In certain lights the mist turns to flame. His breath is sucked from him, his eyes fill with involuntary tears. Ah, that the entire world could so easily turn to flame!-except for God's fastidious mercy. Which holds the sun back. Which measures what man can bear.

Jedediah contemplating "Jedediah." It seems that he inhabits a body. Uses it to walk about in. The eyes-his eyes-are evidently the means by which he draws God to him. When he read the Bible, in those days before the spirits' humming and singing and their coy, sweet whispers ("Jedediah? Jedediah? Come to us!") distracted him, it was evidently the case that God, though a spirit, was to be evoked through the print of a book: through verse after verse of that old leather-bound book. Hear my prayer, O Lord, Jedediah whispered, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me. . . . For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned. . . . My heart is smitten, and withered like grass. His eyes smarted in the smoke from his tiny fire, his voice was hoarse with longing. Still, he did not raise his voice; he did not beg; certainly he did not command his Lord. Very softly he whispered, Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.

It would be many weeks, Jedediah reasoned calmly, before God might reveal Himself.

ONE OF THE mountain spirits slipped giggling beneath the covers and, in a gesture both childlike and depraved, ran her thin cold fingers up and down his thighs.

Jedediah turned at once to embrace her. Hard. Hard. Though they were pressed together in the dark, though his ravenous mouth was against hers, he could see her quite distinctly.

He groaned with the surprise of her. Of it.

Strange, in his father's house, in his brother's household, he had seen only a small warm pretty face. Hair, eyes, shoulders. Shyly expressive hands. He had looked at her often enough, covertly, but he had never seen her.

Now he saw her vividly. Piercingly.

With his very skin he saw her.

The mole beside her left eye, the delicate vein on her forehead. The tiny, white, almost invisible lines about her mouth, which was a girl's mouth. He had not remembered that her limp, curly hair was so fine, feathery-fine, and that it stirred with his breath as he grew near.

Germaine?

She smiled. Revealing slightly grayish teeth that were charmingly crooked. The incisors were a fraction of an inch longer than the front teeth so that her smile gave her the quick, fey, shy, somewhat wicked look of a woodland creature-a wolverine, a fox. And what color were her eyes? Brown? Gray-brown? Hazel flecked with gold? At the moment when his hard, eager, desperate flesh entered hers-when the soft, warm resistance of her body suddenly gave way-her eyelids fluttered and her eyes rolled white in their deep-set sockets.

Germaine, he groaned.

And afterward he woke, his heart pounding so violently that he feared he might be having a seizure: with both hands he pressed against his chest, against his tumbling heart. His lips were too numb to shape a prayer.

Then he saw what had happened, what the spirit had teased him into doing, and he woke fully, humiliated, angered. As his heartbeat slowed and his breathing returned to normal her image faded swiftly. He realized with spiteful pleasure that he had forgotten her name. As he had forgotten the name of the mountain, and the name of the river that plunged below him, so thunderous he no longer heard it.

Her small hectic face? Faded, erased. The quick daring movements of her hands? Gone.

She was his brother's wife, his brother's child-wife. A girl of sixteen, imagine, married to that bullying ignorant fool! He remembered Louis's name clearly, of course, but he did not remember hers. . . . Begging him to stay until the baby was born. Don't you want to see your little nephew?-aren't you going to be his godfather? A certain flirtatious, nervous lilt to her voice, so that he would not really think she was begging.

Now he never thought of her. He never thought of any of them.

Except, at unanticipated times, at moments when his soul felt unaccountably weak, watery as gruel, he found himself gazing upon his father through his eyelashes; his head bowed; his manner supplicant. There, the man who was his father. The man whom God had employed to bring him into the world. Into time. Into suffering. Into sin. What did it mean, Jedediah wondered, stooping to rub his ankle which throbbed painfully at such times (for all his money, Jean-Pierre Bellefleur had a reputation for miserliness, and perhaps it was true-he refused to take his son back to Manhattan, to an "overpriced" butcher, and turned him over, after the accident, to a drinking companion of his, a Dr. Magjar, who had drifted down across the border from Quebec and who spoke only a few words in English, and spoke them poorly: Jean-Pierre's logic being that no great skill was needed to set a few bones)-what did it mean, what did God intend, that out of that man's loins he, Jedediah, should have sprung?

The shock, the disgust, of that first trip to the north country. Two weeks of hunting, fishing, canoeing. Indians. Iroquois. Imagine an Iroquois guide! And Iroquois children. Your own age. And lakes, and mountains, a wilderness as far as the eye can see . . . !

Harlan and Louis and Jedediah, then a very young child. Their mother, of course, remained behind in their twelve-room town house, and Jean-Pierre did not mention her once during the two weeks. Instead, at the lakeside camps, at the riverside inns and taverns, there were other women, astonishingly friendly, noisy, gay: women who tilted their heads back and roared with laughter. One of them, no younger than Jedediah's mother, and far less attractive, ran her fingers roughly through Jedediah's hair and told him he had his father's beautiful dark eyes, Satan's eyes. She had smelled of perspiration, like a man.

Jean-Pierre, his voice slurred with drink, his eyelids drooping. Hugging the boys. Jedediah and Louis, but Harlan wrenched free; and then Louis pushed away. Hugging Jedediah, who could not move. If you fall in love too young, Jean-Pierre said shrilly, you will always be alone. Her name was Sarah. Her name . . . but it wouldn't mean anything to you . . . it wouldn't mean anything now. . . . If you fall in love too young and nothing comes of it you will always be alone for the rest of your life. So you might as well open the doors. Bring the crowd in. One, two, a dozen, two dozen, what the hell, what does it matter. . . .

Jedediah had wanted to shrug himself free of his father's embrace, but he had not dared to move.

His father, his father's voice. In the cabin with him. He felt the danger of that voice's intimacy.

