He had been saved by entering their element, by learning to breathe in the water: suddenly lithe and slippery as a fish, wriggling away from the deadly surface, away from the hazy ceiling of light through which more rocks plunged, like gigantic murderous raindrops: he swam under the raft, and clutched at it with fingers that were immediately emboldened and strong enough to hold him in place. And then there was silence. A vast profound silence. Through which, gradually, the pond's voice, the pond's subtle rhythmic murmurous voice, rose. He had not drowned, he had not even lost consciousness despite the wound to his head. But he was no longer awake. He was no longer Raphael Lucien Bellefleur II. He remained there, beneath the raft (slatted with hazy light, for the logs were fitted very clumsily together), his lungs cautious in their new element, his lips tightly pursed together, waiting, not waiting, in a trance of such calm, such delectable bliss, in which minnows of light and a deeper blanketing dark contended, that when the danger was past-when the danger was long past-he roused himself reluctantly, and swam out from under the raft.

He had had no time to scream Help me, and indeed his voice was choked by the water, by the pond's surprisingly dense, stubborn substance, and yet the pond had helped him: perhaps even before Raphael himself had known the magnitude of the danger he was in. The pond had embraced him, had buoyed him up, had given him shelter, had allowed him to breathe even in those clouds of faint swirling mud. It had hidden him, it had protected him. It had saved his life.

How unreal, how uninteresting was the world to which he returned, an incalculable period of time later . . . ! Shaking his wet hair out of his face as he stumbled to shore, wiping at his eyes, gasping for breath. His body was ungainly, staggering beneath the renewed weight of the world that must be borne, a column of air stretching upward, into the featureless sky, and at the same time pressing down heavily upon his head and frail shoulders.

An effort, to lift his feet. To make his way back home.

Where they would cry out with alarm at the sight of him, and ask him what had happened. . . . (An accidental fall, his forehead striking a rock, his clothing soaked.) Unreal, uninteresting, that world. The castle. The Bellefleurs. His people.

Raphael Lucien Bellefleur II.

The world stretched away in every direction and the pond, his pond, was at its center. But he could tell no one about this: nor could he tell them about the Doan boy pitching rocks: they would make a fuss, they would stir the air with their emotion, their anger. Perhaps they would even want to take revenge upon the boy. The pond had saved Raphael, it had hidden him, had borne him aloft when danger was past, and so he must not want revenge: he was fated not to die and so it should not matter-it did not matter-what violence another human being had committed against him.

The tiny fish had disappeared into the shadow of some floating pond weed (which, too, was new to Raphael's eyes), and now, on the opposite shore, a marsh wren had poked its head shyly through the rushes. Raphael, motionless, clasped his arms around his knees.

He waited. He had the rest of his life.

The Walled Garden.

It was in the lush ruins of the old garden, behind the mossy fifteen-foot granite walls, that Leah learned from Germaine what the nature of her task must be.

"What do you want of me? What is wanted of me?" Leah asked, excited.

The baby stared at her, with those remarkable eyes. And clenched and unclenched her little fists.

"Yes, Germaine? Yes? What?"

Leah leaned over the gondola-cradle, hardly daring to breathe. At these times the baby's powers were such that Leah could feel a heartbeat not her own, a wild demanding pulse not her own, throbbing inside her body. It was almost as though the baby had not yet been born, but remained, still, in her womb, drawing nourishment from her and yet giving her nourishment as well, pumping blood into every part of her.

"Yes? Germaine? What do you want of me? Has it anything to do with-with the house, the family, the fortune, the land?" Leah whispered.

When no one was around the baby girl stared quite directly at her. Leah felt almost faint, staring into those eyes. The baby's lips moved too but no words emerged: only gurgling bubbling sounds, and high-pitched shrieks, which Leah could not decipher.

"Yes? What do you want of me? Oh, yes-please-I won't be afraid-" Leah begged.

Visitors appeared, and Germaine became a baby again; oversized, to be sure, but not exceptional. She wheezed, she bawled, she wet her diapers, she kicked her summer blanket off, like any temperamental infant. So that Leah became a mother again, quite eagerly she took on the role, changing diapers, rocking the cradle, accepting the fulsome compliments she knew Germaine detested (ah, how fast your little girl is growing! why, it's hard to believe she's grown so much since-has it been only a week?). She held the baby in her arms, staggering beneath the surprising weight, for which she was never prepared, and blushing, laughing with pride, ah, yes she is growing, she has a prodigious appetite, she sucks up more milk than the twins combined and still she's hungry for more!

Then the visitors left, the chatter faded, and Leah sent the servant girls away too, so that she and her daughter could be alone. And she would say, almost timidly, peering over the side of the immense cradle: "Did I make a fool out of myself with them? Did I embarrass you? Should I have sent them away at once-?"

It was on an unnaturally warm day in May that, half-dozing, her arm slung across the baby in the cradle, Leah realized what her task would be.

And how simple, how clear!-how lucid, Germaine's wish!

The family must regain all the land they had lost since the time of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur. Not only must they regain all the land-a considerable empire!-but they must labor to prove the innocence of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II as well.

"Ah, of course!" Leah cried, astounded. "Of course."

