Blackwood Farm (5 page)

5

WITHIN MOMENTS
we found ourselves in front of the big house, and I experienced a flashing sense of embarrassment as I looked at its huge two-story columned portico.

Of course the garden lights were on, brilliantly illuminating the fluted columns to their full height, and all of the many rooms were aglow. In fact, I had a rule on this and had had since boyhood, that at four o'clock all chandeliers in the main house had to be lighted, and though I was no longer that boy in the grip of twilight depression, the chandeliers were illuminated by the same clock.

A quick chuckle from Lestat caught me off guard.

“And why are you so embarrassed?” he asked genially, having easily read my mind. “America destroys her big houses. Some of them don't even last a hundred years.” His accent lessened. He sounded more intimate. “This place is magnificent,” he said casually. “I like the big columns. The portico, the pediment, it's all rather glorious. Perfect Greek Revival style. How can you be ashamed of such things? You're a strange creature, very gentle I think, and out of kilter with your own time.”

“Well, how can I belong to it now?” I asked. “Given the Dark Blood and all its wondrous attributes. What do you think?”

I was at once ashamed of having answered so directly, but he merely took it in stride.

“No, but I mean,” he said, “you didn't belong to this time before the Dark Gift, did you? The threads of your life, they weren't woven into any certain fabric.” His manner seemed simple and friendly.

“I suppose you're right,” I responded. “In fact, you're very right.”

“You're going to tell me all about it, aren't you?” he asked. His golden eyebrows were very clear against his tanned skin, and he frowned slightly while smiling at the same time. It made him look very clever and loving, though I wasn't sure why.

“You want me to?” I asked.

“Of course I do,” he answered. “It's what you want to do and must do, besides.” There came that mischievous smile and frown again. “Now, shall we go inside?”

“Of course, yes,” I said, greatly relieved as much by his friendly manner as by what he said. I couldn't quite grasp that I had him with me, that not only had I found him but that he was wanting to hear my story; he was at my side.

We went up the six front steps to the marble porch and I opened the door, which, on account of our being out here in the country, was never locked.

The broad central hallway stretched out before us, with its diamond-shaped white-and-black marble tiles running to the rear door, which was identical to the door by which we had just entered.

Partially blocking our view was one of the greatest attributes of Blackwood Manor, the spiral stairway, and this drew from Lestat a look of pure delight.

The frigid air-conditioning felt good.

“How gorgeous this is,” he said, gazing at the stairway with its graceful railing and delicate balusters. He stood in the well of it. “Why, it runs all the way to a third floor, doubling back on itself beautifully.”

“The third floor's the attic,” I said. “It's a treasure trove of trunks and old furniture. It's yielded some of its little secrets to me.”

His eyes moved to the running mural on the hallway walls, a sunshine Italian pastoral giving way to a deep blue sky whose bright color dominated the entire long space and the hall above.

“Ah, now this is lovely,” he said, looking up at the high ceiling. “And look at the plaster moldings. Done by hand, weren't they?”

I nodded. “New Orleans craftsmen,” I said. “It was the 1880s, and my great-great-great-grandfather was fiercely romantic and partially insane.”

“And this drawing room,” he said, peering through the arched doorway to his right. “It's full of old furniture, fine furniture. What do you call it, Quinn? Rococo? It fills me with a dreamy sense of the past.”

Again, I nodded. I had gone rapidly from embarrassment to an embarrassing sense of pride. All my life people had capitulated to Blackwood Manor. They had positively raved about it, and I wondered now that I had been so mortified. But this being, this strangely compelling and handsome individual into whose hands I'd put my very life, had grown up in a castle, and I had feared he would laugh at what he saw.

On the contrary, he seemed thrilled by the golden harp and the old Pleyel piano. He glanced at the huge somber portrait of Manfred Blackwood, my venerable ancestor. And then slowly he turned enthusiastically to the dining room on the other side of the hall.

I made a motion for him to enter.