Suppose his father hunted him down. Made out a warrant for his arrest. Or paid a gang of men to bring him back. (Slung over a horse, wrists and ankles bound. A deer carcass. A gutted deer.) In the first year of his solitude he had thought God would reveal Himself at any moment . . . but his only surprises, his only visitations, were from men: trappers, hunters, men like himself who wandered the mountains, some of them known to him from his life down below, most of them strangers. Every few weeks one or two of them might approach his cabin, calling his name. (For they knew him.) Except in the deep of winter, when the fifteen-foot snowbanks protected him, these unwelcome visitors would interrupt his solitude so often that it sometimes seemed (but of course he was imagining it, he really knew better) that his father and his brother were employing them, not merely to bring letters and provisions and unwanted gifts, but to destroy his peace. In that first year . . . or was it more than a year . . . letters were thrust boldly into his unwilling hands . . . and the request was even made that he write out a reply . . . a few words, a few lines . . . to be brought back home. Of course he always refused. Sometimes in anger, sometimes in alarm. Write out a reply! But why, and to whom? He had given them up. He had surrendered himself to God.

Nevertheless he skimmed the letters, holding them at arm's length. For perhaps God might address him through another's voice. Through his brother's scribbling, with its misspellings and its frequent exclamation points. ("Wait till you see your little nephews, growing so fast!-and the town is growing too-Papa bought into a coachline, and a ferry, and one or two other things that will come as quite a surprise!! He asks after you & sends his love. . . .") But he never read the letters carefully, his eye darted about in panic, and in the end he usually folded them and burned them, so as not to risk the temptation of reading them at another time. And he was right to do so, as he discovered one morning when he did examine a sheet of paper that was only scorched around the edges: for it turned out that his father now spent most of his time at White Sulphur Springs, at something called Chattaroy Hall, where wealthy southerners came to summer, bringing with them their daughters, their marriageable daughters, and Jedediah was of an age when he must marry, and take up the responsibilities of an adult, and if he could see one or two of these lovely girls-who couldn't hear enough about him, who already adored him for living alone in the mountains- Elsewhere was the commandment to Love & Honor Yr. Father.

ONE NIGHT, FEVERISH, the skin of his forehead, cheeks, and upper chest actually burning, Jedediah stumbled out into the dark, into the rain, and turned his astonished face upward, convinced that someone had called his name. God? Was it God? Calling his name above the noise of the river, and the hard pounding rain?

He had been ill for several days. His bowels had sickened, turning to water; a fine gray mist passed before his eyes. He slept and woke and slept again, sometimes waking in a convulsive shiver, sometimes with a snort like a deer's snort-his throat was so dry, so parched.

God? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The God of Wrath and of infinite majesty?

A God of fist-sized raindrops. Falling from the sky. How odd, how very odd, the beautiful way in which they fell: so weighted, so heavy! He gaped up into the sky. There was no sky, there was nothing to see, only the immense glistening raindrops, striking him with the force of pebbles. He had lived his entire life so far, Jedediah thought dizzily, without worshipping the God of Rain. Without standing bareheaded, utterly submissive, supplicant, virginal as a young bride, his face turned up to the hammer-force that fell from God.

Calm. Silence. Silence within the deafening roar. Silence within the tumult of his veins, the chatter inside his skull.

God? Now? In this hour?

One hour was all hours, one raindrop all raindrops. God in each, in all, icy-hard, piercing. It was very cold. But there was no wind. But it was summer. Wasn't it summer? The first summer after the summer of his leavetaking . . . or perhaps the second summer . . . the second, or the third. . . . One summer was all summers, just as one raindrop was all raindrops, and he had only to stand there, bareheaded, bare-chested, a suppliant, meek before God, opened to God's love.

The beautiful drumming rain! The ceaseless rain! Egg-sized, fist-sized drops of rain! Mesmerizing. Blinding. (For he could not even see the edge of the bank, he could barely see the doorway of the cabin behind him.) The burning sensation was gone. Now he shivered, in gratitude. Rain ran down his forehead, his cheeks, his chest, it ran down his body in caressing chilling streams, not many drops but one single drop, a vast benevolent soothing flood.

God? he whispered softly.

And then for some reason he turned to look back, and saw, there, in the doorway of his cabin, the very mountain spirit who had teased and tormented him, and led him into sin: she was holding her arms out to him, though not blatantly, not boldly: her small oval face was pale, and utterly familiar, and her voice, though loud enough to be heard over the roar, was gentle. You will have to come back, Jedediah. To me.

The Spider, Love.

From approximately the age of thirteen and a half, until she was eighteen, and Gideon Bellefleur so valiantly courted and won her, Germaine's mother kept as a pet a spider of remarkable size and beauty, which she called Love.

"Ah, isn't it a handsome thing, just look at it," Leah would say, as it quivered in its spittle-glistening web (and the web itself was a masterpiece, Leah would have liked to draw it in pen-and-ink, in all its exquisite detail), or scuttled about the walls and ceiling of her room (upon which it frequently left, at first to the distress of her roommate at La Tour, and La Tour's headmistress, Madame Mullein, and then to the angry distress of her mother, a translucent film or slime that, though almost imperceptible at first, gradually darkened to form ineradicable tracks), or crept affectionately up her arm to her shoulder where it nuzzled, blackly silky and bold, against her neck. "It's just the gentlest thing, aren't you? It wouldn't do any harm to anyone."

Which Leah knew wasn't altogether true. For Love did bite if irritated, and Leah's fingers were covered with angry little stings about the size of mosquito bites, which grew red with her impatient scratching; and if she didn't feed it immediately in the morning-dead flies and other insects, even dead spiders; bread crumbs; cookie crumbs; milk and sugar and tiny bits of meat, offered with a tweezers-it would sometimes leap down from its web and sting her sharply on the back of the hand. If anyone was present (and there were girls at La Tour, her age or younger, who, fascinated and disgusted by Love, crept into Leah's room very early, before chapel, to watch the handsome spider at his breakfast) Leah did no more than draw in her breath sharply, and cry "Oh!-aren't you naughty!-can't you wait a moment?" and suck at the tiny wound, giggling, her eyes shining as they darted over her silent, staring audience of girls in floor-length nightgowns and woollen robes, their hair, long as Leah's, unbraided for the night and falling loose past their thin shoulders. "He gets ravenously hungry during the night, because it's so long for him," Leah explained.

