The Uncanny Premonition Out of the Womb.

The Bellefleur curse, it was sometimes thought, had to do with gambling.

A Bellefleur is a man, certain detractors said, not altogether fairly, who cannot resist a bet-no matter what the circumstances are, or how unfortunate the consequences.

For instance, there was the time (in the early morning hours, after the festivities of Raoul's wedding party) when the men made bets on a race across the southern tip of Lake Noir, Olden Pond, and all of Silver Lake: a night cruise of more than forty miles, with three difficult carries, more than six miles of dangerous current-all to be doubled before dawn. The winning canoe would share a thousand dollars between them and all that remained of the champagne in the manor. And so they raced-Noel Bellefleur and Ethan Burnside, Ewan Bellefleur and Claude Fuhr, Gideon Bellefleur and Nicholas Fuhr, Harry Renaud and Floyd Jensen. Though it was mid-July the first lake was veiled with a bone-chilling fog. And the water lilies and rushes in Olden Pond were far more numerous, and thicker, than anyone remembered. And the stream plunging down into Silver Lake was so violent that two of the canoes-Ewan's, Harry's-overturned.

And so they raced, without the women's knowledge. Through the mist, along the old pathways nearly impassable with witchhobble, taking turns shouldering their canoes, keeping up a good-natured drunken banter. If their arms ached, if their knees threatened to buckle, if they were fairly delirious with exhaustion when they returned (Ewan and Claude won, by at least a quarter-mile; next came Noel's canoe; and then Gideon's; and last of all Harry's and Floyd's) of course they did not say. And for years afterward they would brag of the night's reckless race, though they tried, delicately, to make as little allusion to poor Raoul as possible; it became one of their tales-the summer night Ewan and Claude beat the others over to Silver Lake and back.

Then there was the time, many years ago, when the men grouped themselves into two parties, and took on two remote ponds in the Mount Chattaroy area, where deer came to feed in great numbers (as tame as sheep, they were, so that a canoe could come up to within yards of even the most skittish doe) and on the very stroke of noon of July 31 (the leaders of both parties made certain that their pocket watches were synchronized, so that the "stroke" of noon would not be anticipated by one or the other) the slaughter began. The men allowed themselves a mere hour to float, since they hadn't much need of venison, and in any case it would be too burdensome to tote both boats and baskets of meat out to the road from such remote ponds; whichever party killed the most deer was acclaimed the winner, and shared a considerable purse. (When there were wealthy hunters involved, friends of Raphael's or, at a later time, Noel's, the Bellefleurs naturally met and raised their bets; when the parties were comprised primarily of local landowners, the Bellefleurs courteously tempered their enthusiasm. One day long ago, when Gideon's grandfather Jeremiah was himself a boy of about seventeen, it was said that $10,000 changed hands, to be divided among six men, including Raphael, who had organized the sport though he hadn't much interest, so it was said, in hunting or deer or "sport" at all. . . . The number of slaughtered deer varied: in some versions it was eighteen, in others as high as forty. But since not even the bucks' heads were toted back it must have been difficult to estimate with any accuracy.) And there was the time, when Gideon was a boy of fifteen, and he and Nicholas and Ewan and Raoul were allowed to accompany their fathers to a horse race in Kincardine, and afterward, at an inn, the men gambled with the inn's proprietor and certain of his customers that they could distinguish not only the make of liquor served them in unidentified glasses, but its proof; they challenged the Kincardine men to a contest in which the blends were broken down, and the years given, and even (Noel was especially adroit at this, having practiced so assiduously) the place of origin. As soon as Noel Bellefleur sniffed his first drink, and sipped it, and set it down calmly on the bar and announced: "Ninety proof. Sixty-five point five percent rye at five years old, twenty-five percent bourbon at six years old, the rest some good sour spirits . . . most likely from Hennicutt County, Kentucky; yes, Hennicutt County, on account of their kegs being all center-cut maple, and impossible to miss-" why, the Kincardine men naturally wanted to withdraw their bets, but it was too late.

And there were times, many times, when a fair amount of money changed hands around poker tables, at all-night sessions. At Bellefleur Manor; at the White Sulphur Springs Inn which was, for a while, the most famous watering place in the mountains, and drew numerous Southern plantation owners and their families; at the rambling wood-frame Innisfail Lodge, before it caught fire and burned to the ground ("But it was, of course, heavily insured," men said simply, meaning no criticism of the Bellefleur owners); in private camps and homes. Poker, billiards, iceboat racing. For a while, glider-racing. (But a disastrous accident, resulting in the deaths of two young men, one of them a cousin-twice-removed of Noel's, put an end to these contests.) Money changed hands with great alacrity and excitement. Money, and occasionally horses, and even land. If the women knew (and all the women disapproved, some of them-like Cornelia and Della-most angrily) they said very little; for what was to be done . . . ? The Bellefleur men were rich, they had a passion for gambling, they were famous in the mountains for their reckless, inventive challenges, and for their courtesy and grace in defeat (which was infrequent enough: for they were amazingly lucky), what was to be done to prevent them from their play . . . ? After all, they controlled the fortune.

Horse racing was far more public, of course. Most of the betting was public. Men rode their own horses, they were acquainted with nearly everyone involved, the races (at the Powhatassie fairgrounds, at the Derby track, across the state in Port Oriskany where competition was most severe) were events of great local significance; and so it would have been thought rather eccentric if an owner did not naturally bet on himself. The women still disapproved, but less vehemently. Upon occasion they even allowed themselves to be caught up in the fever of the races: for betting on horses wasn't an idle pastime, like betting on the April morning when ice-locked Lake Noir would finally crack, or betting on who might wrestle whom to the dirty floor of a riverside tavern, or who could shoot a shot glass off the head of a retarded boy who worked for some tavern keeper-it had to do with an owner's pride in his horse and in his own performance. It had to do with pride in one's blood, in one's name.

GIDEON WAS ASTOUNDED by his wife's suggestion.

"But why now?" he said.

Leah gazed at him thoughtfully, her eyes half-closed. She was sitting in an oblong of sunshine, near the old sundial at the very center of the garden. Though she was no longer quite as beautiful as she had been-it was mid-July, the baby was due at any time, her eyes were ringed with fatigue and her skin had lost its superb glowing health, and she wasn't able to carry the extraordinary weight of the unborn child with nearly as much style as previously-she had had Garnet Hecht help her fashion her hair in the heavily ornate manner in which she'd worn it as a bride (copied from an inept but charming portrait of Raphael Bellefleur's beautiful young English wife Violet: the back hair arranged in a glossy chignon, two distinct bands of hair tied tightly with a velvet ribbon, its ends hanging down loose; a narrow braid over the crown of the head; and, in addition to that, wavy bangs brushed low over her strong, intelligent, somewhat crinkled forehead) and she was wearing a white crocheted shawl over a gown of coarse, knobby material, ochre mixed with green, which Gideon had never seen before. As a consequence of a disagreement that had taken place between them several days ago-Gideon had not liked Leah's retort to an innocent-seeming question of his mother's about the condition of Bromwell's health-Gideon faced his wife with his hands self-consciously on his hips, his knees slightly bent in horsey fashion, his eyes narrowed.

"Because . . ." Leah said slowly. "Because . . ."