She rose to her feet, greatly moved. Her heart swung back and forth like a pendulum.

"Why-of course."

The baby watched her closely. The small brilliant eyes did not blink.

"How could I have been so slow, so stupid," Leah murmured, "not to have understood until now. . . . The Bellefleur name: the Bellefleur empire. As it once was. As it should be, today. And poor Jean-Pierre-an innocent man rotting away in the Powhatassie prison-how could my family have forgotten him all these years!"

SHE WAS TO be accused of reckless, improvident thinking by her mother-in-law Cornelia, and by her own mother, and even, it was said, by her husband; but in fact she had brooded over the situation of the Bellefleurs for some time, even before the birth of Germaine. How had it come about, by what sort of mismanagement and bad luck, that the Bellefleurs, who had once owned one-third of the mountain region, and thousands of acres in the Valley, had lost so much? How had it come about, by what devilish conspiracies of their enemies (and in certain cases it was probable that their "friends" had joined forces with their enemies to cheat them), and outright, blatant maneuvering, that they had been forced to sell great parcels of land, hundreds of acres at once . . . ? It wasn't simply the Jean-Pierre case that had gone so badly in court: Leah learned from Elvira that a number of small cases had gone against the Bellefleurs, having to do with property boundaries and mineral rights and laborers' compensation. While at one point local judges were likely to find for the Bellefleurs even when, perhaps, they were not exactly in the right (Leah admitted that the original Jean-Pierre had been involved in questionable doings, and even Raphael, the most scrupulous of businessmen, the most deliberate of gentlemen, had evidently overstepped his rights upon occasion) as the decades passed the Bellefleurs slipped out of favor, somehow lost their hold, suffered rather than profited by their exaggerated reputation (but what was the Bellefleur "reputation," exactly?-now that Leah lived in the castle, now that she truly was a Bellefleur, she could not recall what outsiders said). Judge after judge had found against them; juries were even less reliable (being open to bribes and intimidation by the Bellefleurs' enemies); after the astonishing verdict of guilty was handed down to Jean-Pierre II, and his two subsequent appeals rejected, it was commonly said in the family that no Bellefleur could expect justice in this part of the world. At the age of eighteen Hiram was sent off to Princeton, to get a good liberal arts education, then to enter law school so that he might, someday, be elected or appointed to the bench, and help to make right the outrageous situation his family had to endure-but nothing came of it, Hiram professed to be bored by the law, could not force himself to study (he much preferred speculating, on paper, and acquired prodigious fortunes by way of phantom investments in the stock market), and simply returned to help run the estate; and that was that. The Bellefleurs no longer had powerful friends and acquaintances in the government. The governor, for instance, was a man no one in the family knew-and this was the man, Leah exclaimed, who could pardon Jean-Pierre if he wished, at any time! The governor had such rights, and in the days of Raphael Bellefleur they would certainly have been employed in the family's favor; but now everything was changed. "We should place one of our own people in the governor's mansion," Leah said boldly. "We should have a senator. We should regain all that land-why, if you look at one of Raphael's old maps, it's enough to make you burst into tears, what we've been cheated of! They want to take everything from us." (And here she sometimes unrolled one of the four-foot-long parchment maps, covered with spidery lines and notations, which she had come across in an old trunk otherwise given over to someone's soiled cavalry uniforms-absurd ermine hat, green trousers, scarlet aiguillettes, boots, buckles, stained white gloves-during those queer elated restless weeks of Germaine's early infancy when Leah carried her baby about everywhere despite the baby's weight, prowling the castle late at night, humming and singing to quiet the baby (who was capable from the very first of astonishing cries and paroxysms of rage), her own footsteps springy, exuberant, triumphant, as if given spirit by Germaine's ceaseless vitality, which wore out everyone else.) "And if we placed someone in the governor's mansion, there would be no problem about getting a pardon for Uncle Jean-Pierre," she would say.

The maps, the old maps, surveyors' maps mainly: what a kingdom they had encompassed! It was indeed, as Leah said, enough to make one burst into tears. She was able to stir grandfather Noel to emotion, and to make the otherwise skeptical and lethargic Hiram angry, by pointing out with a pencil or an old quill pen (rummaged from Raphael's desk) all that they had owned at one time, and what was taken from them, piece by piece, parcel by parcel, the very best land in some cases, along the river, and mineral-rich holdings in the Mount Kittery area: it was a tale both Noel and Hiram knew well, but to have it pointed out to them was another matter, by Gideon's excited, ferocious young wife, who did not hesitate to interrupt them in midsentence when they attempted feebly to explain the circumstances behind one or another of the forced sales, most of which had taken place in Jeremiah's time; and it was another matter to see, as Leah quickly sketched in for them to see, how the original holdings, those two million acres, were broken down into jigsaw-puzzle parts that could be unified again.

"Here, and here, and here, and along here," Leah murmured, tracing imaginary lines, squinting as she bent over the stiff paper, which she frequently had to lift away from her baby's greedy clutching hands ("Ah, that little pest, she's into everything, wants to put everything in her mouth!" Leah exclaimed), as the men pressed near. "This area here, you see?-it's now owned by the McNievans-and along the river here, isn't this the Gromwell Quarry-and this triangular section here, from White Sulphur Springs to Silver Lake-do we know who owns it?-you can see how easily all this could be brought together again, the way it really should be. The land is all one, it belongs in one section, there's something unnatural and insulting about the way it's broken up, don't you agree?"