Quite frequently one of the girls, lingering behind after the others had left, would ask Leah shyly if she might feed Love sometime. Or have him perch on her finger, or her shoulder, as he did so jauntily with Leah when the mood struck him. "I wouldn't hurt him, I wouldn't crush him or anything," the girls promised, when Love was still fairly small-penny-sized, with a modest little belly; and then as the weeks passed, and Love greedily devoured the dozen little meals Leah offered him daily, and grew-grew to the size of a roach, then to the size of a hummingbird-the girls said, shivering, hugging themselves, "I wouldn't be afraid of him-I wouldn't drop him, or knock him away-I wouldn't scream, Leah, please!"

Though Leah always accepted food the girls brought, and was particularly pleased to receive walnut fudge (since it was not only one of Love's favorite foods but one of Leah's, and Della never-never-sent fudge to La Tour), she always refused to allow the girls to participate in the ritual of feeding Love. He was her discovery, her pet. There had never been anything like him in the history of La Tour Academy for Girls, and there never would be, and Leah was so unhappy there, so lonely and restless and angry, and yet spitefully proud of herself (for she was a Bellefleur: she belonged to the Bellefleur family and as far as anyone knew she belonged to the wealthy Bellefleurs), that she refused not only most of the girls' timid requests for Love, but their timid, inarticulate, groping overtures for friendship as well. And then too there was the possibility, the very real possibility, that Love would sting a girl so hard that she would betray Leah and run to Madame Mullein. Or might Love even (and this thought rarely crossed Leah's mind, it was so hideous) quickly grow to prefer another girl, another girl's trembling finger, her soft freckled arm, the warm fragrant scent of her hair . . . ?

Leah's roommate Faye Renaud was a child of about average size, and consequently much shorter than Leah, with unruly frizzy hair, and nondescript features, and a slight stammer that sometimes exasperated Leah (who, even when intimidated by a teacher or one of the older girls, spoke out quickly and boldly, for no one was going to get the better of her), and sometimes charmed her: Faye was Leah's closest friend at the school, her only friend really, and the girls sometimes liked to pretend that they were sisters. But even when Faye begged for a chance to pet Love's fine satiny-black hair ("I won't tell the other girls, Leah, please!" she whispered) Leah thought it wisest to refuse.

"Love is a wild creature, after all," Leah said, with dignity.

VERY LATE ONE night, when all the lights were out, shut off by a master switch operated by the headmistress, Leah, sleepless, homesick for the mountains, for the very feel of the Chautauqua air, and the odor of brackish Lake Noir, homesick even (though she would certainly not admit it) for her mother, imagined she heard something beneath her bed. Heard it, or felt it. Sensed it somehow. . . . As a small child she had frightened herself with the thought of nasty ugly creatures hiding beneath her bed. They were vaguely aquatic, yet dark, darkly sluggish, like eels writhing in mud; they were possessed of a queer half-human slyness, though they were also, and this is what terrified her, hardly more than black shapes. They were keenly aware of her, of every move she made in bed, and so it was necessary for her to lie perfectly still, her arms rigid at her sides and her breath as shallow as possible.

But she had outgrown these silly creatures. The only thing beneath her bed, Leah thought, was dust balls.

And so, while Faye slept a few yards away, Leah lay at the very edge of her bed and reached under. She groped about quite boldly. Of course there was nothing! What could there be! Her fingers closed about a slipper and tossed it aside. And encountered a ball of dust. (Leah was often scolded for her "failure to observe the rules of cleanliness"-for even her clothes, and even her hands and feet and neck, were not always as clean as they might be.) And encountered, then, something else . . . at the very first like a dust ball, it was so soft, so fine, so filmy . . . and then it was firmer . . . and it tickled . . . ah, it was moving! moving! . . . and then it stung her.

She was so surprised, she did not even yank her arm out; she simply moved it a few inches away. And lay there, frozen, her eyes opened wide in the dark.

And then, after a few seconds, she felt the softness again . . . she felt the tickling again . . . as the thing crawled over her hand. She lay motionless, waiting. It was going to sting. She knew it was going to sting. That piercing needlelike thrust. . . . But it simply remained there, on the back of her hand. A mouse? A baby mouse? Leah had, of course, seen innumerable baby mice, and it always distressed her when the cats tormented them, when they ran about blindly, squealing, squeaking for life; even baby rats were darling creatures. But a mouse beneath her bed? Mice in the room? Rats?

She drew her hand cautiously away. Where was that slipper. . . . If she acted quickly enough perhaps she could crush the thing before it escaped. . . .

But with remarkable alacrity, and a kind of grace that seemed almost human, the thing leapt back onto her hand and began to make its way, slowly, as if aware of her apprehension, up her arm . . . very slowly up her arm . . . its delicate legs brushing against the delicate hairs of her arm. . . . Staring at the faintly moonlit ceiling Leah lay paralyzed, and thought, as the creature fumbled a little by the crook of her arm, that it would now fall off: it couldn't get a toehold: it would fall off and she would scramble out of bed, on the other side of the bed, and scream for help. But the creature did not fall off. It simply turned, and made its way up to her shoulder, at the same slow, deliberate pace, as if it were fully conscious of her, and able to read her thoughts.

Leah did not dare move. Odd, that her heart continued to beat calmly, that she did not fly into a panic. She was an unusually strong-willed, even stoic child, and felt contempt for the "ladylike" girls at the academy, but there had been times-once, when Angel reared back from a copperhead, and again when a boy, younger than Leah, started inexplicably to sink, to drown, while swimming in Lake Noir-when she had lapsed into a state of sheer brainless panic. And she had a bad temper: she was a most moody, mercurial child: sometimes, Della shouted, she was possessed of a demon, and only a good exhaustive beating would cure her. But that night as Love crept delicately along the smooth skin of her upper arm, to pause at her shoulder, its thin legs poised like a dancer's, its keen sharp eyes fixed intelligently upon her, Leah did not panic, did not babble out for help, though she wanted, ah, how very much she wanted, to cry "Faye, help me! Faye, do something! Get a shoe, get a boot, hit it, please, crush it, please!"-she did not succumb to the terror she felt, but lay motionless, hardly breathing.

