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obedience to last once I was out of his sight. He was insatiably curious.
    He followed me down the staircase and sat forlornly on the bottom step, watching me through the mask.
    "What is it like in the village?" he asked wistfully. "Is the church very beautiful?"
    "No," I lied hastily. "It's very ordinary, quite ugly in fact. It wouldn't interest you at all. And the village is full of people who would be unkind and frighten you. "
    "May I come with you if I promise not to be frightened?"
    "No!"
    I turned my back on him, to cover my alarm. That threat had never failed to silence him before. I was concerned to find that his obsessive love of music was now strong enough to overcome a fear I had steadily fostered since he was old enough to talk. My instinct was to protect him from a world which would inevitably seek to do him harm. Even Marie and Father Mansart agreed that I must keep him away from people, and total isolation seemed to be the only answer to my dilemma.
    I knew that ignorance and superstition would destroy him. Careful as I had been not to parade his presence, my windows were still smashed at regular intervals and more than one ugly, abusive letter had been pushed through my door, advising me to leave Boscherville and take "the monster" with me. It took enormous courage for me to face the grim, unwelcoming silence of the congregation every Sunday, to sit in the rear pew with Marie and hold my head high, pretending not to notice the primitive hostility all around me. Nobody wanted me here, but my presence was a mark of my defiance, a symbol of my refusal to be driven from my home and hounded from one village to the next.
    It was also my one escape from a house I thought of increasingly as a prison. My house—that quaint and pretty house of which I had been so proud—was now no more to me than a dungeon in the Bastille. Returning from Mass, the first sight of its ivy clad walls was enough to make my heart sink; but the thought of the child behind its carefully locked doors, waiting patiently and trustingly for my return, always forced my lagging footsteps down the garden path. Lately, as I approached, I had been aware of the white mask pressed against the window of the attic bedroom and I sensed his growing anxiety that one day I would walk out of the house and never come back.
    "Don't sit on the stairs!" I said harshly. "Go and study your text for the day and then copy it out."
    "I don't want to."
    "I am not interested in what you want to do!" I replied coldly. "I expect to find it finished by the time I return."
    He was silent as I reached for my purse; then suddenly he announced with decision:
    "I'm not going to study my text. I'm going to make it disappear so that you can't find it… like the scissors. 1 can make anything disappear if I want to, Mama… even a house!"
    He jumped off the stair and ran past me into the drawing room, as though he expected to be hit; and when he had gone, I leaned against the wall, trembling with apprehension. I tried to tell myself that this was just a silly, childish threat, devoid of any meaning other than vain protest. But I could not stop shaking and I found myself unable to step out through the door. I was afraid to go now, afraid to leave him to his strange, unchildish devices. I dared not think by what terrible means he might contrive to make the house disappear!
    When I had regained my composure, I took off the cloak and walked into the drawing room. I found him sitting on the rug before the fire with Sasha, staring fixedly at the flickering flames in the hearth.
    "I've decided not to go to Mass today," I told him unsteadily.
    He turned to look at me and clapped his hands in unveiled satisfaction.
    "I knew you would," he said. And laughed.
     
    I had been his jailer; now he was mine. I felt as though I had been sealed up in a tomb to serve the corpse of a child-pharaoh in its afterlife, and I fiercely resented the captivity which he had forced upon me. Love, hatred, pity,