Bellefleur (49 page)

Domestic help began to arrive, and were housed in the old coachman’s lodge: cooks, butlers, maids, groundsmen, even a lampman, even several page boys (who were Hiram’s idea: he remembered liveried page boys from his youth, or claimed he did, and had always associated them with the aristocracy). Three seamstresses; two hairdressers; a “floral artist”; a Hungarian gypsy band from Port Oriskany; a string quartet specializing in nineteenth-century Romantic music. A team of electricians came to arrange strings of brightly burning electric lights indoors and out, strung along the battlements and from tower to tower, so that they would be visible for many miles, across the entire width of Lake Noir. “How lovely,” Leah murmured. “How lovely everything is. . . .” Two truckloads of flowers were delivered: roses, gloxinias, lilies of the valley, carnations, orchids. Leah and Cornelia and Aveline helped arrange them, in every part of the house; a great basket of orchids was brought to Elvira’s suite where the old woman, wearing a wrinkled floor-length houserobe, and pretending to be somewhat peeved by all the attention, claimed there was no logical place for them. “Cut flowers are a shameful waste,” she said. “We have more flowers than we know what to do with in the summer.”

“But this isn’t summer, Mother Elvira!” Cornelia said lightly.

“I’m not even certain it
is
my birthday, this week.”

“Of course it’s your birthday!”

“. . . or that I’m really the age you say,” the old woman murmured, shivering in her gown. “Bellefleurs always exaggerate.”

A pity, Leah thought, gazing at great-grandmother Elvira, that her husband wasn’t still alive; or that no one of her generation had survived. How lonely it must be, to have outlived everyone. . . . Elvira was said to have been an extremely beautiful young woman when she became betrothed to the luckless Lamentations of Jeremiah, more than eight decades previously; and with her fine white hair, her unusually soft complexion, and her slender, almost girlish frame she was still an attractive woman. She might have been sixty-five years old, or seventy. Hardly more than eighty. Ah, but one
hundred
. . . ! It seemed impossible.
She,
Leah, would never grow so old.

“Why are you staring at me, miss?” Elvira said sharply.

Leah blushed. She realized that the old woman had forgotten her name.

“I was thinking—I was thinking—”

“Yes?”

“That this will be a birthday for us all to remember, and to cherish,” Leah said weakly.

“Yes, I don’t doubt
that.
” Great-grandmother Elvira laughed. Leah spent a sleepless night, her mind reeling with last-minute plans. So many guests had accepted invitations. . . . So much food had been
delivered
. . . . (Several truckloads of choice beef and lamb; Cornish game hens; red snapper, sole, salmon, and sea bass; crabmeat and lobster.) There was a hideous tapestry in one of the third-floor guest rooms that she
must
take down, after all: it showed a naked potbellied drunken Silenus on a swaybacked ass, being led in a riotous procession of nymphs, satyrs, and fat little cupids. Quite possibly the ugliest thing she had ever seen. . . . And what if Germaine were ill, in the morning? And what if Gideon disappeared as he had threatened? (But he wouldn’t dare betray the family.) And suppose old Elvira stubbornly refused to come downstairs, to open her presents. . . .

Near dawn Leah had a confused waking dream. She was back at the Powhatassie penitentiary (which she had visited twelve days earlier), being led once again through the five locked gates, one after another after another, in her fox coat and her black silk shantung suit. She tried not to notice the high granite walls, the crumbling concrete, the stench. . . . In the high-vaulted visitors’ room she was led to an elderly man said to be her uncle Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II. Silvery-haired, diminutive, with small rheumy colorless eyes; his skin dry and flaking, and dead-white; thin lips stretched in a mock-courteous smile; a hump, small but prominent, between his shoulders. As she approached he raised his eyes to her and his gaze pierced her like a blade: for it was obvious that he was a Bellefleur. Even in his ill-fitting gray-blue prison uniform he was a Bellefleur, one of her people. . . .

“Uncle Jean-Pierre! At last! Oh, at last! I’m so grateful to be allowed to see you!” she cried.

The courtly old man (who looked far older than Noel or Hiram) acknowledged her words with a slight nod of his head.

