Unlike the rest of his family, Jonathan Noir was an early riser.

He woke as the sun broke the horizon and shone warmly into his east-facing bedroom window. He was eager to get up and into the day. There were always many things to be done about the manor and on those rare occasions when the work load was light, there was always someplace interesting to explore around Geiststadt or the surrounding fields and hills.

He dressed quickly in brown trousers, almost white linen shirt, and rough leather boots well suited for farm work or hiking, whichever would occupy his day. After chores Jon hoped to steal a few hours in the afternoon to explore the meadows of HangedMan's Hill, which was more a long, rough, rocky ridge way than a gently sloping hillside. Summer would arrive in five days -- along with his twenty-first birthday. The upland meadows were in their first bloom with a wealth of colorful and interesting wildflowers and butterflies. As far as Jon Noir knew, no one had yet done a systematic study of the lepidoptera of Kings County. It would be an interesting subject to occupy his idle hours for the next few months.

He went down the steps quietly, making little noise. Jon had ten siblings. All, even his twin brother, Thomas, were older than him. Only he, Seth, and James still lived with their father, Benjamin Noir, at Noir Manor where Jon now enjoyed the privacy of his own bedroom. He could rise as early as he wanted without disturbing a roommate, and clutter the chamber with books, papers, and specimens of insects, plant life, and the local fauna without anyone complaining. But he did miss the hubbub and hustle of his younger years when the house had been full of his brothers and sisters. They were a varied group, fathered by Benjamin Noir on a succession of four wives. As the baby of the family Jon had garnered a lot of attention from them, particularly from his four sisters.

But his sisters were now all married. Sarah and Emily still lived in Geiststadt. Jane was in Brooklyn, a short day's journey to the West, and Catherine in faraway Massachusetts. His brothers Thomas -- who boarded in Manhattan while attending Columbia University -- Daniel, Alijah, Matthew, and Reuben also lived away from Geiststadt. Thomas spent his summers at Noir Manor. In fact, he was due any day, as Columbia's spring term had recently ended.

Jon envied Thomas's education. It was only one of a long list of grievances between them, dating back to Jon's earliest memories. Thomas had always had the finest of everything. Jon had to be satisfied with leftovers. He'd had only the scant local schooling, supplemented by occasional tutors somewhat grudgingly provided by his father. But Jon had learned a lot from books, as well as from simply observing his surroundings. Ultimately, though, he knew college wasn't for him. He could never go away to school. He loved Geiststadt far too much to leave it for long.

He took the back stairway down to the ground floor, stopping in the kitchen where Callie sat in her rocking chair before the roaring fire in the open fireplace. As usual, she wore flowing skirts, apron, and cloth bonnet. Though it was nearly summer, she rocked before the blazing fire soaking up the warmth like an old beetle worshiping the morning sun.

No matter how early Jon rose, Callie was always already in the kitchen. A small, bird-like woman with a deeply lined and darkly tanned face, she'd been with Benjamin Noir for nearly forty years before he'd moved to Geiststadt, and the twenty years since. Captain Noir had never again married after Gretchen, his fourth wife, had died giving birth to Thomas and Jonathan. Callie was the woman of the house. Officially she was the Noir housekeeper, but basically she bossed the other servants and performed what few domestic tasks she felt like doing. Most often she sat in the kitchen warming her gaunt frame before the roaring fire. She could never get enough heat. She was from the Caribbean -- Cuba, the story went -- and though Geiststadt had a relatively mild climate, it couldn't compare to the tropical balminess of the islands of her long-gone youth.

She shot Jon a glance from her dark, hard eyes, sunken deep in a thin face wrinkled by years spent in that tropical sun. She wore a calico kerchief that hid her thin white hair. Her tiny, frail body was enveloped in her thick, voluminous skirts.

"Up already, boy?" she asked. She stood, and slapped some bacon in a pan and put some day-old bread to toast on the edge of the hearth. "You gone get some work done today, or waste your time crawling round the marsh?"

Jon smiled to himself. The marsh that lay west and south of Geiststadt was also one of his favorite hiking grounds.

"Not today," he said. "Thought I might poke around HangedMan's Hill some."

