Several Mayfairs had seen her; one was pointing to her. Someone was walking to the corner to reach out towards her as if that might mean she might not be run down as she crossed the street.
“Well, I don’t think I like these clothes anymore,” she said under her breath as she walked fast before the distant oncoming traffic. “Nope, sick of it Won’t do it anymore.”
“Mona, darling!” said her cousin Gerald.
“Yeah, well, it was just a matter of time,” said Mona. “But I sure didn’t count on both of them dying. No, didn’t see that coming at all.” She walked past Gerald, and past the Mayfairs assembled around the gate and the path to the steps.
“Yeah, OK,” she said to those who tried to speak to her. “I’ve got to get out of these ridiculous clothes.”
Fourteen
IT IS NOT the story of my life which you require, but let me explain how I came upon my various secrets. As you know I was born in the year 1828, but I wonder if you realize what this means. Those were the very last days of an ancient way of life-the last decades in which the rich landowners of the world lived pretty much as they had for centuries.
We not only knew nothing of railroads, telephones, Victrolas, or horseless carriages. We didn’t even dream of such things!
And Riverbend-with its vast main house crammed with fine furniture and books, and all its many outbuildings sheltering uncles and aunts and cousins, and its fields stretching as far as the eye could see from the riverbank, south, and east and west-truly was Paradise.
Into this world I slipped almost without notice. I was a boy child, and this was a family that wanted female witches. I was a mere Prince of the Blood, and the court was a loving and friendly place, but no one observed that a little boy had been born who possessed probably greater witches’ gifts than any man or woman ever in the family.
In fact, my grandmother Marie Claudette was so disappointed that I was not a girl child that she stopped speaking to my mother, Marguerite. Marguerite had already given birth to one male, my older brother, Rémy, and now, having had the audacity to bring another into the world, she crashed down completely from favor.
Of course Marguerite rectified this mistake as soon as possible, giving birth in 1830 to Katherine, who was to become her heiress and designee of the legacy-my darling little sister. But a coldness by then existed between mother and daughter, and was never healed in Marie Claudette’s lifetime.
Also I personally suspect that Marie Claudette took one look at Katherine and thought, “What an idiot,” for that is just what Katherine turned out to be. But a female witch was needed, and Marie Claudette would lay eyes upon a granddaughter before she died, so on to this little witless baby who was bawling in the cradle Marie Claudette passed the great emerald.
Now as you know, by the time Katherine was a young woman I had come into my own as a family influence, was much valued as a carrier of witches’ gifts, and it was I who fathered, by Katherine, Mary Beth Mayfair, who was the last in fact of the great Mayfair Witches.
I fathered Mary Beth’s daughter Stella, as I am sure you also know, and fathered by Stella her daughter, Antha.
But let me return to the perilous times of my early childhood, when men and women both warned me in hushed voices to be well-behaved, ask no questions, defer to the family customs in every regard, and pay no attention to anything strange that I might see pertaining to the realm of ghosts and spirits.
It was made known to me in no uncertain terms that strong Mayfair males did not do well; early death, madness, exile-those were the fates of the troublemakers.
When I look back on it, I think it is absolutely impossible that I could have become one of the great Passive Well-Behaved, along with my Oncle Maurice and Lestan and countless other goody-two-shoes cousins.
First of all, I saw ghosts all the time; heard spirits; could see life leaving a body when the body died; could read people’s minds, and sometimes even move or hurt matter without even really getting angry or meaning to do it. I was a natural Utile witch or warlock or whatever the word might be.
And I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t see Lasher. He was standing by my mother’s chair many a morning when I went in to greet her. I saw him by Katherine’s cradle. But he never cast his eyes on me, and I’d been warned very early on that I must never speak to him, nor seek to know who or what he was, or say his name, or make him look at me.
My uncles, all very happy men, said, “Remember this, a Mayfair male can have everything he desires-wine, women, and wealth beyond imagining. But he cannot seek to know the family secrets. Leave it in the hands of the great witch, for she sees all and directs all, and upon that principle our vast power has been founded.”
Well, I wanted to know what this was about. I had no intention of merely accepting the situation. And my grandmother, never someone not to catch the eye, became for me an extreme magnet of curiosity.
Meantime, my mother, Marguerite, grew rather distant. She snatched me up and kissed me whenever we chanced to meet but that wasn’t often. She was always going into the city to shop, to see the opera, to dance, to drink, to do God knows what, or locking herself in her study screaming if anyone dared to disturb her.
I found her most fascinating of course. But my grandmother Marie Claudette was more a constant figure. And she became for me in my idle moments-which were few-a great irresistible attraction.
First let me explain about my other learning. The books. They were everywhere. That wasn’t so common in the Old South, believe me. It has never been common among the very rich to read; it is more a middle-class obsession. But we had all been lovers of books; and I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t read French, English and Latin.
German? Yes, I had to teach myself that, as well as Spanish and Italian.
But I cannot recall a point in childhood where I had not read some of every book we possessed, and in this case that meant a library of such glory you cannot envision it. Most of those volumes have over the years simply rotted away; some have been stolen; some I entrusted many decades later to those who would cherish them. But then I had all I wanted of Aristotle, Plato, Plautus and Terence, Virgil and Horace. And I read the night away with Chapman’s Homer, and Golding’s Metamorphoses, a mammoth and charming translation of Ovid. Then there was Shakespeare, whom I adored, naturally enough, and lots of very funny English novels. Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe.
I read it all. I read it when I didn’t know what it meant until I did. I dragged my books with me about the house, pulling on skirts and jackets and asking, “What does this mean?” and even asking uncles, aunts, cousins or slaves to read various puzzling passages aloud to me.
When I wasn’t reading I was adventuring about with the older boys, both white and black, jumping onto horses bareback, or trekking into the swamps to find snakes, or climbing the swamp cypress and the oaks to watch out for pirates invading from the south. At two and a half, I was lost in the swamps during a storm. I almost died, I suppose. But I shall never forget it. And after I was found, I never again suffered any fear of lightning. I think I had my little wits nearly blown out of my head by thunder and lightning that night. I screamed and screamed and nothing happened. The thunder and lightning went on; I didn’t die; and in the morning I was sitting at the table with my tearful mother, having breakfast.