Gideon was rumored to have offered the entire purse, $20,000, to the Fuhr family. But of course the Fuhrs refused it-for why should they accept Bellefleur money, and under such circumstances? I don't want it, I don't deserve it, it's a bitter thing, Gideon said tonelessly, but why should the Fuhrs listen? Why even should the Bellefleurs listen? At the wake Nicholas's father turned away from Gideon though he knew very well-he must have known-that Gideon had had nothing to do, really, with his son's death. (Marcus had died at once, of a broken neck; but Nicholas had died after a day and a night of agony, his chest massively crushed, each of his arms and legs broken. . . . The mare Angel was dead as well: she had been so cruelly injured, her owner had had no choice but to shoot her between the eyes. But her rider, though badly hurt, and possibly crippled for life, was fortunately in no danger of dying.) Gideon had had nothing to do with Nicholas's death, but the Fuhrs did not want to see him again, or even to hear his name. They did not want Bellefleur pity or Bellefleur tears, or, at the funeral home, lavish floral displays-lilies, white iris-sent by the Bellefleurs. Of course Gideon had not caused the accident, of course he could not be reasonably blamed, and even the most bitterly distraught of the Fuhrs knew it-surely everyone knew it!-but still they did not want to hear his protestations, his grief, they did not want to see his tear-reddened eyes or smell his whiskey-sweet breath.

And they certainly did not want his money.

Nocturne.

When, after more than ten months in the womb, and after a seventy-two-hour labor of such violent pain and remorseless, convulsive heaving, that Leah, stoic throughout the pregnancy, and unwilling to speak aloud of her dread, was reduced to a thrashing screaming animal whose cries rang out, through the opened windows, to permeate the darkness, and were said to be heard across the lake (so that there was, for Gideon, nowhere to hide, and not even a drunken stupor could save him)-when, after the ordeal of a labor so colossal that there would never be, for Leah, words to contain it (and it was her private theory that the labor itself hadn't begun that oppressively hot August evening after dinner when most of the family were down at the lake, and only the grim-faced silent Della, in her tiresome mourning, attended her; it had really begun that Sunday at Powhatassie, after the finish of the race, after Nicholas was carried on a stretcher off the track-not known yet to be so irreparably injured, but unconscious nevertheless, and bleeding-and she was stricken by a lightning-bolt of pain intense enough to darken her vision, as if not only her eyes but her entire body, her entire vision, had gone blind), and in her incoherent bawling she cried out not only for her mother to help her, and for poor Gideon (whom she had banished days earlier from her bedside-she couldn't bear, she claimed, to witness his hapless suffering, since her own was terrible enough: "Get away! Get out of here! I can't stand it! I won't have you here! You're really a coward, you're really a baby yourself, go on out of here, go play poker with your friends, go get drunk, you love to get drunk, you've been drunk for the past month! Go away from my bedside, go on out of here!" she cried, her broad face streaked with perspiration that seemed already to have worn little rivulets into her flesh, no matter how often Della or Cornelia wiped it away), but God Himself, in Whom she had never believed: God Whom she had, even as a small girl, cheerfully mocked (at times even to her mother's face, for it was always a delight to upset Della); when after the stench of blood in the room, and the first sight of the infant's head between Leah's smeared thighs, caused not only aunt Veronica to fall down in a dead faint but Dr. Jensen himself (and Jensen had been so marvelous when the twins were born, talking to Leah constantly, even, at the crucial moment, pressing on her abdomen and breathing with her, sharply and deeply and rhythmically, with her, as if his lungs had the power to inform hers-as in fact they did: the birth, after a ten-hours' labor, had gone miraculously well)-when all this had transpired, and Leah's poor wracked body was free of whatever had inhabited it, Cornelia spoke first, saying, "It should be suffocated at once," and great-grandmother Elvira said, "It could be taken away-taken to Nautauga Falls-left on the doorstep of an orphanage-" and Della, having elbowed the other women aside, ignoring her daughter's wailing (for Leah, in her delirium, wanted the creature), said simply: "I'll take care of it. I know what to do."

IF LEAH WAS a lush, plump, darkly red multifoliate rose, spoiled by years of careful nurturing in fertile, manure-rich soil, then Garnet Hecht was a straggly wild rose, one of those stunted, anemic, but still pretty blossoms whose petals are, almost at once, blown; such wild roses are usually white, or pale pink, and their pistils are frail and powdery as a moth's wings; even their thorns are meekly dull beneath one's exploratory thumb.

Still, Gideon thought, running, Garnet's tiny hand grasped hard in his (how light it was!-her bones were as thin as a sparrow's), still, such roses are pretty once you actually examine them.

