He didn’t even realize he’d drifted off till he started awake and found it all repeating, found Claire in the door again, her hand over her breastbone as before. Only it wasn’t Claire, and it wasn’t the doorway. It took Ran a moment to reorient. He was staring at the opposite wall, where a painting hung. Blue-eyed and fair, the subject bore little resemblance to Claire. With her unruly mass of thick blond hair, full of waves as stiff as beaten egg whites, she looked more like Botticelli’s Venus, not the youthful goddess, but the model reencountered in a farmhouse or a tavern somewhere, twenty years beyond the seashell and the bubbling foam, lost in middle life. It was her hand, that specific gesture solely, that connected them across the generations, something in the camber of her wrist as she queried a mother-of-pearl button on another era’s dress. Ran briefly lost himself in the alkyd gleam of her fine eye, and then, for the second time, the blast of a boat horn startled him. Now, though, in the great, watery black windows, it appeared, its deck hung with lights like strings of incandescent pearls. Ran heard disembodied laughter carried over water and watched it pass like something from a dream.
When it was gone, he noticed something protruding from the gilt-edged pages of a book—a cobweb or perhaps a catkin. He picked it up and saw it was a feather, almost transparent where it had been exposed to light and air. When he opened to the place it marked, however, the part protected by the book was still bright green.
FIVE
Harlan, now, has seen the boat. He smiles at her, puts a finger to his lips, and, with that finger, points across the water to the rice dike on the opposite shore. Through an open trunk gate, water from the hidden field behind the high clay wall pours back into the river on the falling tide. Above the bol Nina’s engine, Addie can’t make out the splash, but then, far louder than the engine, comes another sound, an eerie ululation, like crickets or cicadas, yet made by human tongues. “E-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e.” It is like women keening in grief or warning, and as they cry, they accompany themselves with pots and sticks, and Addie hears the tink and thunk of wood on tin and bone on bone.
And then a new sound drowns out all the rest. From behind the dikes, as from a hidden amphitheater, something like a cloud of smoke arises, green smoke shot through with flashing trails of red and yellow fire, and the smoke is birds, and the new sound, the overwhelming sound, is the chittering they make. Her hand goes to the button on her breast, and she can feel her heartbeat, quickened, under it. The cloud rises higher. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of birds—so many and so loud she doesn’t hear when Harlan fires the gun. She sees the muzzle-flash, though—once, and then again. The shot moves through the flock like a hand through smoke, and six or seven birds from low to high drop down. The cloud breaks in two, then heals and drifts across the river toward the house. Addie shades her eyesand something stings her face. Pellets of spent shot ping the metal rail and pelt the deck like fine black hail. One hot iron bead has landed on her sleeve!
“Goodness! Goodness mercy!” Blanche begins to swat at it.
Too late, though. It melts the watered silk like butter and leaves a tiny black-rimmed, smoking hole.
Addie takes a step and has to brace herself against the cabin wall. The captain cuts the engine now, and in a strange, ringing silence, the Nina glides toward dock through water studded with dead birds, like strange bromeliads, feathered, warm and apple-green, bobbing in the patch of dazzle, where the sun casts demilunes in the dark river.
“Welcome to Wando Passo!” Harlan hails her, smiling as he waits. His gun—the new percussion fowler that Percival DeLay had built on Oxford Street in London as a wedding gift (with a certifying letter from James Purdey himself)—rests across his forearm. Two wisps of matched blue smoke rise from the barrels of Damascus steel. The air is heavy with black powder and cigar smoke, and Addie hears his friends laughing in the soft, coarse way men take when blood sport has been successfully concluded.
The crew have secured the lines and gangway now, and as Addie starts down, at a signal from the groom, the revelers link arms and start to sing, drunkenly, but with their hearts, “SheWalks in Beauty Like the Night,” the very song Addie sang her guests the first night Harlan came to supper at her aunt’s. How many times has she told him of her love for Byron, whom Addie holds in esteem above even Longfellow. And that Harlan should remember, that she should be holding in her hand the very book…(When she saw the youthful portrait on the frontispiece in Russell’s, it brought back her days at Mme. Togno’s; it was the dead poet’s sensitive and melancholy face with which she frequently invested her own Gabriel, when Addie still allowed herself
