The Witching Hour (146 page)

A
LL RIGHT, HERE
we go again, thought Rowan. It was what? The fifth gathering in honor of the engaged couple? There had been Lily’s tea, and Beatrice’s lunch, and Cecilia’s little dinner at Antoine’s. And Lauren’s little party downtown in that lovely old house on Esplanade Avenue.

And this time it was Metairie—Cortland’s house, as they still called it though it had been the home of Gifford and Ryan, and their youngest son, Pierce, for years. And the clear October day was perfect for a garden party of some two hundred.

Never mind that the wedding was only ten days away, on
November 1, the Feast of All Saints. The Mayfairs would hold two more teas before then, and another lunch somewhere, the place and time to be confirmed later.

“Any excuse for a party!” Claire Mayfair had said. “Darling, you don’t know how long we’ve been waiting for something like this.”

They were milling on the open lawn now beneath the small, neatly clipped magnolia trees, and through the spacious low-ceilinged rooms of the trim brick Williamsburg house. And the dark-haired Anne Marie, a painfully honest individual who seemed now utterly enchanted by Rowan’s hospital schemes, introduced her to dozens of the same people she had seen at the funeral, and dozens more whom she’d never seen before.

Aaron had been so right in his descriptions of Metairie, an American suburb. They might have been in Beverly Hills or Sherman Oaks in Houston. Except perhaps that the sky had that glazed look she had never seen anywhere else except in the Caribbean. And the old trees that lined the curbs were as venerable as those of the Garden District.

But the house itself was pure elite suburbia with its eighteenth-century Philadelphia antiques and wall-to-wall carpet, and each family portrait carefully framed and lighted, and the soft propitiatory saxophone of Kenny G pouring from hidden speakers in the white Sheetrock walls.

A very black waiter with an extremely round head and a musical Haitian accent poured the bourbon or the white wine into the crystal glasses. Two dark-skinned female cooks in starched uniforms turned the fat pink peppered shrimp on the smoking grill. And the Mayfair women in their soft pastel dresses looked like flowers among the white-suited men, a few small toddlers romping on the grass, or sticking their tiny pink hands into the spray of the little fountain in the center of the lawn.

Rowan had found a comfortable place in a white lawn chair beneath the largest of the magnolias. She sipped her bourbon, as she shook hands with one cousin after another. She was beginning to like the taste of this poison. She was even a little high.

Earlier today, when she’d tried on the white wedding dress and veil for the final fitting, she’d found herself unexpectedly excited by the fanfare, and grateful that it had been more or less forced upon her.

“Princess for a Day,” that’s what it would be like, stepping in and out of a pageant. Even the wearing of the emerald would not really be an ordeal, especially since it had remained safely in its case since that awful night, and she’d never gotten around
to telling Michael about its mysterious and unwelcome appearance. She knew that she ought to have told, and several times she’d been on the verge, but she just couldn’t do it.

Michael had been overjoyed about the church wedding, everyone could see it. His parents had been married in the parish, and so had his grandparents before that. Yes, he loved the idea, probably more than she did. And unless something else happened with that awful necklace, why spoil it all for him? Why spoil it for both of them? She could always explain afterwards, when the thing was safely locked in a vault. Yes, not a deception, just a little postponement.

Also, nothing else had happened since. No more deformed flowers on her bedside table. Indeed the time had flown, with the renovations in full swing, and the house in Florida furnished and ready for their official honeymoon.

Another good stroke of luck was that Aaron had been completely accepted by the family, and was now routinely included in every gathering. Beatrice had fallen in love with him, to hear her tell it, and teased him mercilessly about his British bachelor ways and all the eligible widows among the Mayfairs. She had even gone so far as to take him to the symphony with Agnes Mayfair, a very beautiful older cousin whose husband had died the year before.

How is he going to handle that one, Rowan wondered. But she knew by now that Aaron could ingratiate himself with God in heaven or the Devil in hell. Even Lauren, the iceberg lawyer, seemed fond of Aaron. At lunch the other day, Lauren had talked to him steadily about New Orleans history. Ryan liked him. Isaac and Wheatfield liked him. And Pierce questioned him relentlessly about his travels in Europe and the East.

