Bellefleur (71 page)

Germaine, she called out, absently, while gazing into the mirror, are you hiding in here?—where are you?

She had thought she’d seen, for a brief moment, the child’s reflection in the mirror, behind her; but when she glanced around no one was there. A pale glowering winter light gave to the furnishings in the room—some of them familiar, some new—an inhospitable look.

Germaine? Are you playing a game with me?

But the child did not appear from behind the bed, or the desk, or the old armoire Leah had had moved upstairs from Violet’s room, and since she rarely played games with anyone, let alone her mother on a busy morning, Leah concluded that she wasn’t in the room: it was quite probable that the new girl, Helen, was still dressing her in the nursery. Perhaps one of the cats had darted beneath the bed.

Though it was a long journey by train to Winterthur, and a December blizzard was predicted, Germaine was to accompany Leah; for Leah would have been uneasy, for reasons she could not have articulated, if the child were left behind. Often, upon impulse, at the oddest times (when Germaine was being bathed, for instance, or when she was already asleep for the night, or when Leah was in the midst of an important telephone call), Leah felt the need, an almost physical need, to seek out her daughter, to hug her and stare into her eyes, to laugh, to kiss her, to ask, in a voice that never betrayed anxiety, What should I do next? What next? Germaine? At such times the child usually hugged her mother, wordlessly, and with a surprising strength; her slender arms could close like steel bands around Leah’s neck, startling and delighting her. The
love
that passed between them—! But it was more than love, it was the passion of absolute sympathy: absolute identity: as if the same blood coursed through both their bodies, carrying with it the very same thoughts. Naturally the two-year-old never told Leah what to do, or even betrayed much intelligent awareness of Leah’s actual words, but after a few minutes of hugging and kissing and whispering, during which Leah had no idea what she said, it might have been simply baby talk, she would invariably know what strategy to pursue: the idea, the perfectly formed conviction, would rise jubilant in her mind.

So Germaine
must
accompany her to Winterthur, to this extremely important meeting, despite Gideon’s and Cornelia’s objections; and of course Helen would be coming, and Nightshade, whom Leah was beginning to find indispensable; and at the last minute Jasper had been added to the party. (Hiram, of course, who had worked with Leah for months on these negotiations, had fully intended to go—but since his mother’s wedding to that old derelict he had been sleeping poorly, plagued by bouts of sleepwalking; it would be too dangerous, he believed, to sleep in unfamiliar surroundings, even if a servant stayed up through the night to watch him. And he had to admit, he said with a wry laugh, that his nephew Jasper, though only nineteen, knew more than he in certain respects . . . the boy had business instincts as remarkable as Leah’s.)

Leah took off the emerald earrings, and screwed on a pair of pearl earrings, tilting her head, noting with quiet pleasure how the winter light behind her outlined her figure (a superb figure, still, though she continued to lose weight, and her dressmaker was always busy) and, reflected in the mirror, illuminated her fine smooth pale skin. She was still a young woman, still young, though she had lived through so much . . . though she felt, at times, half-amused, as if she might be great-aunt Veronica’s age. . . . Gideon, sullen Gideon, was graying: his wonderful black hair was turning salt-and-pepper: there were impatient, not very attractive, creases on his forehead. Of course he was still a handsome man. It hurt her, it angered her, to see how handsome he was, how little fools like two or three of their houseguests this past month, and of course servants like Helen, and that unfortunate Garnet Hecht, gazed upon him adoringly. They
were
fools, women were largely fools, and deserved whatever happened to them . . . whatever happened to them when they succumbed to men. . . . Since Gideon’s little finger had been amputated, however, perhaps he would not seem so attractive; perhaps he would seem deformed; freakish; contemptible. (It was a measure of his absurd self-mocking stubbornness that the finger had had to be amputated at all. Gideon’s hand had been infected from a bite of some kind, and though he must have felt pain for days, and noticed the angry red streaks reaching upward toward his heart, he had done nothing about it . . . claimed he was too busy to see Jensen. How angry Leah had been, how she had wanted to strike him with her fists, and claw at that dark imperious face!
You would let yourself rot away, wouldn’t you, inch by inch, to spite me. .
. . )