The antique crystal chandelier was showering a wealth of light on the long table, a table which could seat some thirty people, made especially for the room. The gilded chairs had only recently been re-covered in green satin damask, and the green and gold was repeated in the wall-to-wall carpet, with a gold swirl on a green ground. Gilded sideboards, inset with green malachite, were ranged between the long windows on the far wall.

A need to apologize stole over me again, perhaps because Lestat seemed lost in his judgment of the place.

“It's so unnecessary, Blackwood Manor,” I told him. “And with Aunt Queen and me its only regular inhabitants, I have the feeling that someone will come and make us turn it over for some more sensible use. Of course there are other members of the family—and then there's the staff, who are so damned rich in their own right that they don't have to work for anybody.” I broke off, ashamed of rambling.

“And what would a more sensible use be?” he asked in the same comfortable manner he had adopted before. “Why should the house not be your gracious home?”

He was looking at the huge portrait of Aunt Queen when she was young—a smiling girl in a sleeveless white beaded evening gown that might have been made yesterday rather than seventy years ago, as it was; and at another portrait—of Virginia Lee Blackwood, Manfred's wife, the first lady ever to live in Blackwood Manor.

It was murky now, this portrait of Virginia Lee, but the style was robust and faintly emotional, and the woman herself, blond with eyes of blue, was very honest to look at, and modest, and smiling, with small features and an undeniably pretty face. She was dressed ornately in the style of the 1880s, in a high-necked dress of sky blue with long sleeves puckered at the shoulders, and her hair heaped on the top of her head. She had been the grandmother of Aunt Queen, and I always saw a certain likeness in these portraits, in the eyes and the shape of the faces, though others claimed they could not. But then . . .

And they had more than casual associations for me, these portraits, especially that of Virginia Lee. Aunt Queen I had still with me. But Virginia Lee . . . I shuddered but repressed those alien memories of ghosts and grotesqueries. Too much was taking my mind by storm.

“Yes, why not your home, and the repository of your ancestors' treasures?” Lestat remarked innocently. “I don't understand.”

“Well, when I was growing up,” I said in answer to his question, “my grandma and grandpa were living then, and this was a sort of hotel. A bed-and-breakfast was what they called it. But they served dinner down here in the dining room as well. Lots of tourists came up this way to spend some time in it. We still have the Christmas banquet every year, with singers who stand on the staircase for the final caroling, while the guests gather here in the hall. It all seems very useful at times like that. This last year I had a midnight Easter banquet as well, just so I could attend it.”

A sense of the past shook me, frightening me with its vitality. I pressed on, guiltily trying to wring something from the earliest memories. What right had I to good times now, or memories?

“I love the singers,” I said. “I used to cry with my grandparents when the soprano sang ‘O Holy Night.' Blackwood Manor seems powerful at such times—a place to alter people's lives. You can tell I'm still very caught up in it.”

“How does it alter people's lives?” he asked quickly, as if the idea had hooked him.

“Oh, there've been so many weddings here.” My voice caught. Weddings. A hideous memory, a recent memory overshot all, a shameful awful memory—blood, her gown, the taste of it—but I forced it out of my mind. I went on:

“I remember lovely weddings, and anniversary banquets. I remember a picnic on the lawn for an elderly man who had just turned ninety. I remember people coming back to visit the site where they'd been married.” Again came that stabbing recollection—a bride, a bride covered in blood. My head swam.

You little fool, you've killed her. You weren't supposed to kill her, and look at her white dress.

I wouldn't think of it yet. I couldn't be crippled with it yet. I'd confess it all to Lestat, but not yet.

I had to continue. I stammered. I managed.

“Somewhere there's an old guest book with a broken quill pen crushed in it, full of comments by those who came and went and came again. They're still coming. It's a flame that hasn't gone out.”

He nodded and smiled faintly as though this pleased him. He looked again at the portrait of Virginia Lee.

A vague shimmer passed over me. Had the portrait changed? Vague imaginings that her lovely blue eyes looked down at me. But she would never come to life for me now, would she? Of course she wouldn't. Hers had been a famous virtue and magnanimity. What would she have to do with me now?

