Hood led Juan into a broad flat boat. At one end Charon with his burning eyes and wild tangle of white beard stood in his filthy cloak knotted at one shoulder, gripping his pole like a grim gondolier. “ ’Tis only the buried dead may cross,” Hood said, sitting down on a wooden thwart. “The unburied must wait on shore for an hundred years.” “Are you and I the buried dead, then?” Juan asked with a smile. “We are all buried, in comparison with what may be,” Hood riddlingly replied.
On the far shore of Acheron he led Juan into the flickering dark. Here there was still much work to be done. The three heads of Cerberus lay in a heap, and Dido, dressed in black and looking rather bored, sat at a small table playing patience by the light of a lantern. A fork in the path led to Tartarus on the left and Elysium on the right, both under construction. Hood led him to the left, through a passageway that opened into a torchlit place where laborers struck at the walls with picks, pushed carts laden with rocks, or sat wearily on barrels, eating bread and cheese.
“And yet,” Georgiana said a few hours later, “you cannot deny that all of Nature is the work of a great Designer.”
“Come now, I do not deny the existence of a great Designer,” Hood replied, as he cut into his roast goose. “I deny only that that existence may be proved from the evidence of Nature.”
“But — Augustus — what more evidence can there be, than the regularity and order of Nature? Night following day, the succession of seasons, the regular progress of the stars, the orderly development of the oak tree from the acorn and the rose from the rose seed, the marvelous mechanism of the human eye, so perfectly adapted for the sensation of vision — surely the sense of a Designer must present itself forcibly to a mind unbiased by ideas repugnant to reason.”
“Indeed, ’tis well argued,” Hood said. “I do not — upon my word, I do not deny the appearance of order in Nature. I deny only—”
“Appearance, you say!”
“Aye, just so: for what appears, may not be. Yet the appearance of order once being granted, I deny ’tis evidence of purposeful design. It may, with equal reason, be explained as the result of an accidental collocation of atoms, as in the system of Democritus and Epicurus.”
“What! My dear Augustus, you — why, ’tis the rankest atheism!”
“Nay, my dear Georgiana. ’Tis the rankest Reason. Come, have some more port, Mary. The white is better than the red. Is it my fancy, or does our friend Don Juan look as if he has just returned from the dead? Why, I’m only joking, dear. Pray, Don Juan, do explain my little riddle, else she’ll cook me and carve me and serve me up on a platter.”
After dinner, Hood retired to the library to read a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, while Juan took a turn with Mary and Georgiana along the path of osiers on the bank of the Ymber. In the early evening light, a swan and five cygnets passed near the shore. Georgiana stopped to watch for a moment, while Mary, who had been agreeing that the spelling of English was much in need of reform, and who hadn’t noticed her sister’s interest in the swan, walked on several steps ahead. Juan, seeing that Georgiana had been left behind, inclined his head and said in a low voice, “I fear your sister has taken a dislike to me.”
“Why — why — but surely you are mistaken.”
“You see how she avoids us.”
“But I cannot understand—”
“Come, come,” called Georgiana, “what are you two plotting?”
“We were speaking,” Mary replied, coloring slightly, “about the irregularity of English orthography.”
The flush in her cheeks, the reflection of the osiers in the dark water, the shimmer of the lace frill on her square décolletage, the evening light falling on distant fields, the sense of sudden intimacy caused by his words and by Mary’s little falsehood, all this filled Juan with a sense of well-being, and that night, lying in his curtained bed, he recalled the pleasing scene as if it were a painting: the man standing with slightly inclined head, the woman close beside him, the second woman standing at a distance, her face turned toward them, in the soft light of dusk.
Now in the late mornings, whenever he walked with Mary and Georgiana along winding garden paths, or in the evenings when all four played together until supper, Juan seized any chance he had to exchange a word in private with Mary about Georgiana, or to speak with Georgiana while Mary watched across a distance. And Juan could feel, in the young wife, a quickening of interest, a ripple of feeling that was deeply familiar to him — for he was never mistaken, in such matters.
One afternoon after his late breakfast Juan accompanied Hood to the stable yard, where one of the grooms replaced a worn bridle and examined a shoe. Juan then rode out with Hood to Avernus, watched his friend disappear into the cave, and rode back to the house. There he sat with Mary and Georgiana in the drawing room before retiring to his apartment, where he threw himself down on the walnut armchair beside his bedroom window. It was an unusually comfortable chair, upholstered in claret-colored wool velvet. He drummed his fingers on the arm, stood up and walked into the sitting room, flung himself across the sofa, rose at once and returned to the bedroom, where he strode to the window. He opened the casement wide and stood with his hands on both sashes as he looked down at a strip of lawn, a plum orchard, a beech grove, and a distant turn of river. A moment later he climbed up onto the window ledge. Directly below was a narrow stretch of lawn, on which lay a rake and a watering can.
Juan leaped, wondering dimly if he would break a leg. On the brilliant jewel-green grass his dark green shadow appeared; as he fell he had the odd sensation that his shadow had been stolen from him and was now being returned. He broke his fall, rolled over twice, and stood up, joined to his shadow. His whole body tingled with exhilaration. And suddenly he recalled his leap into the canal, the lights on the water, the orange peel, the eyes of the merchant’s wife widening in fear, the waiting gondola.
He passed through the orchard and made his way through the coppice of beech trees, past a small lake with an island, and through a pine grove to a melancholy retreat, where paths wound among yew trees, weathered statues, and a dark pool rimmed with crumbling stone. At the far end of the retreat rose an immense oak. Its half-bared roots, thick as saplings, had been artfully shaped to form two seat backs. At the base of each seat was a dark red pillow bearing Hood’s crest: a swan wearing a crown. On one of the pillows lay Juan’s grammar. Juan threw himself onto the other pillow, opened his grammar, closed it immediately, and studied an iridescent insect that was walking on the back of his hand.
Ten minutes later he was studying the same insect as it walked along a blade of grass that Juan slowly tipped from side to side. He looked up to see Mary approaching on a path beside the crumbling pool. The pink silk of her hooped gown rippled with light and shade, the lace ruffles at the ends of her elbow-length sleeves shook on her gloved forearms, and as she drew closer he saw that she was wearing around her shoulders a covering of translucent white fabric, the ends of which were tucked into her low-cut bodice and held in place by a blue silk breastknot.
“ ’Twas impossible to come directly,” she said in a quiet, urgent tone, and the trouble in her face gave her an energy that reminded Juan of her tight, trembling ringlets. “Your note—”