But she hadn’t attacked him. She had not even spoken to him about the finger. The
absurd,
the
ridiculous
finger. . . . It was an imperfectly kept secret that Gideon now slept in another bedchamber, at the far end of the corridor, though, for appearance’s sake, or out of indifference, he kept most of his clothes in this room. Certainly the servants knew, for how could they fail to know, and anyway what did it matter: Gideon with his expensive automobiles (the Rolls coupe, Leah had learned to her dismay, had cost nearly as much as the family limousine, which seated eight people comfortably, in addition to the driver) and his lengthy unexplained absences (which Leah supposed had to do with business deals and investments of his own, for he and Ewan preferred to keep their money separate from the family, and were always alluding to matters no one else understood) and his imponderable inert spirit-paralyzing tarry-black moods (which Leah despised, for they were the purest form of self-indulgence): what did it matter, really?

The mirrored Leah raised her chin, untroubled.
She
did not care in the slightest about her husband; so one might gather from studying her impassive face. She looked, instead, as indeed she
was,
like a young woman about to embark upon yet another adventure—confident as a sleepwalker in the destiny opening before her.

THAT MIRROR, MOVED
upstairs from Violet’s drawing room when Leah had had her bedchamber expanded (a wall was knocked out, and a long modern plate-glass window took the place of the fussy old windows with their leaded mullions) to accommodate a spacious desk, as well as other new pieces of furniture, was one of the most handsome of the manor’s antiques: it was about three feet by two, with a heavy ornate gold frame, inlaid with ivory and jade, in a girandole style. Leah had had it moved upstairs along with a somewhat crude but charming bas relief carving of the Bellefleur coat of arms, which hung now on the wall above her desk.

An antique mirror, evidently a favorite of Violet’s: and, as it turned out, a most unusual mirror. For while it couldn’t be trusted (for reasons of the light, evidently) to show everything that passed before it, as if finicky about its tastes, it certainly showed Leah at her most complete, her most characteristic. It was the only mirror she could rely upon. Dressing, preparing her hair, rehearsing certain facial mannerisms, gazing for long moments at a time into her mirrored eyes: so Leah communed not only with that expertly presented reflection, but with her own interior self, which was of course hidden from the scrutiny of others.

You know me! Ah,
don’t
you know me! she laughed into the mirror, running her tongue hard over her front teeth, patting the back of her sleek, heavy coiffeur. If Nightshade were not present (for she often allowed him into her boudoir, he was so asexual, so harmless) she might even lean to the glass and brush it with her lips, innocently vain as a young girl before a ball.

No one else knows me as
you
know me, she whispered into the mirror.

It was quite true: for, on her way to her room on the eighteenth floor of the Winterthur Arms, after a highly gratifying afternoon during which another sizable chunk of the old empire was returned to them (piece by piece, slowly, it reasserted itself, Jean-Pierre’s original property, though now it was, of course, not simply wilderness land but farms and orchards and mills and factories and villages, entire villages, and parts of cities as well), and Leah would be able to declare, in triumph, upon her return to Bellefleur, that they were now more than
half
their way to their goal—returning to her room undeniably tired but jubilant as well, and fairly gloating with her good fortune, feeling her strong heart beat with confidence, Leah happened to see, in the elevator’s gold-flecked mirror, an image so clearly
not
herself that she laughed aloud, angrily, at the sight of it.

The broad, showy, vulgar mirror framed a woman of young middle age, with distinctly sallow skin, and querulous, even shrewish lines about her lipsticked mouth. The woman might have been handsome at one time; but now her eyes were shadowed, and her hair, though expertly and fussily arranged on her head, was dull and lusterless, and lacked body. She wore dangling earrings, evidently pearls, that, so close beside her skin, made it appear almost yellowish, and the fur collar of her jacket looked synthetic. How crude a mirror, and what an insult to the overcharged guests of the Winterthur Arms! Leah did no more than glance in it, absentmindedly patting the back of her head. The lighting in the elevator was poor and the quality of the mirror’s glass was obviously inferior. . . .

