosalind and their circle, and rather mysterious. For the halo wasn't always there. But then again, if one peered closely and was patient, it reappeared.

FROM THE FIRST evening of their acquaintance Rosalind's independence excited Ewan: here was a woman who didn't want to be married, not even to a Bellefleur. She was a part-time singer in nightclubs in the city, and an occasional photographer's model, and she had done, she said, "theater." (From the age of seventeen to twenty-one when, she said mysteriously, her life had been rudely altered, she had acted in supporting roles at the Vanderpoel Opera House, where comedies, musicals, and melodramas were sometimes performed; but of course Ewan had never seen her there.) Naked one night except for a frothy ostrich boa wound about her waist, Rosalind had high-stepped about the bedroom clapping her hands and singing in a hoarse, rowdy, utterly delightful voice, "When the Boys Come Home," the concluding number, she said, of one of her most successful musicals. Ewan had stared, bewitched. It was obvious that he did love her.

But he was suspicious. At times he felt sick with dread that she had betrayed him-was betraying him at that very moment-and nothing would do but that he had to telephone her, or send a man over on some contrived pretext (bringing her a dozen white roses, or a chocolate mousse, her favorite dessert, from the city's prestige restaurant in the Nautauga House); once he had ordered the police helicopter flown back to town from some dreary backwoods logging community where a tedious murder investigation was underway, and it had landed, creating quite a disturbance, on the penthouse terrace. (That day, a gentleman in a trench coat was observed leaving Rosalind's apartment hurriedly, but when Ewan questioned Rosalind she explained quite convincingly that she'd woken with a miserable toothache, and had called her dentist over for an emergency consultation.) Another time, Ewan observed at the racetrack that his mistress's bets-for $25, $40, all small sums-were placed on quirky horses with 1001 and 853 odds, and that these horses won; but Rosalind explained that she'd overheard her hairdresser chatting with a woman patron, and remembered the names of the horses mentioned, and, of course, she just had good luck. She wasn't a close friend of anyone connected with the racetrack, she said, and as for jockeys-jockeys repulsed her physically. Which Ewan believed, after some deliberation. His jealousy was such that he imagined lovers of Rosalind's crouched in closets, or hiding in shower stalls, when he entered the apartment unannounced; he did find outsized footprints in the pink marble bathtub, and hairs not Rosalind's or his own on her silk-covered pillows, and his stock of ale, kept in the apartment's second refrigerator, was often decimated; but he was sensible enough to doubt his own suspicions, and at any rate Rosalind always joked and teased him into a good mood. You spend all your time chasing criminals, she said, naturally you're suspicious. But you mustn't let it color your vision of human nature, Ewan. After all-! We pass this way but once.

Though Ewan enjoyed the city's nightlife, and felt quite wonderfully flattered by being seen in the company of gorgeous Rosalind Max, he liked best, as he told Gideon, spending a long period of time-twelve hours, eighteen hours-locked up in the penthouse with his mistress, with a generous supply of liquor, ale, salted peanuts, frozen pizzas, and doughnuts (glazed, powdered, cinnamon, apple, cherry, whipped-cream) from the city's most popular bakery, Sweet's. He and Rosalind made love, and drank, and ate, and made love again, and drank, and made love, and fixed themselves enormous meals out of the freezer and refrigerator, and drank and ate doughnuts, and slept awhile, and woke to make love, and poured themselves more drinks, and finished off the rest of the doughnuts . . . and so the weekend went; at such times they consumed more than two dozen Sweet's doughnuts, and an unfathomed quantity of other food and drink. I don't love her, she's a notorious bitch, Ewan complained with a wry smile, but, you know, I can't think of a better way to spend my time. . . . Then you're very fortunate, Gideon said curtly, and broke off the conversation. (The brothers had been growing apart for years, and after Gideon's accident, and his acquisition of the Invemere airport, they rarely spoke; it happened that they were rarely home at the same time, and when they were they tended to avoid each other.) It was 3:00 A.M., Sunday morning, when, after a protracted bout of lovemaking, eating, and drinking, Ewan had fallen into his stuporous sleep, and was snoring loudly (indeed, Rosalind was to say that she owed her life to her lover's snoring-it had kept her awake-she'd decided to take a bubble-bath-and happened to be in the bathroom, sunk in the luxurious hot water, when the assassin broke into the apartment and into the bedroom and began firing at poor Ewan); and he never woke up again-never, that is, as Ewan Bellefleur, the sheriff of Nautauga County.

How quickly it happened! A stranger bursting into the room-firing seven shots from an automatic pistol-Ewan bleeding onto the silken pillows and sheets-Rosalind hiding terrified in the bathroom. And then everything went quiet again.

How quickly, how irreparably . . . And after it appeared that the murderer had gone Rosalind came out, shaking, knowing what she would find in the bed, and yet screaming when she saw it: her poor naked helpless lover, her dead lover, his body riddled with bullets, the very top of his skull penetrated. He was dead, yet his fingers still twitched.