She turned and fixed him with her brilliant stare.

"Stay away from that place, boy. Stay away. Bad things happened there, long before we come to Geiststadt, when the Dutch was here."

"I know."

Callie was a fountain of tales, whether of strange happenings in the Carribean, or Key West, the island off the Florida coast where Benjamin Noir had last plied his seaman's trade before moving north. Or even the history of the Dutch village called Dunkelstad, which had once stood on the very land where Geiststadt was now.

There were even stories concerning strange happenings in Geiststadt itself -- tales of ghostly sightings and mysteriously disappearing farm animals. Even people. Strange mists sometimes arose from the marshes, or crept down from the heights of HangedMan's Hill whose crest and higher slopes were still covered by virgin forest. There was even an odd tale connected with Jon's birthday. Callie solemnly swore that it had snowed on the night Jonathan and Thomas had been born, though they had come into the world on the first day of summer. Fortunately, that frigid episode had been brief. Normal temperatures had returned before the crops were ruined. Otherwise, Jon's and Thomas's reputations in the village might have forever been tarnished, though clearly the strange weather couldn't have been the fault of the newborn babes.

Callie liked nothing more than spooking a roomful of servants and children on a cold winter night with her tall tales. Sadly, though, Jon thought, there were no more children in the house. Seth and James had no interest in Callie's yarns. He was the only Noir left who did.

He sat at the wooden kitchen table. Callie brought him a platter of food and a mug of strong gunpowder tea that had come all the way from China. It was his father's favorite. Jon liked it as much as his father did, though they had little else in common.

Jon had inherited the features of Gretchen Noir, the mother he'd never seen. He was only of moderate height, and lean. Clean-shaven, with thick, unruly blond hair, blue eyes, and delicate cheekbones, nose, and mouth. He wondered if Callie -- and his father -- saw his mother's face in his. They never spoke of her. They never would say what she'd been like, and Jon had stopped asking a long time ago. Callie wasn't a tender woman, but, besides his older sisters, now all gone away, she was the closest thing to a parent Jon had ever had. His mother had died giving him birth and his father, at best, simply ignored him. When he and Thomas were growing up his father had given Thomas all his attention. But even Thomas, Jon realized, hadn't gotten their father's affection, for Benjamin Noir didn't have much affection to give.

Jon sopped a hunk of toasted bread in bacon grease and chewed it thoughtfully. His father was a big, strong, distant man. Still fit and vital though now in his eighties, he was educated, too. Not only about the sea, but about history and languages and astronomy and botany and many strange, odd things. He'd let Jon borrow his books and watched as Jon taught himself Greek and Latin with minimal help from occasional tutors, but he'd had no interest in educating the boy himself.

Jon had made himself useful on the manor from an early age, purely from an innate love of the house, the land, and the people and animals who lived on it. Benjamin Noir took advantage of Jon's talents, enabling him to turn his attention to his own arcane studies. He let Jon have more and more say in running the farm as Jon grew older and more knowledgeable. But what his father spent long days and nights studying, Jon couldn't exactly say. Benjamin Noir had shut him out entirely from that part of his life. Though he had some curiosity regarding his father's studies, Jon had found interests of his own to occupy his time and attention. Most of them centered about the land, its flora and fauna, even its imperfectly known history. There was more than enough in all that to occupy Jon's time and energy.

Jon finished the bacon, bread, and tea, and pushed away from the table, calling out a farewell to Callie, which she acknowledged with a wave of her wrinkled hand from her accustomed place in front of the fireplace.

Outside the sun was shining. Its rays blazed in glory upon the uraeus symbol made of gold leaf, blue and red enamel, and jet inlay set above the main entrance to Noir Manor on the east-facing side. The uraeus was a kind of Noir family crest. It consisted of a winged sun disk with a snake said to be a cobra writhing under it. Jon had seen similar insignia in travel books about Egypt. Some of the villagers -- especially the Derlichts and their client families -- proclaimed the uraeus pagan and sacrilegious, but it always made Jon feel safe and protected as it shone like a golden beacon in the rays of the sun.