She was so beautiful in her fever of righteousness, and her slate-blue eyes shone so magnificently, how could the men respond except by saying, "Yes, yes, we agree, yes, you're absolutely right."

THE GARDEN, THE walled garden. A sunny hazy jumble of kisses and warm embraces, scoldings, vermilion flowers, yellow and white butterflies, maple seeds flying in the heat of May. A rich blue sky in which giant faces hovered. Isn't she a beautiful baby! Isn't she big! Intoxicating odors: bananas and cream, raspberry jam, chocolate cake, lemon squeezed into tea. Honey-and-milk, greedily sucked.

Something mashed on a spoon. The spoon's metallic taste, and its hardness. A sudden rage, like an explosion: kicking, shrieking, the food thrown away.

Doesn't she have a mind of her own, Leah laughed, wiping the hem of her dress with a napkin.

The walled garden, those warm spring days. Weather-stained remains of statuary imported from Italy by great-great-grandfather Raphael: a startled and chagrined Hebe, the size of a mortal woman, her hooded eyes downcast and her slender arms weakly shielding her body; a crouching marble Cupid with bulging eyes and a sweet leering smile and wings whose curly feathers had been fashioned, with great care, by an anonymous sculptor enamored of detail; a comely Adonis whose right cheek was discolored, as if by inky tears, and whose base was overgrown with briars. (And of course the baby stumbled into the briars, despite Leah's sharp eye. And of course there were heart-stopping wails heard everywhere, so that several of the children, playing by the lake, ran back to see who was being murdered.) The walled garden where Leah contemplated her maps, drinking coffee for hours, nibbling at pastries, rocking Germaine in her lap and humming to her. A constant sound, a constant music, punctuated by others' voices-Christabel (who wanted to hold the baby, who begged to be allowed to feed the baby, even to change her diapers) and Bromwell (who, until Leah put a stop to it suddenly, had been weighing and measuring and minutely examining his baby sister day by day, and experimenting with her ability to focus her eyes, to grasp at objects, to recognize people, to smile, to respond to simple queries and games and stimuli-heat, sound, color, tickling, pinching-of various degrees of intensity: he was keeping a fastidious record of the baby's growth for scientific purposes, he protested, angry with his mother for her ignorant proprietary attitude which was, he said, characteristic of peasants) and grandmother Cornelia (who spent a great deal of time simply staring at the baby but who was reluctant to hold her, even to touch her, even to be a witness to her diaper-changing or bath-"Those green eyes just look through me," she murmured, "through me and through me, and never come to an end"), and cousin Vernon (whose straggly ticklish beard and singsong voice as he recited his poetry elicited immediate smiles from the baby) and Noel and Hiram and Lily and Aveline and Garnet Hecht (who frequently helped out with Germaine when Leah was in the mood-and she was not always in the mood-to tolerate the girl's cringing manner) and the other children, the many other children. . . . Of course Gideon appeared from time to time: towerlike, colossal, imperious: with the right (which none of the other men seemed to have, not even grandfather Noel) to seize Germaine in his hands and toss her up into the sky so that squeals and shrieks rang out everywhere in the garden. And there were strangers' voices, strangers' faces, too many to count.

Only aunt Veronica did not appear in the garden. For she was in perpetual mourning, it was said, and allowed herself to emerge from her suite of rooms only at night, and then of course the baby was put to bed.

Sunshine, bumblebees, mourning doves pecking eagerly at crumbs, scattering into the air when Germaine approached, waving her arms. The big cat Mahalaleel flopping onto the grass and rolling over onto his back, so that Leah or one of the children might rub his stomach. (How quickly one of his invisible nails could catch in someone's skin!-it was always an accident, and there was always a tiny drop of blood.) Dragonflies, crickets, rabbits startled out from bushes, garter snakes, black-capped chickadees. The remains of a box-hedge maze, in which the children ran wild, pretending to be lost. There was a dying monkey tree someone had shipped back from South America, and a Russian olive, no longer flourishing, planted, according to family tradition, by aunt Veronica's lost love. There was a gigantic cedar of Lebanon with more than thirty limbs, each the size of a tree of ordinary proportions. There were, at the rear of the garden, wych-elms, silver firs, white spruce. And ivy and climbing roses that grew where they would, choking out other plants.