He was dead, he must have been dead, shot at such close range: yet his eyelids fluttered. So she screamed and screamed.

BUT OF COURSE Ewan did not die, and it was a measure of his neurosurgeon's skill, as well as the resiliency of his own constitution, that he recovered as quickly as he did: a mere five weeks in the hospital, two in the intensive-care unit. And then he moved to a convalescent home on Manitou Island, chosen by the Bellefleurs for its proximity to the manor, as well as the excellence of its professional staff.

Ewan did not die, and yet-and yet it could not be said that he had survived. Not the Ewan Bellefleur whom everyone had known.

Some forty-eight hours after the shooting, when Ewan first regained consciousness in the intensive-care ward, his eyes rolled, and his pale lips moved, and he tried to grasp the hand of the attending nurse-and his initial words, but dimly grasped, had to do with blood and baptism. He then lost consciousness again, and remained in a comalike state for another two days, and when he again awoke, this time permanently, it was observed at once by Noel and Cornelia-the only people allowed to see him at that time, for Lily had collapsed and was inconsolable-that this Ewan did not appear to be their Ewan.

He recognized them, and seemed to be unusually clear-minded about the ward, the hospital, the delicate operation performed on his brain, and the circumstances of what he called his "misfortune." But he spoke in a near-whisper, and his manner was contrite, even chastened; it alarmed his parents that he said not a single word about the attempted murder-he knew that someone had tried to kill him, certainly, but he showed no anger, no bitterness, not even any curiosity about the assassin's identity. (The assassin was never to be found, though the sheriff's office and the city police launched an extensive investigation. If only Rosalind had caught a glimpse of the man-! But of course she had not, nor had anyone in the building, including the doorman in attendance downstairs, seen him; and the gun-a quite ordinary .45 Colt automatic, found twenty floors below in the alley-proved to be untraceable.) From the first, then, Noel and Cornelia had known something was gravely wrong. Of course they were grateful that their son had survived: how many men, even with the bodily constitution of a bull, like Ewan, could have survived five bullets in the chest (miraculously, they had passed through him, striking no vital organ), a cruel shoulder wound, and a bullet lodged in his skull . . . ? And he had lost so much blood, and had arrived in the emergency ward in an advanced state of shock. But the Ewan who regained consciousness, the Ewan who held their hands and comforted them, and spoke gently (and apologetically) to his wife, and wept with delight to see Vida and Albert, and was so courteous with the nurses . . . this Ewan was no one they knew.

He was soft-spoken, he was contrite, he blushed with shame over the circumstances of his "misfortune" (for he was never able to bring himself to do anything more than allude to Rosalind, and the penthouse apartment, and his life of "error"); only while in the convalescent home, when he was free to walk, with a cane, about the sloping lawns, in the company of one or two members of his family, did he bring up-and then hesitantly, apologetically-the experience he had had, and the necessity, now, for changing his life.

Of course, he said quietly, he would resign his office. Had already resigned, in fact. Knowing what he did about life-about the nature of sin-about the baptism of blood-and Our Saviour's overseeing of every moment of our lives-he could not continue with his worldly occupation; even the very memory of it filled him with dismay. (That he had actually carried a handgun! That he had gloried in his rifles, automatics, shotguns! His soul was aggrieved.) Since he had no secrets from them or from anyone he was willing to show them the letter he had written to his former mistress, breaking off all further relations with her, and signing over the apartment to her for as long as she wished to have it-though he could not resist begging her to consider the self-defeating sinfulness of her ways, which might one day drag her down to Hell. His parents and his wife prudently disclaimed their right to read the letter, and it was sent by registered mail to Rosalind Max, who never replied. (Though of course she kept the apartment, and the car, and the rest of the gifts, including even the twin portraits.) As time passed and he mended and grew strong Ewan was willing to talk more openly, and with a great deal of spirit, about his "baptism." Evidently he had died, or almost died, and at the very moment of death, as he was about to pass over into the other world, Jesus Christ Himself had appeared, and called out sternly to him, for it wasn't time yet for him to die, how could he die when he hadn't fulfilled his task on earth!-and he had better kneel, and submit to baptism. So Christ Himself had baptized Ewan, and with Ewan's own blood. (He had touched Ewan's chest wounds, had even poked a forefinger near his heart, in order to bloody his hands for the baptism.) They were together a long, long time, Ewan on his knees, Christ standing before him, instructing him, not so much in the sinfulness of his past life-for Ewan knew very well, now, the scales had fallen from his eyes and he knew-as in the life ahead, which would be extremely difficult. He would meet resistance, especially from those he loved; especially from his family. (Even Lily, though "religious," did not really believe.) But he must have courage. He must never slacken, he must forever remember the circumstances of his baptism, and Christ's love, and though the world might mock him he must only go forward to meet his destiny and fulfill himself on earth.