"Gideon, oh, stop-Gideon, please-Gideon-"

But she could not catch her breath, he pulled her along so quickly, through the woods beside the lake, late at night, only the three-quarter moon (which was the color of curdled milk, angrily glaring) and a scattering of stars as witnesses. They were running together through the pine woods just to the north of the manor; underfoot were needles upon which their feet slipped, and Garnet cried out in breathless alarm. "Oh, Gideon, please-I didn't mean-I'm so afraid-Gideon-"

The pine trees were perfectly straight. Perfectly black, in silhouette. Ahead was the uncanny dark of Lake Noir, in which the moon-even this bright, pulsating moon-was reflected only dimly; and no stars were reflected at all.

Behind them, far behind them, a woman's wail arose; and Gideon ran faster. He was panting hard. He was wordless. Poor Garnet staggered after him, her thin arm outstretched, her childlike hand grasped tightly in his, sobbing, not daring to slacken her pace.

"Oh, but Gideon-I didn't mean-please-"

It was Della Pym who had sent Garnet to Gideon, with something to eat-cold sliced turkey, and ham, and half a loaf of that thick whole-wheat bread he loved, and some date-nut bread as well-for after Leah's labor began he had gone upstairs to the third floor, over into the east wing, where he had been sleeping, off and on, since the Powhatassie race, with only a bottle of bourbon to keep him company, and his Springfield rifle (with which, from the window, he shot hawks and crows out of the sky-or had been shooting them before the wise birds learned to avoid that wing of the house). He had been sleeping on the floor, on a filthy old carpet, in his clothes, and his mother claimed-not quite truthfully-that he hadn't washed or shaved or rinsed his mouth since Nicholas's funeral. If Leah would not comfort him (and she would not, his weakness disgusted and frightened her), why then he would allow no one to comfort him, let them rap on the door, or pound, let them murmur his name or pronounce it, as Noel did, sharply and briskly-Gideon, what the hell are you doing to yourself! Gideon, open this door at once!

Garnet, trembling, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and crept along the shadowy hallway, a candle in one hand, the silver tray heaped with food, and covered by a white linen napkin, in the other. Because she knew she would be struck dumb when he confronted her (if he confronted her, for he hadn't unlocked the door even for Cornelia, these past few days) she whispered ahead of time: Oh, I love you. Gideon Bellefleur. I love you. I love you. I have loved you since the first day I set eyes on you. . . . And, yes, it was on your white stallion, you were riding your white stallion, through the main street of Bellefleur, and you never saw me staring, you never glanced my way. . . . You never glanced to the right or the left, riding through the village like a prince. It was on your white stallion I first saw you, and I loved you at once, and I will always love you, no matter that you never glance at me, or even know my name. . . .

Drunk and grinning a lopsided grin, and smelling of a man's sweat, Gideon had opened the door; and leaned against the doorway staring at her. I didn't think I had really heard anyone knocking, he said. You didn't rap very hard, did you. You aren't very strong, are you.

He snatched the tray from her and threw the napkin aside and began to eat. Ravenously, like an animal; like a wolf. Garnet stared at him, her face burning. He tore at the meat with his head inclined to the side, like a wolf. His strong stony-white teeth gleamed in the tremulous candlelight.

She had thought she would faint-a terrible dizziness arose in her-but she had not fainted. She stood rooted to one spot, staring at Gideon Bellefleur. Oh, I love you, she whispered in secret.

"IT CAN'T BE allowed to live-"

"It-they-must be put out of their misery-"

"Don't let Leah see! Is she awake?"

Voices ballooning around the bed. Great tall teetering figures.

The taste of blood, of salt, of orange-burning fire, drawing all sensation to the tongue. . . .

Leah had given birth and lay back in a delirium.

They were gasping. Whispering. What a tragedy! What could they do! Aunt Veronica, bringing a water-filled basin to the bedside, saw what lay squirming there and with a soft faint Oh! sank forward, in a dead faint. And Floyd Jensen, sleepless for most of the seventy-two hours, stared at the creature for a long, long moment-not one baby (and a giant baby at that) but two babies: then again not two babies (which would have been quite within the normal order of things) but one and a half: a single melon-sized head, two scrawny shoulders, and at the torso something hideous that resembled, in Jensen's feverish imagination just before he fainted, part of another embryo- The creature had only two arms, two tiny fists, which it flailed angrily. And of course it was bawling.

"Don't let it wake poor Leah! Oh, what should we do-"

"It should be put out of its misery-suffocated at once-"

"But it's living, it's alive-"

"Is she waking up? No? Hold her still-"

"It should be put out of its misery!"

"Might we take it to the city? Where no one-no one would know? An orphanage, a hospital-the steps of the cathedral at Winterthur-"

Grandmother Della in her soiled black dressing gown, her scalp showing in pink slats through her thinning yellow-white hair, her eyes unusually bright, all but shouldered Cornelia aside. Cornelia, her brother's silly chit of a wife! She stepped forward masterfully, just as she had stepped forward, years before, at the astonishing birth of Bromwell and Christabel, and raised both squirming infants aloft, to clear their lungs, give them a shake, get them wailing-for wasn't she, after all, no matter how she disapproved of the girl and of the girl's bully of a husband, the grandmother?-the mother's mother? This creature was far heavier than the twins. But she raised it aloft. And, staring frankly, with a curious half-repulsed half-satisfied little smile, she said: "Just look at it! Shameless! You can see it's meant to be a girl but that other part sticking out-just look!-why, those things are hanging halfway to its ankles, I never saw anything like it-"

Leah lay weakened and delirious on the blood- and sweat-soaked sheets. Murmuring: Mother, Gideon, dear God. Mother. Gideon. Oh, please God, dear God. Help. . . . Give me my baby.

