Bellefleur

  Garnet stared at her, speechless. All the poor thing could do was nervously pleat her apron in her fingers!

  “I said,” Leah murmured, her face flushed, “that I’d like to bring Cassandra back with me. At least for a while. You don’t object—?”

  “Leah—” Della said.

  “Garnet, you don’t object?”

  Garnet stood behind the tea tray, staring, struck dumb. It was as much as Leah could do to brush her gaze across the skinny little thing without bursting into angry laughter. “She’d have much better treatment with me,” Leah said. “You know that.”

  No one spoke. The fire blazed up fitfully, then died away. Perhaps the flue wasn’t completely open—the room was filling with damp eye-searing smoke. Leah hummed into the baby’s joyous face, but Garnet and Della and Hiram stood mute. And then Germaine began chattering: something about baby, baby, something about home, coming home: and Leah glanced briefly up at Garnet (still pleating her apron in her bony fingers) and knew that she had won. And was not at all surprised.

  “The Innisfail Butcher”

  Though Germaine’s great-uncle Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II enjoyed the dubious honor of having his likeness sketched many more times than any other Bellefleur (even his grandfather Raphael, the surly butt of so many newspaper caricatures), and reproduced not only throughout the state but throughout the nation and Canada, and even (so a Bellefleur cousin discovered to his horror and chagrin when, opening the Times as he breakfasted in a Mayfair hotel, his eye snagged upon an ugly little headline that had to do with “mass murder” in the States—and saw, above the headline, an incongruously detailed, and even rather handsome, pencil sketch of the thirty-two-year-old “Innisfail Butcher”) in England and France as well, and though the less vicious of these likenesses were actually kept, for a while, by the Bellefleur who was always most fond of Jean-Pierre, his aunt Veronica, in a scrapbook bound in white kid, the only representations of Jean-Pierre that were eventually allowed to remain in the manor were the charming pencil sketch on the nursery wall, and a pencil-and-charcoal sketch, equally charming, but perhaps even more romantic, made of young Jean-Pierre just before his embarkation for Europe at the age of twenty-four, for his abbreviated Grand Tour. (His mother was later to blame his father, most unfairly, for the fact that Jean-Pierre’s trip abroad was truncated, and the poor young gentleman forced to return home before his education in culture was complete: He would not have drifted into a life of cardplaying and other forms of idleness, he would not have succumbed to the blandishments of his false friend from Missouri, he would not have been in the notorious Innisfail House on that fateful night, and would not subsequently have suffered his tragic fate, had Jeremiah been more judicious in his management of the farm, had he been more clear-sighted about the market for wheat . . . ! The sins of the fathers, Elvira raged in her grief, are visited upon the heads of the sons, and the sons are ground underfoot.)

  The sketch on the nursery wall, preserved nicely in a tortoiseshell frame, and rarely subjected to more than an idle glance on the part of the children, showed a sweet-faced child of indeterminate age (the artist must have been unevenly skilled, for all the children’s lips looked alike, being feminine and rather bee-stung, while their Bellefleur noses varied, and their eyes—touched up with tiny white dots—looked in some cases preternaturally adult, in other cases so piously soft they threatened to melt into the coarse-grained paper): he might have been five, or seven, or eight: captured in prayer, his cheekbones prominent, his small but striking eyes cast upward above his fervently clasped hands and a near-imperceptible (or did Leah imagine it, having studied the drawing for so long) smirk. Hung for decades between a square-jawed Matilde and a fairly dour Noel, Jean-Pierre II most resembled his nephew Raoul; the only Bellefleur of either sex who was arguably more “beautiful” than Jean-Pierre was Gideon.