They stared at him, speechless. Their faces lengthened with grief. Ah, Ewan! What has happened to Ewan! Their Ewan . . .

Lily wept, and collapsed again. She moaned in her delirium that that whore had murdered her husband: why didn't the police arrest her and throw her in jail! Of course Rosalind Max had done the shooting herself. . . . Everyone in Nautauga Falls knew that.

Noel and Cornelia and Leah and Hiram had no idea what to think. Ewan wasn't demented and yet he wasn't sane; his brain evidently had not been damaged, and yet . . . Gideon visited with him only once, and came away shaking: with distress or rage, no one knew. Ewan had seized his brother's hands and pleaded with him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour, and to accompany him, Ewan, on his pilgrimage to Eben-Ezer in the western corner of the state; he had pleaded with Gideon to cast off his worldly pursuits and devote himself to the Lord, before it was too late. For somehow it had come about-no one knew exactly how, nor could anyone at the Manitou clinic explain-that Ewan had met with a certain Brother Metz, who claimed to be a direct descendant of the German "saint" Christian Metz, who had founded the sect known locally as "True Inspiration" a century ago. The stooped, bearded, eagle-nosed old man had appeared at the clinic, and he and Ewan had spent several hours together in earnest discussion, on the veranda, but where he had come from . . . how he had known about Ewan . . . was to remain forever a mystery.

With tears in his eyes Ewan announced to his family that he would not be returning to Bellefleur Manor.

He had, he said, relinquished all his worldly goods, with the exception of $10,000, which he had given to Brother Metz's community at Eben-Ezer, as soon as he was formally discharged from Manitou he was to journey, on foot, to the community, where he would live for the rest of his days. He might in time become a minister in the True Inspiration church, when Brother Metz deemed him worthy, but of course he had no plans, he had no ambition, whatever the Lord wanted of him would come to pass, and in that would reside his happiness. . . .

He would not, he promised, harangue his family about their misguided lives. The pursuit of money, the pursuit of power-the mad desire to amass the wilderness empire old Jean-Pierre had once owned, which had brought him to his doom-! No, he would not harangue; that was not the way of True Inspiration. One lived one's life as a model of Christian virtue, just as Christ had lived His faultless life. So Ewan explained, gently. There would be no preaching except to those who wanted to believe.

His fellow policemen and his many acquaintances in the Falls assumed he was joking, until, one by one, they visited him. And came away, like Gideon, appalled. For Ewan Bellefleur wasn't demented and yet he wasn't sane. . . . Most baffling of all was his lack of interest in revenge. He didn't appear to care about the progress of the investigation; he adroitly changed the subject when one of his lieutenants named certain names, suspects among Ewan's numerous enemies in the county. Nor would he suggest names himself. (As for the theory that poor distraught Rosalind had had anything to do with the attempted assassination . . . Ewan simply shut his eyes and shook his head, smiling.) His associates were shocked at the change in him, and though they discussed it in detail, for weeks and months (indeed, the conversion of Ewan Bellefleur provided material for debate among people who barely knew him) they were never able to decide: was he midly insane, had the bullet damaged his brain, or was he far healthier than he'd ever been before, in his entire life . . . ? But it did seem perverse, even repulsive, they thought, that a former sheriff should have so little interest in apprehending a dangerous criminal.

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, Ewan whispered.

PRETTY VIDA IN her white high-heeled pumps, her jaws moving surreptitiously as she chewed gum (her mother and grandmother thought such a habit, in a young lady, insufferably vulgar), sat in the tearoom of the Manitou clinic with its mirrors and ferns and fleur-de-lis wallpaper, asking Albert repeatedly if he could understand what was going on, if he really believed that strange, frightening man was their father. And Albert, baffled, resentful, restless, lit matches and dropped them burning into the ashtray and said with a shrug of his shoulders, It's him all right, it's him bullying us in a new way.

But I can't believe it, Vida whispered.

It's him, Albert said, wiping at his eyes. The old fucker.

AND ONE MORNING in late summer, wearing a plain, inexpensive brown suit, tieless, with the collar of his white shirt worn on the outside of his lapels, and carrying a small canvas valise, Ewan Bellefleur checked out of the convalescent home unattended, and set out on his journey westward to Eben-Ezer (now called, in these fallen times, Ebenezer) some five hundred miles away. He was going on foot, like a pilgrim.

Most of the staff saw him off. A number of the nurses wept, for Ewan had been the best-loved patient they had had in years; several staff members vowed that they would come visit him, and in the meantime they would pray for their own enlightenment. Though red-faced and still somewhat stocky, with a broad, muscular chest that strained proudly against his shirt front, and small bright eyes encased in a galaxy of wrinkles, Ewan nevertheless exuded a remarkably boyish enthusiasm. About his gray hair, they claimed, a frail, pale, almost invisible aura radiated; or so it seemed, in the confused excitement of his departure.

