Bellefleur (3 page)

She lit a candle and shielded the flame with her hand and body so that Gideon would not be disturbed, and hurried barefoot out of the room. Once she was in the corridor she could hear the creature quite plainly. It was not a human cry, it had no language, but she understood it at once.

And so Germaine’s mother went to open the door to Mahalaleel: naked beneath the white silk robe that fell to her ankles: a tall woman, an exceptionally tall woman, tall and strong and full-bodied, her long legs superbly muscled, her neck columnar, her thick braid of dark, burnished-red hair falling between her shoulder blades, heavily, to the very small of her back: a beautiful giantess upon whose deep-set eyes and long, straight, Roman nose and slightly parted fleshy lips the candlelight swayed and shimmered caressingly.

“Yes?” Leah cried, as she descended the great mahogany staircase. “Who is it? Who is out there?”

She hurried downstairs without glancing at the old tapestries, which hung in spent, faded folds, and the niches in the stone wall where marble busts—of Adonis, Athena, Persephone, Cupid—had been accumulating masks of grime for decades, and now rather resembled mulattoes of indeterminate sex; she passed the curious old Civil War drum on the first-floor landing, which Raphael Bellefleur had had covered with his own skin, after his death, and edged with brass, gold, and mother-of-pearl (poor Grandfather Raphael!—he had anticipated homage for generations, and now not even the idlest of the children took notice of him): she hurried, barefoot, her heels striking the faded crimson carpet heavily, the flickering candle held aloft, tendrils of dark richly-red hair loose about her forehead, her great eyes bright with unaccountable tears.

“Yes? Who is it? Who is it? I am Leah, I am coming to let you in!”

There was such a commotion, what with the clawing and wailing at the door, and Leah’s full-throated cry, that the rest of the castle—already awake because of the storm, or sleeping only fitfully—was soon out of bed. In those early years the twins were always sharply attuned to their mother, Christabel especially: now they slipped past Lettie and ran along the first-floor corridor from the nursery, little Bromwell whimpering as he adjusted his wire-frame glasses, Christabel wild-haired and tearful, her nightgown slipping from one small shoulder. “Mother, where are you! Mother! Is it a ghost trying to get in!” And naturally the cousins sprang out of their beds, Lily’s and Ewan’s noisy children, crowded together as they peered wide-eyed over the banister: and Ewan himself, bear-sized, vexed, his broad face reddened and his graying hair crazy about his head as if the gypsy moth had got into it to spin her amazing cocoon: and aunt Lily trailing along behind, a cashmere shawl over her shoulders and clutched at her sagging breasts, her pale wan face as unfocused as a smeared watercolor, pulling at her husband’s arm, “Oh, what are they doing now, oh, stop them, Ewan, is it Gideon, is it Leah, what on earth are they doing
now
—” And at the very head of the stairs Vernon appeared, trembling, his mismatched pajamas hanging from his skinny frame. He could not stop himself from pulling at the straggly white-blond hairs that grew from his chin, for he had very narrowly escaped certain spirits, that afternoon in the forest, he had run desperately home as they chattered and shrieked and clutched at his sleeves, and pinched his ears and aimed tiny burning mocking kisses at his pursed lips, and now it seemed to him that the boldest of the spirits had found him out and would in a moment break down the door and rush up the stairs to claim him. . . . Yet he did not shout at Leah to leave the door unopened, like the others.

Edna the housekeeper was up, her flannel robe straining across her enormous breasts; and the servants Henry and Walton; and the children’s tutor Demuth Hodge, whose hair stood up in comic tufts; and at last poor Lettie, who woke to find the twins gone from their beds and a violent wind rocking the house and rain in gusts pitched against the windows, like pebbles thrown by a mad hand. “Bromwell, Christabel, where are you!” she cried. (Though her thoughts—poor Lettie!—were only of their father.) And grandfather Noel appeared in his underclothes, which were shamefully soiled. His yellowish white hair floated about his skull and his foreshortened, beakish face was livid with rage. “Leah! What is this! Why have you thrown the entire household into chaos! I forbid you to open that door, girl! Don’t you know what happened in Bushkill’s Ferry, haven’t any of you
learned
—” He limped badly, for his right foot had been nearly blown away in a mine explosion in the closing days of the War.