And in the morning, at dawn, when the room finally grew light enough for her to see (for the feathery weight on her shoulder, so close to her ear, though unmoving, apparently unthreatening, did not allow her to sleep: she even began to imagine she could hear it breathing), she turned her head slowly, her eyes narrowed, her lower lip caught hard in her teeth-and there it was: there, the handsome spider: hardly more than spider-sized at the time, but remarkably sleek, with tiny beadlike eyes, and hair of burnished black, so fine, so thick, as to resemble fur.

"Why, you're a spider," Leah whispered in amazement.

LOVE, A SECRET from Faye for a brief while, and from the other girls for several weeks, grew rapidly. His favorite foods were bits of other insects mashed around in sugar-milk, and very tiny bits of meat. (A silver-dollar-sized piece of fatty beef, smuggled upstairs in a napkin from the dining hall, would keep Love engrossed for days.) From the very first Love was keenly sensitive to his mistress's moods, and if she was tearful he would rub against her ankle, like a cat, and scuttle up her to nuzzle against her neck and cheek; if she was nervous he would crawl rapidly about the walls, spinning out abortive webs, the strands of which fell loose, swaying, responsive to the slightest movement of the air. When Leah was in high spirits Love kept his distance, with an almost resentful dignity: he spun his fascinating web in a high corner of the room and perched in its center, watching her, censorious, immobile, offended. At such times Leah would clap her hands and call him, her cheeks flushed, her eyes gleaming with the wildness of it-that she, Leah Pym, had a spider for a pet!-a sleek handsome black hairy-legged yellow-beady-eyed spider for a pet.

"Come here! Now you come here!" she cried, bringing her palms smartly together. "Don't you want to be fed all day? Don't you give a damn? You, Love! You pay attention to me!"

But Love would not be commanded, nor could he be wooed. He came to his mistress only when the spirit moved him: sometimes surprising her by leaping from the wall onto her head and burrowing into her hair (on Sundays and on Wednesday evenings when dining was "formal," Leah and Faye prepared each other's hair, sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes impatiently: Leah's dress-up hairdo was quite elaborate, involving not only a heavy chignon but several brands and braids of hair wound about her head, and full, fluffy, wavy bangs that nearly obscured her eyebrows: and it was invariably into that charmingly pretentious hair arrangement that the mischievous Love insinuated himself, a minute or two before the bell rang to summon the girls downstairs), and, more frequently, scuttling up her stockinged leg to her underpants of cotton wool and burrowing inside them and crawling, flattened, sly, across the swell of her stomach, while she squealed and slapped at him and jumped about the room trying to dislodge him-knocking over her desk chair, the tea things, the water basin, poor Faye's potted fern, the stack of kindling wood beside the little fireplace. And there were times-especially after she had returned to Bushkill's Ferry, and home, and Love was much larger, having grown to the size of a sparrow-when Love sensed that her mind was elsewhere as she fed or stroked him, and, in a sudden ill-natured frenzy, stung her most cruelly on the back of the hand, or the breast, or even her cheek. Leah's scream, her shock, her sudden childish tears, somewhat placated him at such moments. "Oh, that hurt, that hurt, why did you do that, oh, you did that deliberately, you calculated that, don't you love me?-haven't I been good to you? Do you want me to take you out to the woods and turn you loose? Don't you love me?" Leah whispered.

THE BEAUTIFUL YOUNG Leah Pym and her gigantic black spider, incorrectly said to be a black widow spider, became quite notorious in the Valley. Very few people had actually seen the spider, and fewer yet had seen it perched upon her shoulder like a tamed bird, or nestled in her hair; but everyone had an opinion about it.

When the girl first returned from the academy at La Tour-appearing, unannounced, at her mother's door, tearful and weakened and alarmingly thin (for she had lost a considerable amount of weight, having succumbed to a terrible melancholia that not even contempt for her classmates and her teachers and the headmistress could dissipate) it was said that she had contracted some deathly illness, down in the flatland. (La Tour was one hundred or more miles to the south, a fairly prosperous commercial city of moderate size, on the Hennicutt River; mountain people claimed that the air in such low-lying places was foul, and that they had actual difficulty breathing it, through their nostrils especially, because it was so unpleasantly thick-textured.) It was whispered that she had had a disastrous love affair-with one of her teachers?-but were there men teachers at the Academy?-ah, but then perhaps poor Leah had been victimized by a woman!-and it was no wonder that Della, imperious closemouthed Della Pym, refused to discuss the situation. Word spread that the girl had behaved very oddly during her last weeks at the school: she had stopped eating; tore pages out of her diary and textbooks, and burned them; gave away clothing because it no longer fit her, being too loose; gave away jewelry; even a lovely mink hat that had been a present from her uncle Noel, about which she had always been rather vain. She had refused to go to chapel. Or to her classes. She had "pined away" for Bushkill's Ferry, for Lake Noir, for the mountains. She had lost all interest in her sorrel mare, and was to leave Angel behind at the academy stable, when she left so abruptly. Strangest of all, the girl had a most unusual pet. . . .

