Bellefleur Read Free Page A

this one after having wandered through the closed-off rooms, knowing precisely what she wanted: for she had played in the manor as a very young girl, one of Gideon’s cousins, one of the “poor” Bellefleurs from the other side of the lake). And then she kicked at him, and he threw himself on her, and they grappled, and cursed each other, and grunted, and panted, and as the storm raged outside they made love, not for the first time that night, and ground their damp tearful faces against one another, and murmured I love you, oh, God how I love you, and not even the Spirits of the Dead, their forlorn tumultuous heartrending cries, could penetrate their passionate heaving ecstatic labor. . . .
    And then it was over, and both were asleep. Gideon swam effortlessly, through what must have been a flood; but he was untouched by uprooted trees, debris, even corpses flung along by the current; his heart swelled with triumph. It seemed that he was hunting the Noir Vulture once again. That enormous white-winged creature with its hunched shoulders and mottled, naked, monkeyish face. . . . Leah sank to the very bottom of sleep, where she was pregnant at once: not only pregnant but nine months’ pregnant: her belly swelled and pulsed and fairly pounded with life.
     
    AND THEN, SUDDENLY, she was awake.
    Downstairs, at the very front of the house, far away, something was crying to be let in.
    She could hear it plainly: it was crying, begging, clawing to be let in.
    Leah shook off her warm, heavy, mesmerizing sleep, and was at once drawn up to the surface where the storm still howled, and something begged piteously for entry. Without hesitating she rose naked from bed and slipped on her silk robe—one of the few items of clothing that still remained from her trousseau of six years ago, now badly frayed and a little soiled at the cuffs. Her husband flung an arm toward her and murmured her name in his sleep, querulously, possessively, but she pretended not to hear.
    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