And there was aunt Aveline in her quilted satin robe, her hair done up in dozens of curling rags, and her husband Denton close behind with his bland mollusk’s face, and their sharp-nosed little girl Morna, and their
thirteen
-year-old Louis who was grinning stupidly, thinking that one of Uncle Gideon’s enemies had come to get him, and wiry little Jasper who broke away from his mother’s clutching hand and ran boldly down the stairs after Leah—“Aunt Leah, do you want help! Do you want help opening the door!” And naturally Lily’s and Ewan’s children ran down too, the girls Vida and Yolande as noisy as Garth and Albert, and only Raphael holding back: for in truth of all the Bellefleurs Raphael was perhaps the most frightened, that tumultuous night of Mahalaleel’s arrival. Far away upstairs grandmother Cornelia was muttering angrily to herself as she tried to adjust her wig without a servant’s kindly assistance (for the old woman believed that the house had been struck by lightning and was on fire, and she
must
leave her room, and of course her pride would not allow her to be seen by her sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren and even by her old husband, without her new French wig). Great-grandmother Elvira stirred in her sleep but was unable to wake: the cruel winds pitched her about, she saw clearly the waters of the Nautauga rising (as indeed they did that night, some twenty inches an hour during the worst of the storm), and reasoned angrily once again with her husband Jeremiah
not
to try to save the horses, as he did nineteen years ago; but of course the stubborn old man paid no attention to her though his overalls and even his bushy black beard were soaked, and something very sharp had pierced his boots so that the left boot had filled with blood, and the ugly scar on his forehead, a war wound of which he was foolishly proud, had gone white with apprehension. “Do you want to drown! Do you want to drown and be swept away!” she shouted at him. “Then I won’t be responsible for you! I won’t be responsible for locating your miserable old carcass and burying it!”—which indeed she was not, as it happened. Uncle Hiram who so frequently walked in his sleep, especially at this point in his life, was, oddly, soundly sleeping in his bed, in his handsome bedroom suite overlooking the garden; he was to know nothing of the commotion, and to express astonishment, the next day, both at the fact of Mahalaleel and at his niece Leah’s headstrong behavior. (“But why cannot Gideon control his wife,” he was to inquire of his brother Noel, “isn’t the boy somewhat
ashamed
of their relationship?”) Aunt Veronica did not come downstairs either, though she had been awake, evidently, for hours; she heard the shouts and felt a faint curiosity but remained in her room, fully dressed, a rain cape about her shoulders, simply waiting—waiting out the storm?—waiting.

And then Gideon himself appeared at the top of the staircase, snapping up his trousers. His great muscular chest gleamed with perspiration beneath the matted dark hair; his mouth was an angry red circle inside his beard; his eyes fairly bulged in their sockets. “Leah,” he shouted, “what the hell are you doing down there? Whoever wants to get in—let me see to it!
Let me see to it.
”

But of course it was too late. Leah, helped by Jasper and Albert, had unlocked the door and was struggling to swing it open (this particular door, in the old entrance hall at the very center of the manor, was never used now: it was made of solid oak on both sides, and lined with steel to make it fireproof, and must have weighed nearly one hundred pounds: and of course the hasps and hinges were badly rusted); and quite suddenly it
was
open, blown back furiously against the wall; and rain exploded inward; and there in the immense arched doorway—there, scuttling desperately and ignominiously inside, rushing toward Leah’s feet, was a skeletal creature, no more than rat-sized, its dark fur wet, its ribs showing, its silvery-gray whiskers broken, its tail limp and dragging and thin as a shoelace. What an ugly thing! What a begrimed starving contemptible rain-soaked ugly thing!

Gideon hurried down the rest of the stairs, shouting. Why, the thing was a rat: he would kick it to death at once. Ewan’s oldest son Garth made a swipe at it with a chair. Jasper clapped his hands and yodeled to frighten it. Grandfather Noel was shouting that it was a trick of some kind, a trick to distract them—they were in danger—there were Varrells crouched outside in the shrubbery—why hadn’t anyone thought to bring a gun? The creature, terrified, was cringing behind Leah’s legs, its belly flat against the floor. Bromwell said that it was a muskrat and wouldn’t harm anyone: could he have it, could he have it as a pet? Gideon shouted that it was a rat, it was diseased and filthy and would have to be killed. Someone thought to close the door—the rain was torrential—but now the poor creature could not escape. Gideon approached it, Leah tried to push him aside, saying, “Let him alone! What does it matter if he’s ugly!” and a noisy half-circle of children advanced, stomping, clapping their hands. The creature hissed, retreating; then, seeing it was trapped, it sprang forward and darted between Gideon’s legs; then it ran crazily along the wall, colliding with table legs, bumping against grandfather Noel’s naked ankles. Everyone was screaming: some in alarm, some in excitement. A rat! A giant rat! Or was it a muskrat! Or an opossum! Or a wildcat! Or a fox cub!