This daughter of Della Pym's, Della's only child, born some five months after her father's death, was known generally to be willful and vain and bad-tempered, though Della certainly had not spoiled her. One of Gideon Bellefleur's earliest, fondest memories of his beautiful cousin had to do with a violent temper tantrum she threw at the age of three: something so maddened her that she stamped and kicked and threw herself about, and savagely ripped the front of her white satin dress with its Flemish lace collar and cuffs, and had to be carried out sobbing by one of the adults. Upon another occasion she sulked at the wedding of a cousin in Innisfail, and drank glass after glass of champagne, and challenged certain of her boy cousins to a wrestling match (which they wisely declined), and, gaily intoxicated, her long billowing skirts hoisted to midthigh, she waded in a brook and splashed about and refused to come back when her mother called her. She was then no more than eleven years old, but her hips had already begun to fill out, and her small breasts had a distinctly womanly fullness and softness to them, that made Gideon and his brothers quite uneasy. The incident ended abruptly when Leah stumbled back to shore, wet and breathless and white-faced, weeping, for reasons no one could comprehend, "I don't want to! I don't want to!" What it was the child did not want, no one knew, nor could she explain. "I don't want to!" she sobbed, tears streaking her rounded cheeks; and Gideon, then a boy of fifteen, could do no more than stare.

(Odd, that Della and Leah came so frequently to Bellefleur celebrations. It seemed they were always underfoot, and Leah was even bold enough, once or twice, to bring her hairy little pet along. Though Della detested her wealthy relatives she always accepted their invitations to weddings and christenings and holiday gatherings because she felt that they did not really want her and were counting on her refusal-and why should she give them that pleasure? "For my sake, Leah, behave like a young lady," she always said; but when, inevitably, Leah behaved quite badly, she never seriously scolded her afterward. "You've got their blood in you, after all," she would say apathetically.) Leah was sixteen years old when, diving from a granite cliff into Lake Noir, and swimming, through a chilly September rain, halfway across the choppy lake, she caused her cousin Gideon to fall irrevocably in love with her. He halfway knew he had been falling in love with her for years, by degrees, and that astonishing sight-the husky, strapping, deeply tanned girl in the green one-piece bathing suit, diving without hesitation into the water some fifteen or twenty feet below, every muscle beautifully coordinated-was nothing more than a final blow. Leah swam as strongly as Gideon himself, her heavy dark hair wound about her head like a helmet, her face pale and stubborn with effort. He had wanted-but had been unable-to run off the cliff and splash down beside her. He had wanted to pursue her and overtake her and turn it all into a boisterous joke. But he hadn't moved, he had simply stood there, staring, watching that body sleek and forceful in the water as an eel's, in the grip of an emotion in which love and desire were so inextricably braided that he was left quite literally breathless.

(Much later, when Noel closeted himself with his son, and pleaded and reasoned and shouted with him, and even dared to lay hands on him, Gideon's only response was a baffled, sulky, "Well, I don't want to want her, not only is she a cousin of mine but she's a daughter of that insufferable old bitch! What do you think, Pappa, do you think I want any of this?") As a fairly young girl Leah attracted suitors, some of them, like Francis Renaud and Harrison McNievan, a decade or more older than she; and of course there were a number of boys Gideon's age who were very interested in her. But all were intimidated by the spider Love. There were tales-not, in fact, very exaggerated-of the girl's wanton cruelty in allowing Love to clamber across a visitor's shoulders, and even to sting upon occasion. (You would have thought, people murmured, that the Pym girl would have respect for poor Harrison-with his arm crippled from the War, not to mention all the land he inherited!) At the age of seventeen and eighteen Leah enjoyed a perverse popularity in the region, despite her frequent and quite open disdain of men, and her skittish, even priggish behavior when she was alone with a man. It might have been her very nervousness she wished to disguise, by outlandish requests (she commanded Lyle Burnside to fetch a silk scarf of hers that had blown-or had she allowed it to blow?-down a steep cliff along the Military Road) and girlish pranks edged with malice (she agreed to meet Nicholas Fuhr on Sugarloaf Hill one summer day, and sent a fat, somewhat retarded half-breed girl instead) and sudden, inexplicable outbursts of temper (at a wake-of all places!-she turned to Ewan Bellefleur, who had been eying her with an unsubtle smile, and accused him of being wicked, of gambling and wasting money, of being unfaithful to his fiancee (whom at that time Leah had never met: she knew only that Ewan was marrying into a Derby family of surprisingly modest wealth), and of having fathered illegitimate children-an attack that amazed Ewan, not because it touched upon anything he might be in a position to deny, but because it was so unprovoked: hadn't his look of frank, appreciative interest in his cousin at all flattered her?).

"That's Della's work," Ewan was told. "The woman wants to poison her daughter against all men, but especially against Bellefleur men."

The ugliest-or was it the most amusing?-episode involved a young man named Baldwin Meade, who was rumored to be related, distantly, to the Varrell family, once numerous in the Valley, before the notorious feud with the Bellefleurs in the 1820's killed off so many on both sides. It might have been that Leah was attracted to Baldwin Meade because of this connection, for what would infuriate her wealthy relatives more than a liaison with one of their enemies?-even if the feud was long dead, and hardly more than a source of embarrassment to all. (Though this was not exactly true. Ewan and Gideon and Raoul had sworn, as boys, to revenge themselves if and when the occasion arose: for, rejecting the state's claim that Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II had murdered two Varrells that night at Innisfail, along with nine other men, they calculated that six Bellefleurs had been killed to a mere three or four Varrells, which seemed to them monstrously unjust.) If Baldwin Meade was related to the Varrell family he certainly did not emphasize the fact, nor did he resemble them in the slightest: they had been swarthy, thick-chested, of no more than moderate height, with hirsute bodies, and beards that grew halfway up their faces; and it goes without saying that the Varrells, the Bellefleurs' old enemies, were uneducated, crude, brutish, and inarticulate. ("Why, you look as if you'd just joined the human race a few weeks ago," Harlan Bellefleur was heard to exclaim, in actual surprise, even as he raised his Mexican handgun to blow half the man's face away; witnesses were struck by Harlan's graceful manner, the way in which he hesitated before he pulled the trigger, as if the very idea, the very thought, that the man cowering before him wasn't altogether human, held a profound significance he must contemplate-though not at the moment.) By contrast Baldwin Meade was tall, slender, clean-shaven, a cheerful if indiscriminate talker, and though his manners were about average for the mountains he was certainly not coarse, and took care never to use profanity or barnyard colloquialisms in the presence of those women designated as ladies. How, exactly, he behaved on that Fourth of July night, what sort of things he said to Leah, what sort of things he wished to do, or actually did, to Leah, no one knew: for the girl would never tell, and one could hardly bring the subject up with her mother.