She sat on the very edge of her uncomfortable chair, and began to speak. There was so much to say! So much to explain! She was Leah Pym, his sister Della’s daughter; she was his nephew Gideon’s wife; she had come to bring him hope. After so many years, after so many years of the vilest injustice. . . .

As she talked, more and more rapidly, the silver-haired old gentleman merely gazed at her. From time to time he nodded, but without conviction.

He had been falsely accused and falsely found guilty, but his case had not been forgotten, and she and her attorneys were in the process of reviewing it, and soon, very soon, they might have encouraging news. . . .

Around them, other visitors and prisoners were shouting at one another. There was a considerable din. A heavyset young woman beside Leah merely stared at her husband, through the scratched glass partition, and the two of them wept. Ah, Leah thought with a thrill of terror, how awful!

The skin of her uncle’s face was like an aged palimpsest. His eyes, close-set and watery, struck her as very beautiful. We haven’t forgotten you, we haven’t betrayed you, Leah said, speaking more and more quickly, her own eyes filling with tears. It
amazed
her, that she should be facing, after so long, her uncle Jean-Pierre: that after having refused to see her for so many months, he should suddenly have relented. His expression was slightly mocking; yet wise; kind; good. She could see that he had suffered. She could see that he half-pitied her, for her idealism. He thought she was a fool—
perhaps
. A silly goose of a girl. But she would show him! She wouldn’t give up so easily as the others had.

Because I know you are innocent, she whispered.

His lips twitched in a smile. He raised one liver-spotted hand, and drew it slowly beneath his nose.

. . . I know, I know you are innocent, she said.

The visitors’ room was a great concrete cavern lurid with voices and echoes. Somewhere, far away, rain pelted against windows. But the windows were opaque. Leah, squinting, could not see the sky—could not see where the angry rain struck.

“The Innisfail Butcher!” This gentle broken-spirited old man with the kindly pitying eyes and the dry wrinkled skin that seemed to lie against his bones in layers, like the skin of an onion. . . .

Leah talked and talked. Perhaps he heard. Perhaps he understood. At any rate he did not try to dissuade her. He said only two things during the course of their ninety-minute visit, and Leah, though straining, could not hear them precisely. The first sounded like
If old Raphael gets in office I think he might pardon me.
Leah, surprised, managed to smile faintly, and to explain that there was a man named Grounsel in the governor’s office—and that she and her attorneys had already begun petitioning him. The second remark of Jean-Pierre’s was made in response to Leah’s spirited statement, that she wished—ah, how she wished!—Jean-Pierre might be a free man by the time of his mother’s birthday; it would be, he must know, his poor mother’s hundredth birthday. The old man, gazing at her with his mild rheumy eyes, frowned for a moment, and said what sounded like
My mother—do I have a mother—

The rain interrupted them, slamming against the windows.

And Leah awoke, her heart pounding—and it
was
raining—the morning of the birthday celebration, and pouring rain—vicious pouring rain.

TOWARD 9:00 A.M. THE
rain stopped, and the sky appeared to open. But how queer, how alarming it looked—as if, Leah thought, one were gazing into a bottomless chasm. But the rain
had
stopped.

The Bellefleur women hurried about the house, giving orders to the help, frequently contradicting one another. Leah wanted
The Triumph of Silenus
taken down at once from the guest room reserved for W. D. Meldrom, but Cornelia insisted that it remain: wasn’t it one of the treasures of the estate, an oil attributed to Caravaggio? Aveline wanted most of the furniture in the main drawing room moved about, so that the atmosphere was less casual; she preferred, she said, the original formality of the house, before Leah had gone changing everything around. Della, who had been pressed into a visit, who had, as she said, far more important things to do at home, found fault with the gloxinia plants. They were already dying: sent up from the Falls at such absurd expense, and already dying . . . ! Lily followed the maids about, uncharacteristically critical, stooping to sniff at cushions (she was convinced—it had become one of her obsessions, since the party was planned—that the manor’s many kittens had fouled these wonderful old pieces of furniture), ordering floors repolished, sighting strands of cobweb floating from the high, shadowy, vaulted ceilings. It was imperative, she kept saying, that they not make fools of themselves.

