The Bellefleurs were betting on toboggan races with the Fuhrs and the Renauds, and there was much good-natured horseplay out on the hill, and more drinking. Beer, ale, Scotch, bourbon, straight gin, straight vodka, and various brandies were being consumed. Della was to learn afterward only that her husband had insisted upon taking part in the race—had insisted that he knew how to handle a toboggan—though to her knowledge he had never done anything of the sort before. That the men would attempt Sugarloaf Hill on its steepest side, at night, with the moon nearly obscured by clouds—that they would risk their necks in an absurd bet (the winning toboggan was to collect only $200, to be divided up between five or six men)—that they would plunge downward in the face of a bitter northeast wind, with the temperature already minus five degrees: all this suggested drunkenness, swinish drunkenness.
There were so many versions of what happened on the hill, some overlapping and some flatly contradicting one another, that Della, in her grief and fury, soon gave up attempting to sort out the truth from the lies. She knew only that three toboggans raced—that poor Stanton, in a red stocking-cap and muffler, doubtless quite drunk, had been in the fourth position on the Bellefleur sled—that while in the lead the Bellefleur sled struck an exposed rock and hurtled off to one side, toward a grove of pines—the order was given to jump—and amid much shouting and laughter the men did jump, happy to abandon the expensive toboggan to its fate: but of course Stanton, who knew nothing of tobogganing, was abandoned along with the sled, and killed outright when it smashed against a pine. As quickly as that it happened—as quickly as it takes to recount the incident—one moment the poor befuddled young man was alive, and the next moment he was dead, thrown against a tree trunk like a rag doll, his face so badly mutilated that several of the men, so drunk they could barely stagger to where he lay, quarreled at first about who it was.
“But you know,” one of them said finally, with inspired drunken logic, “it must be what’s-his-name—you know—the one with the mustache—him—Della’s husband—because he’s nowhere around here now, and this one here, on the ground here, isn’t any one of us—”
They found the red stocking-cap some thirty feet from the body, twisted about a tree limb.
AND SO, GRANDMOTHER Della said, stroking Germaine’s cheek with her cool dry hand that smelled of the harshest soap, you have only one grandfather: a Bellefleur grandfather.
The little girl sat motionless, not drawing away from the old woman’s hand. For even to move, at such a moment, would be wrong.
. . . They wanted, of course, to kill the baby as well. They wanted me to miscarry. I was four months pregnant with your mother at the time and if they’d had the courage, grandmother Della said, shaking with laughter, sniffing, they would have invited me to ride the toboggan too. . . . But I didn’t miscarry, despite the shock of losing Stanton. I was terribly ill for a long time, and I went to live with my sister Matilde, and then the baby was born, your mother Leah, and I wept that it wasn’t a boy because I was somewhat out of my head at that time and I imagined that only a boy, a man, could take revenge on his father’s murderers.
She closed the old photograph album. For a long moment she said nothing, and though Germaine ached to scramble off the sofa and run away, she remained sitting, her feet in their shining patent-leather shoes brought pertly together, her handknit red kneesocks exactly even. Finally grandmother Della sighed, and wiped at her nose with a rumpled handkerchief, and said in a half-amused tone meant to release her granddaughter: But the one thing I did miscarry, thank God, was God. I never again believed in any of that barnyard manure from that Christmas Eve to this very day. For that I suppose I should thank the Bellefleurs!
Solitaire
In one of the manor’s smallest and dampest rooms, on the second floor of the east wing, looking out upon a section of wall and part of a minaretlike tower with mock-battlemented turrets, the old man sat, backed into a corner, playing cards: slapping cards down on the table before him, one after another after another: studying, without expression, the message that finally lay flattened out before him, exposed and bereft of mystery. And then he snorted with contempt or impatience, and gathered the cards up, and shuffled them again.
Gradually, the children were told, their great-uncle Jean-Pierre would become adjusted to the “outside world,” and to them; perhaps, in time, he would allow them into his room (but what a dreary room it was, with a low ceiling and dark-paneled walls and only one window!—and he had chosen it himself), and he would invite them to play cards with him; but at the present time they must respect his privacy and the dignity of his old age, and not spy on him through the keyhole, or jostle about in the corridor giggling like little fools.