There were probably twenty things that needed doing about the farm, but first Jon headed for the Glass House.

The villagers had called it Noir's Folly when Benjamin Noir had begun building it. Noir had lived for three months in a hut that barely had room for him and Callie and the children, erecting the Glass House before he built a barn for his livestock or even Noir Manor for himself and his family. Set in a slight depression that protected it from wind and storm but left it exposed on all sides to the sun, it was a hundred feet long, sixty wide, three stories tall, and was by far the biggest building in Geiststadt.

It was constructed of glass windows embedded in a web of wooden frames oriented north-south, with the main entrance in the south wall. Part of the north wall was brick and stone. An adjacent furnace room abutted this wall, designed, Jon had discovered, like those in ancient Roman bathhouses. The furnace heated water, which was then transported in ceramic pipes -- also built on the Roman model -- that ran under the conservatory's floor.

When it had been completed the plants began to arrive.

Orange and lemon and lime trees from Florida. Orchids of every size and color and description from a thousand islands of the far west. Herbs and medicinal shrubs from China. Insect-eating oddities from the jungles of the New and Old world. Water lotuses and lilies from Egypt and the Amazon.

Benjamin Noir made a fortune -- on top of the rumored fortune he'd brought to Geiststadt with him -- supplying fresh fruit to the growing metropolis of Manhattan even in the dead of winter, as well as exotic flowers to society ladies and medicinal potions to doctors and quacks of every persuasion.

No one laughed at the Glass House now.

Jon went through the antechamber -- the entrance was double-doored to conserve heat during the winter months -- and entered the House proper. He wrinkled up his nose at the stench that suddenly assailed him and waved a hand at the swarm of flies whose buzzing was an annoyingly audible hum.

After twenty years his father's Corpse Flower was finally blooming.

It had started to flower two weeks ago. The previous season's single-leafed stalk, nearly twenty feet high, had collapsed and given way, as always, to a new bud growing out of the soil inside the giant tub in which the Corpse Flower resided. But this bud was different than the one that usually appeared. It grew ferociously fast, sometimes a preposterous foot a day, developing into what was technically called the spadix, a fleshy central column that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a phallus. A bell-like structure called the spathe was now unfurling around the base of the spadix, reaching perhaps halfway up its eleven foot length. This spathe resembled a frilly-edged, upside down skirt. Its outside surface was dull green speckled with creamy spots. Its interior was vivid crimson, as if it had been painted with blood. As the spathe continued to slowly unfurl to its four-foot diameter, the plant's odor grew more and more potent. Its stench attracted swarms of insects, mostly flies by day and certain species of moths at night, which entered the Glass House through its ventilation panels.

This smell of rotting flesh gave the unusual plant its name of Corpse Flower. Benjamin Noir had brought its seed from the South Sea island of Sumatra. Jon could find no reference to it in any of his botany books. It was clearly related to the little Jack-In-The-Pulpit that Jon often came across during his rambles through the woodlands, but when this plant was compared to the homey little native it stood out like an oak to a shrub. Jon had been observing it with growing excitement over the last few weeks, visiting it early in the day and late at night and whenever he could in between, measuring and jotting down notes and drawings in his journal.

Even his father seemed entranced by the plant's transformation. Jon would find him standing before it nearly every day. Benjamin Noir took no notes or observations concerning it, but the rare flowering had clearly captivated him in his own way.

Jon had just finished his initial notes -- the spadix had gained another six inches of height during the last twenty fours -- when he was interrupted by a young field hand who came running breathlessly into the Glass House.

"Jon--" Isaac had been with for the Noirs for nearly five years. He and Jon were fast friends and companions. Probably several years younger than Jon, Isaac was an escaped slave from one of the larger plantation-style farms up the Hudson River, or, considering his accent, perhaps from somewhere far to the south. No one in Geiststadt particularly cared. Benjamin Noir owned no slaves because he thought they generally caused more problems than they were worth. He only cared that Isaac, who was bigger and stronger than most fully-grown men, did the work of two for the wages of one. Jon only cared that he was an ideal companion on his rambles through the countryside.

"What's all the excitement?" Jon asked.