Aaron was also an unfailingly faithful companion to Michael’s Aunt Vivian. Everybody ought to have an Aunt Vivian, the way Rowan figured it, a fragile little doll-like person brimming with love and sweetness who doted on Michael’s every word. She reminded Rowan of Aaron’s descriptions in the history of Millie Dear and Aunt Belle.

But the move had not been easy for Aunt Vivian. And though the Mayfairs had wined and dined her with great affection, she could not keep up with their frenetic pace and their energetic chatter. This afternoon she had begged to remain at home, sorting through the few items she’d brought with her. She was beseeching Michael to go out and pack up everything in the Liberty Street house and he was putting it off, though he and Rowan both knew such a trip was inevitable.

But to see Michael with Aunt Viv was to love him for a whole
set of new reasons; for nobody could have been kinder or more patient. “She’s my only family, Rowan,” he’d remarked once. “Everybody else is gone. You know, if things hadn’t worked out with you and me, I’d be in the Talamasca now. They would have become my family.”

How well she understood; with a shock, she had been carried back by those words into her own bitter loneliness of months before.

God, how she wanted things to work here! And the ghost of First Street was keeping his counsel, as if he too wanted them to work out. Or had her anger driven him back? For days after the appearance of the necklace she had cursed him under her breath for it.

The family had even accepted the idea of the Talamasca, though Aaron was persistently vague with them about what it really was. They understood no more perhaps than that Aaron was a scholar and a world traveler, that he had always been interested in the Mayfair history because they were an old and distinguished southern family.

And any scholar who could unearth a breathtakingly beautiful ancestor named Deborah, immortalized by none other than the great Rembrandt, and authenticated beyond doubt by the appearance of the unmistakable Mayfair emerald on her breast, was their kind of historian. They were dazzled by the bits and pieces of her story as Aaron revealed them. Good Lord, they’d thought Julien made up all that foolishness about ancestors coming from Scotland.

Meantime Bea was having the photograph of the Rembrandt Deborah reproduced in oil so that it would be hanging on the wall at First Street on the day of the reception. She was furious with Ryan for not recommending the purchase of the original. But then the Talamasca wouldn’t part with the original. Thank God that after Ryan’s guess as to the inevitable price, the subject had been dropped altogether.

Yes, they loved Aaron and they loved Michael and they loved Rowan.

And they loved Deborah.

If they knew anything of what had happened between Aaron and Cortland or Carlotta years ago, they said not one word. They did not know that Stuart Townsend had been a member of the Talamasca; indeed, they were utterly confused about the discovery of that mysterious body. And it was becoming increasingly obvious that they thought Stella had been responsible for its presence.

“Probably died up there from opium or drink at one of those
wild parties and she simply wrapped him up in the carpet and forgot about him.”

“Or maybe she strangled him. Remember those parties she used to give?”

It amused Rowan to listen to them talk, to hear their easy bursts of laughter. Never the slightest telepathic vibration of malice reached her. She could feel their good intentions now, their celebratory gaiety.

But they had their secrets, some of them, especially the old ones. With each new gathering, she detected stronger indications. In fact, as the date of the wedding grew closer, she felt certain that something was building.

The old ones hadn’t been stopping at First Street merely to extend their best wishes, or to marvel at the renovations. They were curious. They were fearful. There were secrets they wanted to confide, or warnings perhaps which they wanted to offer. Or questions they wanted to ask. And maybe they were testing her powers, because they indeed had powers of their own. Never had she been around people so loving and so skilled at concealing their negative emotions. It was a curious thing.

But maybe this would be the day when something unusual would happen.

So many of the old ones were here, and the liquor was flowing, and after a series of cool October days the weather was pleasantly warm again. The sky was a perfect china blue, and the great curling clouds were moving swiftly by, like graceful galleons in the thrust of a trade wind.

She took another deep drink of the bourbon, loving the burning sensation in her chest, and looked around for Michael.