Through the window a curdled-milk moon. No night sounds at all: not even crickets: Leah's screams had silenced everything.

The baby shrieked. Kicking, fighting. For breath. For life. Two somewhat abbreviated legs, and part of an abdomen, and rubbery-red slippery male genitalia, possibly oversized-it was difficult, with all the commotion, for Della to estimate-growing out of the abdomen of what appeared to be a perfectly well-formed, though somewhat large, baby girl. Her legs were longer and appeared to be normal, and her tiny hairless vagina was a healthy purplish-pink, the size of Della's smallest fingernail, between the thrashing legs.

"I know what to do," Della said loudly.

GIDEON'S HANDS, ACTING of their own accord, tore the girl's clothing away. And then his own. If he could have torn her skin away as well, he might have done so: how greedily, how desperately, his fingers plucked! He wanted nothing between them, not a breath, not a thought.

She strained apart from him but he forced himself, his great weight, onto her; and then into her; half-angrily he ground his mouth against hers and felt her hard childish teeth, resisting. Somewhere, far away, a scream sounded-or was it a loon's wail-but Gideon, plunged so far into this girl whose name he didn't recall, heard nothing.

. . . Gazing at him with lovesick moonstruck eyes. Her words trailing off into the air, in his presence. Long thin hands, bony fingers, the nail bitten back to the quick, a habit that excited his disgust. Leah mocked. Of course Leah mocked. The girl was silly . . . yet the surprise of her in the corridor, the sudden alignment of eyes and hair and pert little chin that made her beautiful to his sleep-dazed eyes . . . the shy soapish odor of her . . . that tiny hand grasped so tightly in his. . . . She wept, she sobbed of love. Love. He did not hear. He no longer knew where he was. In the pine forest above the lake, on the needle-strewn cold ground? Something that was not the girl drew him down violently, as if the earth had cracked open and it was into the very earth itself he plunged: weightless, bodiless, helpless. Falling. Deeper. The desire to crush, to annihilate. To smother those cries. Plunging. Tearing.

A demon poked at him with its hot sharp tongue, breathing boldly into his face. The tongue in his ear. So moist, so agitated! He could not control himself. The girl in a daze murmured, Love, love, oh, I love you, murmured a name that must have been his, but he did not hear: and then gripped his back, which had gathered itself into bunches of muscles, rising, arched, furious, as Leah herself might have gripped it, once did grip it, long ago.

"Oh, Gideon, I love you-"

GRUNTING, DELLA CARRIED the squirming thing to the walnut cabinet at the far end of the room, ignoring her daughter's cries, and pushed aside a silly Chinese porcelain boar's-head tureen-the costly junk her family had accumulated, she would have liked to make a pyre and burn it all!-and flopped the baby down. And, keeping her back discreetly to the others, blocking Leah's view if, risen on her elbows, she should actually be watching, with one, two, three skillful chops of the knife, solved the problem once and for all.

She turned to face the room. Drawing her first full breath in many minutes she said, triumphantly: "Now it's what it was meant to be, what God intended. Now it's one, and not two; now it's a she and not a he. I've had enough of he, I don't want anything more to do with he, here's what I think-" and with a sudden majestic swipe of her arm she knocked the bloody mutilated parts, what remained of the little legs, and the little penis and testicles and scrotum, onto the floor-"what I think of he!"

BOOK TWO.

The Walled Garden.

The Vial of Poison.

Germaine's grandfather Noel Bellefleur carried with him, in secret, for more than fifty years, a vial of about two inches in length, encrusted with tiny cheap-cut rubies and diamonds (or perhaps they were colored glass and rhinestones), filled with cyanide. No one knew of the vial of poison: not even Noel's wife, not even his mother. He carried it with him at all times, except when he slept, and even then it was never more than a few yeards away, hidden in a drawer. When, in later years, he and Cornelia no longer shared a bed, and occasionally-on account of his harsh snoring, Cornelia claimed-did not even share a room, he began to keep the vial beneath his pillow. For safekeeping, he thought. Waking in the night after a disturbing dream, or after no dream at all, he would reach under his pillow anxiously and there it was-the tiny object, stone-studded, its roughness pleasurable to his fingertips, warmed by his presence.