The garden, where Leah scribbled drafts of letters, bent over an old lap desk she'd found in an attic: to attorneys, to judges, to the governor of the state. Scribbled her letters, or dictated to Garnet Hecht. (By way of Elvira she learned that Jean-Pierre had been fearful for months that something terrible would happen to him-he hadn't any enemies of his own but the family had enemies, and it was well known that the Varrell brothers had planned some sort of attack; by way of Jean-Pierre's brothers Noel and Hiram she learned in some detail of the judges' prejudices-the first judge, Phineas Petrie, who had handed down the sentence of life plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years in a voice, witnesses claimed, of unctuous cruelty, had a history of disliking the Bellefleurs because, decades earlier, a young Petrie soldier and a young Bellefleur soldier had gone off together on the Big Horn Expedition of 1876, the Petrie boy under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Custer and the Bellefleur boy under the command of General Terry, and one had perished and the other had survived; the judge who heard the first appeal, Osborne Lane, had been rejected by a beautiful young woman who later became involved with Samuel Bellefleur, and so naturally he detested the very name Bellefleur; and the judge who heard the second appeal, and who dismissed it so rudely, was an old political rival of Senator Washington Payne's-the senator having been financed generously by Bellefleur money, or so rumor had it.) Leah read off her letters to the children, and sometimes stopped in midsentence, and crumpled the stiff sheets of stationery and threw them to the ground. "I am the only one who cares any longer," she said angrily. "The rest have given up! They should be ashamed of themselves, Bellefleurs who have given up!"

IT WAS IN the garden, half-dozing in the slanted honey-warm sunshine, that Leah recalled Germaine's birth: no more than an hour of labor, and then the miracle of the baby, put into her arms, nursing vigorously at once; and Gideon at her bedside gripping her hand. You were the easiest of all, Leah murmured. You were no trouble at all. Why I hardly bled. . . .

Now there was a mossy stripe on her belly. And her belly, her waist, her thighs, were flaccid. And her breasts drooped. But she was losing weight gradually, already her ankles and calves were back to normal, and her face showed only a few lines of strain. How good you look, Leah, people said. And to Gideon: How beautiful your wife looks. . . . (And Gideon smiled stiffly and thanked them, for what else could he do?) The garden, the hum of insects. Mealtimes, naps. Kittens rolling and tumbling underfoot. A game of peek-a-boo around the sundial, around the lonely towering statue of Hebe. Under the low-hanging branches of the cedar of Lebanon. (Where, one morning, they discovered a partly devoured opossum Mahalaleel had dragged over the garden wall.) Leah ripping open envelopes, letting them fall to the terrace floor. Leah calling impatiently for one of the servants. Leah bumping her nose against the baby's pug nose, or wiping the baby's mouth, or sauntering about with the baby on her hip, listing to one side. Leah shaking the rattle-of carved hardwood, with coral and silver ornamentation-that was aunt Veronica's present to Germaine. Or blowing up a red balloon and allowing it to streak away, fluttering, falling to the grass as Germaine squealed. Leah hauling Germaine up, out of the brittle dead leaves in the old fountain, her voice ringing, Now what have you done, for God's sake, do you want to blind yourself?-as the baby cried.

It was in the garden one May morning, when Gideon was leaving for a five-day trip to the Midwest, in connection with a number of horses he was selling, that Leah first brought up the subject of his uncle Jean-Pierre, who must be released from prison, and the necessity of regaining all the land-all the land-the Bellefleurs had lost. Gideon was bent over the baby's cradle, one forefinger gripped by the baby's surprisingly strong fingers; he made a grunting sound that might have been an assent.

"Then you'll help me? Gideon?" Leah said.

She moved to slide her arm around his waist, then hesitated. Gideon was staring at his daughter's greeny-hazel eyes, that so powerfully seized him: that seemed almost to grip him, to fix him where he stood. He had never quite comprehended the fact of the twins, the fact that he had fathered Christabel and Bromwell, and it was beyond him, it was dismayingly beyond him, that this baby was his as well. Of course it was all ordinary, even routine, he had even helped choose her name, everyone had behaved matter-of-factly about the birth (he knew of course about the difficult labor, he knew nothing about the birth itself), these things happened all the time, it was better to let the mind skate lightly over them, not to puzzle or brood. . . . When he pulled his finger away the baby's grip tightened.

"Ah, she's strong! She's wonderful, she's so quick!" Gideon laughed. "She's strong."

"You'll help me?" Leah said.

Straightening, Gideon brushed his hair back from his forehead with both his hands, in a brusque movement, and smiled toward Leah without exactly looking at her. "Of course," he said, "whatever you want."

"Whatever I want . . . ?" Leah said, sliding her arm around his waist.

"Whatever, whatever, whatever," Gideon said, backing away.

Bloody Run.