The Brood of Night.

It was a fear commonly shared by the Bellefleurs that great-uncle Hiram, afflicted as he was by a sleepwalking malady that admitted of no cure (from the age of eleven he had been subjected to every sort of treatment: strapped in his bed, forced to swallow pills, powders, and foul-tasting medicines, led through exhausting and humiliating exercises, pleaded with, "talked to," forced to undergo, at White Sulphur Springs, a vigorous regimen of hydropathy under the direction of the famous society physician Langdon Keene-his "bodily poisons" were flushed away by enemas, wet packs, long soaks in the odorous waters, submission to waterfalls and cascades and other forms of "exomosis," and all, alas, to no avail)-it was a fear certainly shared by Hiram himself-that he would one day succumb to a disastrous accident while groping about in his uncanny somnambulist's stupor: but in fact the unfortunate man was to die fully awake, in the daytime, of a curious but evidently quite serious infection that grew out of a minor, nearly imperceptible scratch on his upper lip. It seems to have been the case, so far as anyone could judge, that his death at the age of sixty-eight had nothing at all to do with his history of noctambulism.

But how strange, how bewildering, his mother Elvira said (for she had, over the tumultuous decades, worried more than anyone else about Hiram's affliction, which she saw to be a direct response to the child's shame at his father's financial blundering), how absurd, the elderly woman said, half-angrily, when they told her about his sudden death. "There's no logic to it, no necessity, he simply died of anything at all-" she laughed-"when we had worried ourselves sick over him for almost sixty years. . . . No, I don't like it. I don't like it. Sixty years of carrying on like an idiot during the night and undoing the sense he made during the day and then to die of an infection that might have happened to anyone. There's no necessity to it, there's something vulgar about it, I forbid you to tell me anything more!"

And though her elderly husband, known vaguely among the Bellefleurs as the "old-man-from-the-flood," and great-aunt Matilde (with whom the couple now lived, on the remote north shore of Lake Noir), grieved for her son's surprising death, great-grandmother Elvira remained tearless and resentful, and really would not allow anyone to bring up the subject of Hiram and the last week of his life.

"There's something hopelessly vulgar about accidental death," the old woman said.

EVEN AS A boy Hiram had been serious and hard-working, and he was, he suspected, often compared favorably with his shallow brothers Noel (who spent all his time with horses, as if mere animals could occupy the intelligent energies of an adult male) and Jean-Pierre (who, long before the fiasco at Innisfail, was a grave disappointment to the family); at the age of eleven he was already astute in business matters, and could not only discuss the various aspects of the Bellefleur holdings, including the troubling tenant farms, with the family's accountants, attorneys, and managers, but challenge these gentlemen when it seemed to him they were mistaken. It was, in a sense, in defiance of his obvious talent that he chose to study classics at Princeton, where he was, surprisingly, an only mediocre student; and no one ever quite understood why he left law school so abruptly, in the spring of his first year, in order to return to Bellefleur. As a boy he had lightly mocked his family and their eccentricities, and spoke as if he wanted nothing more than to dwell hundreds-perhaps thousands-of miles away, in a "center of civilization" remote from the Chautauquas; but living away from the manor for even a few months greatly distressed him, and the bouts of sleepwalking grew so frequent (he was once discovered by a night watchman crawling on all fours on the ice-encrusted roof of Witherspoon Hall, at Princeton, and again stumbling into the waters of Lake Carnegie; he was quite seriously injured when, at about eleven o'clock in the evening, he walked, clad in pajamas and bathrobe, directly into the path of a horse-drawn carriage on muddy Nassau Street)-and the daytime anxiety so acute-that the family speculated he might simply be homesick, despite his angry disavowals. (For all his life, up until the very eve of his death, great-uncle Hiram was infuriated by anyone's theories concerning him: his gray, intelligent, normally contemplative eyes narrowed, and his jowls quivered with rage, at the very suspicion that anyone, even a loved one, might be forming an opinion about him. "I am the only person qualified to know about myself," he said.) It had always been remarked, how peculiar Hiram's transformation was: for while during the day he was alert, quick-witted, and characteristically abrasive (a mere game of checkers, for instance, inspired him, even in the presence of children, to a pitiless intensity, and he was not a good-natured loser)-while during the day he missed nothing, handicapped though he was by his clouded right eye-as soon as he fell asleep he was entirely at the mercy of whims and muscular twitches and wisps of fey, cruel dreams, and often attempted, in his noctambulism, to destroy by shredding or fire the numerous papers, ledgers, journals, and leatherbound books he kept in his room. (It was one of the shameful secrets of the poor man's life, confided only to his brother Noel, and then after much agonizing, and a spirited vow by Noel that he would never, never tell anyone, that both his children-his son Esau who had lived only a few months, and his son Vernon-had been conceived, evidently, while he was asleep. Poor Eliza Perkins, his bride, the eldest daughter of a moderately wealthy spice importer in Manhattan, had had to endure not only her conscious husband's fumbling, awkward, embarrassed intercourse, which so often ended in sweaty failure, but her unconscious husband's intercourse as well-more successful from a physiological point of view, though no less dismaying in other respects. It was not known whether Eliza confided in anyone, or that she quite grasped the situation: she had been, at the time Hiram brought her to fabled Bellefleur Manor to live, an extremely innocent, even rather charmingly ignorant, girl of nineteen.) During the day great-uncle Hiram was always impeccably dressed, and carried his high, round little stomach with a rigid propriety. He contemplated with a grudging approval his balding skull, and his still-dark curly sideburns; he had always been pleased with his long, soft, "sensitive" fingers (to which he applied, every morning, an odorless cream lotion manufactured in France). His drawing-room manners were, as everyone attested, superb. When angered he spoke with an icy, cutting delicacy, and though his sleek pink skin flushed even more darkly, he never lost his temper. It would be common, it would be vulgar, he said, to show one's feelings in public; or even in certain rooms of the house.