Great-uncle Jean-Pierre was an old man, and he wasn’t, after all, in perfect health. Sudden noises startled him. He could not bear the cats scurrying in the corridors—the sight of Nightshade, poor Nightshade, quite repulsed him—he hadn’t any appetite for even the tastiest of the dishes his mother Elvira ordered for him (he preferred watery oatmeal, and the coarse white bread the servants ate, and he had a curious habit of sprinkling nearly everything—roast beef, potatoes, fresh lettuce and tomatoes—with sugar)—he hadn’t (and this struck Leah as strangest of all) any interest in the family’s affairs.
But then of course he wasn’t well. He coughed, and sniffed, and spat angrily into his handkerchiefs, and complained of chest and stomach pains, and insomnia (for his bed was too soft, and the linen too scratchy-clean), and a sense of vertigo whenever he left his room, or even dared to look out the window. Bellefleur Manor was a horrific place—it was so inhumanly large—he hadn’t remembered how large it was: ah, what a terror to contemplate! What sort of mind, driven by an unspeakable lust, had imagined it into being? The castle . . . the castle’s grounds . . . the lightless choppy immensity of Lake Noir . . . the thousands upon thousands of acres of wilderness land . . . the mountains in the distance: a terror to contemplate: and beyond them, sprawling out on all sides, a greater horror, that entity glibly referred to as the world. What maddened mind, deranged by an unspeakable lust, had imagined all this into being . . . ?
Jean-Pierre II snorted with derision, and shuffled and cut and shuffled and dealt out his cards, one after another after another. He much preferred his game.
The Bloodstone
Because of a vow she had made as a young woman in her twenties, many years ago, after the second, or possibly the third, of her fiancés died (and one of the fiancés was a handsome thirty-year-old naval officer whose father owned a string of textile mills in the Mohawk Valley) great-aunt Veronica never emerged from her suite of rooms before sunset, and never wore anything but black. “Anyone as unhappy as I should hide away from the sun,” she said. It was thought that she had imagined herself a beauty at one time—and perhaps she had been a beauty—and now she was in mourning not only for the two or three men who might have saved her from a perpetual virginity, but for her own youthful self: for the girlhood that must have seemed at one time inviolable, but which gradually eroded until nothing remained of it but the stubborn chaste irrelevant vow she had made, evidently before witnesses: “Anyone as unhappy as I should remain hidden away from people, so as not to upset them,” she said boldly. “Ah, I am accursed!”
Because of the vow Germaine rarely saw her great-aunt, and then only in the winter months when the sun set early and Germaine’s bedtime wasn’t until well after dark. The surprise of great-aunt Veronica was her ordinariness: if the children hadn’t known of her unhappy loves and her curious penitential vows they would have thought her far less interesting than their grandparents, and certainly far less interesting than their temperamental great-grandmother Elvira (shortly to become, at the age of 101, a bride again). Great-aunt Veronica was a plump, full-hipped and full-breasted woman of moderate height, with a placid sheep’s face, smallish hazel eyes with innumerable blue tucks and pleats about them, a mouth that might have been charming except for its complacent set, and a fa
irly smooth, unlined skin that varied extremely in tone: sometimes it was quite pale, at other times mottled and flushed, especially about the cheeks, and at other times, still, it was ruddy, coarse, and heated, almost brick-red, as if she had been exercising violently in the sun. (Though of course she never exercised. It seemed to tire the poor woman even to walk downstairs, which she did with an air of listlessness that not even the promise of excellent claret and excellent food could dispel.)
