Pierce's move from the city to Blackbury Jambs: "it was as though he had suddenly been returned to the common intercourse of earth and man from some stony planet, these nice people couldn't imagine how off it was for him, a city man, to be wished a good morning by strangers in the street. . . . There was so much to relearn' the names of plants and flowers and the order of their coming forth, the usual greetings to be offered between citzens and the usual replies to them; the streets and alleys of the town, its stores, customs, history."
Pierce discovers the local Variety store has more of his needs than he would have expected, including the Sunday New York Times: "For a long time Pierce had stopped taking that immense wad of newsprint; he had become convinced that what gave Sunday that particular character it had for him -- a character it retained in all seasons and every kind of weather, a headachy, dreary, dissipated quality -- was not Jehova claiming his own day and poisoning it even for unbelievers, not that at all but a sort of gas leaking out from that very Sunday Times, a gas with the acrid smell of printers ink, a narcotizing' sickening gas. And in fact the symptoms seemed to have been at least partly relieved when he began refusing to buy it. But out here its effect might be neutralized."
Again, the merging of the two rivers is tellingly described -- a figure of the two streams of history Pierce is seeking to distinguish: the broad, muddy Blackbury with its wide black iron bridge and the sparkling Shadow, crossed by a narrow stone bridge.
Pierce notes that astrology is common currency among many of the residents of Blackbury Jambs.
At a croquet tournament (croquet is apparently a pervasive passtime in Blackbury Jambs), Pierce meets Rose and discovers from her that Fellows Kraft was a local resident. Rose has been asked by her uncle Boney to take up duties at the diminished family foundation, which includes management of Kraft's literary estate and home (which has seldom been entered since his death).
Rose has been browsing in Fellows Kraft's unpublished memoir, and reads about his lifelong search for an "Ideal Friend" -- always a male one. She cannot determine if Kraft was being coy about his sexuality, or if he was truly a sexual innocent.
Kraft's idea of human relations expressed in terms of croquet: "We will be solitary, inevitably, like balls struck across a wide lawn, striking others now and then, and being struck by them. We must be glad of that striking; and keep up our courage and our cheer; and not forget the ones we have loved -- no, and pray that our remembrance will in turn earn us a place, however little visited, in their hearts."
She reflects that "nowadays everyone -- no, not everyone, but lots of people she knew -- lived the way gay men like Kraft had always lived; in brief collisions, restless."
Kraft described his artistic inspiration in the Baroque ceiling of a Venetian church. Painted by the elusive artist Fumiani, the ceiling shows "flights of angels ascend[ing] not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky."
Rose asks Pierce to accompany her into Kraft's long-shuttered house -- an erastz Tudor (appropriately enough for an historical novelist). Loaded with books and "darkened with smoke, like a Mohawk's lodge," the house "had the musty smell of a reclusive animal's den."
In a glass case, Pierce finds a Medieval ms. labelled "PICATRIX."
He also finds an incomplete manuscript that begins with an epigraph (apparently from Novalis) relating to Parsifal's search for the Grail.
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