From time to time he unscrewed the minuscule cap, and sniffed at the contents, his eyes hooded. The poison smelled wonderfully astringent. As quick, as surprising, as mothballs or ammonia or skunk: odors he halfway liked, in their mild forms. He might even shake the white crystals out on a surface and examine them. Did poison, even so marvelously effective a poison, lose its miraculous power to kill, after a period of time . . . ? Though there were innumerable reference books in his grandfather's library which he might have consulted, though he might even have inquired, casually, of his grandson Bromwell (who, at this time, when Germaine was only an infant, had acquired a remarkable library himself, and never exactly with anyone's permission: the child simply ordered whatever he liked-a complete set of the World Book, volumes on biology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, even a telescope kit that came in a large packing case to the depot in Bellefleur, where Gideon went, mystified, to pay $400 for whatever it was his headstrong little boy had ordered now), and though he might certainly have asked Dr. Jensen, who dropped by frequently at the house, to check on Leah and her new baby girl, he said nothing to anyone-the poison was his secret, sacred to him, unutterable. From time to time he simply changed the vial's contents, filling it with "fresh" cyanide.

Noel Bellefleur in his old age had the shrewd, rather raffish appearance of an osprey surfacing from brackish water, a squirming fish in its beak. There was something blurred and soiled about him. His nose had a slight knob in it, his cheeks were relatively unwrinkled but very shiny, the scar from an old war wound gleamed boldly on his forehead like a third eye: an eye more clearly defined than his own eyes, which, behind the lenses of his glasses, were gauzy, unfocused, as if set in water. He limped badly, and with what appeared to be a deliberate awkwardness. He wore shapeless outfits at home-trousers that drooped on his somewhat shriveled haunches, and white shirts that, not tucked into his belt, were allowed to billow out, roomy as nightshirts or a servant's smock. Even when he appeared in public his linen was never very clean. Germaine was to think of him as birdlike, indeed-a hook-beaked bird in an untidy nest. One would not have been surprised to see feathers and down clinging to him. When he troubled to shave, which was infrequently, he did a poor job of it, and sometimes appeared in the breakfast room bleeding from a half-dozen tiny nicks, indifferent to, sometimes angered by, his family's protestations. Once every several months a barber was driven to the manor from Nautauga Falls, to tend to both Noel and his elderly mother Elvira (who received the man in the privacy of her room). If Noel was a thin, watchful, rakish old bird, his wife Cornelia was a plumped-out guinea hen, still an uncommonly attractive woman with small, pretty hands and feet, and snow-white hair that was perfectly and stiffly groomed at all times.

Like birds the two pecked at each other, from time to time, impatiently, irritably, but without violence. If Cornelia had known of the secret vial she would have exclaimed: "That crazy old fool is doing it to spite me-he wants to humiliate me. He'll swallow cyanide and leave me behind and everyone will point me out: that's the woman whose husband committed suicide to escape her!"

But in fact Noel had acquired the precious little object when, as a boy of seventeen, he had suffered, perhaps even more painfully than Hiram and Jean-Pierre, his father's protracted humiliation: the decline of the family's fortune, the selling-off of land, the dismantling of old Raphael's railroad (the wonderful little cars, even the ties, were sold for scrap metal!-and the furnishings, which no one wanted, were stored in one of the unused hop barns, where rain soon destroyed them), the desperate attempt to make quick money by raising foxes. . . . "What now, what next," Hiram muttered, with a sigh like a thud, and Noel, unable to spend all his time with his horses, began to lie about the house, a skinny, loose-jointed boy, listless, overtaken by a Bellefleur malaise as severe as any, feeling too weak, too miserable, to raise a finger. In those days Jean-Pierre, named appropriately for old Jean-Pierre, was his mother's darling, spoiled and capricious and very good-looking, with dark curls and dark, cunning, puppyish eyes, and he was somehow able, despite the Bellefleurs' financial problems, to spend a great deal of time playing cards in the Falls, and in certain notorious riverfront taverns: twenty years old to Noel's seventeen, he would nevertheless (being guileless, and infinitely good-natured) have brought his younger brother along on his expeditions, in order to snap him out of his "mood"; but Noel always refused. He did acquire from Jean-Pierre, however, who had won it at poker, the bejeweled little vial. "It's for smelling salts or something," Jean-Pierre said, tossing it to Noel. "Maybe opium. I don't have any use for it."

"Cyanide," Noel said at once.

"What?" asked Jean-Pierre, smiling. "What did you say?"

He hid the little vial away and showed it to no one. Once it was filled with poison it acquired a peculiar life or spirit of its own-quite as if it were another Bellefleur, another member of the family-but at the same time it was indisputably his. Suicide, Noel thought dreamily, as a boy in his late teens and then in his early twenties, ravaged by lurid violent fantasies of sex which of course he could not control, suicide, just the thought of it, the thought of escape, why is it so luxurious . . . ?

