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Daring to lift his head—slowly. Cautiously. Wisps of cloud like filmy, darting thoughts were being blown across the moon. The grove of Chinese elms was still; the rutted, weedy lane called Acacia Drive was empty; no movement anywhere except the restless, perpetual stirring of grasses by the wind. All of nature was hushed as in the aftermath of a terrible vision.

The thing-without-a-face had vanished into the night.

2. Exile

At Cross Hill where the perpetual teasing wind from Lake Noir blew southward through our lives.

Where in exile and disgrace and in fear of his life our father had brought his family, his wife and five children, to live in his late grandfather’s ruin of a house; on ninety acres of neglected land in rural Contracoeur, in the lower eastern range of the Chautauqua Mountains.

Mount Moriah, eleven miles directly due west. Mount Provenance, twenty miles to the south.

Where millions of years ago gigantic ice glaciers pushed southward like living rapacious creatures from the northern polar cap to gouge the earth into nightmare shapes: peaks, precipices, drumlins, ridges, steep ravines and narrow valleys and floodplains. Where as late as Easter Sunday of mid-May snow might fall and as early as mid-August the night air might taste of autumn, imminent winter.

At Cross Hill, built in 1909 by Moses Adams Matheson, a wealthy textile mill owner, positioned on the crest of a glacial incline three miles south of Lake Noir (so named because its water, though pure as spring water when examined—in a glass, for instance—irradiated, in mass, an inexplicably lightless effulgence, opaque as tar) and five miles east of Contracoeur (a small country town of about 8,500 inhabitants) on the banks of the Black River. Named Cross Hill because the house, neoclassic in spirit, had been idiosyncratically constructed in the shape of a truncated cross, of pink limestone and granite; looking now, after decades of neglect (for Moses Adams Matheson’s son and sole heir had never wished to live there) stark and derelict as an old ship floundering in a sea of unmowed grass, thistles and saplings.

A hundred thousand dollars, minimum, would be required, Father gloomily estimated, to make Cross Hill “fit for human habitation;” almost as much to restore the grounds to their original beauty. (Which Father had seen only in photographs.) We didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were “reduced to poverty—paupers.” We would have to live “like squatters” in a few rooms of Cross Hill, most of the enormous house shut up, the rooms vacant. And we would have to be grateful, Father warned us, for what we had—"Grandfather’s legacy to me. A place of sanctuary.”

Temporary sanctuary, he meant. For of course Roderick Matheson meant to clear his name and return to the capital. In time.

Seeing the ruin of Cross Hill that first afternoon in a pelting rainstorm, our station wagon’s wheels stuck and spinning in the grassy-muddy drive, Mother burst into tears, crying bitterly, “I’ll die here! How can you bring me here? I’ll never survive.” The younger children, Neale and Ellen, immediately burst into tears too. But Father quickly reached over to grasp Mother’s wrist, to comfort her; or to quiet her; we heard Mother draw in her breath sharply; Father said in a lowered, pleasant voice, “No, Veronica. You will not die. None of us Mathesons will die. That will only please them—my enemies.”

Enemies: some of them former associates of Father’s, even friends of his and Mother’s, who’d betrayed him for political reasons; had perjured themselves in a campaign to vilify and destroy his career; had had a part in issuing warrants for his arrest.

Here are facts. We children knew little of them at the time, we had to piece them together afterward. For much was unknown to us. Much was forbidden knowledge.

In April of that year, shortly after his forty-fourth birthday, Judge Roderick Matheson, our father, was arrested in his chambers at the State Court of Appeals.

At the time of his much-publicized arrest the youngest of the eleven justices