Her darkened, hollowed eyes gave to her tired face something of the glimmer of a death's-head: but she had looked, in the last weeks of her pregnancy with the twins, very much like this, and Gideon steadfastly refused to become alarmed. His manner was guarded, his jaw rigid. He had not broken down during their quarrel, he had not burst into helpless, enraged tears, wanting both to pummel the woman and to embrace her, and so the crisis seemed to him past, and he would not succumb. He preferred today's slow, dreamy, drawling voice to her usual nervous, strident voice, though it seemed to him extraordinarily arrogant of her to have sent poor frightened Garnet Hecht (all elbows and skinny legs and flyaway hair, her pretty face distorted when she merely gazed upon Gideon, with whom, as Leah so mockingly said, even in Garnet's presence, she was piteously in love) to summon him into the garden to speak with her-as if she were royalty, and he one of her subjects. She sat on a cushion on one of Raphael's thronelike granite chairs, beside the rusted, useless sundial (which, shadowless, gave no time), both arms resting lightly on the mound in her lap, which always seemed about to move, to shift its position, her pale swollen legs clumsily outstretched, her swollen feet in brocade slippers Cornelia herself had made for her; she sat there, immobile, imperious, monumental in her very weight, gazing at her husband with her head tilted back, so that her eyes were hooded and she seemed to be peering at him from a distance. A month-old kitten, gray-and-white-striped, hardly more than a potbellied ball of fluff with big ears and a pert erect tail, played with the hem of her skirt and had even begun to tear the material; but Leah did not notice.

Gideon waited. His knees were really trembling, slightly; imperceptibly; he had come close to breaking down several days ago, he had wanted very badly to bury himself in her, sobbing, demanding-demanding that she return to him, as she'd been: his fierce virginal bride whose very soul, like her lean, hard, skittish body, had been tightly closed against him so that he had had to conquer it, and conquer it, and again conquer it; and she had dissolved into tears of love for him; for him. But now . . . Now the woman was so wonderfully, so arrogantly, pregnant, what need had she for him?-what need had she for a husband? Other people only distracted her from her ceaseless brooding, her obsessive concern with her body and its urges and sensations. Months ago Leah had confessed to Gideon, in a puzzled voice, groping for the correct words, that nothing was so real to her now as certain flashes of sensation-tastes, colors, even odors, vague impulses and premonitions-which she interpreted as the baby's continuous dreaming, deep in her body. (Our son, Leah said, our son's dreaming that pulls me down into it, the way an undertow might pull you down into the lake even when the surface of the water appears to be calm. . . . ) "Because," Leah said, the skin about her eyes crinkling, "it seems to me necessary."

She had summoned him to her, when she knew-she must have known-that he and Hiram were leaving that morning for New York; she had summoned him to her to suggest that he place a number of bets, with different parties, on himself and his stallion, for next Sunday's race at Powhatassie.

"Necessary?"

"I can't explain."

They had not made love for many months. Only dimly, sadly, could Gideon remember: but then it was wisest not to remember. She had expelled him from her bed out of a nervous, and certainly premature caution. (Dr. Jensen himself had assured Gideon that lovemaking, at least of a gentle sort, would not be at all injurious to the unborn child, up until the very last month or two. But that had been before the child had grown to so prodigious a size.) Even as an adult, as the father of children, Gideon could not quite determine how a man might deal with a woman whom he could not make love to, and consequently disarm; for it seemed to him that a woman, even a relatively plain, unassertive woman, had all the advantage . . . all the power. He could not have said what this power was, where it presides, how precisely it might touch a man, but he knew its sinister strength.

"You've never taken much interest in my horses before," Gideon said stiffly. "You've always disapproved, like your insufferable mother, of such things as gambling. And now you seem to be giving me permission . . ."

Leah glanced down at the kitten, which had begun to attack her ankle; with an effort, fairly grunting, she stooped over to seize it by the scruff of its neck. In midair the tiny creature kicked and bleated. Gideon, staring at the kitten, at his wife, struck by her magnificent russet hair, which gleamed in the intense sunshine, was rocked with an emotion he could not comprehend. He loved her, he was helpless in the face of his love for her, yet this emotion seemed to encompass and swallow up even love. Like other Bellefleur men before him, like Jean-Pierre himself many decades before, Gideon looked upon a face so incontestably not his own, so distant from anything he might have dreamt, that he experienced it simply as fate.

"You don't love me," he whispered.

Leah did not hear. She dropped the kitten from a height of twelve inches or so and it immediately lay down and rolled over, showing its rounded, palely fuzzy stomach. It kicked frantically, pawing the air, though Leah's hand was safely out of reach. ". . . before I was even born," Leah said. "Your side of the family. Your father most of all. Don't deny it."

She was alluding to her own father's death, one Christmas Eve many years ago. He had been killed in a tobogganing accident-it had been an accident-on one of the treacherous hills north of Mink Creek. Gideon made a gesture of impatience. They had discussed this incident many times and had come to the conclusion, which Gideon hadn't at all forced, that Leah's mother had imagined it all-a conspiracy against her young husband, a deliberate capsizing of the toboggan, Stanton Pym thrown against a tree and killed outright.

". . . that night, don't deny it. And the bets were collected," Leah said. "At the very funeral they were collected."

"I really doubt that," Gideon said, his face burning.

"Ask my mother. Ask your own mother."

"None of this has anything to do with me," Gideon said. "I was a child of three or four at the time."

"There was a great deal of betting on the toboggan race and perhaps on other matters too, that night," Leah said. "And the bets were collected, at my father's funeral."

"You speak with such authority, but you really don't know," Gideon said uneasily. "You have only your mother's word. . . ."

"Your side of the family has always gambled. It's in your blood, it's part of your fate. And so . . . And so it occurred to me, the other night, that the Powhatassie race might be an important event in our lives."

"Did it!" Gideon said. But his mockery was so light, so diffident, that Leah did not detect it. "It occurred to you the other night . . . ?"

"What time is it?" Leah said, frowning. She turned stoutly to look at the sundial but it showed only a sliver of a shadow, a very pale gray. "I don't have my watch. . . . You and Hiram are leaving now, aren't you?"

"Why did this suddenly occur to you, after so many years?" Gideon said. He was still standing some yards from her; he had not come closer; quite deliberately he was keeping his distance. He could well imagine the fragrance of her gleaming red hair, and her body's close secret sweetness. "You've always disapproved," he murmured. "In fact you begged me not to race, when we were first married. . . . You were afraid I might be injured."

"I've talked with Hiram," Leah said. "You should be leaving now."

Gideon did not hear. He said, in the same low voice, "You were afraid I might be injured . . . ?"

Leah's gaze shifted. For a brief moment she said nothing.

"Ah, but you weren't hurt, were you! All those years. . . . And before we were married. . . . The ice-racing, the diving, the swimming, canoeing at night, wrestling, boxing, all the dangerous things . . . the ridiculous things. . . . Things young men do. . . . You weren't hurt," she said faintly. "And you won't be."

"And I thought you and Della disapproved of the betting too. The principle of betting. Isn't it dishonest, isn't it sinful . . ."

"I don't believe in sin," Leah said curtly.

"I thought you were so fiercely moral, about dishonesty."

"About telling lies. About being mean, and narrow-minded, and selfish. As for gambling-it isn't very different from ordinary business investing, as Uncle Hiram has explained. I don't think I quite understood before."

"But now you understand."

"I . . . I . . . I understand many things," she said slowly.

The oblong patch of sunshine had grown wider, and more intense. Gideon stared, squinting at Leah. There was something she had said that disturbed him, but he could not grasp what it was; the very sight of her, the groping and yet magisterial tone of her voice, had begun to mesmerize him. ". . . many things?" he said.

"His dreams. His plans for us," she whispered.

"His . . . ?"

She crossed her fleshy arms over her belly, protectively, rocking slightly forward.

"You must leave. You'll be late for the train," she said. "Come here, kiss me goodbye, you haven't kissed me for so long. . . ."