  The second drawing, taken down from the wall by one Bellefleur, hung again by another, taken down again and again hung, in different parts of the manor, at different stages of the luckless man’s career in court—and kept, finally, when Germaine was a child, in Leah’s boudoir—showed a handsome, rather foppish young gentleman with curled mustaches and hooklike curls on either side of his narrow forehead, his eyes fixed upon the viewer in an expression of tenderness, sincerity, and grave feeling. “The Innisfail Butcher,” indeed—! One could not fail to be moved by the sweet set of his mouth, or the nobility of his slightly uplifted chin. This was the young man who was welcome in the finest drawing rooms and clubs in Manhattan, during the period when the Bellefleurs maintained a modest but attractive town house just off Washington Square; it was said of him by one Manhattan heiress (admittedly, her father’s fortune was not immense) that she had never heard any young man of her acquaintance speak so sensitively about music. And during that single season when Veronica Bellefleur took her favorite nephew to the theater, and to the races, and to her friends’ homes in the city and out on Long Island, when it had seemed not only probable but inevitable that he would make a “brilliant” match, he had behaved, according to all witnesses, with exquisite tact, modesty, grace, and charm at all times. If he had a temper, if he occasionally drank too much (and to the very end of his days as a free man, Jean-Pierre seemed incapable of calculating the effect of alcohol on his brain, though he had a great deal of practice), or flew into a tantrum over a creased collar or a mislaid cuff link or butter served too hard to spread, no one knew except the Bellefleurs and their servants. The only public trait about him that might be characterized as somewhat odd, which his Manhattan acquaintances remarked upon years later, at the time of the trial, was that he frequently joked about the “doom” of his name. Since no one there knew the first Jean-Pierre’s fate, and since Jean-Pierre II had little to gain from discussing it in any detail, he would only say, with tantalizing melancholy, that his great-great-grandfather had died a noble but extremely painful death in the War of 1812. Surely you are not superstitious, young women said, sometimes touching his arm lightly in the emotion of the moment, when they were not quite aware of what they did, surely you don’t believe that a mere name can have any effect upon your life . . . ? Of course not, Jean-Pierre would wittily reply, not a mere name: but what of myself?

  It was not true that Jean-Pierre had not begun his career of cardplaying before the European trip, as Elvira liked to claim; but his activities at that time, as a young man in his early twenties, with aristocratic habits and pretensions, were fairly innocuous, undistinguished from those of most of his contemporaries among the well-to-do landowners in the Valley. He became a serious cardplayer in Europe when, marooned in a Swiss inn during a week of torrential rains, he acquired certain skills—they were not quite tricks—from a fellow tourist, a grandfatherly Englishman from Warwickshire, grandmother Violet’s home. (But Jean-Pierre’s friend claimed never to have heard of the Odlins.) Before that Jean-Pierre had gamely traveled about from country to country, with oscillating enthusiasm, and varying degrees of head and chest colds, being taken by train or carriage through Belgium, Holland, the Rhineland, Northern Italy, Baden-Baden, the South of France, Paris, Rome, the Algarve, Athens, Southern Italy, Luxembourg (a dizzying jumble whose names he could not keep straight, though he made every effort to record them in his diary, and to send postal cards back home giving his impressions—usually quite brief—of each place, and its art treasures, and “natives”), alone for the most part, and humbly dependent upon English-speaking hotel people and guides; but he was fortunate enough to make a few acquaintances, all of them Americans, and one of them a somewhat older San Franciscoan with whom he rode about on the delightful Brussels streetcars most of one day, in a kind of boyish bliss, shamelessly indulging in his nostalgia for their native land. (Jean-Pierre spent several days in the company of Mr. Newman, who had made a fortune in leather back home, and who was courteous enough to murmur that, yes, indeed yes, he had heard of the Bellefleur family by way of his associates in New York City. They had much the same tastes in art: ei
ther a piece of sculpture or a painting struck them at once, or it never did; they were bored with madonnas, and religious subjects in general; the notion of patina alternately amused and bewildered them. If something is merely old, must it be good? One fine October day they spent an hour or more admiring, from different angles, the impressive Gothic tower of the Hôtel de Ville, and wondered if it might be possible to duplicate it back in the States: Mr. Newman knew exactly the place for it, on a Nob Hill avenue; Jean-Pierre argued for the Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Their somewhat forced intimacy came to an abrupt end when, in all innocence, Jean-Pierre suggested that the two of them visit a sumptuous brothel not far from their lodgings, and Mr. Newman drew away in silent consternation, clearly too shocked even to protest. (But how peculiar, Jean-Pierre thought, the man admitted to being thirty-six years old, a bachelor, in every respects “normal” enough!))

