One evening, after accusing Margaretha of flirting with a coffee broker, MacLeod tied her to a bedpost and lashed her with a riding crop. She said that she would never forget the expression on his face or the shadow on the wall.

Their second child was born in May, a daughter. MacLeod called her Jeanne-Louise, after an aunt who had always hated Margaretha. A few months later they moved again, this time to Malang, and here too it seemed that the hills were filled with discontented spirits.

A nursemaid was hired to help with the children, an unusually tall girl from a backwater village to the south. One evening the girl was caught with a stolen pig, and MacLeod gave her fifty lashes with his belt. Less than a week later he and Margaretha returned from a cocktail party to find that the door of their home had been left ajar, while shutters banged madly in the wind. There were odors of kerosene and vomit, then a distorted vision of her children on the nursery floor.

There was a bird, she told Gray, that supposedly sang whenever a child was to die. She never heard the bird. The physician found her in the garden and told her that he had managed to flush her daughter's intestines of the poison. She did not have to ask about her son, because it was in the doctor's eyes and the way he kept fumbling with a watch chain . . .

By now it was dawn, and she lay on the bed with her arm across her eyes. Faint light was breaking from the rooftops, leaving the chimneys in black relief against the sky.

"I had the plague," she said.

"The plague?"

"Typhus. After my son died I had typhus. They sent me to a coffee plantation to recuperate. It was beautiful, but also very lonely. One night I took a long walk. The road was dark and the jungle around me was very thick. But somehow I knew that I had to go down this road—a red road, red clay, you know? So I kept walking, and the farther I went the stronger this feeling became— something important was waiting for me, something that would change my life."

She paused, reaching for a glass of brandy on the nightstand, while Gray lit a cigarette.

"There was a village at the end of the road," she continued. "It was one of those very dirty places filled with mud. But that night there was a festival and all the people had gathered in a circle. Of course I was afraid to join them at first, but I had to see what was in the center of that circle. Many of the people were staring at me, but I didn't care."

She paused again, rising on an elbow, and he briefly caught a glimpse of an intensity he had never seen before. "Have you ever had a vision, Nicky?"

He shook his head. "I don't think so."