Bellefleur Read Free Page B

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