  After that Europe seemed to deteriorate, almost daily, hotel suites were invariably disappointing, guides were clearly out to cheat him, “art treasures” began to repeat themselves (or had he, poor Jean-Pierre wondered, made a fatal error and reversed his journey, so that he was traversing the very countries he had imagined he was finished with forever?). Trains were delayed, or did not arrive at all. Bridges were washed out. There was a typhoid scare, and an influenza scare. (Jean-Pierre himself experienced a gonorrhea scare of fourteen hours, which left him shaken and chaste for many days.) While waiting out an incessant rain that everyone connected with the inn in which Jean-Pierre was trapped claimed was most unusual, he at least learned, from a similarly disenchanted Englishman named Fairlie, how to be extremely clever at poker, and even at bridge—a talent that was to serve him well in the Powhatassie State Correctional Facility.

  And then his itinerary was cut short when an expected bank draft did not arrive, and an unexpected telegram of craven apology from his father did, and he returned home with far more relief than he showed (he made it a point of showing, to his family, extreme indignation—hinting that he had been invited to dine at one of the “oldest houses in Europe” just when the fateful telegram was delivered); and he settled in to apply himself to learning how to manage the complicated Bellefleur estate . . . though it was of course too complicated to be learned by anyone other than a financial wizard (Jean-Pierre’s idea of a financial wizard was his brother Hiram, who had failed to be admitted to law school—who had, in fact, left Princeton without his bachelor’s degree) . . . and what good did it do, he queried often, to know what course to take when the market fell or soared according to its own whims, and there were unscrupulous men manipulating it, and a man’s fortune had little to do with his intelligence, or his moral worth? (For certainly no one was a finer, more tediously “moral” man than his father, yet no one in the Valley had failed, in recent years, so ignominiously as Lamentations of Jeremiah with his “fox farm.” Even the Varrell trash could laugh at them now, Elvira said.)

  Jean-Pierre made sporadic journeys to Port Oriskany and Vanderpoel, sometimes not even giving as an excuse the matter of “family affairs”; he made infrequent trips to New York (for the tall narrow town house at Washington Square South had been sold years before); he began to make a great many trips to Nautauga Falls, Fort Hanna, and other rather rough river towns, and Innisfail—Innisfail, some eighteen miles from Bellefleur Manor as the crow flies, but considerably longer (at least thirty-five miles) if one took the usual route, the Innisfail and the Old Military roads, and then the unpaved Bellefleur Road up to the lake, as anyone but an Indian or a madman (so Jean-Pierre’s attorney was to claim, foolishly) would do. And as for riding a horse through the pitch-black night, along an unfamiliar and dangerous terrain . . . when the rider is unskilled, and even fearful of horses . . .

  The night of the multiple murders at Innisfail House, the largest and probably the most disreputable of the taverns in the area, Jean-Pierre claimed to have shared a carriage with several passengers, including his new acquaintance from Missouri, Wolfe Quincy, on the trip from Nautauga Falls to Innisfail. He claimed to have gotten a ride back—back, that is, to the village of Bellefleur—with a peddler whose mule-drawn wagon was heaped with all sorts of goods, but who specialized in barbed wire. (The peddler was never found, unfortunately. The driver of the carriage claimed not to remember Jean-Pierre on that particular trip, though he’d seen him previously, on other trips; nor did the other passengers remember him. But Jean-Pierre’s fervent story was never to waver.) What precisely happened at Innisfail House between the hours of midnight and two-thirty Jean-Pierre Bellefleur simply did not know. He simply did not know.

  Eleven men were murdered, one after another. Several were shot at close range, several others were stabbed, and their throats viciously slashed; two who died of bullet wounds were also subjected to throat-slashings. How it happened—how a single murderer was able to do so much, so superhumanly much—no one knew. There must have been time for a number of the men to defend themselves, yet it seemed that they did not defend themselves; even Wolfe Quincy died without putting up much of a struggle. (That it was unlikely Jean-Pierre was responsible for the killings was underscored by the fact that his friend Quincy was among the victims. Jean-Pierre was extremely fond of Quincy, and dependent upon him as well, for Quincy could hold his liquor far better than Jean-Pierre, and when they were involved in ambitious all-night games he watched over Jean-Pierre with an almost maternal solicitude. He was a broad-bellied, good-natured man of about forty, originally from Massachusetts, lately from Missouri, an excellent drinking and gambling companion whose only fault was a tendency toward boasting of his exploits in the War: how many men he’d killed, how many horses he had stolen, how many bullets he had survived (and judging from the scars he proudly showed the squeamish Jean-Pierre, there were at least half a dozen). Quincy was the last man, the last human being on earth, Jean-Pierre’s attorney claimed, Jean-Pierre would want dead.)