Returning home from the band concert and the fireworks display in Nautauga Park, in a two-seater drawn by a roan gelding, driving in the dark along the Bellefleur Road, Leah and her twenty-six-year-old suitor must have quarreled somewhere between the intersection of that road and the Military Road, and the village of Bellefleur itself, for it was only a few hundred yards away from the old iron forges (once owned by the Fuhrs), near the crest of a very long, steep hill, that the young man was found the following morning. Not dead, but nearly so: delirious and raving and crying for his mother: his right arm and the right side of his face grotesquely swollen, watermelon-sized. Leah had driven the carriage back to Bushkill's Ferry and had been considerate enough (for she always respected the needs of animals, even though horses no longer interested her) to unharness and feed and drench the gelding, and to stable him in the Pym's old barn; she made no secret of the fact that the carriage was on her mother's property, and left it in plain view, in the cinder drive, for any curious neighbor to see. But she never explained the incident, she shrugged and laughed and waved her arm, saying that people "exaggerated," and if they really wanted to know why didn't they ask silly Baldwin Meade himself? It was claimed by the men who brought Meade in, and by Dr. Jensen, who tended to him, that the poor boy had been copperhead-bit in three places, and it was extremely fortunate for him that he was found as early as he was, for by noon he would certainly have died. Copperhead-bit! people said. They pulled thoughtfully at their lips, they smiled slyly. Copperhead! Not likely.

WHEN GIDEON BELLEFLEUR first visited Leah as a suitor, and not as a boy, or a boy cousin, he was humiliated and outraged by the fact that Leah, in an open-necked polka-dot sundress, her lovely hair all curling-iron ringlets and spit curls and waves clearly meant to emphasize not only her beauty but her arrogant confidence in that beauty, nevertheless received him in a dingy, musty side parlor of the old Pym house; and the enormous black spider was perched on her shoulder, on her very skin.

She fixed her very dark blue eyes upon him with an almost mocking concentration as he spoke, but it seemed quite clear to Gideon, who blushed and stammered, that she was not really listening to his words. (Indeed, she was thinking, as she stared at her handsome cousin, with his thick dark hair that rose from his forehead like a brush, and his squarish jaw, and his eyes that were so prominent, almost bulging with-with what?-energy?-excitement?-that any other girl would fall in love with him, possibly in a matter of minutes, but that she was not such a girl. And she thought, lazily stroking Love's hairy back, in order to placate him (for he seemed unusually agitated, she could feel his tiny heart beating), that though it might be amusing to appear to fall in love with Gideon Bellefleur, since it would outrage not only the Lake Noir Bellefleurs but, most of all, Della herself, such an antic might bring with it consequences she could not foresee. Gideon's reputation was not so wicked as Ewan's, but he was a gambler, and it was common knowledge that he and Nicholas and one or two other young men frequently raced their horses on outlaw tracks, and involved themselves with sluttish women back in the mountains, and over in Derby and Port Oriskany; and he had been very cruel to an acquaintance of Faye Renaud's, the daughter of a Unitarian minister who had presumed, on the basis of two or three innocent outings, always in the company of others, that Gideon Bellefleur would soon be engaged to her. Still, there was the quite appealing fact that Gideon lived in the castle, and Della loathed the castle, and frequently made a show-a silly show, in Leah's opinion-of actually shielding her eyes from it, on exceptionally clear days when its eerie sprawling coppery-pink shape appeared to float above the lake, far closer than, in fact, it was. And Leah was curious about the castle, for she'd seen, over the years, only the grounds, and the walled garden, and two or three of the larger downstairs rooms, which were really public rooms, open to any Bellefleur guest. She wanted-ah, how badly she wanted!-she could not resist wanting, despite Della's warnings-to see every room, every cubbyhole, every secret passageway, every corner of that monstrosity. Gazing at Gideon her eyes misted over as she saw the two of them, Gideon leading her by the hand, descending the stone steps into the vaultlike cellar . . . where strands of cobweb would brush against their eager faces, and mice would scamper away in corners, and the air would smell of damp, of mildew, of rot, of pitch-black darkness itself, a darkness ten times black . . . and Gideon's flashlight would dart about . . . and he would grip her hand hard if she stumbled . . . and if she began to tremble with the cold he would turn to her, and . . . ).

Gideon broke off in the middle of a sentence and said roughly that he didn't want to bore her; he'd better be going. He had wanted to ask her to accompany him to Carolyn Fuhr's wedding but she was clearly not interested. . . . "You keep petting that thing on your shoulder," he said. "That ugly thing on your shoulder."

Leah blushed, and brought Love into her lap, where she stroked his back and sides, and tickled his fat little belly, or bellies, with her forefinger. She and Gideon stared at each other for a full minute, and then she said, blushing even more deeply, "He isn't ugly! How dare you say such a thing!"

Gideon got to his feet, with the graceful dignity of which he was sometimes capable, and made a mocking little bow with his head, and simply walked out of the parlor and out of the house and down the brick walk.

But at their second meeting he was again insulted, for this time not only was Love present (though not in his mistress's lap or on her shoulder, but quivering at the center of a five-foot web spun out so recently, in a high corner of the room, that it glistened wetly, and possessed an almost icy, crystalline beauty-quivered, Gideon saw with disgust, as he greedily devoured bits of food placed in the web for him), but Della-Della with her cheerless bustle, her long black skirts that looked (as Cornelia said) as if they were fashioned out of feedbags!-Della with her dried-up prunish shrewd face, and her small head that seemed to be made of ill-fitting plates of bone, and her wasp's smile, and her obvious gloating dislike of him!-was in and out of the room, bringing the young couple tea and stale chunks of carrot cake, and inquiring after Gideon's family with a feigned courtesy, and sympathetic little moues when she heard that Noel had been laid up with the grippe, and Hiram had injured himself sleepwalking again, and the deer and porcupines were eating up everything in sight. Leah appeared to be somewhat more congenial on that afternoon, but it was difficult to tell: her dimpled smile, her calm level lovely dizzying stare, her erect posture, her strong hands clasped at her knees, her murmured assents: what, really, did they mean? Was she trying to signal Gideon, when Della's back was turned?-or was she perversely trying to signal Della, while Gideon looked blankly on? And the huge ugly creature in the web, devouring his bits of carrot cake, and fairly shuddering with the ecstasy of eating. . . .