"Old Erich says the cows broke through the fence again and got into the marsh. We gotta get them back before we lose any in the sinkholes."

Jon sighed. This was sure to take up most of the morning, which in turn would push his regular chores back to the afternoon. So much, he thought, for a quiet ramble up HangedMan's Hill.

"Let's get out of here," Isaac said. "The swamp smells better than that ugly old plant."

Thomas Noir rose earlier than usual. Much earlier. While he saw nothing wrong with languishing in a warm, comfortable bed, he knew that he had a busy day ahead of himself and he had better get going.

His once cozy rented room was no longer cozy. It was bare and sullen-looking in the early morning light. The things that made it bearable -- his few pieces of furniture, his fine rugs, his books and manuscripts -- were all gone. He'd packed them yesterday with the help of his servant, Tully McCool. Well, he thought of McCool as his servant. He knew that McCool had a different interpretation of their relationship. But that was all right. McCool could think what he thought. He -- Thomas -- knew the truth of the matter.

McCool had left the previous afternoon to get a headstart in the slow-moving furniture wagon. There was nothing left in Thomas's room but the bed and the chamber pot under it, a change of clothing from underwear out, and a small satchel that held the few necessities he'd need on the way to Geiststadt. Even his copper bathing basin, which he'd kept in a closet-sized room just down the hall, had been carted away by McCool and was already on the way to the bucolic little hamlet that Thomas had the misfortune to call home.

Thomas sighed as he relieved his bladder, rather inaccurately, in the direction of the chamber pot. He didn't care. He was leaving this room forever and when he returned to the metropolis of Manhattan -- which he would, as soon as possible -- he would have achieved his majority, his birthright, and his inheritance.

There would be no more hired rooms. He was tired of living on the Captain's parsimonious handouts. He wasn't ready to build a house yet, so he'd take a suite in a fine hotel. In fact, come to think of it, he wasn't ready to tie himself to a single place, even as fine a place as Manhattan. The whole world -- Boston, London, Paris, Vienna -- was out there, ready for him to explore. Perhaps he wouldn't return to Manhattan after all, but book passage to the Continent. He had a year more to finish his degree, but what did he need with a piece of paper proclaiming him a college graduate? He would finish his more important studies this summer. Then perhaps a year on the Continent would suit him more than a year in college cramming his head full of worthless scraps of knowledge that were no use in the real world.

Thomas dressed carefully, fastidiously, as he mused about his future. He was a big man. He had inherited the Captain's size as well as his dark good looks. That was, he realized, one of the reasons why the Captain favored him over his brothers. With his thick black hair, dark eyes, sharp features, imposing height, and evident physical strength he looked more like a muleskinner or stevedore than a gentleman. That was why he always dressed like a gentleman. So people would know who he was. Not a fop, with excessive perfume and a high-combed pompadour. Not a dandy, with too-high collars and too-lacy cuffs and too many accessories cluttering his appearance. But a gentleman, like Beau Brummel, the man who'd defined masculine fashion on the Continent for the last thirty years.

His friends thought him excessive to change his underwear every day and take a water bath two or even three times a week. But besides being a disciple of Brummel, Thomas also liked the sensation of cleanliness. He enjoyed the scent of freshly washed skin and the soft caress of newly laundered linen.

His best clothes were already packed and on their way to Geiststadt. He didn't care to waste them on a seven or eight hour carriage ride over dusty roads. His second best -- even his third best -- were quite sufficient to bedazzle any observers on the road home.

He put on clean linen drawers and undershirt and a fresh pair of cotton socks. Then his Wellington boots. It was difficult to pull on the knee-high, calf-hugging brown leather boots without the assistance of a valet, but Thomas persevered. Then he shimmied into his dark blue trousers with the buttoned side panel. Skin tight to the knee, they were cut looser below with enough slack in them to fit over his boots. Thomas buckled the straps that fit under the Wellington's insteps tight to ensure unwrinkled perfection over his muscular thighs. He shrugged into his white linen shirt and struggled with the cravat for a moment, seeking that elegant drape which only an experienced valet seemed capable of producing. He decided in the end not to waste too much effort on its meticulous folds. He was going to spend the day in a stage and then a hired carriage, not in a fashionable dining establishment.