  Which sounded, in the antiquated courtroom with its faint dry echo, not quite right.

  JEAN-PIERRE WAS FOUND guilty of murder in the first degree, despite his innocence, and sentenced by Judge Phineas Petrie to life plus ninety-nine years . . . plus ninety-nine years repeated ten times. Evidence was no more than circumstantial; the only witness—the tavern-keeper’s malicious wife—admitted that she was nearly fainting with terror when she saw, from an upstairs window, a single rider galloping away into the night, along a narrow trail leading into the foothills. She could not see the figure, could not of course identify the murderer, but she claimed that “of course” it was Jean-Pierre Bellefleur who had, within her hearing, loudly and drunkenly threatened lives in the past, and had had to be ejected from the tavern more than once, because of his wicked temper. All this was slanderous, of course. And Jean-Pierre protested. He had left Innisfail House before midnight and was home by three in the morning. Because he was so exhausted he had slept in a hayloft . . . he hadn’t wanted to disturb his family . . . perhaps he was somewhat drunk . . . the events of the night were badly confused. He knew only one thing: that he was innocent of the heinous charge brought against him. And that the “Innisfail Butcher”—how quickly the newspapers had hit upon that vile epithet, and how widely Jean-Pierre’s lean, anxious, hawkish face was known throughout the state!—remained a free man, given license to murder again, while he, Jean-Pierre, a victim of grotesque circumstances, was condemned.

  The tavern-keeper’s wife simply repeated her imbecilic story. The rider on the horse headed in the direction of Lake Noir, by way of the foothills; the dark horse with three white stockings and a close-cropped mane and tail; Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s belligerence and general rowdiness. He was like a child, the woman said, wiping at her eyes. A child pretending to be an adult man, and fooling people into accepting him as such. . . . But also like the Devil. When he drank, he was like the Devil. He just went wild, he had to be dragged out onto the veranda by his friend from Missouri, slapped around and maybe splashed with cold water; and even then he wasn’t always all right. (But
when Jean-Pierre’s attorney, cross-examining the woman, asked her with a droll twist of his mouth why she and her husband allowed such a “devil” into their establishment, she could only stammer: “But—you see—so many of them are—so many of the men—They’re all like that more or less—” A ripple of laughter ran through the packed courtroom.)

  Nevertheless, he was found guilty. By twelve jurors who had seemed, at first, to be just and upright and unprejudiced men. (Though of course no one in the Valley could be “unprejudiced” about a Bellefleur.) It is said that jurors, filing back into court with a verdict of Guilty, do not look at the defendant; but the jurors at Jean-Pierre’s trial certainly looked at him. They eyed him, studied him, stared quite frankly at him as if they were in the presence of a venomous but fascinating insect.

  . . . And how do you find the defendant?

  . . . We find the defendant Guilty as charged.

  Guilty!

  Guilty as charged!

  When of course he was innocent, and could do nothing more than scream and tear at the sheriff’s men who were restraining him. No! You can’t! I won’t let you! I’m innocent! The murderer is at large! The murderer is among you! I am not the murderer!

  If only the tavern-keeper’s spiteful wife had been killed along with the others: then there would have been no witness. But in the pandemonium the woman was overlooked.

  If only . . .

  FOR A WHILE he could not be certain he had heard correctly. What did the words mean, Guilty as charged . . . ?

  Perhaps when the prosecuting attorney had queried him about the old feud of the 1820’s—whether he felt any “ill-will,” whether he had ever craved “revenge”—he should have answered more carefully, more thoughtfully, instead of uttering, through tight pursed lips: “No.”