No, only the antique mirror in her own room could be trusted.

Once Upon a Time . . .

O
nce upon a time, the children were told, a seventeen-year-old Indian boy was lynched not a mile away—hanged from a great oak on the lakeshore drive. The oak was called the Hanging Tree. But it was no longer there—it had been felled many years back.

Why was he hanged, the children asked.

Some men thought he had started a fire. A hay barn went up in flames, and people thought Indians had done it.

But did
he
do it?

Your great-uncle Louis thought he hadn’t, probably.

Then what happened?—what happened to the Indians?

The boy was killed, and they dragged his body around the village for a while, and ended up with it at a riverside tavern. It might have gotten buried. As for the rest of the Indians—they ran away, as they always did. After a while, then, they came back.

Weren’t they afraid?

Well—they came back.

FREDERICKA READ ALOUD
to her brother, punctuating her reading with sobs of angry despair, for men
were
animals, mankind as a whole
was
unregenerate, and only Christ’s Word could redeem them: by lamplight on a sleeting January evening she read from Franklin’s “A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown, with Some Observations on the Same,” while Raphael sat with his fingers still, not drumming, on the desk top before him.

. . . These Indians were the remains of the tribe of the Six Nations, settled at Conestogo, and thence called Conestogo Indians. On the first arrival of the English, messengers from this tribe came to welcome them, with presents of venison, corn, and skins; and the whole tribe entered into a treaty with the first proprietor, which was to last “as long as the sun should shine, or the waters run in the rivers.”

This treaty has been since frequently renewed, and the chain brightened, as they express it, from time to time. It has never been violated, on their part or ours, until now. . . .

It has always been observed that Indians settled in the neighborhood of white people do not increase, but diminish continually. This tribe accordingly went on diminishing, till there remained in their town on the manor but twenty persons, viz., seven men, five women, and eight children, boys and girls. . . .

This little society continued the custom they had begun, when more numerous, of addressing every new governor, and every descendant of the first proprietor, welcoming him to the province. . . . They had accordingly sent up an address of this kind to our present governor, on his arrival; but the same was scarce delivered when the unfortunate catastrophe happened, which we are about to relate.

On Wednesday, the 14th of December, of 1763, fifty-seven men from some of our frontier townships, who had projected the destruction of this little commonwealth, came, all well mounted, and armed with fire-locks, hangers, and hatchets, having travelled through the country at night, to Conestogo manor. There they surrounded the small village of Indian huts, and just at break of day broke into them all at once. Only three men, two women, and a young boy were found at home, the rest being out among the neighboring white people, some to sell the baskets, brooms, and bowls they manufactured, and others on other occasions. These poor defenseless creatures were immediately fired upon, stabbed, and hatcheted to death! The good Shehaus, among the rest, cut to pieces in his bed. All of them were scalped and otherwise horribly mangled. Then their huts were set on fire, and most of them burnt down. Then the troop, pleased with their own conduct and bravery, but enraged that any of the poor Indians had escaped the massacre, rode off, in small parties. . . . Those cruel men again assembled themselves, and, hearing that the remaining fourteen Indians were in the workhouse at Lancaster, they suddenly appeared in that town, on the 27th of December. Fifty of them, armed as before, dismounting, went directly to the workhouse, and by violence broke open the door, and entered with the utmost fury in their countenances. When the poor wretches saw they had no protection nigh, nor could possibly escape, and being without the least weapon for defense, they divided into their little families, the children clinging to the parents; they fell on their knees, protested their innocence, declared their love to the English, and that in their whole lives they had never done them injury; and in this posture they all received the hatchet. . . . Men, women, and little children were every one inhumanly murdered in cold blood. . . .