The waistcoat came next, ribbed wool and silk, a somewhat lighter blue than his trousers, then the double-breasted riding coat that matched the trousers perfectly. It hugged his broad chest and narrow hips, its faultless construction declaiming Thomas's faultless taste as a gentleman of refined elegance.

He checked his pocket watch, giving it the customary morning wind before arranging it on its golden chain in his waistcoat pocket. It was not a terribly old watch, dating from the closing years of the previous century, but nevertheless it positively emanated heka. It had been one of the Captain's prize possessions. Thomas had been thrilled and amazed when the Captain had given it to him last year on his twentieth birthday.

It was French. It kept exquisite time, even having an insert face that ticked off the seconds. Its gold outcast was decorated with an Egyptian scene done in repousse -- dating it to sometime soon after Napoleon's invasion of that country in 1798. It showed a sphinx with an outsized uraeus figure hovering in the air above it. When the Captain had given Thomas the watch he'd told him with more than a little satisfaction that once it had belonged to Napoleon himself.

All antique, odd, and beautiful objects had heka. Or so the Captain said. The fact that this object had once been owned by the most powerful man in the world increased its heka considerably. Thomas, who had inherited the Captain's inclinations and talents as well as his looks, could feel the watch's heka when he held it in his hands. It was warm in his waistcoat pocket. Its ticking was like heartbeat of a hidden familiar, secret, cunning, waiting to spring into action to enforce Thomas's slightest whim.

It was good, Thomas thought, to have power.

He sighed. Someday he might really discover how good it was. Meanwhile, it was a waste of time to muse upon the future and what it might bring when the present had to occupy his full attention. First he had to take the stagecoach to Brooklyn. There he'd hire a carriage to Geiststadt. The regular stage service between Brooklyn and Flatbush -- with a stop at Geiststadt -- was too sporadic to suit Thomas's needs. He hated wasting his time waiting on schedules arranged by others.

He sighed again. He anticipated three, maybe four months in Geiststadt. Well, it couldn't be helped. He had to be careful. He had to make sure that the transfer of power and wealth went smoothly. He couldn't afford any mistakes. He had a long and prosperous life waiting ahead of him. If his plans worked. And why wouldn't they?

Jon Noir stood in dark unmoving water up to his calves, the mud sucking greedily at his boots. Slogging through the marsh that spread out for miles southwest of Geiststadt took effort, but Jon had tireless legs and a deceptively strong back and arms he'd developed in a lifetime of hiking, working the farm, and wandering the surrounding countryside.

It was a warm day. Jon and Isaac and old Erich, at times separately and at times together, had been chasing their runaway milk cows all morning. They had found all but the one named Elsa, leading them in turn to safer pastures than the unfenced marshland with its infrequent but deadly sinkholes. As it approached noon, the three searched different areas of the undulating landscape calling for her.

Jon took a breather, sitting on a grass hummock and wiping the sweat from his brow with his forearm. He could use a cool wind for a momentary respite from the heat, like the one that had blown on his birth night. Callie used to hold the entire Noir household spellbound telling of it, but none more so than Jon and his twin Thomas. For Jon the stories were enough to quench his thirst for the faraway. Thomas, though, was as different from Jon in this as he was different in so many other ways. Callie's stories only seemed to fire his desire to see everything, experience everything, and somehow maybe someday even come to own everything.

When Thomas graduated from Columbia, Jon expected his father would send him on the Grand Tour. A year in Europe. England. France. Germany. Spain. Italy. Greece. Jon did envy Thomas that. A year abroad would be something to remember and talk about all the rest of his life in Geiststadt. But it seemed unlikely that Jon would get the opportunity to take such a trip. His father would never pay for it.

"Jon!!! JON–A–THAN!!!"

Isaac's deep shout carried strongly over the open marshland. Jon turned and saw the large, dark figure waving strenuously. He waved back across the rolling marshland and started to slog towards him, avoiding the open water and overly lush regions of vegetation that indicated sink pits which could very well be bottomless.