In that moment her mood changed. And Gideon was unlocked. And came to her, dropping on one knee, his arms encircling her, rather roughly, his lips pressed against hers, at first timidly, then greedily, as he felt her strong arms close about him. Ah, how lovely it was to kiss her! Simply to kiss her! Her wide fleshy lips seemed to sting, her darting tongue made him dizzy, the weight of her body, the impulsive tightening of her arms, nearly caused him to lose his balance and topple into her lap. She was so large, so magnificent. She could draw him into her, and swallow him up, and he would shut his eyes forever, in bliss, in surrender.

After all, Gideon thought brokenly, I am the father. I am the father.

Horses.

It was on a nameless chestnut gelding of no great beauty or grace, but with a normally tractable disposition, short-headed, blunt-nosed, with a single white stocking on his left forefoot-won at cards with British officers not three weeks before the Golden Hill riot in January-that Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, looking, with his smart three-cornered hat of black velvet, and his costly new leather boots, somewhat older than his twenty-six years, first saw Sarah Ann Chatham: at that time a girl of no more than eleven or twelve, small-featured, snub-nosed, with a lightly freckled oval face of disquieting beauty, and pale golden silky hair, and a bearing that was at once childlike and imperious; and . . . and even before the girl laughed and pointed at him (his mount, alarmed by an approaching stagecoach, was rising on his hind legs and whinnying piteously, and Jean-Pierre began to shout in French), showing her babyish teeth, pulling free of the hefty red-faced Englishwoman beside her (a nursemaid, a governess?-she was too ugly to be a relative)-even before Jean-Pierre, sitting in the cold brownish-yellow muck, had the opportunity to stare fully at her, he had fallen in love. . . . For the rest of his life he would recall not only the incredible shock of the cold, the muck, the graceless fall itself, and not only the beautiful, elated child's cry in the instant before the servant hurried her along (for she had responded to Jean-Pierre's accident as if it were an antic meant only to amuse, and only to amuse her), but the queer indecipherable joy of the moment-a joy that arose out of an absolute certainty-a sense that his fate was now complete, his life itself complete, laid out invisibly before him but laid out nevertheless, and awaiting his acknowledgment. He was in love. Pitched to the street, the object of amused derision (for others, too, were laughing openly: that he was so clearly French was naturally part of the joke), his dandyish clothes ruined; he was in love. All that, as a boy, he had been told and read of the New World-that native Indians of astonishing classical proportions lived here, and went nude even in winter, in forests of prodigious beauty and beside streams visibly crowded with salmon and trout (one had only to dip a hand-net in the water to capture them); that there were undefined, unimaginable monsters, some as tall as fifteen feet, that lived freely in the mountains, and made sporadic raids on the settlements, carrying off even adult men as prey; that there were, in certain areas, diamonds and rubies and sapphires and great blocks of jade in the soil, and silver and gold deposits of a lushness never seen before on earth; that there were fortunes to be made in a six-months' space of time, and never any regrets-all these marvels paled beside the snub-nosed impetuousness of a girl he did not even know, at this time, was the youngest daughter of an ailing customs commissioner in New York, an officer of the Crown who, within the year, would evacuate his family home to England, and leave Jean-Pierre bereft forever.

(Of course there were other horses. Innumerable horses. Even an albino-of nearly as high a quality as Gideon's famous Jupiter, decades later, with the same pinkish skin and white hooves, fifteen hands two inches in height, thirty-two inches from girth to ground, a dazzling snow-white horse that, seen, could not always be believed; even the matched Andalusians his malicious son Harlan was to steal from him one windy night. In the period of prosperity that came before, and led into, his catastrophic term in Washington as a congressman, Jean-Pierre began a rhapsodic memoir of his experiences with horses, The Art of the Equestrian, which, though never completed, was to appear in serial form in the small upstate newspaper he would acquire in the early 1800's. There were other horses, many horses, just as there would be many women-a flood of women, in fact: but it was the nameless chestnut gelding he would recall, with ferocity and love: his first mount of the New World, the earliest of his innumerable prizes!) Pepper, the young black gelding who threw Jedediah, and then stumbled backward over the screaming child, snapping his leg just below the knee, was another "good-natured" horse. After the accident Jedediah's mother insisted that he be sold, or given away; but Jean-Pierre refused. It was hardly the horse's fault, he said, that some contemptible fool in blood-stinking overalls and boots came too close . . . and it was hardly the horse's fault that his boy hadn't enough sense to grab onto a saddle horn. When, after the bone was set, and after, slowly, it mended, Jedediah still limped, it was often the case that his father asked him impatiently what was wrong. "Are you trying to reproach me?" he said. "You can walk correctly if you try." Eventually the horse was sold when Jean-Pierre needed money quickly, and most of his property was tied up in complicated legal arrangements. But he was to remain in Jedediah's imagination, in the dimmest, least fathomable region of his mind's eye, for the rest of his life: a gigantic whinnying creature, utterly black, both wraithlike and portentous as stone, rising on his hind legs, careening backward, bringing down the incredible irrevocable fact of his weight on a child's bare knee. In the delirium brought about by his solitude Jedediah would wake speechless from dream-visions in which the horse appeared-not as Pepper, not as one of his father's horses, not even as a horse, but as an aspect of God Himself.

Then there was an ugly scrappy creature of uneasily mixed blood-Arabian, Belgian, saddle horse-Louis's stallion Bonaparte, later called Old Bones. He was named not for the megalomaniac emperor but for his older brother Joseph who, traveling incognito as the mellifluous Count de Survilliers, acquired through Jean-Pierre's Compagnie de New York some 160,260 acres of uninhabitable and unfarmable wilderness land under the mistaken impression that, as part of New France, it would prove a reasonable and even idyllic retreat for the defeated emperor himself, once he escaped Saint Helena. (Unfortunately, Napoleon was closely guarded on Saint Helena and his escape was never a possibility. And the 160,260 acres were uninhabitable, despite Jean-Pierre Bellefleur's hearty enthusiasm, and his dreams of roads, railroads, and even canals to come.) The elder Bonaparte was wall-eyed, and so was Louis's stallion. But while the horse was, even in his prime, graceless and temperamental, he was also resilient, shrewd, and courageous, and as stubborn as his master. Perhaps to antagonize his father Louis liked to say that he wasn't a horseman-wasn't an equestrian-and ridiculed the cult of breeding Thoroughbreds. He had read in a newspaper that in the long run, over a period of many years and many races, Thoroughbreds did not make all that much profit for their owners.

It was the roan stallion Bonaparte Louis was riding that April afternoon in 1822 when he pursued the noisy hooting mob out of the settlement on the south shore of Lake Noir (not to be called Bellefleur for some years)-the mob, the laughing, frightened justice of the peace, and the doomed Indian boy himself (tied by a length of barbed wire to the saddle horn of a man named Rabin, an old Indian trader, and forced to run alongside Rabin's horse). Louis shouted to the men that they might have the wrong person, they'd better let the boy stand trial, they'd better call in the sheriff and have an investigation-and one of the Varrells, a man Louis's own age and approximate size, but with sharply slanted cheek-bones and dead-black straight hair, reached over, swaying drunk in his saddle, and struck Bonaparte's neck with his fist. He shouted at Louis to get the hell home. The stallion whinnied in alarm and danced away, his great eyes rolling, but he did not rear back; and Louis, though astonished that anyone would have the audacity to strike out at him, was nevertheless clear-headed enough to do nothing more than settle his horse, and to resist returning the blow while he and Varrell were both on horseback. For he wanted, after all, to save the boy's life. . . .