“And these days,” I pressed on, fastening to my little narrative, “I find myself cherishing this house desperately, and cherishing as well all my mortal connections. My Aunt Queen I cherish above all. But there are others, others who must never know what I am.”

He studied me patiently, as if pondering these things.

“Your conscience is tuned like a violin,” he said pensively. “Do you really like having them here, the strangers, the Christmas and Easter guests, under your own roof?”

“It's cheerful,” I admitted. “There's always light and movement. There are voices and the dull vibration of the busy stairs. Sometimes guests complain—the grits is watery or the gravy is lumpy—and in the old days, my grandmother Sweetheart would cry over those complaints, and my grandfather—Pops, we all called him—would privately slam his fist down on the kitchen table; but in the main, the guests love the place . . .

“. . . And now and then it can be lonesome here, melancholy and dismal, no matter how bright the chandeliers. I think that when my grandparents died and that part of it was all over I felt a . . . a deep depression that seemed linked to Blackwood Manor, though I couldn't leave it, and wouldn't of my own accord.”

He nodded at these words as though he understood them. He was looking at me as surely as I was looking at him. He was appraising me as surely as I appraised him.

I was thinking how very attractive he was, I couldn't stop myself, with his yellow hair so thick and long, turning so gracefully at the collar of his coat, and his large probing violet eyes. There are very few creatures on earth who have true violet eyes. The slight difference between his eyes meant nothing. His sun-browned skin was flawless. What he saw in me with his questioning gaze, I couldn't know.

“You know, you can roam about this house,” I said, still vaguely shocked that I had his interest, the words spilling anxiously from me again. “You can roam from room to room, and there are ghosts. Sometimes even the tourists see the ghosts.”

“Did that scare them?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

“Oh, no, they're too gung ho to be in a haunted house. They love it. They see things where there are no things. They ask to be left alone in haunted rooms.”

He laughed silently.

“They claim to hear bells ring that aren't ringing,” I went on, smiling back at him, “and they smell coffee when there is no coffee, and they catch the drift of exotic perfumes. Now and then there was a tourist or two who was genuinely frightened, in fact there were several in the bed-and-board days who packed up immediately, but in the main, the reputation of the place sold it. And then, of course, there were those who actually saw ghosts.”

“And you, you do see the ghosts,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered. “Most of the ghosts are weak things, hardly more than vapor, but there are exceptions. . . .” I hesitated. I was lost for a moment. I felt my words might trigger some awful apparition, but I wanted so to confide in him. Stumbling, I went on:

“Yes, extraordinary exceptions . . .” I broke off.

“I want you to tell me,” he said. “You have a room upstairs, don't you? A quiet place where we can talk. But I sense someone else in this house.”

He glanced towards the hallway.

“Yes, Aunt Queen in the back bedroom,” I said. “It won't take more than a moment for me to see her.”

“That's a curious name, Aunt Queen,” he remarked, his smile brightening again. “It's divinely southern, I think. Will you take me to see her as well?”

“Absolutely,” I answered, without the hesitation of common sense. “Lorraine McQueen is her name, and everyone hereabouts calls her Miss Queen or Aunt Queen.”

We went into the hallway together and once again he glanced up at the curving stairs.

I led him back past it, his boots sounding sharp on the marble, and I brought him to the open door of Aunt Queen's room.

There she was, my darling, quite resplendent, and very busy, and not in the least disturbed by our approach.

She sat at her marble table just to the right of her dressing table, the whole making the L in which she was most happy. The nearby floor lamp as well as the frilly lights on the dressing table illuminated her wonderfully, and she had her dozens of cameos out before her on the marble and her bone-handled magnifying glass in her right hand.

She seemed dreadfully frail in her white quilted satin robe, with its buckled belt around her tiny waist, her throat wrapped well in a white silk scarf tucked into her lapels, over which rested her favorite necklace of diamonds and pearls. Her soft gray hair was curled naturally around her face, and her small eyes were full of an exuberant spirit as she studied the cameos at hand. Under the table, and where her robe was parted, I could see that she wore her perilous pink-sequined high-heeled shoes. I wanted to lecture. Ever a danger, those spike-heeled shoes.