"I found Elsa!" Isaac bellowed unnecessarily, as Jon could see the black and white spotted bovine standing placidly at Isaac's side.

"Fine!" Jon said as he approached. He happily thumped the cow on the side of the neck. "Just in time for lunch." He turned around in a circle, scanning the expanse of marsh that surrounded them. "If we can find Erich, we can head for home."

There was no sign of the old cowherd. He could, Jon realized, be almost anywhere in the marshes. The bog land was relatively flat, but did slope in rolling waves to the south. Fed by a stream running off Skumring Kill, the marsh covered hundreds of acres south and west of Geiststadt. Although mostly a grassy plain, it was also dotted with copses of willow, elm, and oak as well as bramble thickets too dense and thorny to penetrate.

Isaac mopped the sweat from his face with a rag and tucked it in the back pocket of his breeches.

"Maybe Erich got tired of looking. Maybe he already headed off to the Hanged Hessian."

"Maybe." Jon smiled to himself. Old Erich had been with the Noirs for longer than Jon had been alive. He was inclined to take advantage of his age, as well as Jon's good will. Jon frequently covered the cowherd's lapses with his father. Erich was a good man, loyal and knowledgeable, but he was getting up in years and lately took more rest than Benjamin Noir might approve of. "All right. We're not too far from The Hessian. Let's go see if he's there."

"I could do with a drink of cool water," Isaac said, leading Elsie by a rope he'd looped around her neck.

Jon squinted up at the sun riding high in the middle of the sky.

"I could do with a pint of cider and a bite of ploughman's." He stuck his hand in his pocket and jangled the change therein. "And fortunately I think I've got enough for both of us."

Isaac grinned. "All right."

Together they picked a path through the marsh, trying to stick to the higher, drier ground. Isaac led the cow. Jon watched for butterflies and unusual flowering plants. They both kept an eye out for Erich, though truthfully both were thinking more of the cool pints waiting for them at the inn on the Brooklyn-Flatbush road.

But life in Geiststadt was not all butterflies and cider.

Jon stopped so suddenly that Isaac, trudging at his heels as he led Elsa by the rope around her neck, almost blundered right into him.

"What is it?" the ex-slave asked as his friend stood rooted to the ground.

Jon Noir had a number of small, but useful talents that he accepted as his lot in the everyday scheme of things. One was his talent for finding lost things. He was so good at finding lost things, he'd often find things that no one actually realized were lost.

Like old Erich's body floating face down in a patch of scummy bog water, flies already buzzing around him looking for places to lay their eggs on a warm spring morning.

"Sweet Jesus," Isaac whispered, catching sight of the body over Jon's shoulder.

Though they could see only the back of the head, neither doubted that it was Erich. The body was dressed in the old cowman's clothes. It was tall, lean, and stringy. The hair that floated like a dirty halo on the scummy marsh water was long and grey.

Jon, finally compelled to action, ran forward, splashing through the standing water that had accumulated in a slight hollow. It came up to Jon's thighs as he reached Erich's side and kneeled beside him. He turned the body over.

Isaac, who had followed him, cried out wordlessly.

Erich's expression was one of utmost horror, as if he realized his impending doom. As if he knew it would be horrible and painful beyond endurance. A wound gaped in the old man's chest where his heart had once been. The organ had been messily excised, it seemed, by a sharp blade that had hacked through Erich's sternum and ribcage.

But that wasn't all. As if to make up in some fantastic measure for the removal of Erich's heart, a childishly crude cupid's heart had been incised on Erich's wrinkled forehead. Words had been cut in block letters in his right and left cheeks. They were hard to read in the stubble that covered Erich's hollow, seamed cheeks like a salt and pepper snowfall. They were in German, which was not Jon's native tongue. But Jon was good with languages and he'd lived in a German-dominated community all his life. He'd picked up enough Deutch to decipher the legend "I AM" on the old stockman's right cheek. His left bore the word "RETURNED," spilling over past his jawline and onto his leathery neck.

Jon and Isaac looked at each other in baffled horror as Elsa chewed her cud in bovine contentment.

Copyright © 2003 by CBS Broadcasting, Inc.