On the bluff above Lake Noir where wild lilac grew in the midst of second-growth pines, beside the foot-wide Bloody Run (in early June still fed by melting snow on higher ground, and plunging with an eerie guttural music down the bluff's granite outcroppings, in a half-dozen frothy cascades, to the dark water ninety feet below), on the very earth where once, on other June evenings, others, other Bellefleurs, love-sickened or love-obsessed or loveless, stood to gaze across the lake's moody planes to the forest on the far shore and the crescent of Silver Lake in the distance, luminescent even when the moon was smothered by cloud-on the very soil, tufted with wild grass and saxifrage and clover, where Jean-Pierre Bellefleur in his middle years stood dreaming of a girl, a girl's face, he had not seen for three decades, and Hepatica Bellefleur first succumbed to the embrace of that swarthy bearded man, now nameless, who courted her with such vigor and eventually won her, to the misfortune of both, and Violet Odlin Bellefleur, pregnant for what was probably the tenth time (there were so many brief pregnancies, so many miscarriages, and several infants dead at birth or surviving only a few days, she had not only lost count but considered it part of her obligation as a wife and as a dutiful obedient Christian to withhold from any activity so conscious as counting), walked in the moonlight, restless, murmuring aloud, occasionally punctuating the low-throated noise of Bloody Run by peals of girlish laughter, as she rehearsed not the vigorous rejection of Hayes Whittier's proposal to her, which was so inevitable, so ineludible, she need not have groped after the words, but the acceptance which she knew she would not give (no matter that her rejection would destroy for the second time her husband's hopes for the governorship, and perhaps his spirit as well-Violet was a virtuous wife, incapable of imagining herself otherwise), and Veronica Bellefleur strolled in secret with that Swedish nobleman who called himself Ragnar Norst and who explained away his dusky complexion and his dark liquid thick-lashed eyes by alluding merrily to some "Persian" blood on his mother's side of the family, and Ewan Bellefleur lay vigorously upon one or another of his anonymous girls, in the heat, the near-maniacal obsessive heat of his precocious and prolonged adolescence, which was quite a serious matter to Ewan most of the time and to his innumerable hapless girls all of the time, and Vernon Bellefleur wandered and was to continue to wander, a book in one back pocket, papers inked with ideas for poems, stray words that struck him as musical, first lines of love sonnets-in whose convoluted syntax his cousin Gideon's wife was to emerge as one Lara, the supreme and unearthly love of the poet's life, the only reason for the poet's life-in his other pockets or in hand, growing moist in hand, as insomnia and dread of sleep compelled him to climb up along Bloody Run though he was quickly breathless, and beggarlice and burdocks stuck to his trouser legs, and his heart contracted with the knowledge that all that he did was futile, and Yolande, unknown to him, was to walk, in the sunshine, half-dreaming of-of who?-of what?-sometimes the seductive image of her reverie possessed a face, a man's face, her uncle Gideon's?-or the face of a stranger?-or that of a young man from a cattle farm on the Innisfail Road whom she rarely saw; and sometimes the image wasn't a man's face at all but her own, uncannily transformed, shining with unexpected ethereal beauty like that of a May poplar (supreme in its golden-green-radiant glory for a few days, before the other trees come into leaf), not only shining but somehow magnified, her face spread out semitransparent against the lake, the forest, the sky itself, arching over her as she paused intoxicated with the promise of-the heady rich seductive promise of-of whatever it was-whatever it would turn out to be, that image worthy of Yolande Bellefleur's devotion: here the lovers pressed mutely together, ground themselves helplessly together, clutching each other, whimpering, Don't move, don't move, for if nothing happens, if nothing actually happens and no seed is released then Gideon hasn't been unfaithful, not precisely: and there will be no consequences.

One June night, beside Bloody Run, on the hill above Lake Noir, and not for the first time in this secret place: Gideon and Garnet locked together, their straining bodies joined, wed, implacably fused together: Gideon whispering Don't move like a prayer.

His eyes shut tight. Entering her, not breathing. Ah, the slightest move! The slightest error! She lies very still, gripping him. Breasts pressed flat against his chest. Unmoving, unprotesting. They must avoid the slightest friction. . . . He has forbidden her to say that she loves him, it is a wild little snarl of a song he doesn't want to hear, any more than he wants to see her pale rose-petal of a face, bruised and torn and befuddled by the mere size of him, and what he must perform. Don't move, he whimpers. Their heads are a few feet from Bloody Run but already they are unaware of the rivulet's gurgling. They are unaware of the lake below, or the sky above, which is dissolving slowly in a rather chill ecstasy of moonlight. Naturally there will be consequences but the lovers are locked too fiercely together to comprehend even that they are locked together, that they belong in two separate bodies and that there is danger, grave danger, in what they are doing, impaled upon the moment, the present moment, the past and future forgotten: everything else forgotten.

Every part of his immense body, every cell, quivering, about to discharge itself. They must remain motionless and innocent as the dead. As figures on the tombs of the dead. Breathing slowed, slowed. A preternatural calm. They must. Don't, he murmurs, his eyeballs aching, his hands fumbling to hold her still. (He feels her prominent pelvis bones against his thumbs.) That skinny little thing Garnet, who would be able to love such a skinny thing, isn't she pathetic, of course I'm fond of her and she is pretty but isn't she pathetic, so in love with you. . . . But then all the women are in love with Gideon Bellefleur aren't they. . . .

Stop, Gideon whispers.

He is so large, so swollen, so tense with this piercing, terrible pleasure, which wants only to shout madly and dispel the night, that the girl's neck and backbone might easily snap; so he must hold himself as rigid as possible, his knees trembling with the unnatural effort, an icy sweat broken across his forehead and back. In his mind's eye he sees, jumbled together with a dozen other things, two horseshoes where his jaws should be, pressing, pressing together with awful violence. Stop. Wait. Don't. His ribs are steel bands that have begun to quiver so finely, so minutely, that they are in danger of shattering: it is almost intolerable that the girl's stunned fingers should grope against them. His neck is a rod, his penis is a rod: his lungs contract with infinite cunning for if they swell suddenly all is lost: his eyes, held fast behind his glaring lids, have begun to bulge and are in danger of starting out of his head. His penis is a rod, an anguished rod, pushing slowly into the girl, pushing her down into the grass, into the earth, moment by moment, beat by beat. There is no stopping it. There is no stopping. But he whispers, Stop through his gritted teeth.