Often he fingered the vial, safely hidden in his trouser pocket. While enduring conversations in the drawing room with his female cousins and aunts, or sitting through interminable dinners. Suicide, the thought of it, the luxurious thought of it, why did he smile so suddenly, his delight raying across his face? For of course he never intended to use the cyanide. Never. But the thought of it, the feel of the vial, were most satisfying.

(In the family there were legends of odd "suicides." Noel's grandmother, for instance, who drowned in Lake Noir . . . and his own father, perhaps, Lamentations of Jeremiah, who insisted upon going out in a murderous storm though everyone in the family tried to stop him: wasn't that a kind of suicide, really? Strangest of all was the contrived death, the "assassination" of President Lincoln, an intimate friend of grandfather Raphael's-or so family legend would have it, and Noel, being skeptical, did have his doubts. But it was generally believed in the family that Lincoln had arranged for his own "assassination," so that he could retire from the world of politics and strife and domestic pain, and live out the remainder of his days as a special guest at Bellefleur Manor. The poor man had come to abhor his life with its public and private burdens, and its very real crimes (so many thousands of men killed in the war, which no notion of political justice could ever absolve, and hundreds of civilians imprisoned in Indiana and elsewhere, without due process of law-simply at his imperial command). Lincoln had, it was said, so despaired of life that he wanted only to tear a hole in the earth's side and plunge through and lose himself forever. . . . And so, by means of a plot Noel had never quite understood, which was completely financed by Raphael Bellefleur and perhaps even imagined by him, the public Lincoln had been "assassinated" so that the private Lincoln might live. Of all the forms of suicide, Noel thought, that had the most style.) AT THE FUNERAL for the poor Fuhr boy, killed in that freak accident, Noel, possibly the most intoxicated mourner present (though his own son Gideon was well fortified by whiskey-it was just that, Noel thought resentfully, Gideon was young, and could hold his alcohol with as much control as Noel had once had), fingered in secret the precious vial, and gave himself up to thoughts of death.

Death. How suddenly it might come when you didn't want it. How reluctantly it came when you did. Nicholas Fuhr was dead: he'd survived any number of riding accidents, and fistfights, and God knew what else: but suddenly he was dead, his poor body broken. There were a number of men Noel had wished dead in his time-the Varrells, of course, before they were murdered (and the blame placed wrongly on Jean-Pierre); one or two rivals for Cornelia's hand; his nation's wicked enemies in the war. But he had never killed anyone. Not even as a soldier. He would not have wished to actually kill anyone, to actually bring about a death, and it troubled him that perhaps, when the time came (and when might it come?-he was an old man now, his eyesight was failing, the lake salmon were fished out, Fremont was getting wobbly) he would be incapable of taking the cyanide he had hugged to himself for so many decades. . . . Odd, how his grandfather Raphael had continued living. An embittered old man. Still wealthy, but a failure: a failure at politics, a failure as a husband, and (so he thought, and said) a failure as a father. He certainly wanted to die, living in near-seclusion all those years, only his Honored Guest (some comradely political failure he'd picked up on his campaigning, some party hack he had, for reasons no one knew, become indebted to: the rumor, absurd of course, was that the bearded old man was Abraham Lincoln!) to keep him company, along with his books and journals. He must have wanted to die, Noel thought, yet he hadn't had the courage, or the bitterness, to kill himself.

He, Noel, would have the courage. When the time came.

But now he sipped whiskey, and brooded over the past, and found it too much trouble to bestir himself even to comfort Gideon, who badly needed comforting, like an overgrown child; he had told Gideon several times that the accident at Powhatassie wasn't his fault, it certainly wasn't his fault, he must forget it, or if he couldn't forget it (Nicholas, after all, had been Gideon's closest friend) he should try to extricate himself from it, in his memory-and above all he shouldn't feel guilty for having won the race, which he and Jupiter deserved to win; or for winning all that money. (Not that Noel really knew how much money had been won. He half-suspected that Hiram had cleared a great deal, in secret; and he had a vague idea that Leah herself had done well. He had won a modest amount, only $6,000.) But he let Gideon go, and paid no attention to his wife's querulous remarks, sipping whiskey, chewing on his cigars, rubbing the kittens' heads roughly, and tickling their balloon-fat little bellies, thinking of the past, of all that had gone wrong: not only did things go wrong, Noel thought, bemused, they went into knots and snarls, tortuous as the eye-dismaying designs on one of his sister Matilde's crazy quilts. (Which were crazy. All interwoven interlocked dizzying colors. Too much for his brain to absorb. Ah, his sisters Matilde and Della! It pained him to think of them. Perhaps he would not think of them. Della blamed him, unfairly, for her husband's accidental death, and was not above whispering Murderer at him, nearly three decades later; she even blamed him-and this was a measure of the old woman's bullheadedness-for the fact that Gideon and Leah had fallen in love, and insisted upon marrying though they were cousins. And Matilde. Perfectly lucid in conversation, good-natured and even good-humored whenever he visited her, but obviously insane-for why, otherwise, would the woman live up there north of the lake, in an old hunting lodge in what remained of a fifty-acre camp Raphael had built for wealthy guests (one of them was the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, who managed to hold his position, and his power, for more than three tumultuous decades; another was the industrialist Hayes Whittier, who exerted so much control over the Republican Party, and whose son-twenty-one years old, but with the physique of a ten-year-old-was dying of consumption: so it was Raphael's idea that the north woods, his north woods, might save the boy)-why on earth would Matilde keep so stubbornly to herself, eccentric as any old mountain hermit, refusing his and Hiram's money, growing her own vegetables and raising a few scrawny chickens, making a spectacle of herself in the village-in the village that bore her own family's distinguished name!-by buying up rags and old clothes, and selling those crazy quilts, and occasionally eggs, home-baked bread, and vegetables? He would not think of her.) Ah, but should he allow himself to think of Jean-Pierre?-at whose trial (in fact trials, since the first resulted in a hung jury) he had not merely fingered but actually grasped the poison vial, wondering if he should use it himself if Jean-Pierre was found guilty, or whether he should slip it to his brother. . . . But Jean-Pierre was too cowardly to take cyanide, just as he was too cowardly to have murdered ten or eleven men; he would have burst into tears, and possibly told their mother. And shame, anger, rage, had fueled Noel after the conviction, so that he hadn't wanted to die, not even to escape the ignominy bruited about everywhere in the newspapers, and chuckled over by the Bellefleurs' many enemies, who did not care that justice was being mocked so long as the Bellefleurs were wounded. He had not wanted to die but the little vial-its very existence, the fact of its promise-comforted him a great deal.