After less than an hour Gideon left the Pyms', his face burning with frustration. He had managed to extract from his cousin a vague promise (retracted the very next day, by messenger) that she would accompany him to a lawn party at the home of the former senator, a man named Washington Payne; but he had the uncanny, maddening idea that she was not really listening, that she was not aware of him at all.

And so he did not see her for several weeks, and scrupulously avoided thinking of her, and got into a fairly vicious fight with his brother Ewan when Ewan taunted him crudely about her, and spent as much time as possible with his horses. (His favorite horse at that time was the stallion Rensselaer, descended from old Raphael's English Thoroughbreds, a grandson, many times removed, of Bull Run himself.) But of course his mind dwelt on her; his very senses, it seemed, swerved upon her at the slightest provocation. A girl's uplifted voice, the odor of must and damp, the sight of cobwebs in the dew-glistening grass. . . . Children splashing about at the shallow end of the lake. . . . A polka-dot dress worn by his own, rather plain sister Aveline. . . .

One night he rode Rensselaer over to Bushkill's Ferry, to the Pyms' old red-brick house, and, his nerves perfectly steady, his audacity fortified by no more than two or three swallows of good mash whiskey, he calculated, from the ground, which room was his cousin's, and climbed an oak tree with long, slovenly, overhanging branches, and managed, his gloved hands moving deftly and quickly, not only to get the ill-fitting window open but to open it without making any noise; and he climbed inside, and found himself, indeed, in his cousin's room (a spacious, attractive room, but far messier than he had anticipated), only a few yards away from his sleeping cousin, whose wild dark hair cascaded across her pillows, and whose moist, pouting lips were slightly parted. But judicious Gideon Bellefleur did no more than glance at the sleeping girl. He went at once to the immense, elaborate cobweb that stretched from floor to ceiling, and, without giving himself time to think, without giving himself time to feel the trepidation he might reasonably have felt, simply reached out to grab the spider: a thick, weighty black shadow hovering in the web, its yellow eyes open, its many legs already beginning to thrash. Another man might have killed Love with a gun, or even a rifle; another man might have used a sharp hunting knife; but Gideon made no concession to the hideousness of the creature other than his gloves-fine, soft, beautifully fitting leather gloves with suede ornamentation, custom-made to accommodate his large hands.

The thing made a high shrieking noise, not unlike a bat, and stabbed repeatedly at him with its mouth (which contained teeth, or teethlike, and very sharp, serrations in its jaw), and kicked wildly at him with its many legs (which, though scrawny, were really quite elastically strong), and thrashed about so violently that Gideon nearly lost his balance and stumbled backward. He had not calculated exactly how to kill it-strangling was impossible, it hadn't a neck-but in the excitement of the moment his gloved hands acted as if by instinct, as if, in the dim Bellefleur past, they had killed many a Love, just by holding it fast, gripping it fast, and squeezing. . . .

Despite the struggle Love put up, despite the spider's remarkable size, the episode lasted no more than two or three minutes. By then of course Leah was awake. And had lit the kerosene lamp on her bedside table. And was sitting up in bed, the covers held tightly over her breasts, her hair in heavy darkly-red curtains, frizzled at its ends with alarm, on either side of her beautiful pale face. When Gideon, panting, finally turned to her, and with a magnificent disdainful gesture let drop what remained of Love on the very end of her bed, on a folded-back cotton quilt, Leah stared at him sullenly and said, in a voice so soft he had to stoop to hear, "Now look what you've done, Gideon."

The Nameless Child.

He was excited because he could see that the pond had changed greatly since last autumn. Everywhere, on all sides, there was new life. Cattails. Water willow. Burr reeds. An uneven line of tiny alder sprung out of nowhere-out of the marshy soil. He was excited, tramping about in his boots, his woollen shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows the way Ewan often rolled his sleeves up. But within a few minutes he grew breathless, and had to stand very still. It was the muck that exhausted him, pulling at his boots, sucking down as he struggled to walk at the very edge of the pond where the mud was softest.

Do you remember, Raphael whispered. Do you know who I am . . . ?

The pond had changed. There were water lilies in bloom, and dragonflies hovering in the air. A rich wet odor. He couldn't breathe it deeply enough. That winter he had been sick, he'd been sick more than once, the last time with bronchitis and a high fever (so that March passed in a hot delirium, like a rapid shallow stream in which nothing is distinct except the swift movement, the passage, itself), and so it sometimes hurt him to breathe sharply; but the smell of the pond was so rich and dark and good he felt comforted.

Mink Pond. His pond. His secret.

The shouts of his brothers and cousins rang out, some distance away. At the creek, most likely. Playing at war, playing at shooting one another, crouching behind boulders, poking their heads out incautiously, stretching their mouths to jeer. He had let them run ahead of him, he had adroitly eluded them, and now they had no idea where he was, and would never think of him, would let him alone. . . . Do you remember who I am, Raphael said without moving his lips.

How odd, how surprising, the unanticipated growth of the pond. Of course it was deeper than last August, and larger by some six or ten feet all around, because of the thaw, and the cascades of water that plummeted down from the mountains. But it had grown in other ways. There were more cattails, more reeds, innumerable foot-high water willow; and the creamy-white lilies; and horsetails and marsh marigold and pennywort and spike rushes. Many insects. Dizzy with the sunshine. The wet warmth. Dragonflies, diving beetles, water striders. Frogs. As Raphael approached the edge of the pond one frog after another leapt into the water. The water was clear enough for him to watch their quick deft progress as they swam away from him, toward the darker, deeper water at the center of the pond.

