Bellefleur (27 page)

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

I
t 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.