Then there was his oldest son Raoul, managing one of the family's sawmills down in Kincardine, who, caught up in a peculiar marriage, or in a peculiar menage (Noel really knew little about the situation, he shut the women up when they began to speak of it, detesting gossip not his own) never-never-came home to visit. Not even during Cornelia's illness a few years ago. Not even when Noel himself was laid low with intestinal flu one winter, and sweated off eighteen pounds. "That boy doesn't love us," Noel said bitterly. "He has his own troubles," Cornelia said. "He doesn't love us or he'd come visit," Noel said. "And that's all."

Jean-Pierre, his good-looking dandyish brother; now in prison for life plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years. . . . And his oldest son Raoul, whom he'd thought, in his vanity, had so closely resembled him. . . . And Della who hated him, and Matilde who had no need of him (stout, winesap-apple-checked, chasing a clucking chicken out of the kitchen so that Noel could have a seat, smiling politely and answering his questions: How was she getting along, did she need firewood, did she need provisions, did she need money?-did she need him?) And Cornelia who baited him, who did not respect him as a woman should respect her husband. (Their marriage had gone off course on their honeymoon. In fact on their wedding night. Though they had made their wedding journey plans in secret, and had told only a few family members, nevertheless Noel's friends and drinking cronies caught up with them at the White Sulphur Springs Inn where they were spending the night, and treated them to a raucous "horning"-a serenade of bells, tin pans, firecrackers, and horns of various kinds, and many ribald shouts and shrieks; and Noel, following mountain custom, very cheerfully following mountain custom, had of course invited the drunken party in for more drinks, and cigars, and even a few games of poker. Next morning he'd been astonished to learn that his bride was miffed.) And there was his father, Lamentations of Jeremiah, who had worn himself out trying to recoup the family's losses, never outliving his father's disappointment in him, and that cruel jeering name, administered with such deliberation. Poor Jeremiah had been swept away in the Great Flood almost twenty years ago, and his body had never been recovered, never given a decent burial. . . .

The living and the dead. Braided together. Woven together. An immense tapestry taking in centuries. Noel began drinking the day of Nicholas's death, and continued drinking into the autumn, making a pig of himself by the fireplace, spilling whiskey and tobacco and ashes down his front. . . . The living and the dead. Centuries. A tapestry. Or was it one of Matilde's ingenious quilts that looked crazy to the eye but (if you allowed her to explain, to point out the connections) made a kind of dizzying sense . . . ? He mourned his lost father, and his imprisoned brother, and even his unnamed son who had died at the age of three days, long ago; he mourned Hiram's pretty young wife Eliza; and his oldest son Raoul; and the others. The others. Too many to enumerate. He'd had a disagreement with Claude Fuhr a while back and their friendship of decades had ended in a shouting match and neither had apologized and perhaps Noel should have made the first move because he, being a Bellefleur, possessed more charity. . . . But he had not apologized, and now they were blaming Gideon for Nicholas's death, and everything went wrong, tied itself into ugly knots and snarls only a quick swig from the bejeweled vial could solve.