Absolutely unexceptional were her pastimes: she did needlepoint, like the other old women, but would never have had the stamina or the imagination to create works of art like aunt Matilde; she played gin rummy from time to time, for modest stakes; she gossiped about relatives and neighbors, usually with an air of languid incredulity. She admired good china but had never built up a collection of her own. She could not tolerate anything but the finest linen against her skin (or so she liked to say), and of course she abhorred machine-made things, most of all machine-made lace. (All the Bellefleur women, even Leah, abhorred machine-made lace, no matter that the family had recently acquired a lace-manufacturing factory on the Alder River.) Her manners were mincing: she was really too much: sitting primly at the dining room table, night after night, sipping daintily at her wine, drinking a spoonful or two of soup, making a show of playing with her food as if the very notion of an appetite were abhorrent. (Indeed, it was a family joke of long standing that great-aunt Veronica gorged herself in her room, before coming downstairs for dinner, in order to preserve the myth of her girlish fastidiousness, decades after the myth had ceased to have any meaning—or anyone who might care to believe in it.) That Veronica had a dainty appetite was bluntly belied by her full, comfortable figure, and the suggestion of a second chin, and her obvious air of superb health. For a woman of her age—! people were always remarking, in wonderment. Though no one knew exactly how old she was. Bromwell had once calculated that she must be much older than grandmother Cornelia, which would have made her more than seventy, but everyone laughed him out of the room—one of the few instances in which the child was demonstrably mistaken. For great-aunt Veronica looked, even at her most torpid, no more than fifty; at her freshest she might have been as young as forty. Her small undistinguished eyes sometimes shone with an inexplicable emotion that might have been a pleasure in her own enigmatic being.
Upon occasion she wore open-necked gowns, which exposed her pale, rather lardish skin, and the beautiful dark-heart-shaped stone she wore about her neck on a thin gold chain. Asked about the stone she always gazed down upon it sorrowfully, and touched it, and said after a long painful moment that it was a bloodstone—a gift from the first man she had ever loved—the only man (she saw this now, so many decades after) she had ever loved. A deep green stone, flecked with red jasper, glowing and fading with variations in light, pulling heavily on the thin chain: a stone heart the size of a child’s heart. Is it beautiful, do you think it’s beautiful? she would ask, frowning, peering down at it so that her small pudgy chin creased against her chest. She couldn’t, she declared, judge any longer, herself. For it had been so many, many years since Count Ragnar Norst had given her the bloodstone.
But of course it was beautiful, people said. If one liked bloodstones.
NORST INTRODUCED HIMSELF to Veronica Bellefleur at a charity ball in Manhattan, attended, it was said, by many persons of questionable background. Though Veronica, then a comely young woman of twenty-four who wore her red-blond hair braided and wound about her head like a crown, and who distinguished herself by her high tinkling spontaneous laughter, had, of course, a chaperone, and would not ordinarily have countenanced a stranger’s approach—let alone a stranger’s daring in actually taking her hand and raising it to his lips!—there was from the very first something so peremptory and at the same time so artless about his manner that she could not assert herself against it. In handsome though rather dated formal attire, with a very dark goatee and gleaming dark curls on either side of his forehead, Count Ragnar Norst identified himself ambiguously as the youngest son in a family of merchants who owned a shipping line that spanned the globe, doing trade in New Guinea and Patagonia and the Ivory Coast, and as a diplomatic attaché whose embassy was, of course, in Washington, and as a “poet-adventurer” whose only desire was to live each day to the fullest. Veronica’s confused impression of Norst upon that occasion was a positive but troubled one—he was attractive, but how intensely, how queerly, he had smiled at her! And with what unwelcome intimacy he had kissed her hand, as if they were old, intimate friends. . . .
Yet she dreamt of him almost at once. So that when he reappeared in her life some weeks later, at a crowded reception at the home of Senator Payne, not far from Bellefleur Manor, she greeted him with an unthinking vivacity—actually held her hand out to him, as if they were old friends. It was not until he seized the hand and raised it to his warm lips and bowed over it that Veronica realized the audacity of her behavior, but by then it was too late, for Norst was chattering to her about any number of things—the weather, the beautiful mountain scenery, the “rustic” lakeside cottage he had rented for the summer at Lake Avernus (about twelve miles south of Lake Noir), his hopes for seeing her as frequently as possible. Veronica laughed her high scandalized laugh, and blushed, but Norst took no heed: he thought her, in his own words, “dreadfully charming.” And so very American.