The needle's eye, the needle's eye, tiny voices sing, mixed in with the sound of the tumbling little brook, and Garnet, hearing them, instinctively draws in her breath, and tightens her grip-her slender arms across his back, her surprisingly strong legs against his. The needle's eye has caught many a smiling lass and now . . . and now it has caught you. . . . At the wedding, at the very altar, she had nudged against him and given him a look that made him feel faint, whispering, You don't love me: you've had so many women! You don't love me! In the dazzling white gown of moire silk, hundreds of pearls sewn to it, her veil more delicate than the crystalline stars of Lake Noir's deep ice, so quivering with life that the rich powerful beats of her heart were visible in her eyes, she simply stared at him: and her wide beautiful mouth relaxed, but almost imperceptibly, so that he knew he was saved. She ran recklessly to the edge of the cliff and dove off, her body plunging downward so gracefully, so perfectly, that it seemed she must be willing it: and he wanted to run after and throw himself into the water beside her, but he could not move. The needle's eye, the needle's eye . . . Her head, a colt's head, came up to bump his jaw. And there was laughter. You don't love me, you are such a bully, the voice rang out, teasing him almost to a pitch of madness, I will never forgive you for what you did to Love, I will never forget, laughing shrilly as he tried to undress her and she wriggled away to run heavy-footed about the bedroom of the hotel suite, and he gave chase, his laughter frightened, an unfamiliar laughter, his arms clumsily outstretched, and then she was slapping at him, harder than she should have slapped, and her skin was hot to the touch, and her eyes glared feverishly, and she kissed him full on the lips, sucking and biting, and then reared back, and pushed him with the heel of her palm, and looked at him for the first time, her face distended with exaggerated revulsion-Oh, just look at you, just look, grizzly! Baboon! Look at the hair, the frizz, on you, oh, my God look, her voice rose gaily, wildly, and a coarse bark of startled laughter escaped from her, How can you!-how is it possible!-I didn't marry a baboon, did I! Gideon, stricken, ashamed, did not at first run after her but tried to say-what was it he tried to say-stammering, mumbling, his overheated face going hotter still with the impact of his bride's disgust-tried to say that she must have seen him swimming, hadn't she-he couldn't help himself-the hair on his chest, and on his belly-he couldn't help it-he was sorry-but she must have seen him swimming, hadn't she, and other men as well- Rain like demons' merry insubstantial faces pressed against the bedroom window, Gideon halfway thought in his confusion that people in the hotel knew about them and had somehow climbed up to stare, or were they his friends, his brothers and cousins, come to mock him, while Leah in a distant corner of the room crouched, her body rosy with candlelight, gleaming as if it were, like his, covered with a fine oily film of perspiration, and then she burst into tears, and he hurried to her and embraced her, surprised at how small she was, in his arms, and how passionately she pressed her face against his chest Oh I love you, Gideon, I love you I love you- Don't move, Gideon says faintly.

Don't don't don't move.

The girl, exhausted, sobbing, lies motionless beneath him, but cannot relax her grip on him, in terror of the voices so close to her head in the wild grass, and the presence that sprawls beside them, Don't stop, go on, what the hell are you doing, you two, do you think I don't know about this, do you think I haven't been spying all these months, go ahead, go right ahead, what a pair of idiots, what a pair of contemptible idiots, Leah laughing angrily, jubilantly, a straw or a blade of grass between her teeth so that she can tickle poor Gideon, drawing the invisible blade from his ear to his lips and back again, tickling, tickling, poking the blade into his ear, drawing it down along his vein-taut neck, along his shoulder, slick with sweat, Do you think I don't know everything that goes on in my house, do you think I haven't seen you two looking at each other or whispering together, what a pair of idiots, drawing the teasing blade across his back, along his backbone, and then suddenly, without warning, her warm moist bold hand falls upon his back, rubs his backbone, rubs at the very base of his spine, at that small knob at the base of his spine, rubbing with such robust lewd energy that Gideon is at once plunged-catapulted-into a delirium from which, out of which, he can never hope to return, though even in his final paroxysm he begs No please don't stop wait no no-

The Poet.

Germaine's great-uncle Vernon, the poet, prematurely grizzly, sweet-faced, with the mismatched eyes that so delighted her (Vernon loved to squat before her, closing one eye and then the other, the blue eye, the brown eye, the blue eye, as the child gasped and muttered and waved her fists, sometimes shutting both her eyes in the excitement of the game, squealing with laughter that grew wilder as the game accelerated and the brown eye, the blue eye, the brown eye, the blue eye opened and shut more and more rapidly, until tears streamed down Vernon's cheeks and were lost in his beard) was said, openly, with that Bellefleur "frankness" that caused so much grief, to be a disappointment to the family and especially to his father: not simply because he was evidently incapable of adding up a column of figures (something Bromwell had mastered at the age of two), or intelligently following family discussions on the perpetual subject of interest rates, debts, loans, mortgages, tenant farmers, investments, and the market prices of various Bellefleur commodities, and not even because as a slope-shouldered, absentminded, apologetic bachelor whose face resembled (as his niece Yolande affectionately said) a hunk of aged cheese, and whose shapeless clothes, so rarely changed, gave off an unfortunate odor of onions, stale sweat, solitude, befuddlement, rotting fruit (he thrust apple and pear cores into his pockets, orange rinds, banana skins, even half-eaten tomatoes, for he usually ate while on one of his walks, composing poetry in his head and then scribbling it down on slips of paper which he also thrust into his pockets, often not quite conscious of what he did), and-but how might it be expressed?-simple oddness, he was unlikely to marry into a prominent or prosperous family, and in fact unlikely to marry at all; but because of his essence, his soul, his very being.