He was one of the Bellefleurs who professed to "believe" in God, though the nature of Hiram's God was highly nubilous. A comically limited God, in many ways less powerful than man, and certainly less powerful than history: a God who might have been omnipotent at one time, at the dawn of creation, but who was now sadly worn out, a kind of invalid, easing toward His eventual extinction. (It seemed to Vernon, who believed, for a while, most passionately in God, that his difficult father had hit upon a belief calculated to offend both the God-fearing Bellefleurs and the God-deniers.) Nothing was more amusing, or more provoking, than to hear great-uncle Hiram interrupting his relatives' remarks with long, elegant monologues punctuated with Greek and Latin quotations, ranging over the entirety of religions and religious thought-now Augustine was ridiculed, now Moses, now the Gospels, now John Calvin, now Luther, now the entire Popish church, now the cow-worshipping Hindus, now the arrogant, confused, self-promoting Son of God Himself. At such times he spoke in fastidious sentences, even in paragraphs, with an air of detachment and irony, and even those who disagreed violently with him were forced to admire his wit.

But he worried, he brooded: for it sometimes seemed to him that his appearance, proper as it was, did not entirely suggest the distinguished, cerebral, highly contemplative person he knew he was. His wartime injury, resulting in the loss of much of the vision in his right eye, might have added to his air of distinction, he felt, if only he could find exactly the right pair of eyeglasses. . . .

Thus Hiram Bellefleur during the day.

But during the night: ah, how alarming the transformation!

Those who glimpsed him in his somnambulist's trance were appalled at his appearance. Hiram at night resembled only scantily the Hiram of the day: the muscles of his face were either slack and sagging, or screwed up into extraordinary twitching grimaces. His eyes rolled. Sometimes they remained closed (for, after all, he was asleep); sometimes they showed pale trembling crescents; sometimes they were wide open, their gaze unfocused. He stumbled and staggered and groped about, often as if he were about to wake up, and were orienting himself to his surroundings; but he never did wake up until he injured himself, or someone prevented him, in time, and shook him awake. (Though it was dangerous to do so. For the childish, impish Hiram, asleep, threw his arms about and kicked and even butted with his head, exactly like a two-year-old in a tantrum. And there were times when the shock of being awakened on the edge of a roof, or on the abutment of a bridge, or in a freezing rain, or, more recently, while attempting to hug to his breast the furious yowling Mahalaleel, so affected him that he was in danger of a heart attack.) The caprices of noctambulism! Dr. Langdon Keene himself, physician to the notorious Jay Gould (who suffered from a somewhat milder form of the disorder than poor Hiram), made a study of Hiram's body fluids, and forced the young man-he was seventeen at the time, and extremely prone to depression-to drink several quarts of water a day, even when he wasn't a patient at the White Sulphur Springs spa. But the sleepwalking did not cease: on the contrary, the demands of Hiram's bloated kidneys gave to his shrewd nighttime manuevering an especial grace (born perhaps out of desperation), so that he was able to slip by the servant who attended him, like a wraith, and descend the great circular stairs of the manor, his arms extended, one foot unerringly placed below the other, in absolute silence, and make his way out to the well some two hundred yards to the east of the house, where only the hysterical barking of the dogs prevented him from urinating over the fieldstone side of the well, and into the family's drinking water. Upon another occasion the young man-who professed a loathing of horses-made his way asleep into the stable, and attempted to climb on the back of an unbroken colt of Noel's, awaking only when the frantic young horse leapt about in the stall and struck at Hiram with his hooves. He might, one would think, have been grievously injured: but apart from a few bruises and a bloodied nose, and of course the trauma to his system caused by the abrupt awakening, he was unhurt. Dr. Keene thought that aspect of his young patient's noctambulism particularly interesting-for whether Hiram slipped and tumbled down a flight of stairs into the cellar, or waded out into the swamp in brackish snake-infested water that came to his knees, or walked unheeding through an octagonal stained-glass window, or fell some forty feet from the balcony of one of the Moorish minarets, or, as a young officer in the army, wandered toward the enemy's trenches in total obliviousness of the gunshots and fiery explosions on all sides of him, he was, relatively, time after time, unhurt. "He should have died many times by now," the physician said, rather tactlessly, while discussing Hiram's case with his parents. "In a sense, you might consider the remainder of his life a gift."