His brothers' and his cousins' shouts. Girls' voices as well. And, cutting through their raucous noise, which had the power to annoy but not to disturb him, the terrible, jarring sound of a chain saw. (The giant elms and oaks near the manor were being cut back, after the winter's damage. There was evidently money for that now. And for repairs on the slate roof, which had been leaking badly for so many years.) Then the chain saw was silent, and the pond's sound-which was not a voice, not even a whisper, but an almost inaudible lapping or bubbling murmur-rose to encompass him. It was soothing like music, like music without words. Though the pond could not speak and could not, perhaps, exactly remember, it was allowing Raphael to know that his presence was sensed.

His official name-which he had been shown once or twice, on documents with gold seals and the Bellefleur coat of arms in red and black wax-was Raphael Lucien Bellefleur II. Within the family he was Raphael. A few of the children called him Rafe. (Though most of the time they called him nothing-they did not concern themselves with him.) Alone in his sickbed when even the tiresome hired nurse was out of the room he had no name at all; nor did he have a name by the pond. He slipped into invisibility, nameless.

Sick, his eyes rolling back in his head, he had calmed himself thinking of his pond. Of course it was frozen over-frozen over and packed with heavy snow-seven or eight feet of snow-and if he had been allowed, as of course he wasn't, to go out on showshoes with the other boys, he might not have known where the pond was, even: though he should have remembered the configuration of hemlock and mountain maple and ash down behind the cemetery. In those brief dark winter days the pond was hidden from sight but Raphael, pretending drowsiness even when his mother and his favorite sister Yolande were with him, saw on the insides of his reddened eyelids the pond of last autumn, defiantly visible, its surface winking like scales in the sun. His pond. Where the Doan boy had tried to kill him. His pond. Which had taken him in, even the outlandish surprise of him, a yelping thrashing drowning child, a terrible coward, plunging and sinking in the water (which had turned muddy as if with disgust), clumsy as a heifer.

He had comforted himself with the pond. It seemed to him that he could bring his temperature down simply by approaching the pond, walking in it, past his ankles, past his knees, past his groin. . . . The soft featureless black mud took him in, but did not draw him off balance. The pellucid water, though agitated by his clumsiness, did not turn cloudy.

Sometimes he woke from a small dream and shook his head in surprise, that so much time had passed. The dream might have begun in midafternoon; but when he opened his eyes it might be dusk. Aunt Leah's cat Mahalaleel frequently slept at the foot of his bed, and it was remarkable how long the cat could sleep. He sometimes twitched, and shuddered, and made kittenlike mewing sounds, and his great ears trembled, and his large knobby paws kneaded the quilt; but he slept deeply and profoundly and even if Raphael moved his legs or adjusted his pillows Mahalaleel did not wake. That's because a cat dreams so hard, the nurse told him. They dream of-oh, all kinds of things-I suppose it's pictures mainly-and they do a lot of running. You can tell.

It was good luck, Raphael knew, that Mahalaleel came up to his room, to sleep on his bed on those dark winter afternoons. Morna said that a cat might creep into a baby's room and jump right into the cradle and suck the baby's breath away, so the cat shouldn't be allowed in Leah's room with the new baby, or even in Raphael's room, because he slept so much. Yolande said that was idiotic: Cousin Morna repeated the stupid things Aunt Aveline told her: of course Mahalaleel was good luck, because of his beautiful eyes, and his beautiful fur. But when Raphael leaned down to pet the cat he sometimes made a vexed little sound, deep in his throat, that showed he didn't want to be touched at that moment.

Bronchitis and a high fever, running for four days. Dr. Jensen, and the woman with the carrot-colored hair, hired out of a Nautauga Falls hospital, and brought up to the castle with a surprising number of boxes (she liked, she said, to have her own things about her-she'd thought that Bellefleur Castle would be cold and damp and frightening, judged from the outside), the expense immaterial. (Raphael overheard the adults conferring. The expense, Gideon told Ewan, is immaterial.) When she believed Raphael was asleep the woman actually got down on her knees and prayed, whispering: Dear God, don't let this boy die on me, don't let him die, I know You wouldn't play such a cruel trick on me. . . .

Of course he hadn't died. With a thrill of contempt he thought of how far he was from dying: how, walking into the pond, he had felt the cool buoyancy, the springiness, of the water which would never allow him to drown.

That day, something had struck him on the forehead with a terrible, incalculable force, and he had fallen off the raft and into the water, so quickly, so suddenly, it was as if the world had heaved itself sideways and sloughed him off, insubstantial, feathery, as a burr. He must have shouted, he must have cried out-he heard a child's astonished scream-but there was no time to think, to see, as the dark water rose over his mouth, his nose, his wide staring eyes. What was happening could not be happening and yet: and yet, even in the water, thrashing about helplessly in the water, he was struck by another rock that crashed down upon him from high in the air, and the dark mud at the bottom of the pond rose up to him. His body struggled. His arms, his legs. He was gasping for air where no air existed, where there was only water, water and mud, still he sobbed, swallowing and choking, raw and desperate and wild and doomed he sobbed, for Raphael knew he was drowning even when he no longer knew that he was Raphael who would drown; he reasoned clearly with a part of his mind which was curiously detached from the ugly thrashing about (as if floating in midair some distance away, but sightless, having no eyes with which to see) that the Doan boy had come here to kill him, to deliberately kill him-that he would kill him, and no one would ever know.

But he hadn't been killed. He hadn't drowned.

Squatting at the edge of the pond on this wet sunshine-rich day, his lungs grateful for all the air they could draw in, however sharp, however chilly, it might be, Raphael found himself staring at a small school of very small fish a few feet away. Very tiny fish!-darting, dipping, suddenly reversing direction, and then again reversing direction, so close to him now that he could have reached out, and scooped them up in the palm of his hand. Pickerel . . . ? He did not move, staring at them. Such tiny creatures, near-transparent, hardly longer than the nail of his smallest finger. . . .