It ran from side to side, its teeth bared, its ears laid back. Leah stooped to catch it. “Here! Come to me! I won’t hurt you, poor thing!” she cried. And it hesitated only an instant, and then—seeing Gideon bearing down, his face contorted—it leapt into her arms. But so great was the commotion, so obstreperous the children, that it panicked in her arms and began snarling and scratching and tearing at her with its teeth. “Now! Now! Poor thing!” Leah cried. She held the squirming creature, which was evidently much heavier and more muscular than its skeletal shape indicated, and would not let it leap free, and crooned to it as if to a baby, though she was bleeding from a half-dozen welts on her arms and cheeks. Della, Leah’s mother, appeared in the foyer, in a long black gown, her small, nearly bald skull covered by a transparent black nightcap, crying, “Leah! Put that thing down! What on earth are you doing! I say—
put that thing down at once!”
She tried to seize Leah, but Leah jerked away; Gideon tried to wrench the creature from Leah’s arms, but she would not surrender it, saying, “Why do you torment the poor thing—why are you so cruel?” She held the squirming creature away from her body but it was still slashing at her, and now there were ugly red welts on her shoulders, and even on one of her white, hard, lovely breasts—the sight of that must have maddened her husband. “Ah, now you’re being naughty!” Leah said in a queer exultant voice. “Do you want
me
to punish you?”

“Leah, for God’s sake let me get rid of it,” Gideon said.

But there was no reasoning with Leah once she fixed her mind on something.

She lifted the creature slowly above her head, so that it could not
quite
reach her with its flailing claws. The muscles of her magnificent shoulders and arms grew taut. Still crooning she managed to calm the creature, and at last to stroke its head. “Poor thing, poor wet cold terrified thing, are you hungry?—would you like to be fed, and sleep by the fire? You can’t help your ugliness, can you!”

She lowered it and cradled it in her arms, though it was shivering convulsively. “You’re a poor lost thing, like any of us,” she whispered.

AND THAT WAS
how Mahalaleel came to Bellefleur Manor: Leah saved him, and took him back to the kitchen where a fire was burning, and gave him food—milk, scrapings from a frying pan, bacon rind, chicken bones—which he nibbled at without much zest, trembling, his eyes darting ratlike in his angular, bony head, his skinny silly tail lying limp on the floor behind him. Then she dried him in a big towel, murmuring, “Now you’ll be warm, now you’ll be safe, now no one will harm you,” ignoring her husband and her mother, who were pleading with her to do something about her wounds. Gideon stared at the welts, at the glistening blood, and his heart sank within him, and his vision went black, and he felt—ah, how bitterly he felt!—his soul close to draining out of his body: for his beautiful young wife, his cousin Leah, the mother of his twin children whom he loved so much he could not bear it,
would not
obey him. All of the Nautauga Valley held him in awe, there was not a man in the region who dared stand up to him, but his own wife—his own wife!—defied him constantly, and what could he do? He loved her, he was sick with despair over her, and would have wrenched the skinny shivering Mahalaleel out of her arms and snapped his neck with one deft gesture if he believed it might have made any difference: which Mahalaleel, gazing at him covertly, through his silvery-white lashes, must surely have sensed.

“Come to bed, Leah,” Gideon said wearily.

The others had retreated. The house was now quiet. Even the storm had subsided. Was it near dawn? Leah, stretching, half-closed her eyes with pleasure, her body rippling like a fish’s, as if she were oblivious of Gideon. At her feet, on the flagstone hearth, the wretched creature slept at last.

“Come to bed,” Gideon said, taking her arm.

She did not resist. With a modest gesture she drew her ripped, bloody robe closed over her breasts, and turned to her husband as if to bury her face in his shoulder.

“You must be very tired,” he said.

“
You
must be very tired,” she said softly.