"Yes," said Elvira impatiently. "But he still must live it, you know-!"

(ONE OF THE most unsettling of Hiram's nocturnal adventures, which he was to tell no one about, not even Noel, took place three weeks after his young wife Eliza had disgraced herself by running away. Though as a precaution against sleepwalking he had not only strapped himself into bed, and rigged a system of bells attached to wires which would sound an alarm if he blundered into them, but had posted a reliable servant boy in the corridor outside his room as well, he nevertheless found himself-woke suddenly to find himself, confused and terrified-some twenty or more feet out onto the ice of Lake Noir. It was only mid-November; the ice was extremely thin; indeed, he could hear it cracking and sighing on all sides. Petrified with horror he dared not move, but looked about him like a madman, seeing only the cold glittering ice and the moon reflected haphazardly in it and, at a seemingly great distance, the dark shoreline. The castle itself was hidden in shadows. It took the distraught man a minute or two to absorb the circumstances of his situation, and its danger; he was so panicked that he did not even feel, clad in his woollen nightshirt, the idle ferocity of winds that blew from the mountains, sending the fairly mild temperature (it was about 32 degrees Fahrenheit) down some fifteen or twenty degrees. Sweat broke out through every pore of his body. As the ice cracked beneath his paralyzed feet he looked down, and saw, quite suddenly, a figure standing below the ice, exactly where he stood-a figure who was upside down, and whose feet were evidently pressed against his. Though at other times the waters of Lake Noir were disturbingly dark, and its ice near-opaque, as if heavy with minerals, on this occasion the ice appeared to be translucent, and Hiram could stare down to the very bottom of the lake some forty or more feet below. The presence of the shadowy figure-it was a man, he saw, a stranger-quite unnerved him, for what was he doing there?-how on earth had he come to be there, beneath the crust of ice, upside down, in the bleak silence of a November night? Sweating, trembling, Hiram dared not move, but stood with his bare feet pressed against the stranger's feet (and were they too bare?-he could not quite see), hearing the irritated cracking of the ice on all sides. The figure was motionless, as if paralyzed or frozen in place. And a few feet away another figure stood, upside down, shadowy as the first, unmoving. And there was another . . . somewhat smaller of stature, a child or a woman . . . and still another . . . and as Hiram's eyes adjusted to the gloom [here, even his clouded eye possessed a penetrating vision] he saw to his astonishment that there was a considerable crowd of reversed figures, some of them moving but most fixed in place, their feet against the thin crust of ice, their heads nearly lost in shadow. He wanted to cry aloud in terror: for who were they, these upside-down silent people, these doomed people, these strangers! Who on earth were they and why did they dwell in the Bellefleurs' private lake?) AND YET, IN the end, so far as anyone could discern, Hiram's death at the age of sixty-eight appeared to have nothing at all to do with his somnambulism.

He had returned from the factory town of Belleview, a two-mile stretch along the Alder River which the Bellefleurs owned, and had built up within the past several years, and, exhausted, his eyes and nostrils still smarting from the chemical stench (the paper mill was by far the most virulent-smelling of the factories, it really left him quite sick), his head reeling from the offensive sights he'd seen (for the mill workers' living quarters, whether in the barrackslike apartment buildings the Bellefleurs had erected, or in their own ramshackle wood-frame dwellings which marred nearly every hill and knoll, were really unfit for human habitation, and threw Hiram into a frenzy of doubt about the worth of human nature itself en masse), he lay down fully clothed except for his shoes atop his massive brass bed, and slipped into an uneasy vexing sleep that had to do with Leah's unreasonableness and the ferret-faced impudence of one of the mill managers and his sister Matilde who was so eccentric, up there on the north shore sewing her outlandish incomprehensible savage quilts, and his son Vernon who appeared, in this waking-dream, not altogether dead (which seemed to Hiram's way of thinking something of a betrayal of the family name) . . . and suddenly, suddenly, it must have been because of family concern, over the weeks, about Gideon's behavior, his monomania for flying (the willful young man-for to Hiram he would always be "young"-had bought still another airplane, at considerable expense, merely for his own private pleasure) . . . suddenly Hiram was seeing again, and hearing, the insolent engine of that sporty little seaplane, painted in camouflage spots, pontooned, with a single whirring propeller, as it taxied bouncing along the choppy surface of the lake, and rose into the air, shakily at first, and then with a rakish confidence, bearing Eliza Bellefleur away from the embrace of her lawful husband. . . .