The sky continued to lighten, though it was not exactly clear. Warmer and warmer the day became. A hazy sun glared through vast caverns of cloud: ah, how very hot the manor was! The windows must be opened. It was mid-November, there had already been a considerable snowfall, but it had melted, and now the temperature was rising as if it were midsummer: 50°, 53°, 57°, 59° . . .

Leah burst into tears when she saw that one of the children, evidently accompanied by a dog, had tracked mud onto a silk-and-wool carpet that had just been cleaned. And what time was it? The first of the guests—on the specially reserved Bellefleur coach on the train from downstate—would be arriving in about six hours.

The sky darkened suddenly. And suddenly there was a tremendous wind, which blew up out of nowhere. Running to the windows, the Bellefleurs saw to their astonishment that the sky had turned boiling-black: and, in the distance, Mount Chattaroy and Mount Blanc were ringed with clouds that appeared to be on fire.

Then there was a blinding flash of light, followed immediately by a crack of thunder so loud that several of the children screamed in terror, and the dogs set up a howl. Lightning! Lightning must have struck!

They ran about shutting windows. But in some cases it was already too late—the wind was too strong, torrents of rain had soaked everything, one could hardly push the windows closed; and there was the danger of lightning. (It
had
struck nearby—fortunately only a giant oak in the park, which had been struck many times in the past.)

So the Great Storm began: which was to rival in violence and damage the Great Storm of twenty years previously: when all of the low-lying areas were flooded, and so many people lost their lives, and even the dead were washed out of their graves.

The winds were of hurricane force. Sometimes the air was sulfurous and warm—sometimes it was quite cold, bringing walls of ice that struck the windows like bullets, and in many cases cracked them. Trees were felled. Sheets of rain pounded against the gravel walks and drives, turning them to mud. In his tower Bromwell observed, through a telescope, how Mink Creek had already risen: and its waters had turned an unrecognizable clayey-orange.

“Our guests—our party—Grandmother Elvira’s birthday—”

“But this
cannot
happen—”

“Why is the sun so bright—”

“Is it a hurricane? Is it the end of the world?”

“Get one of the men to stop that water coming in under the door—”

“Ah, look at Mount Chattaroy!”

“Is it a volcano? Is that fire?”

“What will happen to our wonderful party!”

The sky shifted from side to side as if it were alive. A sickly greenish-orange. And then a livid magenta. Clotted clouds raced from horizon to horizon. The rain lightened; and then suddenly increased; again it fell in sheets, with such malevolence the entire house trembled. There had never been anything like it! The Great Flood of twenty years back had been less violent, and shrouded in mist, so that one couldn’t actually
see
what was happening. No, there had never been anything like this. . . .

The winds continued to blow, and the rain continued to fall, hour upon hour. Power lines to the manor were blown down, and though it was midday candles had to be lit; but even the candles were in danger of being blown out by capricious fingers of air. Devilish spirits raced up and down the curving staircases, loosed by the storm, frenzied as hysterical children. And the
children
—the children
were
hysterical: some of them were so frightened they had run away to hide, others were leaning out of windows and shouting (“Come on, come on, what are you waiting for, come
on,
you can’t get us, come on and try!” feverish Christabel screamed from out a nursery window). Leah huddled in a corner of the kitchen with Germaine, trying to comfort her (though it was really herself she was comforting), and then, every few minutes, restless, infuriated, she jumped to her feet and ran out to see—to see—if perhaps the storm wasn’t lessening?—and the party might be salvaged after all?

“I could curse God for this! For this vile trick!” she shouted.

Hiram, who had dressed that morning for the party, and was wearing an elegantly tailored suit of the finest lightweight wool, with a very white and very starched shirt, and gold-and-ivory cuff links, and his usual gold watch chain, turned sharply to her, and raised his voice to be heard over the drumlike tolling of the wind: “Leah. How
can
you. If one of the children heard you—! Such superstitious rot, you know very well there isn’t any God, and if there is the poor thing is too feeble to have managed
this.
”

Nevertheless Leah ran about like a madwoman, peering out one window and then another, as if she believed the storm might alter from one angle of perception to another, saying to anyone who would listen, “It’s a trick. A vile trick. Because we’re Bellefleurs. Because they want to stop us—
He
wants to stop us—and He isn’t going to!”