Of course the family did not use these words. They used other words, and frequently.

"Remember that you're a Bellefleur," Hiram told Vernon irritably, when he set out on one of his rambles (sometimes he went no farther than the cemetery, or the village; sometimes he hiked all around Lake Noir and turned up in Bushkill's Ferry where, despite his extreme shyness (in public, even at times in the presence of his own family, he suffered a perpetual blush as if his somewhat roughened skin were windblown) he offered to recite his most recent poems in the general store or at the feed mill or even at one of the taverns (where men who worked for the Bellefleurs were likely to gather); sometimes his poetic inspiration (which he explained as "God dictating") was so complete that he lost track of his surroundings and wound up along a wild stretch of the Nautauga, or up in the foothills in bad weather; once he disappeared for seventeen days and had to be hunted down by hounds, lying weak with malnutrition and a "storm" of poetry in the ruins of a trapper's hut some forty miles northeast of Lake Noir in the shadow of Mount Chattaroy). "Remember that you're a Bellefleur, please don't bring embarrassment on us, don't give our enemies reason to ridicule us," Hiram said. "As if they don't have reason enough already."

"We don't have enemies, Father," Vernon said softly.

"I will have Henry follow you, if you like. On foot or on horseback. And then if you get lost, or injure yourself . . ."

"Who are our enemies, Father?" Vernon said. Though he faced his father boldly he could not prevent his eyes from squinting; and this was a mannerism that particularly annoyed Hiram. "It doesn't seem to me . . ."

"Our enemies," Hiram said, "are perfectly visible."

"Yes-?"

"They're everywhere, don't be an idiot. That pretense of yours of being halfwitted, a poetic genius touched by God-!"

"I'm not a poetic genius," Vernon said, his face going brick-red. "You know perfectly well that I have only begun, I am in my apprenticeship, I have many, many years to go. . . . Father, please don't distort everything! It's true that I am a poet and that God has touched me . . . God dwells in me . . . and I, I . . . I have dedicated myself to poetry . . . which is the language God uses in speaking to man . . . one soul addressing another. . . . You must know how I am groping and blundering, how I despair of creating anything worthy of God, or even of being heard by my fellow man, what a perpetual mystery poetry is to me: is it a way of coming home, a way of coming back to one's lost home? Sometimes I understand so clearly, in a dream, or when I'm half-awake, or, this morning, feeding Germaine in the garden, when she stuck all her fingers in her mouth and spat out her mashed apricots in my face and shook all over with laughter at the look of me, and I found myself staring right into her eyes, and laughing too, because . . . because . . . some barrier had been crossed, some wall between our souls had been . . . It's as if there is an envelope between us, a membrane, nearly transparent, do you see, Father, between your soul and mine, as we stand here talking, and mere words will not penetrate it . . . though we try, God knows we try . . . but . . . but sometimes a gesture, an action, a certain way of speaking . . . a way of speaking which is music or poetry . . . which can't be willed, or learned . . . though it can halfway be learned. . . . Sometimes, Father, do you see," he said, his words tumbling over one another slapdash and desperate, and his eyes narrowed nearly to slits in the face of Hiram's stony silence, "do you see. . . . It . . . it can. . . . Poetry. . . . I mean our souls. . . . Or was I talking about God, God speaking in us . . . in some of us. . . . There is a place, Father, there is a home, but it isn't here, but it isn't lost either and we shouldn't despair, poetry is a way of getting back, of coming home. . . ."

Hiram had turned partway aside, so that his injured eye, his clouded eye, faced Vernon. After a long moment he said, in an uncharacteristically patient voice, "But there is a home, Vernon. Our home. Here. Right here. Exactly-precisely-here. You are a Bellefleur despite the misfortune of your mother's blood, and you live here, you feed upon us, this is your home, your birthright, your responsibility-and no amount of that high-toned babble can alter what I say. You are a Bellefleur-"

"I am not a Bellefleur," Vernon whispered.

"-and I ask you only not to bring more ridicule on our name."

"I am not a Bellefleur except by accident," Vernon said.

Hiram stood quietly. If he was upset he gave no indication: he did no more than tug at his cuffs. (Every day, even in the depths of winter when the castle was snowbound, Hiram dressed impeccably: in custom-made suits, in dazzling white shirts which he sometimes changed by midafternoon, and again by dinner; he wore a variety of vests, some of them colorful; and always his watch and chain; and gold or jeweled cuff links. Though he had suffered all of his life from a curious sort of malady-sleepwalking-he gave every impression of being not only in excellent health, but of being in supreme control of himself.) "I fail to understand what it is you're saying, Vernon," Hiram said softly.