After the excitement of the new baby, the women discovered Noel there by the fireplace and, for a brief while, fussed over him. Even Cornelia. ("Don't you want to see your new granddaughter, old man? She's quite a sight!") Even Veronica, who usually paid no attention to him. (It was generally thought that Veronica was one of Noel's sisters. But in fact she was an aunt. Years older than Noel though she looked remarkably young-with her full, plump face unmarked by character lines, her somewhat coarse, ruddy cheeks, her smallish, close-set, placid hazel eyes, and her hair-so honey-warm a brown, it must have been dyed, and very expertly dyed at that: Noel once tried to figure out the woman's age but his brain resisted and he simply poured himself another drink.) Even Lily, who was ordinarily jealous of Leah, came round to cheer him up by saying he should see the new baby-he should see her at once, she was growing so fast-she wouldn't be a baby much longer.

He growled that they should leave him alone. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die. . . . A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. . . . A time to laugh, and a time to weep.

NEVERTHELESS, ONE DAY, he peeked through the open door of Leah's boudoir and saw . . . and saw Leah in a green silk dressing gown, one breast exposed, full and waxen-white, the nipple, elongated, an astonishing pink-brown; he saw one of the servant girls lifting a baby into her arms; he saw, transfixed, the baby (which was a healthy-sized baby, kicking and flailing its arms robustly) start to nurse, its blind, greedy little mouth grabbing at the nipple. He stood, staring, his hands in his pockets, and his knees turned to water, and his glasses misted over. Oh, dear God, he thought.

Leah, boldly, called him in. Why stand there gaping? Hadn't he ever seen a baby before?-a baby nursing before?

"Isn't she hungry this morning!" Leah said. She shuddered, she laughed. There was a curious elated, gloating sound to her voice which excited Noel. "Ah, just look at that! Isn't she a beauty!"

The small hands made clenching, grabbing motions. The eyes were half-shut with pleasure; and then opened wide with agitation-a deep, clear green-as if there were some danger the breast might be taken away.

"Such a little pig, isn't she!" Leah laughed.

"A very . . . a very healthy baby . . ." Noel said faintly.

"Well, she's big enough. And getting bigger every day."

Noel wiped and polished his glasses. And sat, timid as a suitor, on Leah's couch. His daughter-in-law had never looked more beautiful-her complexion was whitely-hot, as if with concentration; her blue eyes shone in triumph; her lips were full and moist. A considerable quantity of milk had dribbled down the front of her silk gown, and its odor was so warm, so stale, so sweet, that Noel grew dizzy. Ah, if only he could nurse at Leah's breasts!

Why had he hidden away all these weeks, brooding over things he couldn't change, spitting into the fireplace like an old man?

That afternoon, he stayed until Leah chased him out. And returned the next morning, and stayed and stayed. He did not know whether he should envy Gideon or not-there was something courteous, something almost too formal, about Gideon and Leah now: they no longer quarreled in front of the family, or slapped at each other; they no longer squeezed each other's hands, or whispered in each other's ears, or kissed noisily. Gideon had trimmed his beard and mustache, and made a show of behaving, after those terrible black weeks following Nicholas's death, like a gentleman; and Leah addressed him with a small cool discreet smile. In the early days of their marriage Cornelia had been scandalized, the way the two of them "pawed" each other in public. . . . But those days appeared to be past.

Still, Noel did envy his son. Because Gideon was this woman's husband, after all. Her husband, and the father of that beautiful baby.

Leah had always turned aside when stories of the family were told, and she had always professed boredom when the subject of the Bellefleur "fortune" was brought up, as it so frequently was. But now, suddenly, she wanted to hear everything, everything Noel could tell her, going back to the original Jean-Pierre . . . the youngest son of the Duc de Bellefleur . . . banished from his homeland by Louis XV for his "radical ideas" about individual rights . . . arriving penniless in New York and yet, within years, evidently rich enough to acquire, in the 1770's, some 2,889,500 acres of wilderness land for seven and a half pence an acre. . . . It delighted Leah to learn that this extraordinary man had wanted at one time to control the northeastern border of what had newly become known as the United States of America (which meant the control of waterways as well, and commerce with Montreal and Quebec); and that he had even drawn up plans-how seriously, Leah wondered!-for breaking his wilderness kingdom away from the rest of the state, and even from the new nation, in order to establish a sovereignty of his own. It was to have been called Nautauga, and it would have had close diplomatic and commercial ties with French Canada.

"Ah-Nautauga," Leah whispered. "Of course. Nautauga. How simple. . . . Almost three million acres, all his. Nautauga."

The only likeness of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur the family had was a poor engraving that had been the frontispiece of The Almanack of Riches, a paperbound book published in 1813 by Jean-Pierre and a printer friend, in shameless imitation of Ben Franklin's Almanack: in the shadowy reproduction a bright pair of eyes gleamed, and the brows hulked dark and ponderous and shrewd. A handsome man, bewigged, with a very black dandyish beard. That long thin noble Bellefleur nose. Middle-aged, perhaps. Not old. Leah studied the picture, holding it up to the light. A handsome man, yes; and there was something noble about him.

"Tell me everything you know about him," Leah commanded her elders. Then, after a pause, bravely: "Even the circumstances of his death."

