Chapter 1

Irene bundled Cybo into the cellar, shut the door, and came up to the hall. She could hear the clinking of bottles in Mrs. Fanning’s room, hear her windy groans, and the dull clanging of heavy chinaware as she leaned against the wash-stand. She was taking turpentine, a few drops in a spoonful of alcohol; the treatment had been prescribed once long before when Mrs. Fanning suffered an internal hemorrhage, but still she persisted in inflaming her kidneys with it … Spirits of turpentine came out into the hall, sweetish smell of invalidism, and now the whole upstairs was an apothecary’s shop.

The girl turned away from the stairs. She had neither the courage nor the desire to go up and embrace Mrs. Fanning, moan sympathetically, touch her stuffed body with its hot, wet skin. She thought, “And she did let them have the colt and the Jenny Lind. Other people might not have let them. Maybe she would never have done it, if it hadn’t been for the thought of Tyler.” Irene went out on the porch and looked southeast across the sloping meadows. A wagon was moving south in Long Lane, two horses whipped into a straining gallop, the wagon loaded with tiny gray and black dolls. At that distance, and in the gray haze, the heads of the dolls seemed disconnected from their bodies. She wondered idly why a human body seemed to come apart when viewed from a long way off. That was an uninterpreted analogy which she could not pursue—too remote and incapable, she thought—suspended here on this high porch behind the budding trumpet vines … The wagon was moving slower, slower; it stopped, and a doll went chasing back to pick up something which had fallen into the road. Then image and wagon blurred together once more; the toy horses twinkled out of sight past a row of peach trees.

Wheels hummed closer at hand. Mr. Fanning and Demon rioted up from the Fairfield road; the mares rocked wildly and they were frightened, their coarse manes slapped in the wind. Demon was holding his arms stiffly extended as he grasped the reins. He had lost his hat. Irene ran to the edge of the steps and pressed her palms beside her mouth.

“Look out!” she heard a woman’s thin voice screeching. “Becky’s tug strap—look out—”

The team swayed aside and the front carnage wheel ripped through a lilac bush, broken branches whistling against the box. Becky and Bright stopped in their tracks, snorting and blowing; the loose tug was trailing around Becky’s legs and she kept trampling it nervously.

Mr. Fanning climbed down and labored across the damp lawn with a faded carpet-bag in his hand. The bag was heavy and he carried it clumsily. He did not look back at Demon and the tormented mares.

“The rebels are—”