It soon came about that Norst was visiting Veronica at the castle, driving over for luncheon or high tea in his extraordinary black car—a Lancia Lambda, it was, a saloon model that stood high off the ground on wooden-spoked wheels, comfortably roomy enough so that Veronica’s wide-brimmed hats were not in the slightest disturbed as she climbed in. He drove her along the Nautauga River, and down through the picturesque rolling countryside to Lake Avernus, which, already in those days, was beginning to be known as a resort area for well-to-do Manhattanites who hadn’t the interest or the wealth to acquire a genuine Chautauqua camp of the sort Raphael Bellefleur had built on the northern shore of Lake Noir. On those long leisurely drives—which poor Veronica was to remember the rest of her life—the couple talked of innumerable casual things, laughing frequently (for surely, from the start, they were half in love), and though Norst questioned Veronica closely about her life, her daily life, as if every detail about her delighted him, he was conspicuously evasive in speaking of his own life: he had “duties” in regard to his family’s shipping line which called him to New York often, he had “duties” in regard to the Swedish Embassy in Washington which called him there, often, and the rest of the time, well, the rest of the time was given over to . . . to his obligations to himself.
“For we have a grave responsibility, do we not, my dear Miss Bellefleur,” he would say, squeezing her hand in excitement, “a responsibility entrusted to us at birth: the need, the command to fulfill ourselves, to develop our souls to their utmost? For this we need not only time and cunning, but courage, even audacity . . . and the sympathy of kindred souls.”
Veronica was capable of intelligent skepticism in regard to innumerable domestic matters (dressmaker’s and haberdashers’ promises, for instance), and as a child of thirteen she had insolently repudiated the “God” of Unitarianism (for Veronica’s branch of the family was solemnly experimenting with forms of Christianity they considered rational, since the irrational forms were too embarrassing altogether); she was not a stupid young woman; and yet, in Norst’s charismatic presence, she seemed to lose all her powers of judgment, and allowed his words to wash over her. . . . His voice was liquid and sensuous, the first genuinely charming, even seductive, voice the unfortunate young woman had ever experienced. Ah, it hardly mattered what he said! It hardly mattered: gossip about mutual acquaintances at Lake Avernus, gossip about state and federal politics, praise for the Bellefleur estate and farm, fulsome flattery directed toward Veronica herself (who, in the flush of giddiness attending her “love” for the count, was undeniably beautiful, and not at all innocent of the effect of her cruel wasp-waisted
corsets on the snug-fitting silk gowns she wore). Veronica gazed upon Norst with a girlish fascination she did not even try to hide, and murmured in agreement, yes, yes, whatever he said, it sounded so utterly plausible.
It was a most unorthodox courtship. Norst would disappear suddenly, leaving behind only a few scribbled words of apology (but never of explanation) with a manservant; and then he would reappear, a day or twelve days later, never doubting but that Veronica would see him—as if she hadn’t innumerable suitors who treated her more considerately. As if she hadn’t, Veronica’s parents and brother chided her, any pride. But there was Ragnar Norst in his aristocratic car, which gleamed like a hearse, and gave off a scent (which in time became quite sweet, in Veronica’s opinion) of wax polish, leather, finely-veneered wood, and something mustily damp, like a bog made rich by centuries of decay. At all times he wore impeccably formal attire—frock coats, handsome silk cravats, dazzling-white cuffs with pearl, gold, onyx, and bloodstone cuff links, starched collars, plisséd shirts—and his pomaded hair with its twin curls was always perfect. Perhaps his skin was too swarthy, and his black eyes too black, and his moods too unpredictable (for if, one day, he was ebullient, gay, chattersome, and exhilarated, the next day he might be apathetic, or irritable, or melancholy, or so serious in his talk to Veronica of “the need to fulfill one’s destiny” that the young woman turned aside in distress) . . . and in any case, as the Bellefleurs were beginning to say, more and more emphatically, there was something not altogether clear about him. Were the Norsts, indeed, an “ancient” Swedish family? Did they own a shipping line? But which shipping line? Was Norst associated with the Swedish Embassy under his own name, or under an incognito? Was “Norst” itself an incognito? It is quite possible, Veronica’s brother Aaron said, even granting the man (which I don’t) his identity, that he is involved in espionage of some sort. . . . It hasn’t been our habit, after all, to trust foreigners.
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