I shall never forget her reaction, the names she heaped upon me, the curses. “Devil, witch, sorcerer. Always I have known this evil lived in the shadows here. Now you give it a name and history.”
She would turn to the Catholic Church to destroy the thing, she said, “to the power of Christ, and His Holy Mother, and the saints.”
We fought a terrible battle of words. I cried out: “Don’t you see that that is nothing but another form of witchcraft?”
“And what do you teach me, you evil old man, that I must have intercourse with devils? To defeat it, I must know it? I shall stamp it out. I shall stamp out the line itself!” she cried. “You wait and you shall see. I shall leave the legacy without an heir. I shall see an end to it.”
I was in despair. I begged her to listen, to refine her concepts, to accept counsel and not to believe such a thing was possible. We were now an immense family! But she had taken all these mysteries, put them under her Catholic foot, and relied upon her rosary and her Masses to save her.
Later Mary Beth told me to put no store in her words whatsoever. “She is a sad child,” she said. “I do not love her. I tried to love her, but I do not. I love Stella. And Carlotta knows this, and knows she will not inherit the emerald. She has always known, and she is shaped in hate and jealousy.”
“But she is the cunning one, don’t you see? Not Stella. I love Stella too but Carlotta’s the one with the head.”
“It’s all done, it was done many a year ago,” said Mary Beth. “Carlotta’s soul is closed to me. It’s closed to him and he will not abide her here except as something to serve the family case, in the shadows.”
“Ah, but you see how he controls things now. How can Carlotta serve the family case? How do those scholars in Amsterdam serve it? There is something I have to unravel. This thing can kill those it would not suffer to live.”
“You are simply thinking too much for an old man,” she said. “You don’t sleep enough. Scholars in Amsterdam, what is all that? Who cares about people who tell tales of us, and that we are witches? We are, that is our strength. You try to put it all in some kind of order. There is no order.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You are miscalculating.”
Every time I looked into Stella’s innocent eyes, I realized I could not tell her the full burden of what I knew. And to see her play with the emerald necklace made me shudder.
I showed her where I had hidden my books, beneath my bed; I told her someday she must read all of it. I told her the mystery of the Talamasca, the scholars of Amsterdam who knew of the thing, but these men could be very dangerous to us. They were nothing to play with, these men. I told her how to distract the fiend. I described its vanity. I told her what I could. But not the whole story.
That was the horror. Mary Beth alone knew the whole story. And Mary Beth had changed with the times. Mary Beth was a woman of the twentieth century. Yet Mary Beth taught Stella what Mary Beth felt she should know. Mary Beth gave her the dolls of the witches to play with! Mary Beth gave her a doll made from my mother’s skin and nails and bone; and another of Katherine.
One day, I came down the stairs, and I saw Stella perched on the side of her bed, pink legs crossed, holding these two dolls and making a conversation between them.
“That’s rot and stupidity!” I declared, but Mary Beth took me away.
“Come on, Julien, she must know what she is. It’s an old custom.”
“It means nothing.”
But I was talking to the air. Mary Beth was in her prime. I was dying.
Ah, that night I lay in bed, unable to shake the vision of the little girl with those worthless dolls, thinking how to separate the real from the unreal and give Stella some warning of how it might go wrong with this devil. What worked against me as well was the dour nature of Carlotta. Carlotta warned and so did I. And Stella listened to neither of us!
Finally I slept, deep and sound, and during the night dreamed again of Donnelaith and the Cathedral.
When I awoke, it was to a dreadful discovery. But I did not make it immediately.
I sat up in bed, drank my chocolate, read for a while, some Shakespeare, I think, for one of my boys had pointed out to me not long before that I had never read one of the plays, ah yes, The Tempest. In any account, I read some of it and loved it and found it deep as the tragedies were deep, only with a different rhythm and rules to it. Then came time to write.
I climbed from bed, dropped down to my knees, and reached for my books. They were gone. The space there was empty.
In a hideous instant I knew they were gone from me forever. No one in this house troubled my things. Only one person would have dared in the night to come into my rooms and take those books. Mary Beth. And if Mary Beth had taken them, they were no more.
I rushed down the stairs, nearly falling. Indeed, I was so out of breath by the time I came to the garden windows of the house that I was sick with a pain in my side and in my head, and had to call for the servants to help me.
Then Lasher himself came to wrap himself round me and steady me. “Be calm, Julien,” he said in his soft voice. “I have always been good to you.”
But I had already seen through the side windows a raging fire in the far corner of the yard, away from the street, and the figure of Mary Beth hurling one object into it after another.
“Stop her,” I whispered. I could scarce breathe at all. The thing was invisible, yet all around me, sustaining me.
“Julien, I beg you. Do not push this further.”
I stood there, trying not to pass out from weakness, and I saw the stacks of books on the grass, the old pictures, paintings from Saint-Domingue, old portraits of ancestors back to the beginning. I saw the account books and ledgers and sheaves of papers from my mother’s old study, the foolishness she’d written. And the letters from Edinburgh, all tied and in bundles! And my books, aye, one was left, and this one she threw into the fire as I called out to her!
I reached out with all my power to stop it. She swung round as if caught by a hook, the book still in her fingers, and as she stared at me, dazzled and confused by the power that had stayed her hand, the wind rose and caught the book and sent it flip-flopping and whirling into the flames!
I gasped for breath. My curses had no syllables. The worst kind of curses. All went black.
When I awoke I was in my room.
I was in bed, and Richard, my dear young friend, was with me. And Stella too, holding my hand.
“Mamma had to burn all those old things,” she said.
I said nothing. The fact was, I had suffered a very tiny stroke, and could not for a while speak, though I myself did not know it. I thought my dreamy silence a choice. It was not until the following day when Mary Beth came to me that I realized my words were slurred and I could not find the very ones I chose to use to tell her of my anger.
It was late evening, and when she saw how it was with me she was greatly distressed and called at once for Richard to come, as if it were all his fault. He did come, and together they helped me down the stairs, as if to say, if I could get out of bed and walk, then I could not die that night.
I sat on the living room sofa.
Ah, how I loved that long double parlor. Loved it as you love it, Michael. It was a comfort to me to be there, facing the windows that looked out on the lawn, with all remnants of that brutal fire gone now.
For long hours, Mary Beth spoke. Stella came and went. The gist was that my time and my ways were gone now.