It was on a smooth-gaited, high-headed Costena mare that Harlan Bellefleur appeared after years of absence, come home to revenge his family's massacre: townspeople in Nautauga Falls eyed the remarkable horse, with its arched, muscular neck, its abundant gray mane, its dancelike gait-and most of all its handsomely attired rider, who wore lemon-yellow gloves and a floppy-brimmed hat of soft black wool-and murmured that they had never seen anything quite like it; it was something "foreign." (Indeed the horse was Peruvian, sleek, dun colored, with bright, large, expressive eyes set wide in its head, and small ears, and a muzzle that was almost delicate. Harlan himself by this time looked more Spanish than French, and it was only when he leaned from his saddle to inquire courteously about directions to Lake Noir-or did he ask, bluntly, as some witnesses claimed, where he might find the Varrells?-that he seemed, by way of his somewhat nasal inflections, a native of the region: in fact, a Bellefleur. After his death the mare was confiscated by local authorities and disappeared only to turn up, a few months later, in the Tennessee stable of the notorious Reverend Hardy M. Cryer, soon to be Andrew Jackson's "turf adviser.") Raphael Bellefleur professed to admire horses, and indeed he owned several fine Thoroughbreds, and nodded sagely in the company of his many horse-minded associates; but in fact he could barely tell one horse from another, an Arabian from a Morgan, a Standardbred from a Percheron. All that raw, blunt physicality paralyzed his imagination; he liked to think in terms of dollars, tons multiplied by dollars divided by costs. Before politics became a disorder of the nerves for him, and he felt some interest in, if not actual affection for, his magnificent estate, he was often seen in an elegant English two-seater, riding about the graveled lanes, always impeccably dressed despite the reddish dust that arose in capricious clouds, and the pitiless summer sun (which, even in the mountains, could turn the fine thin air to a quivering 105 degrees on windless afternoons). His horses were all English Thoroughbreds, for it was quite true, as the rumor went, that Raphael Bellefleur scorned the French, and professed not to understand a word of his grandfather's tongue; hadn't he, for instance, sailed to London to acquire an anemic pigeon-breasted English girl by the name of Violet Odlin, and wasn't he attempting to furnish his improbable castle in the style in which he imagined English country squires furnished their castles? His chief groom bragged in town that one of their stallions was descended from Bull Rock himself-Bull Rock being, as horse lovers knew, the first English Thoroughbred import, brought to the Virginia colony in 1730; and even Raphael's lesser horses were prizes. But he hadn't any time for racing, or shows; and all forms of hunting repulsed him; so the stallions were exercised mainly by the stablehands, and after his death, when the Bellefleur fortune declined sharply, and poor Lamentations of Jeremiah took over the estate, what remained of the horses were sold off one by one. . . .

During her first years in America, when she was still a reasonably young bride, before her ten pregnancies overtook her, and something very like the black mood of the Bellefleurs poisoned her system, Violet herself was frequently seen in the two-seater, or in her husband's ebonized, gilt-trimmed coach, driven by a liveried black man in a scarlet and gold fez, not a slave, but a freed man originally from the Ivory Coast, lithe and graceful even with a whip, and possessed of a "magical" way with horses. He drove Bellefleur's wife to visit friends, other men's wives, in mock castles and baronial mansions in the Valley (for these were the days, in the 1850's and '60's, of heady prosperity in certain areas of the North), and observers were struck by the aristocratic beauty of the matched Thoroughbreds-their fastidiously groomed coats a very dark brown, gleaming with fragrant imported oils, their manes brushed and, upon occasion, braided-and, carried along by the strength of their superb legs, the wan, washed-out, halfway apologetic, halfway cringing beauty of the woman in the carriage with the heraldic embossed Bellefleur insignia on its doors: "There is Lady Violet," the more reverent murmured, possibly knowing that Violet Odlin was nothing more than Mrs. Raphael Bellefleur, but sensing her husband's heroic pretensions-her husband's, not her own. For Violet, the brim of an enormous veiled and beflowered hat usually slanted across her fine-boned face, had very few pretensions. And in the end she had none at all.

The Bellefleurs' oldest son Samuel-who was to say shortly before his tragic disappearance, though the remark has been attributed, over the years, to various members of the family-Time is clocks, not a clock: you can't do more than try to contain it, like carrying water in a sieve-was given, for his twentieth birthday, one of his father's finest English Thoroughbreds, a deep-chested, rather angular, leggy bay named Herod. Young Samuel, his father's pride, was an officer in the Chautauqua Light Guard, and his Bellefleur handsomeness-the strong chin, the bone-straight nose, the deep-set eyes-was shown to great advantage in the Guard's dress uniform (which, as represented even in fading, coppery-pale daguerreotypes that could not do justice to its heroic colors-the towering ermine hat, the smart white jacket, the green trousers with their dazzling white stripe, the skin-tight white gloves, the scarlet ornamentation about the sword's deep sheath-was to strike later generations of irreverent, unsentimental Bellefleur children as merely ludicrous), and mounted on stately Herod he looked, it must be said, the quintessence of New World aristocracy; who could fail to comprehend, and even to sympathize with, his father's deep pride in him . . . ? Samuel Bellefleur was the envy of his fellow officers, and even of his superiors. (Ah, his fellow officers! All of them were, like Samuel, the sons of well-to-do landowners; they and the male members of their families were enchanted with fine-bred horses, military processions, ceremonial occasions, sabers, muskets, the latest in weaponry and military strategy, and the need to rebuke, to punish, in fact to bring to its knees, the traitorous Confederacy. They were also powerfully moved by military music: "The Star-Spangled Banner," "Buchanan's Union Grand March," "The Tars from Tripoly," "Brother Soldiers All Hail!" brought quick tears to their eyes, and caused their hearts to swell with the instinct, the almost physical need, to march into battle. They would all, with the exception of Samuel Bellefleur, ride off to war in 1861, and while not each was to be killed in action not one escaped grievous suffering; nor did their handsome steeds survive more than a few months.) Felix (later renamed by his possibly deranged father Lamentations of Jeremiah) loved, as a boy, his pony Barbary, a Shetland with large expressive gray eyes, a marvelous gray-and-white dappled coat, and long thick hair that, brushed hard, seemed to give out galaxies of light from within; as a child of five or six he was to be seen carried about the Bellefleur estate, on the newly laid pinkish seashell-and-gravel drives, in a pony cart originally made (so the rumor went, and it sprang from Raphael's neighbors) for a Prussian prince. Sometimes his driver was the aloof Ivory Coast black in his fez and braided jacket, sometimes a mere local boy, the son of a hop-field foreman who, dressed uncomfortably in black, and carrying a lightweight whip more suitable for a woman's hand, sat stiffly erect and refused to speak to his shy, hopeful little charge, who had no friends, and not even any brothers, really, since Samuel, years older, paid no attention to him, and Rodman, his senior by two years, chose to assert his precarious authority by bullying Felix. The hop-field foreman's son was driving the elegant little canopied cart on that August morning when the kidnapping took place, and when-after the boy was found in a ditch, his skull crushed-it became clear that he had disobeyed Raphael Bellefleur's instructions and driven out toward the river, where Raphael's growing paranoia told him, correctly as it turned out, thieves and kidnappers did await (for the history of the Valley aristocrats was not a placid one: forbidden to hunt and fish on territory that had once seemed quite clearly their own, or no one's, accused of poaching and trespassing if they strayed off their own small farms, Chautauquans began to exact revenge in small sinister ways, by starting fires, destroying dams, poisoning cattle, and in large flamboyant ways, by picking off their wealthy neighbors as they were driven here and there in their custom-made carriages-the marksmanship of the Chautauquans being legendary), after it was obvious that the boy had brought not only his own misfortune on himself, but the greater misfortune of the kidnapping of Felix Bellefleur, Raphael said before witnesses: "If the little beast had been alive when they found him, I would have kicked in his miserable skull. . . ." Felix was to turn up, unharmed, some three weeks later, in New Orleans; by then he had already begun to affect a shy, gentle Southern drawl. He could give no account of his kidnapper or kidnappers, and it was possibly his placid indifference to his father's three weeks of grief, rather than the fact of the kidnapping itself, that led Raphael to rename and even rebaptize him Lamentations of Jeremiah. But what of Barbary, the child clamored. Where is Barbary . . . ? The docile little Shetland was never to be found, though the pony cart, overturned, had been almost immediately discovered in a nearby stand of pines. "Where is Barbary? What did you do with Barbary? I want Barbary!" the child wept, turning away not only from his father but from his distraught mother as well.