No, no, no, Hiram muttered, grinding his teeth, trying to force himself awake, no, you don't, not again, not for a second time, leaving me to the humiliation . . . the shame . . . the loneliness night after night. . . . But he could not manage to wake up. It was about five-thirty in the afternoon, the sun shone vigorously through his latticed windows, down on the lawn the children were noisy and a dog was barking foolishly, yet he could not quite force himself awake; and suddenly his tearful bride was back in his bed, in his arms, and he was trying desperately to think of something-anything-to say to her, to explain himself, or to apologize, but her panicked odor disturbed him, her wet dark warm intimate odor, he could not think of a single word to say, not even in his own defense, it exasperated and maddened him that the woman wept so frequently, and turned herself from him in shame-in modesty-though of course he did somewhat despise her, for certain bodily weaknesses she could not control, and were, indeed, part of being female-as he surely understood-and did not truly blame her-except-if only they were downstairs in the drawing room or the Great Hall or at the dinner table, fully and formally clothed, with witnesses to hear and appreciate his remarks!-but, alas, they were, as it seemed they forever were, trapped in that bed that stank of panting futile exertion, and he could not think of a word, not a single saving word, to utter.

Then, abruptly, he woke.

He did awake. And lay there, in his vested suit, with his pocket watch ticking confidently away, his toes in calf-high black silk stockings twitching with exasperation. But the odor was still in the room with him. That wet dark warm furry intimate odor, with its slight scent of blood. Yes, blood. It was blood. How odd, how very odd, how disgustingly odd, the dream-stench was still in the room with him; it was, in fact, in his very bed.

"What-!"

He exclaimed angrily, having pulled back the covers to see an astonishing sight: one of the ginger cats lying on her side in the bed, four hairless, blind kittens nursing and mewing and kneading her belly with their tiny paws.

A mother cat had burrowed her way into his bed, to give birth to her kittens! And she had made a mess, a repulsive mess, damp bloodstains and bits of skin or flesh. . . .

"How dare you, how dare you," Hiram cried, shrinking away from the creature, until his back pressed hard against the headboard, and the entire bed shook with the intensity of his disgust.

THAT AFTERNOON, HE rang at once for a servant, and angrily ordered the woman to drive away the cat and her kittens, and to clean up the mess in his bed. And he stalked out of the room, fairly quivering with outrage. What could the fools who ran the household be thinking, to allow a mother cat to give birth to her kittens in his room, in his very bed! It was unspeakable.

He complained at great length to whoever would listen-Noel, Cornelia, Lily, even, later in the day, aunt Veronica; Leah had no time for him (she was vexed and rattled from a two-hour telephone conversation with their Vanderpoel broker), but instructed her manservant to take care of the situation. By which, she said sternly, looking Nightshade full in the face (for he was now as tall as she, though his posture was always craven in her presence), by which I do not mean you should put the kittens to death.

For they were so clearly Mahalaleel's kittens, they would grow up to be beautiful creatures: they must be allowed to live.

So Nightshade and two or three of the young visiting cousins set up a comfortable bed for the cat, in a corner of a supply-room adjacent to the kitchen. It was an ordinary cardboard box set on its side, with soft rags for the mother cat to lie on, and bowls of fresh water, milk, and chicken scraps nearby. Since the blind kittens were sensitive to light, the room would have to be kept fairly dark; and of course the mother cat's privacy would have to be respected. No one should peek in on her-at least not very often. Nor should the kittens (so darling!-tiny and near-hairless as baby rats) be handled since they were so extremely delicate.

The new bed was established, and though the mother cat-a pretty silky marmalade with striking white paws and a white mask in which her greenish eyes glowed-was hostile at first, and clearly disoriented, she seemed, after a few hours, to have adjusted.

And so Hiram quite naturally forgot about the incident. For he had so much to think about, so very much to think about, the negotiations for that final 1,500-acre block of land had hit a snag, and there might very well be a walk-out at Belleview, and a similar workers' uprising at Innisfail. . . . He was away on business for the weekend, and when he returned, hurriedly preceding the servant who carried his suitcase, he threw open the door of his room and was struck at once by the odor: an odor so intense, in a way so sly, that he was nauseated. His eyes fairly started from his head, he looked from side to side, resisting the impulse to gag, while the idiotic servant carried his suitcase into his dressing room as if nothing were amiss. The cat! Her smell hadn't been eradicated! Though he had expressly ordered the maids to clean the bed, even to change the mattress, and to air out the room thoroughly . . .

"That smell, Harold," he said.

The servant turned politely to him, raising his eyebrows. Quite clearly the fool was pretending not to notice. "Sir . . . ?"

"That smell. How can I be expected to remain in this room, how in God's name can I be expected to sleep in that bed, with this horrific smell. . . . I had asked the pack of you, as you must recall, to clean out my room."

