“You shouldn’t have made that trip to Texas, Mr. Lightner,” he said coldly. “You should never have upset my niece.”
“I agree with you. I shouldn’t have upset her. I was concerned about her. I wanted to offer my help.”
“That’s very presumptuous of you, you and your London friends.” Touch of anger. Or was it simply annoyance that I wasn’t going to drink the bourbon. I looked at him for a long moment, my mind emptying itself until there was no sound intruding, no movement, no color-only his face there, and a small voice in my head telling me what I wanted to know.
“Yes, it is presumptuous, isn’t it?” I said. “But you see, it was our representative Petyr van Abel who was the father of Charlotte Mayfair, born in France in 1664. When he later journeyed to Saint-Domingue to see his daughter, he was imprisoned by her. And before your spirit, Lasher, drove him to his death on a lonely road outside of Port-au-Prince, he coupled with his own daughter Charlotte, and thereby became the father of her daughter, Jeanne Louise. That means he was grandfather of Angélique and the great-grandfather of Marie Claudette, who built Riverbend, and created the legacy which you administer for Deirdre now. Do you follow my tale?”
Clearly he was utterly incapable of a response. He sat still looking at me, the cigarette smoking in his hand. I caught no emanation of malice or anger. Watching him keenly, I went on:
“Your ancestors are the descendants of our representative, Petyr van Abel. We are linked, the Mayfair Witches and the Talamasca. And then there are other matters which bring us together after all these years. Stuart Townsend, our representative who disappeared here in New Orleans after he visited Stella in 1929. Do you remember Stuart Townsend? The case of his disappearance was never solved.”
“You are mad, Mr. Lightner,” he said with no perceptible change of expression. He drew on his cigarette and crushed it out though it was not half spent.
“That spirit of yours, Lasher-he killed Petyr van Abel,” I said calmly. “Was it Lasher whom I saw only a moment ago? Over there?” I gestured to the distant garden. “He is driving your niece out of her mind, isn’t he?” I asked.
A remarkable change had now come over Cortland. His face, beautifully framed by his dark hair, looked totally innocent in its bewilderment.
“You’re perfectly serious, aren’t you?” he asked. These were the first honest words he’d spoken since he came into the bar.
“Of course I am,” I said. “Why would I try to deceive people who can read other people’s thoughts? That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?” I looked at the glass. “Rather like you expecting me to drink this bourbon and succumb to the drug you put into it, the way Stuart Townsend did, or Cornell Mayfair after that.”
He tried to shroud his shock behind a blank, dull look. “You are making a very serious accusation,” he said under his breath.
“All this time, I thought it was Carlotta. It was never Carlotta, was it? It was you.”
“Who cares what you think!” he whispered. “How dare you say such things to me.” Then he checked his anger. He shifted slightly in his chair, his eyes holding me as he opened the cigarette case and withdrew another cigarette. His whole demeanor changed suddenly to one of honest inquiry. “What the hell do you want, Mr. Lightner!” he asked, dropping his voice earnestly. “Seriously now, sir, what do you want?”
I reflected for a moment. I had been asking myself this very question for weeks on end. What did I mean to accomplish when I went to New Orleans? What did we, and what did I, really want?
“We want to know you!” I said, rather surprised myself to hear it come out. “To know you because we know so much about you and yet we don’t know anything at all. We want to tell you what we know about you-all the bits and pieces of information we’ve collected, what we know about the deep past! We want to tell you all we know about the whole mystery of who you are and what he is. And we wish you would talk to us. We wish you would trust us and let us in! And lastly, we want to reach out to Deirdre Mayfair and say, ‘There are others like you, others who see spirits. We know you’re suffering, and we can help you. You aren’t alone.’ ”
He studied me, eyes seemingly open, his face quite beyond dissembling. Then pulling back and glancing away, he tapped off the ash of his cigarette and motioned for another drink.
“Why don’t you drink the bourbon?” I asked. “I haven’t touched it.” Again, I had surprised myself. But I let the question stand.
He looked at me. “I don’t like bourbon,” he said. “Thank you.”
“What did you put in it?” I asked.
He shrank back into his thoughts. He appeared just a little miserable. He watched as the boy set down his drink. Sherry as before, in a crystal glass.
“This is true,” he asked, looking up at me, “what you wrote in your letter, about the portrait of Deborah Mayfair in Amsterdam?”
I nodded. “We have portraits of Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angélique, Marie Claudette, Marguerite, Katherine, Mary Beth, Julien, Stella, Antha, and Deirdre … ”
He made a sudden impatient motion for me to stop.
“Look, I came here because of Deirdre,” I said. “I came because she’s going mad. The girl I spoke to in Texas is on the edge of breakdown.”
“Do you think you helped her?”
“No, and I deeply regret that I didn’t. If you don’t want contact with us, I understand. Why the hell should you? But we can help Deirdre. We really can.”
No answer. He drank the sherry. I tried to see this from his point of view. I couldn’t. I’d never tried to poison someone. I didn’t have the faintest idea of who he really was. The man I’d known in the history wasn’t this man.
“Would your father, Julien, have spoken to me?” I asked.
“Not a chance of it,” he said, looking up as though awakening from his thoughts. For a moment he looked deeply distressed. “But don’t you know from all your observations,” he asked, “that he was one of them?” Again, he seemed completely earnest, his eyes searching my face as if to assure himself that I was earnest too.
“And you’re not one of them?” I asked.
“No,” he said with great quiet emphasis, slowly shaking his head. “Not really. Not ever!” He looked sad suddenly, and when he did he looked old. “Look, spy on us if you wish. Treat us as if we were a royal family … ”
“Exactly.”
“You’re historians, that’s what my contacts in London tell me. Historians, scholars, utterly harmless, completely respectable … ”
“I’m honored.”
“But leave my niece alone. My niece has a chance for happiness now. And this thing must come to an end, you see. It must. And perhaps she can see to it that it does.”
“Is she one of them?” I asked, echoing his early intonation.
“Of course she isn’t!” he said. “That’s just the point! There is no one of them now! Don’t you see that? What’s been the theme of your study of us? Haven’t you seen the disintegration of the power? Stella wasn’t one of them either! The last one was Mary Beth. Julien-my father, that is-and then Mary Beth.”
“I’ve seen it. But what about your spectral friend? Will he allow it to come to a finish?”
“You believe in him?” He cocked his head with a faint smile, his dark eyes creasing at the edges with silent laughter. “Really, now, Mr. Lightner? Do you believe in Lasher yourself?”
“I saw him,” I said simply.
“Imagination, sir. My niece told me it was a very dark garden.”
“Oh, please. Have we come this far to say such things to each other? I saw him, Cortland. He smiled when I saw him. He made himself very substantial and vivid indeed.”
Cortland’s smile became smaller, more ironic. He raised his eyebrows and gave a little sigh. “Oh, he would like your choice of words, Mr. Lightner.”