Of Jeremiah's eventual offspring, of his three surviving sons, only the energetic, restless Noel took to horses, and bragged of himself, in later years especially, as a fool about a good horse: if the management of the estate hadn't taken up so much of his time (for his father, even in his fifties, became increasingly negligent and half-minded) Noel would certainly have traveled about the country, and even to Mexico and South America, searching out horses to add to the Bellefleur stables. He would have bred real racing horses-would have hired professional jockeys-would have bought into tracks like Havre de Grace and Bennings and Belmont Park itself. His brother Hiram, educated in the classics at Princeton, and as a young adult wonderfully obsessed with "the world," as he put it, of finance, had no interest in horses whatsoever-hadn't even any awareness of their comeliness, or their ineffable scent, or their magical presence (which so comforted, during difficult times, both Noel and his son Gideon-more than once father and son discovered, faintly embarrassed, that the other had also made his way into the darkened stable, simply to stand with his arm around a horse's obliging neck, his cheek pressed against a horse's dry, scratchy mane that smelled of marvels: sun, heat, open fields, open roads along which one might gallop forever, raising clouds of dust behind him.) As for Noel's older brother Jean-Pierre II-he had professed, for a time, the interest in handsome horses customary to young gentlemen of his class, but he was a poor rider, he never cared to groom his own horses, he used the riding crop ineptly, and was, as a young boy, always being thrown, or brushed off by low-hanging tree branches toward which his malicious mounts would race; he had given up horses by the time he was thirty. (Which was, at his trial for first-degree murder, the defense's strongest point. For the only witness to the escape of the murderer claimed that Jean-Pierre had ridden off on a dark horse with three white stockings and a close-cropped mane and tail-a horse that was, indeed, in the Bellefleur stable-unless of course the witness had deliberately lied-unless the entire trial, perhaps even the murder of the eleven men (among whom only two were Varrells, and those with local reputations that were for the most part insignificant) had been contrived merely to hound, to embarrass, to shame, to humiliate, and to destroy the Bellefleur family. The witness was the saloonkeeper's garrulous, mean-spirited wife, who had for some reason Jean-Pierre could not explain taken a violent dislike to him from the first; and naturally in the confusion of that night, the interruption of the card games, the overturned tables and chairs, the shouts that lifted to screams and then to shrieks, the very indescribable reality of that tragic night at Innisfail-naturally she had fixed her mind on Jean-Pierre as the murderer, and the defense's attorney, excellent though he was, superbly gifted in the art of cross-examination and of addressing both the jury and the judge with an air of intelligent complicity that could not fail, given his elegance, to flatter, was simply unable to dislodge her from her "story." The murderer was Jean-Pierre Bellefleur and he had ridden off on a horse with three white stockings and a close-cropped mane and tail, a black horse, or a very dark brown horse; and he had ridden, the wretched old woman claimed defiantly, as skillfully as anyone she'd ever seen: like the very devil himself.) Germaine's mother Leah, then Leah Pym, loved horses as a girl, and would have raced her sprightly, spirited sorrel mare in fairground competitions with both boys and girls, had she been allowed; but of course girls were barred from such competitions. They might race with one another, but their victories hardly mattered, and drew little interest. For a while at La Tour, bewitched perhaps by the predilections of other, wealthier girls, Leah took part in stately shows, demonstrating her mastery of her horse, and her horse's reluctant mastery of certain difficult, dancelike maneuvers. Fetlocks clipped, her smooth-gleaming hide only a degree or two lighter than Leah's thick russet hair, every part of her washed by Leah herself, and brushed with a dandy brush, and polished (with a linen cloth!) until she shone, her mane clipped and braided with red ribbons that fluttered fetchingly in the breeze and mimicked the graceful undulations of the ends of the green velvet ribbon that hung down from Leah's chignon, the supple little mare executed all the proper responses to the commandments given her-"Go Large," "Circle," "Volte," "Half Volte and Change," "Half Pass"-and performed with precision, if not always enthusiasm, rather like Leah herself. The mare's name, Leah was to remember, years later, when, sated with adulthood and wealth and the ceaseless maneuvers these demanded, and nostalgic with longing for a girlhood she had in fact detested (ah, Della's decades of mourning, her dry droll humorless remarks about men, about Bellefleur men especially!-her pretense of impoverishment when, as everyone knew, her brother Noel gave them all the money they needed, and not only paid Leah's exorbitant tuition at La Tour (where he had not sent his own daughter Aveline, saying-quite correctly-that she simply wasn't intelligent enough for the school), and her show-horse expenses, but refrained, as a gentleman, from saying anything at all when Leah abruptly quit one morning, in the middle of a French grammar quiz, and returned to Bushkill's Ferry with a single piece of luggage . . . ) was Angel.

Gideon's stallion Jupiter was famous throughout the state. An albino bred to race!-to carry a man of Gideon's size easily and gracefully! Jupiter was a remarkably tall horse, some eighteen hands, and his coat was ivory rather than white, and his smooth-rippling mane and tail were so striking, and his head, his eyes, his ears, his profile were so uncannily beautiful-he had to be seen, people claimed, to be believed. A graceful giant of a horse. Spirited, obviously very strong, possibly even headstrong (for Gideon had to use his knees to control his mount, who was always shivering and shuddering, and yearning to leap forward, to run free with or without his master on his back), possibly even dangerous. (It was rumored, falsely, that Jupiter had killed his previous owner. Or a stablehand at the Bellefleurs'. Or had tried to kill Gideon himself.) When Gideon first appeared at local competitions with his albino stallion a murmur always arose from the crowd at the very sight of him. Young Gideon Bellefleur with his thick, brushlike dark hair and his dark beard, his prominent cheekbones, his strong nose, his skin that was always tanned, but a warm, honeyish tan, not at all swarthy or Indian-burnt; not at all coarse. Young Gideon Bellefleur who was so handsome, so aloof and yet courteous, and remarkably graceful for a man of his size and build: and was it true, people asked, that the Bellefleurs were still millionaires?-or was it true that they were nearly penniless, and had mortgaged the castle twice over, and would soon be forced to declare bankruptcy? They stared hard at Gideon, and felt both envy and resentment of that envy, and yet a curious wild affection as well, for he was-he and Jupiter and the pride they so blatantly took in each other-somehow more real, more wonderfully, incontestably real than the other men and their mounts. Even had he lost-and he did not, of course, lose-they would have stared at him with the same fixed, fascinated gaze, something in them calling out to him, yearning for a glance of recognition from him, from the haughty Bellefleur in him, which of course he would never give-was quite incapable of giving. Gideon Bellefleur. And his legendary albino, Jupiter. . . .

Nevertheless, Gideon was to sell the stallion immediately after the Powhatassie race, and he would have sold all the horses in the Bellefleur stable if old Noel hadn't stopped him.

The Whirlwind.