SO THE DAYS passed. Autumn plunged, as it must, into winter; the sun described a laconic parenthesis in the sky, and disappeared as early as 3:00 P.M.; and sometimes there was no sun at all. Yet Noel Bellefleur was never happier.

What's that silly little melody you are always humming, Cornelia asked him suspiciously, why are you smiling to yourself?

Aveline said, Is Pappa sneaking whiskey in the mornings now?

Leah, the cause of his chattery good spirits, pretended to notice nothing unusual at all. (Her husband's strong-willed father had always been one of the liveliest of the Bellefleurs.) He talked to her for hours, tireless. And if he said, "But, Leah, I must be boring you-I must be wearing you out with this old dead history," she always protested vehemently. How could he think of such a thing, boring her with facts about the Bellefleur family . . . !

Old Jean-Pierre, that outrageous man. Nautauga in its earliest years. The old house across the lake at Bushkill's Ferry. (In which the tragedy had taken place: but Noel did not wish to dwell upon that.) Jean-Pierre's empire, his tumultuous years as a congressman, his partnerships in resort hotels, steamboats, coach lines, taverns; The Almanack of Riches (which, despite its derivative nature, went through three hundred printings!); the scheme to bring Napoleon to the Chautauquas; the old Cockagne Club; the timber-razing projects; the Arctic elk manure scandal; the innumerable women or tales of women. . . . Noel chattered away happily. His own children had never cared to hear these tales, except for the story-necessarily abbreviated-of the Bushkill's Ferry massacre; and so it was something of a miracle that young Leah Pym, the most beautiful bride ever brought to live in Bellefleur Manor, should show such an intense, such an insatiable interest. Noel fairly glowed with pleasure. One of Leah's questions could start him off for an hour or more. It frequently seemed, on those long lazy lamp-lit winter afternoons, that Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, the old man himself, was in the room with them, standing with his back to the fire, leaning against the mantel, puffing on a foul-smelling pipe and shaking with merriment. . . .

ONE NOON NOEL gathered together a party of children for a drive across Lake Noir in his horse-drawn sleigh. The ice was solid-wonderfully solid-frozen now to a depth of twenty or more inches. (The ice of Lake Noir!-a phenomenon taken for granted by local residents, but well worth the attention given it by curious visitors: How is it possible, strangers wondered, that ice, which is after all merely water, should possess the shading and even the texture of onyx, and that it should refuse to melt in the warm breezes of April, retaining its solid state well past the time when ice-locked ponds and lakes on far higher ground had cracked . . . ? Examined in chips or drops Lake Noir did not have a dark or even a shadowy cast; it appeared to be "normal"; and when young Bromwell studied it carefully beneath his microscope he could find nothing exceptional about it. But in bulk it was peculiarly lightless, and seemed to reflect or radiate a blackish sheen, like that of ravens' feathers. It was one of the family legends that the Bellefleur dead, though officially buried in the cemetery, really went to live in Lake Noir, in its murky depths, and could sometimes be sighted beneath the ice, standing upside down with their feet against the ice, by one who was himself fated soon to die. But the children believed this tale only when they wanted to frighten themselves.) Racing across the ice, several of the grandchildren-Christabel, Louis, Vida-bundled up beside him, beneath a wool-and-feather-lined quilt, Noel had a sudden idea: he reached in his pocket for the vial of poison: and there it was, there as always it was. But it no longer gave comfort. It no longer seemed important. Poison? A quick death? Suicide? But why? (So Noel imagined his daughter-in-law interrogating him, the color high in her cheeks, her magnificent eyes glowing.) You-a Bellefleur? Taking comfort from the cowardly thought of suicide?

His first impulse was to throw it away; but of course the ice was solid, the vial might be discovered. So he put it back in his pocket. Since they were going to visit poor Jonathan Hecht this afternoon (Jonathan's condition had worsened, he wasn't expected to live beyond the New Year) it occurred to Noel that he should leave the vial with his old friend. Ah yes!-with Jonathan.

"That poor old man," Noel thought, his heart swelling charitably.

The Vision.

High above the mist-shrouded river. In the many-faceted light, quivering with moisture, that breaks off the mountain. (The name of the mountain? Jedediah has forgotten. Only with an effort can he grasp that things-even so vast, so uncharted-have been given names.) In his wanderings he keeps that mountain in view. It is one of the few snow-covered peaks in the Chautauquas, which are said to be old mountains, eroded by millennia. In a dream he learned that the mountain is a sacred mountain, presided over by spirits that, like angels, are not human; nor are they, exactly, God. They have to do with God. But are not God. Not exactly. . . . He keeps that mountain peak in view. Sometimes he stands motionless and stares at it, observing how, as the minutes pass, or perhaps they are hours, passing silently, seamlessly, the "white" cap shifts and blurs in the sun, as if preening before him. It trembles, writhes, shakes itself.

God?

But God hides within His creation.