Ah, the point is this: I learned from everything, and there was plenty to learn from.
My principal tutor in those first three years of life was in fact my mother’s coachman, Octavius, a free man of color and a Mayfair by five different lines of descent from the early ones through their various black mistresses. Octavius was then only eighteen or so, and more fun man anyone else on the plantation. My witch powers did not so much frighten him, and when he wasn’t telling me to hide them from everybody else, he was telling me how to use them.
I learnt from him for example how to reach people’s thoughts even when they meant to keep them inside, and how to give them suggestions without words, which they invariably obeyed! And how even to force my will with subtle words and gestures on another. I learnt also from him how to cast spells, making the entire world around appear to change for myself and for others who were with me. I also learnt many erotic tricks, for as many children are, I was erotically mad at age three and then four, and would attempt things then which made me blush by the time I was twelve-at least for a year or two.
But to return to the witches and how I came to be known to them.
My grandmother Marie Claudette was always there amongst us. She sat out in the garden, with a small orchestra of black musicians to play for her. There were two fine fiddlers, both slaves, and several who played the pipes, as we called them, but which were wooden flutes known as recorders. There was one who played a big bass riddle of a homemade sort, and another who played two drums, caressing them with his soft fingers. Marie Claudette had taught these musicians their songs, and soon told me that many such songs came from Scotland.
More and more I gravitated to her. The noise I did not like, but I found that if I could get her to take me in her arms she was sweet and loving and had things to say as interesting as the things I read in the library.
She was stately, blue-eyed, white-haired, and picturesque as she lay on a couch of wicker and fancy pillows, beneath a canopy that blew just a little in the breeze, sometimes singing to herself in Gaelic. Or letting loose long strings of curses on Lasher.
For what had happened you see was that Lasher had tired of her! He had gone on to serve Marguerite and to hover about Katherine, the new baby. And for Marie Claudette he had only an occasional kiss or word or two of poetry.
Perhaps every few days or so, he came to beg Marie Claudette’s forgiveness for giving all his attentions to Marguerite, and to say in a very pure and beautiful voice, which I could hear, that Marguerite would not have it otherwise. Sometimes when he came to kiss and court Marie Claudette, he was dressed as a man in frock coat and pants, which were then a novelty you understand, we are only a few decades past tricorne and breeches, and sometimes he had a more rustic look to him, in rawhide garments of a very rough cut; but always his hair was brown and his eyes brown, and he was most beautiful.
And guess who came along, all ringlets and smiles, and hopped up into her lap, and said, “Grandmère, tell me why you are so sad? Tell me everything.”
“Can you see that man who comes to me?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, “but everybody says I should lie to you about it, though why I don’t know because he seems to like to be seen, and will even frighten the slaves by appearing to them, for no good reason, it seems to me, except vanity.”
She fell in love with me at that moment. She smiled approvingly at my observations. She also said she’d never encountered a two-year-old child who was so bright. I was two and a half but I didn’t bother to point this out. Within a day or two of our first real conversation about “the man,” she began to tell me everything.
She told me all about her old home in Saint-Domingue and how she missed it, about voodoo charms and devil worship in the islands and how she’d mastered every slave trick for her own purposes.
“I am a great witch,” she said, “far greater than your mother will ever be, for your mother is slightly mad and laughs at everything. As for the baby Katherine, who knows. Something tells me you had best look out for her. I myself laugh at very little.”
Every day I jumped in her lap and started asking her questions. The hideous little orchestra played on and on-she would never tell them to stop-but very soon she began to expect me to come, and if I did not she sent Octavius to find me, wash me and deliver me. I was happy. Only the music sometimes sounded to me like cats howling. I asked her once if she wouldn’t like to listen instead to the song of the birds, but she only shook her head and said that it helped her think to have this background.
Meantime, over the din, her tales became more and more involved and filled with colorful pictures and violence.
Until the end of her life, she talked to me. In the last days, she brought the orchestra into the bedroom, and while they played, she and I whispered together on the pillow.
Basically, she told me how Suzanne, the cunning woman, had called up the spirit Lasher, “in error,” in Donnelaith, and then been burnt; how her daughter, Deborah, was taken away by sorcerers from Amsterdam; how the beautiful Deborah was followed by Lasher, and courted by him, and made powerful and rich, only to suffer a horrible death in a French town on the day they tried to burn her as they had burnt her mother. Then came Charlotte into the picture, daughter of Deborah by one of the sorcerers from Amsterdam, and the strongest of the first three, who used the spirit Lasher as never before to acquire great wealth and influence and unlimited power.
And Charlotte-by her own father, Petyr van Abel, one of these daring and mysterious Amsterdam wizards, who had for her own good followed her to the New World to warn her of the evil of intercourse with spirits-then conceived Jeanne Louise and her twin brother, Peter, and from Jeanne Louise and her brother was born Angélique, who had been Marie Claudette’s mother.
Gold, jewels, coin of every realm, and every luxury, this family had acquired. Not even the revolution on Saint-Domingue had destroyed its immense wealth, very little of which rode upon the success of the crops, but was piled up now in a string of safe places.
“Your mother does not even know what she possesses,” said Marie Claudette, “and the more I think of it, the more important it is that I tell you.”
I naturally agreed. All this power and wealth, said Grandmère, had come to us through the machinations of this spirit, Lasher, who could kill those whom the witch marked for death, torment those whom she marked for madness, reveal to her secrets which other mortals strove to keep, and even acquire jewels and gold by transporting these things magically, though for this the spirit required great energy.
A loving thing was this spirit, she said, but it took some craft to manage. Look how it had abandoned her of late, and spent all its time hovering about Katherine’s crib.
“That’s because Katherine can’t see it,” I said. “It’s trying very hard. It won’t give up, but it’s useless.”
“Ah, is that so? I don’t believe it, a granddaughter of mine can’t see that thing?”
“Go see for yourself. The child’s eyes don’t move. It cannot see the creature even when it comes in its strongest form, which anyone might touch and feel as solid.”
“Ah, so you know it does that.”
“I hear its footsteps on the stairs,” I said. “I know its tricks. It can go from vapor to a solid being, and then in a gust of warm wind vanish.”
“Oh, you’re very observant,” she said. “I love you.”
I was very thrilled to the heart by this and I told her I loved her too, which I did. She was precious to me. Also, I had come to realize, while sitting on her knee, that I found old people more beautiful in the main than young ones.