On that summer afternoon many years ago, several weeks before Germaine's birth, a record number of spectators came to the fairgrounds at Powhatassie, to see Gideon Bellefleur ride his white stallion Jupiter against six other Valley horses, including Marcus, the three-year-old golden chestnut stallion owned by Nicholas Fuhr. Though Jupiter was the favorite to win the four-mile heat, it was rumored that his age-six years-was beginning to tell; it was rumored that he had done poorly in secret workouts on the Bellefleur track, and that the shrewdest bets were now being placed on Marcus. Of the other horses only one was promising-a beautiful dapple-gray mare with English and Arabic blood, about fifteen-four hands, eleven hundred pounds, far smaller and slighter than the Bellefleur and Fuhr stallions. She was owned by a farmer and horseman named Van Ranst, from the eastern corner of the Valley, a stranger to the Bellefleurs (and one who would go on to breed horses for competition not only at tracks throughout the state, but at Belmont Park, and in Kentucky, and Texas, and even in Jamaica, Cuba, and the Virgin Islands); her name was Angel (and when she learned this fact Leah, who had bet far more on Jupiter than anyone, even Hiram himself, knew, felt a thrill of despair).

A fair clear summer day. More than forty thousand persons were jammed on the course, which had been designed to accommodate little more than half that number; the Bellefleurs, with the exception of Gideon (who had no time to contemplate such nonsense) were inordinately pleased, since fairgrounds officials announced a record turnout and the record turnout was surely in Gideon's honor. By this time Jupiter's fame was no longer limited to the Nautauga Valley and the Chautauqua mountain region. There was talk hundreds of miles away of a magnificent ivory-white stallion that, despite his size and muscular frame, could run a four-mile heat in 7:36, manned not by a light-boned jockey but by his owner, one of the young Bellefleurs, himself a figure of mild regional notoriety. To see the albino stallion run was to allow oneself to be bewitched: for the creature was so dazzling-white, a white more intense than white, and even his great pounding hooves were white (and always kept spotless), and his long silky mane and tail, as soft as a child's hair-and, it was said, the skill of his master was such that horse and man appeared, on the track, a single striving creature, wondrous to behold. It was not only women who gazed upon horse and rider with an adulation so intense as to verge on alarm.

"You love their eyes on you, don't tell me!" Leah cried half bitterly.

Gideon, brushing his thick hair, bent slightly at the knees so that he could stare at his reflection in the mirror, declined to reply.

"They're mad about you. They crave you. Last July, that pathetic creature from downriver-do you remember-and she was actually engaged-and to one of the young men at Nautauga Trust-pushing her way through to you like that, her hair in her eyes, her face smudged: to offer herself to you so openly! As if I, your wife, didn't exist."

"You exaggerate," Gideon mumbled. "It wasn't like that."

"She'd been drinking. She was desperate. I might have taken pity on her if she hadn't practically pushed me aside . . ."

"Would you have taken pity on her, really, Leah?"

"As a woman I could sympathize with her derangement."

"It was Jupiter she wanted, not me."

"Then certainly I could sympathize!"

Gideon's shoulders shook, as if he were stricken with silent laughter.

Driving to Powhatassie husband and wife were seated side by side, but did not touch; nor did they speak: There was talk of the purse-$20,000-which was the highest in the state; there was talk of unofficial betting; of the threat that reformers would picket the fairgrounds, and that one of the area's leading evangelical ministers would preach against horse racing from a hay wagon, as crowds began to arrive-a rumor that was to prove unfounded, though the Powhatassie race would be, to future reformers, the most natural instance of what was wrong with such events, where the Devil had the freedom to mingle with spectators, to corrupt them with sickly dreams of instant wealth, and to excite them with the promise of capricious violence. There was talk too of Nicholas Fuhr and Marcus, who would certainly give Gideon a run for his money. . . . There was talk in the limousine of many things, but Gideon and Leah sat in silence, staring before them, Gideon's hands resting uneasily on his knees, Leah's crossed arms resting on her immense stomach.

Hiram, acting as Leah's agent, had employed a certain bookmaker out of Derby to act as his agent; and a rather large bet was made in his name, on Jupiter. But since Jupiter was the odds-on favorite, a dismaying amount of money must be risked, many dollars to bring in a single dollar. "If we lose . . ." Hiram said thoughtfully, pressing his glasses against the bridge of his nose. "We won't lose," Leah said. "We can't lose." "But if, if, simply for the sake of speculation, if," Hiram said, "if we lose, my girl, how can we tell the others . . . ?" "We won't tell the others, why should we tell the others," Leah said quickly, "we can't possibly lose-haven't I made that clear to you? I know." "You know, you've seen?" Hiram asked doubtfully. "I know, yes," Leah said passionately. "I've seen."

And then through another agent who was to suspect, but not to know, her identity, Leah made a sizable bet of her own. She hadn't the cash to cover it, naturally-she hadn't any money of her own, and no property at all-but she had a pearl necklace, and a sapphire ring edged with diamonds, and a canvas sack of Georgian silver stolen from the recesses of a kitchen closet, and a pair of eighteenth-century Dutch Delft vases by Matheus van Boegart, stolen from one of the third-floor rooms; and a medieval anlace, a two-edged dagger with an immense jeweled handle, come across by accident in a trunk stuffed with dresses, women's shoes, and religious trinkets. While making the transaction Leah wore one of Violet Bellefleur's old hats, a yellowed gauzy rather poignant thing the size of a wagon wheel; it stank of mothballs and age, and the veil, drawn down becomingly to Leah's strong chin, gave her face the eerie anonymity of a statue's. "This bet," the agent said, sniffing out of nervousness, "this bet is a serious matter. I want you to know, if you don't"-perhaps he sensed, beneath her calm, a glacial terror neither she nor the child in the womb comprehended-"that such a sum of money is a serious matter." "I understand," Leah said softly. Like a maiden, like a very young girl, the sort of girl, in fact, she'd never been, she gave herself over to the agent's penciled calculations, and accepted from him, without a murmur of protest, the fact that her winning-that is, her husband's winning-would be so much less than her losing. The one would be magnificent, the other catastrophic.

Because of the reserve between them Leah did not dare ask, nor would she have wanted to ask, the sum of money Gideon himself was betting. But through a judicious interrogation of Ewan she gathered that the sum was fairly modest-it would bring in only about $12,500-no more than $15,000. "But doesn't he expect to win!" Leah cried involuntarily, staring at her brother-in-law. She and Ewan rarely looked at each other: it might have been that Ewan's bearish figure, his unruly graying hair, his brick-red skin, parodied certain inclinations in her husband, who was a far more attractive man; it might have been that Leah, for Ewan, was so much more his natural mate-big-boned, arrogant, fleshy, voluptuous-than his own wife, he dared not contemplate her even speculatively. "Of course he expects to win, we always expect to win and we do win," Ewan said, with an offended dignity that rather charmed Leah (for she was, like Della, inclined to believe that the Lake Noir Bellefleurs were essentially barbaric), "but there's always the possibility, after all, that we won't." "But I deny that possibility," Leah said. Her breath had become labored. If Ewan noticed, he might have attributed it to her condition. "It isn't a possibility at all," she said. "He can't lose. Jupiter can't lose." "I agree," Ewan said, nodding, as one might nod to a distraught person, or a very small child whose babbling almost makes sense. "Oh, yes, I agree. I wouldn't be a Bellefleur if I didn't agree," he said. "But still." "But still?" Leah cried angrily. "But still," Ewan said. Leah contemplated him for a long moment, her slate-blue eyes narrowed, their focus so intense she might have appeared, to poor bewildered Ewan, somewhat cross-eyed. Then she said, finally, shaking her head, "He cannot lose. I know. I would stake everything I own on it-my life, even-even the life of this child."

