To Mike and Mary and Bernice

friends and fellow civilizers

of the barbarian hordes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to:

My wife, Kristine, who was my collaborator at the conception of this story; and to Emily and Geoffrey Card, Erin and Phillip Absher, and Peter Johnson, whose comments at the earliest stages helped give the first draft a better shape and substance;

Clark and Kathy Kidd for hospitality and more as I began the second draft; and Kathy again for reading that draft with fresh eyes;

Mark and Margaret Park, in whose guest bedroom I wrote and faxed away many a chapter;

Kathleen Bellamy, my assistant, who always waits to read till last, so she can catch the mistakes that everybody missed;

And (again and always) my wife, Kristine, and my children, Geoff, Em, Charlie Ben, and Zina, who have taught me what a house is for and what a home can be.

New House 1874

Dr. Calhoun Bellamy made it a point to stay away from his property while the crew was tearing down the old Varley house. He didn't want to remember scenes of destruction. All he wanted to see was each step in the construction of the new house, the one he had designed for Renée and for the children they would have together.

Architecture was all he had wanted to study, ever since his father sent him abroad after the War Between the States. It wasn't the grandeur of the great buildings of Europe, the cathedrals and palaces, monuments and museums, that made him long to be a shaper of human spaces. Rather it was the country houses of Tuscany, Provence, and England. In his mind they formed a strange amalgam: the rambling outdoors-indoors of the villas designed for the perpetual summer and spring of the Mediterranean, and the bright-windowed tight enclosures in which the English managed to frolic despite the bitter winter and the endless rain.