"Sir?" the servant said, blinking slowly. His parchment-colored forehead crinkled into a row of perfunctory wrinkles, but his calm level mocking gaze remained unchanged.

Hiram, his heart thudding, made an exasperated gesture as if he wished to brush the fool out of the way; but he went instead to the bed, and flung back the covers.

And there-again-incredibly-there-the silky ginger cat lay on her side, sleepily licking one of the tiny kittens (who was mewing and paddling the air frantically) while the other three, their bluish-orangish-gray skin rippling with the intensity of their hunger, nursed at their mother's teats.

"This is-this is insufferable-" Hiram cried.

So great was the mother cat's audacity, she merely gazed at Hiram, and continued her rough washing as though nothing were amiss.

"I tell you, Harold," Hiram said, in a shrill voice, "this is insufferable."

He lunged for the cats-the mother cat hissed, and appeared to lunge at him-in a blind rage he snatched up one of the ratlike things, repulsive as it was with its swollen little belly that looked as if it might burst, and a dribble of watery excrement running down its hind legs-and threw it against the wall. Where it struck with a surprising cracklike noise, and fell, dead, to the floor.

"Get them out of here! Get them out of here! Every last one of them!" he shouted, clapping his hands, as the frightened servant stared. "And clean the bed! Change the mattress! At once! I command you! All of you! Under threat of dismissal! Change the mattress and clean the room and air everything out, at once, at once!"

SO, INDEED, HIS command was obeyed. A flurry of servants, both men and women, changed not only the mattress of his bed but the bed itself, having located, at grandmother Cornelia's instructions, a handsome bed with a brass headstand in one of the attic storerooms; they changed the carpet, and the heavy velvet draperies, and threw open all the windows so that a fine clean breeze aired the room completely out, and gave it an odor of sun-warmed grass, and the indefinable scent of the mountains. Now, said Cornelia in an undertone, surveying the servants' work with approval, that absurd old man should be satisfied.

And so, cautiously, he was.

"And has that disgusting creature been done away with?" he asked, "and those even more disgusting kittens?"

They assured him (not altogether truthfully: for the mother cat and her kittens had been moved to one of the barns, cardboard box, rags, bowls of food and all) that of course she had been done away with, and would never bother him again.

"It really is-was-insufferable," he muttered.

BUT THEN ONE afternoon, not three days later, Hiram returned to his room after a lengthy midday meal, and saw, as he approached his end of the corridor, something trotting along . . . something trotting along, head slightly lowered . . . cat-sized . . . and at the door to his room the thing nudged the door open (for evidently it had been left ajar) and slipped inside.

It can't be, he thought wildly. It cannot be.

They had killed the cat and her kittens according to his instructions, but surely that was the cat, once again, carrying a kitten (for he had caught a dim glimpse of something in her jaws) by the scruff of its neck. . . .

He began to shout. He ran into the room, and saw a hellish sight: the very same ginger cat with the white mask and white paws and greenish eyes, a squirming kitten in her teeth, just lowering the kitten to his bed. She had made a kind of nest for herself by burrowing beneath the covers, and had managed to pull back the heavy brocaded spread. What was most hellish was the fact that there were three kittens already nestled there, in addition to the one she was just bringing. All four were mewing piteously, and paddling the air with their tiny paws.

"This cannot be! I refuse to acknowledge it!" Hiram cried.

Even in his consternation he was clear-minded enough to realize that of course the household staff, and even his sister-in-law, had lied to him: humored him: as if he were a ridiculous old man. Which added considerably to his rage. And this time the ginger cat quite insolently confronted him, refusing to be driven away by his shouts and handclapping. Her pretty ears were laid back, her eyes narrowed, she crouched just in front of her brood to protect them, and hissed, and growled deep in her throat. And when the infuriated Hiram lunged toward her to seize her by the throat she slashed out, so quickly her movement was no more than a blur, and caught him with a single claw on his upper lip.

"How dare you- How dare you-" Hiram sobbed, scrambling away.

That claw, that single claw (it was in fact a dewclaw), was so remarkably sharp, far sharper and more treacherous than a needle, that Hiram was quite astonished; and the sight and taste of his own blood demoralized him (though there wasn't much blood, really-the scratch was a minor one.) "Oh, how dare you-all of you-how dare-how dare you-" the poor man wept.

THEY FOUND HIM, sobbing inconsolably. He was sitting in a corner of his darkened room, in a rocking chair, bent over, his eyeglasses fallen to the carpet. I'm going to die, he whispered. She has scratched me, she has drawn my blood, and infected me, I'm going to die, he said, grasping feebly at his brother's arm. Noel told him not to be a fool, why didn't they turn on some lights, for God's sake, what was this?-and when they lit the lamps they saw the ginger cat curled in Hiram's bed, the kittens sleeping beside her, perfectly content. The cat blinked drowsily at them but made no movement to escape.