ONCE, AS CHILDREN of perhaps eight or nine, Gideon and his friend Nicholas were tramping through the woods on the Bellefleur estate, when, quite suddenly, in a hairsbreadth of an instant, they found themselves facing, across a narrow stream, a full-grown black bear. The creature appeared to be staring at them, its head inclined to one side; and then, after a long moment, it turned and moved indifferently away, back into the woods. With its poor eyesight, perhaps it hadn't exactly seen them . . . and they were downwind from it. . . . Both children had begun to tremble badly. Gideon, the taller of the two, glanced at Nicholas, and burst into laughter. "You look so funny," he said, wiping at his mouth. "Your lips are white." "Your lips are white, goddamn you," Nicholas said. Throughout their boyhood the bear remained at the periphery of their vision, even after, in fact, they had seen other bears, and even hunted them: the glimmering white on the creature's chest, the blunt cagey head, the perked-up ears that were like a dog's, the stance of the thing itself, which was like a dog's, uneasily raised on his hind legs. "You look funny," Nicholas said, giving Gideon a shove; and quite naturally Gideon shoved him back. Their bowels contracted with fear. Their pulses rang. "A black bear won't attack," they told each other, "there wasn't any danger, d'you see how it walked away?-it didn't want any trouble from us." One of the mythologies of their boyhood was established.

And when they were both fourteen, and hunting with their fathers and older brothers, in the foothills south of Mount Blanc, they came upon, from different angles, a solitary white-tailed buck browsing in a drowned-out field, and both their shots rang out at once-and both their shots struck the deer, which gave a single whistling snort of incredulity and anger, before it turned, and sprang, and fell to its knees, bleeding wildly from two great gaping wounds in its chest. They had struck the deer!-both their shots! One shot from each gun, and each had struck its target! In the very first instant the young Gideon may have felt a pang of resentment at the fact of Nicholas-the fact that they would be forced to share the giddy triumph of their first kill-and he sensed his friend's resentment of him; but in a matter of minutes, as the boys ran splashing through the flooded field, hooting and shouting crazily, they were reconciled to each other, and perhaps even secretly pleased. ("Nicholas is my closest friend," Gideon told his father when, one Christmas, it seemed that he was spending too much time at the Fuhrs', and not enough at home. "But friendship never takes precedence over family," his father said.) The black bear of their childhood had contemplated them with that uncanny solemnity that belongs to nature, and had appeared to judge them-to judge them as insignificant. It had simply turned and trotted away. But the white-tailed buck-ah, the magnificent buck with its thirty-inch antler spread!-the buck was another story, the story of Gideon's and Nicholas's first significant kill. And it was one they were to tell often.

Nicholas Fuhr, now thirty years old, still unmarried, still with as wild a reputation in the Valley as he'd ever had (having eclipsed Gideon years ago, after Gideon's marriage), was a handsome, beardless young man, nearly Gideon's height, with curly wheat-colored hair and slightly sloped broad shoulders, and a habit, which endeared him to his friends, of throwing his head back when he laughed, and of laughing in great appreciative explosive outbursts. His people were comfortably prosperous farmers; like their neighbors the Bellefleurs they had once made a small fortune selling timber in great quantities, and they had even-like the Bellefleurs, in the mid-nineteenth century-mined iron ore, out of broad but rather shallow deposits in the foothills. The Fuhrs had settled in the region some decades before Jean-Pierre crossed the Atlantic, and they had sold the colony the iron ore that was eventually fashioned into the famous chain of 1757 that was stretched across the Nautauga at its narrowest point, at Fort Hanna, in order to block passage of French ships. ("A chain across the river!-I don't believe it," Gideon would say as a boy, as he and Nicholas hiked along the bluff above the Nautauga. Sometimes it had seemed to him that amazing things had been done so easily in the past, long before his or even his father's birth-that there was a magical quickness, a magical fluidity, between the imagining of a feat and its execution. And hadn't there been dangerous Iroquois everywhere, and frequent sorties by Algonquins from the north, not these sour, defeated half-breeds who ran down pregnant does, and had fished the trout streams nearly dry, and might still be found, from time to time, on Sunday mornings in Bellefleur or Contracoeur, lying in a drunken stupor in the center of the street, their clothing vomit-stained, their faces scarcely human? Hadn't there been gigantic black panthers, and gray wolves so reckless with hunger they might rush into a clearing and make off with small children; hadn't there been many more coyotes and bobcats and black bears, and tall creatures no one had exactly seen, bearlike, and yet half-human? All that remained of that time were the swamp vultures, or the Noir vultures (sometimes called the Bellefleur vultures, but not in the presence of a Bellefleur) and these were retreating, it was said, deeper into the swamp north of the lake; not one had been sighted for years.) Before the race Gideon shook hands with Nicholas, whom he had not seen in months; the men stared at each other, and smiled self-consciously, and talked, for a few minutes, of inconsequential matters-it had been for years a matter of hilarious ribaldry between them, that Nicholas's cousin-twice-removed Denton Mortlock should have married Gideon's priggish older sister Aveline; as adolescents, frequently aflame with filthy, outrageous visions, they had mocked and jeered and tried to imagine scenes of sexual activity between the two phlegmatic stoutish persons-but then Aveline did have three children, and what, precisely, might that mean? So Gideon murmured something about the Mortlocks, who were already assembled in the Bellefleur box at the homestretch; and Nicholas murmured, almost too quickly, a coarse jest; and Gideon laughed; and suddenly there was nothing to say. At another time Nicholas would certainly have inquired after Leah, with whom he was, it was sentimentally believed, half in love; but the tension of the race was building, one could very nearly feel it in the air, and anyway, these past few months, hadn't Leah seemed-hadn't she presented herself, deliberately, when Nicholas came to visit-rather strange?-rather too flagrantly, lewdly pregnant?-so that poor Nicholas, who had dreamt innumerable times of Leah Pym's body, felt faint in her presence, and even somewhat nauseated; and his dreams now of her were jarring. At another time Nicholas would certainly have inquired after Gideon's father and mother, and Ewan, and the twins, and the rest, but today he was distracted, he seemed uncharacteristically nervous, as if he'd felt, in his friend's hard handshake, how very much Gideon needed him to lose.

Gideon stroked Marcus's neck thoughtfully. He had always been very fond of the stallion-he'd wanted, a year ago, to buy him from Nicholas-and now it seemed to him that the horse was somewhat taller, and more muscular in the flanks, than Gideon remembered. A comely golden chestnut with a large asymmetrical star on his forehead, and three of his legs white past the knee. Marcus shivered beneath Gideon's hand and turned to nuzzle him. But Gideon knew he must be careful.

Backing away he said, with a ritual salute of farewell: "Maybe you'll want to sell him, when the race is over." And smiled to show that his words were meant in jest.

Nicholas snorted with laughter. His gray eyes caught Gideon's, and crinkled with excessive mirth. "Maybe you won't be able to afford him," he half-shouted.

And so the friends parted. And so, in that way, with Nicholas's familiar face somewhat distorted, and his hand raised in a playful warning fist that mocked Gideon's own gesture of farewell, Gideon would remember Nicholas. . . .

THE HORSES WERE saddled. "Bring out your horses!" rang through the warm air. During the brief parade to the post spectators began to shout "Jupiter to win!" or "Marcus to win!" or (perhaps because the odds were so attractive) "Angel to win!" The sky was still clear. The early mild breeze had died away. People stood, and strained to see Gideon Bellefleur on his gigantic ivory-white stallion, and Nicholas Fuhr on his brown-bronze stallion; and the slender dapple-gray mare ridden by a boy who looked no older than eighteen, and who smiled nervously at the crowd's roaring; and the other horses-each of them quivering with energy. One minute to the start of the race. Thirty seconds. And the drum tapped. And Leah, seated between the twins and grandmother Cornelia in the Bellefleur box (for Della, of course, had refused to come, she had stared for a long painful moment at Leah and said harshly, I know something of what you've done, Leah, you and Hiram, and that poor fool Gideon as well, I know what you've done and I know what you deserve), her arms folded tightly on her belly, watched impassively as Marcus, on the rail, shot forward at once. But then Marcus was quick, Marcus had always been quick. Close behind him was the gray mare, in a strategic position; and then Jupiter; and the others.