"I don't want to antagonize you, Father, but I must-I must make it clear-I am not a Bellefleur, I am only myself, Vernon, my essence is Vernon and not Bellefleur, I belong to God, I am God, God dwells in me, I mean to say-I mean that God speaks through me-not always-of course-but in my poetry-when my poetry is successful- Do you see, Father," he said, so nervous, so excited, that flecks of saliva appeared on his pale lips, "the poet knows that he is water poured into water, he knows that he is finite and mortal and may drown at any time, in God, and that it's a risk to summon forth God's voice-but the poet must accept that risk-he must take the chance of drowning in God-or whatever it is-I mean the poetry, the voice-the, the rhythm- And then he isn't whoever people say he is, he doesn't have a name, he doesn't belong to anyone except that voice-and they cannot claim him-they dare not claim him-"

Hiram turned suddenly, and struck Vernon across the mouth.

It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that neither quite comprehended what had happened for several seconds.

"I-I-I say only," Vernon gasped, backing away, his hand pressed against his bleeding lip, "I say only that-that-that-man's true home is elsewhere, I don't dwell in this castle of pride and vanity, amid all these-these hideous possessions-I am not your son to order about-I am not your possession-I am Vernon and not Bellefleur-I am Vernon and not-"

Like his son Hiram had a pink flushed face, and now it grew even pinker. With a gesture of familiar, resigned disgust, he simply waved his son out of the room.

"You're mad," he said. "Go drown yourself."

"I am Vernon only and not Bellefleur and you dare not claim me as Bellefleur," Vernon said, weeping, crouched in the doorway like a little old man; "you drove my mother from me with your Bellefleur cruelty, and you buried me alive with your Bellefleur insanity, and now you-and now- But you will not triumph- None of you will triumph- I know that you and the others are plotting something-you and Leah-even Leah-Leah whom you've corrupted with your talk of money, land, money, power, money, money- Even Leah! Even Leah!"

Hiram waved him away with a magician's calm disdain. His hands, like Vernon's, were long and soft; but his nails were meticulously filed. "What do you know, my boy, of Leah," he murmured.

Paie-des-Sables.

On two midsummer nights in succession, camped by remote, nameless lakes somewhere south of Mount Kittery, Gideon and his brother Ewan underwent a peculiar joint experience-shameful, ugly, inexplicable, and above all distressing-which no one in the family was ever to learn about, and which the brothers themselves, almost as soon as they returned to Bellefleur Manor, were to forget.

They had been weeklong guests at the enormous mountain camp of W. D. Meldrom, the State Commissioner of Conservation. (The Bellefleurs had been friends and business associates of the Meldroms for many years, going back to the lively days when Raphael Bellefleur gave so copiously to his fellow Republicans' campaign funds; there had been a marriage or two between the families, not brilliant, but satisfactory to both sides, and great-grandmother Elvira's brothers had, for some years, worked with the Meldroms on their logging operations in the northeastern-most corner of the state.) It was Gideon's and Ewan's mutual argument, put to Commissioner Meldrom discreetly but persistently, as they fished for bass, with light tackle, disguising their boredom (for there was no drinking at the Meldrom camp, and the lake was so richly stocked that with nothing more than a safety pin and a bit of worm-so Gideon contemptuously said-the clumsiest fisherman could catch, half-hour by half-hour, all the squirming wriggling ferocious three- and four-pound bass he might want), careful never to speak too emphatically, and never to allude to the Bellefleurs' and the Meldroms' arrangements in the past, that the current state law guaranteeing that the thousands upon thousands of acres of land owned by the state would be "forever wild" was impractical: wasn't timber a crop like any other, shouldn't it be harvested like any other?-weren't those forests owned by intelligent and farseeing lumbermen like the Bellefleurs far healthier than the "wild" forests, which were vulnerable to beetles, locusts, diseases of all kinds, and fires sparked by lightning, and windstorms? Under the current state law, passed by a legislature swamped and intimidated by conservationists' special pleading decades ago, after the Great War, it was even the case that diseased and decaying trees, even trees felled by storms, could not be removed from the forests; they were to remain where they had fallen, regardless of the hazard, and the waste, and the fact that privately owned woods (like those owned by the Bellefleurs and the Meldroms) were cut back carefully, in order to produce mixed hardwoods and conifers, of varying ages, with open spaces and trails, and as little witchhobble as possible. . . . What the brothers wanted were "managed cutting" privileges from the state, on the very land (though they certainly did not press this point) their family had once owned.

Timber is a crop, and it should be harvested like any other, Meldrom said slowly, but over so prolonged a period of time, and with so many interruptions (Gideon and Ewan were quickly bored with the commissioner's family, and with his other guests, most of whom were elderly and hard of hearing, and they found the three-hour dinners in the elegant "log" lodge, attended by innumerable servants, insufferable), that it seemed he must surely be saying something else too.

"The old bastard wants a kickback, obviously," Gideon said.