There he was, still trapped as he’d been for an hour by the overwhelming Beatrice, and the strikingly handsome Gifford, whose mother had been descended from Lestan Mayfair, and whose father had been descended from Clay Mayfair, and who had married, of course, Cortland’s grandson, Ryan. Seems there were some other Mayfair lines tangled up in it, too, but Rowan had been drawn away from them at that point in the conversation, her blood simmering at the sight of Gifford’s pale fingers wound—for no good reason—around Michael’s arm.

So what did they find so fascinating about her heartthrob that they wouldn’t let him out of their clutches? And why was Gifford such a nervous woman, to begin with? Poor Michael. He didn’t know what was going on. He sat there with his gloved hands shoved in his pockets, nodding and smiling at their little jokes. He didn’t detect the flirtatious edge to their gestures, the flaming light in their eyes, the high seductive ring to their laughter.

Get used to it. The son of a bitch is irresistible to refined women. They’re all on to him now, that he’s the bodyguard who reads Dickens.

Yesterday, he’d climbed the long thin ladder up the side of the house like a pirate climbing the rope ladder of a ship. And then, the sight of him, bare-chested, with his foot on the parapet, his hair blowing, one hand raised to wave as if he had no idea in the world that this series of unself-conscious gestures was driving her slowly out of her mind. Cecilia had looked up and said, “My, but he is a good-looking man, you know.”

“Yes, I do,” Rowan had mumbled.

Her desire for him at such moments was excruciating. And he was all the more enticing in his new three-piece white linen suit (“You mean dress like an ice-cream man?”), which Beatrice had dragged him to Perlis to buy. “Darling, you’re a southern gentleman now!”

Porn, that’s what he was. Walking porn. Take the times when he rolled up his sleeves and tucked his Camel cigarettes in the right-arm fold, and put a pencil behind his ear, and stood arguing with one of the carpenters or painters, and then put one foot forward and raised his hand sharply like he was, going to push the guy’s chin through the top of his head.

And then there were the skinny dips in the pool after everybody was off the property (no ghosts since the first time), and the one weekend they’d gotten away to Florida to claim the new house, and the sight of him sleeping naked on the deck, with nothing on but the gold wristwatch, and that little chain around his neck. Pure nakedness couldn’t have been more enticing.

And he was so supremely happy! He was the only one in this world perhaps who loved that house more than the Mayfairs did. He was obsessed with it. He took every opportunity to pitch in on the job with his men. And he was stuffing the gloves away more and more often. Seems he could drain an object of the images if he really tried, and after that he’d keep it out of other hands, and it would be safe, so to speak, and now he had a whole chest of such tools which he used, barehanded, with regularity.

Thank God, the ghosts and the spooks were leaving them both alone. And she had to stop worrying about him over there with his harem.

Better to concentrate on the group gathering around her—stately old Felice had just pulled up a chair, and the pretty garrulous Margaret Ann was settling on the grass, and the dour Magdalene, the one who looked young but wasn’t, had been there for some time, watching the others in an unusual silence.

Now and then a head would turn, one of them would look at her, and she would receive some vague shimmer of clandestine knowledge, and a question perhaps, and then it would fade. But it was always one of the older ones—Felice, who was Barclay’s youngest daughter and seventy-five years old, or Lily, seventy-eight, they said, and the granddaughter of Vincent, or the elderly bald-headed Peter Mayfair, with the wet shining eyes and the thick neck though his body was very straight and strong—Garland’s youngest son, surely a wary and knowing elder.

And then there was Randall, older perhaps than his uncle Peter, saggy-eyed and seemingly wise, slouched on an iron bench in the far corner, gazing at her steadily, no matter how many blocked his view from time to time, as if he wanted to tell her something of great importance but did not know how to begin it.

I want to know. I want to know everything.

Pierce now looked at her with undisguised awe, utterly won over to the dream of Mayfair Medical, and almost as eager as she was to make it a reality. Too bad he’d lost some of the easy warmth he’d shown before, and was almost apologetic as he brought a succession of young men to be introduced, briefly explaining the lineage and present occupation of each one. (“We’re a family of lawyers, or What does a gentleman do when he doesn’t have to do anything?”) There was something utterly lovable about Pierce as far as she was concerned. She wanted to put him at ease again. His was a friendliness behind which there was not a single shadow of self-centeredness.