Leah watched, expressionless. She remained seated while the others leapt to their feet. Marcus, and Angel . . . and Jupiter (who looked, in the hallucinatory brightness of the track, beneath his rider's considerable weight, by far the oldest of the horses) . . . and, close behind Jupiter, gaining on him, a red bay whose very dark mane and tail flew wildly, and whose impatient rider, crouched unnaturally forward in his saddle, beat at him lightly and rapidly with his whip.

For the first mile Marcus remained in the lead, and the graceful little mare seemed at any moment to be preparing to overtake him, and Jupiter and the red bay contested each other for third place, and the others trailed behind; and the shouting of the spectators died down, only to rise again, with a sound of hysteria. Leah half-closed her eyes. And there she saw the Bellefleur horse, her horse, and her husband, flying into the lead, silky mane and tail rippling in the bright air. We cannot lose, she thought calmly. The child in the womb had assured her. Had allowed her to see into the future; to know. We cannot lose, she instructed herself. The future has already occurred.

She opened her eyes, dazed, to the crowd's tumult, and saw that now the red bay was in third place, and the great white horse, obviously straining, was in fourth place . . . and the feisty little mare had overtaken Marcus himself. (Jupiter, of course, had stamina. Could outlast the others. But Marcus too was a strong horse, and had never run so well as today, hurtling from the post into first place like that-what thoughts must be flooding Nicholas's mind! It was not possible that he should even wish to outrun Gideon.) The twins were standing on their seats, even Cornelia was standing, muttering to herself. Ewan's children fairly bawled. Come on! Come on! Come on! Leah winced-whether from the noise or a sudden tinge of pain in her belly-and thought, the Bellefleurs must have dignity, everyone will be watching. But even grandfather Noel was shouting and waving his fists. His old man's puckered face was flushed, wormlike veins stood out on his forehead, he had never looked so furious in Leah's memory. The stylish white linen suit the family had talked him into wearing, with its polka-dot vest, and the matching tie, now hung rumpled on him as if, in the span of these very few minutes, he had sweated away a number of pounds. We cannot lose, Leah wanted to assure him, so you must take care-you must not strain yourself-your son cannot disappoint you.

As they swung into the near turn for the final mile Jupiter made his move. As Leah had known he would. Jupiter, Gideon, the Bellefleurs, Leah, the child-to-be-born. Spectators began to scream. The mare had kept her lead heroically, and from time to time the boy glanced over his shoulder to see how close Marcus was-and he was very close-and the mare was lightly whipped so that she might spurt forward. The red bay in third place. Jupiter maneuvering to get around him. Gideon crouched low over the stallion's magnificent neck and had no need to use his crop. Leah stared, stared, at the horses' pounding hooves. So very many of them. Flying manes, tails, flying legs, such superb beasts, it hardly mattered which of them won, they were all superb, all beautiful. But Gideon must win. Jupiter must win. An aureole about them, shimmering light, moisture, infinitesimal rainbows caught within it, despite their speed. The white rail. Infinite white rail. The white stallion, which seemed now enormous: even its shadow, flying along the track, was gigantic. Leah swallowed, tasting dust. The air was very dusty. Her eyes were pulled upward and she saw that the sky had turned dark. Quite suddenly it had turned dark. From behind one immense swollen purplish-black cloud a tiny white sun peeked, as if in jest.

And then the whirlwind. The dust spiral. Suddenly, on the track, in the homestretch. Dancing forward to meet the horses. It must have been ten or twelve feet in height. Undulating. Snaking. Yet it appeared to be in no hurry. Yet it did dance swiftly forward. . . . Now Jupiter was rapidly gaining, Jupiter had stolen the rail on the turn, the red bay was suddenly dropping behind, exhausted, no matter that its impatient rider had begun to beat a tattoo on him; and it did seem-or might the queer brightness of the air, that single shaft of piercing white light, have distorted everything?-that Jupiter and his rider were not only accelerating their speed but gaining in size, so that even sturdy Marcus looked like a pony, nobly and futilely galloping through the dust? Leah's lips parted. She might have been about to cry out. Not to her husband but to Nicholas. Nicholas on the golden chestnut, straining forward, his head already dipping oddly; Nicholas whom she loved; whom she loved as a brother; as her husband's dear friend; as a man she might possibly have . . . in another lifetime . . . if . . . Now the mare, distressed by the whirlwind, had begun to falter, had already lost her stride. The whirlwind moved most gracefully toward her. At her. Into her. Blinded, she shook her head; she must have whinnied in terror; and swung suddenly sideways, toward the rail; and crashed into it; and horse and rider fell. The crowd was screaming. Leah realized she had pressed her hands against her ears. Her lips were dry, coated with dust. Her eyes watered. Dazed, she glanced around to see that the air was filled with dust. It was dust. The tiny white sun illuminated each of the dust motes as they knocked about like fireflies or Ping Pong balls, gaily, giddily. Christabel had begun to cough. Grandmother Cornelia was breathing in shuddering gasps through a white lace handkerchief. Ah, what is happening! Is this what must happen! Leah thought, rising slowly to her feet, blinking her great burning eyes rapidly.

The race was nearly over. Spectators were coughing, and shouting, and waving their arms frantically. In the homestretch Nicholas, his head bowed, one gloved hand rubbing at his eyes, began to shout at Marcus, and then to use his whip. But the horse was exhausted, and the whirlwind now danced close about him as if teasing him; and Jupiter was rapidly gaining, running as if he had awakened from a dream, untroubled by the whirlwind and the dust that now blanketed the track in all directions. Leah's cheeks were streaked with tears. Jupiter would push into the lead. Jupiter would win. . . . But Nicholas used his whip harder, as if suddenly desperate, and Marcus, though beginning to stagger, tried to thrust himself forward by great springs from his hindquarters; despite the taunting dust spiral he managed for a moment to actually quicken his pace, with a frantic spring-and another!-as his golden-bronze sides heaved, slick with sweat, and his eyes rolled white and foam flew from his gaping mouth. Jupiter, now beside him, showed no sign of fatigue, nor did he appear to notice the dust spiral, which had grown now to a height of perhaps fifteen feet, and was dancing along with the horses to the finish line. Leah, standing, her feet far apart in order to balance her weight, found that she was gripping the railing with both hands, and that her knuckles had gone dead-white, the bones showing through the skin. Gideon, she prayed. Nicholas. It was the case that the albino horse was considerably larger than the chestnut. As he began to pull past Marcus, his extraordinarily dark shadow flying along beneath and beside him, the smaller horse began to tremble quite visibly. Nicholas's hand rubbed at his eyes. Horse and rider screamed as a dust tentacle leapt out at them suddenly, plunging into the horse's eyes, writhing snakelike about his legs. Marcus swerved to the side, and Gideon with great skill reined Jupiter clear, and then, quite suddenly, Marcus tripped-fell-pitched forward-threw his rider over his head and onto the track-and Jupiter pounded past without an instant's hesitation.

SO GIDEON BELLEFLEUR on his ivory-white stallion Jupiter won the Powhatassie race. And won (it was rumored throughout the region) a considerable amount of money. For the Bellefleurs, being Bellefleurs, and addicted to gambling, had wagered heavily on the race; it was whispered that they had made innumerable bets, under fictitious names, and that they cleared, on that remarkable day, a small fortune-though of course no one in the family would ever speak of such things. If a neighbor, meeting Noel Bellefleur in town, or riding his own, rather rangy stallion Fremont along the road, called out to him-You folks did pretty well the other day, eh?-Noel might affect a look of frowning bewilderment, and mutter something about the purse-that it would keep the horses in oats for another season, and his sons in whiskey.