that Marguerite returned from New Orleans to Riverbend and was received once more by her mother. In 1827 and 1828, she gave birth to boys, Remy and Julien. McNamara came home frequently during this period, but only for brief visits. In New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other places where he appeared he was famous for womanizing and drinking, and for getting into brawls. But he was a very popular “Irish tenor” of the period, and he packed houses wherever he went.
In 1829, Tyrone Clifford McNamara and an Irishwoman, presumably his mistress, were found dead after a fire in a little house in the French Quarter which had been bought for the woman by McNamara. Police reports and newspaper stories of the time indicate the pair was overcome with smoke when trying vainly to escape. The lock on the front door had been broken. There was a child from this union, apparently, who was not in the house at the time of the fire. He later went north.
This fire engendered considerable gossip in New Orleans, and it was at this time that the Talamasca gained more personal information about the family than it had been able to acquire in years.
A French Quarter merchant told one of our “witnesses” that Marguerite had sent her devil to take care of “those two” and that Marguerite knew more about voodoo than any black person in Louisiana. Marguerite was reputed to have a voodoo altar in her home, to work with unguents and potions as cures and for love, and to go everywhere in the company of two beautiful quadroon servants, Marie and Virginie, and a mulatto coachman named Octavius. Octavius was said to be a bastard son of one of Maurice Mayfair’s sons, Louis-Pierre, but this was not a well-circulated tale.
Marie Claudette was still living then, but seldom went out anymore, and it was said that she had taught her daughter the black arts learned in Haiti. It was Marguerite who drew attention everywhere that she went, especially in view of the fact that her brother Pierre lived a fairly respectable life, was very discreet about his quadroon mistress, and Uncle Lestan’s children were also entirely respectable and well liked.
Even by her late twenties, Marguerite had become a gaunt and somewhat frightening figure, with often unkempt hair and glowing dark eyes, and a sudden disconcerting laugh. She always wore the Mayfair emerald.
She received merchants and brokers and guests in an immense book-lined study at Riverbend which was full of “horrible and disgusting” things such as human skulls, stuffed and mounted swamp animals, trophy heads from African safaris, and animal-skin rugs. She had numerous mysterious bottles and jars, and people claimed to have seen human body parts in these jars. She was reputed to be an avid collector of trinkets and amulets made by slaves, especially those who had recently been imported from Africa.
There were several cases of “possession” among her slaves at the time, which involved frightened slave witnesses running away and priests coming to the plantation. In every case, the victim was chained up and exorcism was tried without success, and the “possessed” creature died either from hunger because he could not be made to eat, or from some injury sustained in his wild convulsions.
There were rumors that such a possessed slave was chained in the attic, but the local authorities never acted upon this investigation.
At least four different witnesses mention Marguerite’s “mysterious dark-haired lover,” a man seen in her private apartments by her slaves, and also seen in her suite at the St. Louis Hotel when she came into New Orleans, and in her box at the French Opera. Much gossip surrounded the question of this lover or companion. The mysterious manner in which he came and went puzzled everyone.
“Now you see him, now you don’t,” was the saying.
Marguerite married almost immediately after Tyrone Clifford McNamara’s death, a tall penniless riverboat gambler named Arlington Kerr who vanished completely six months after the marriage. Nothing is known about him except that he was “as beautiful as a woman,” and a drunkard, and played cards all night long in the
He was however legally the father of Katherine Mayfair, born 1830, who became the next beneficiary of the legacy and the first of the Mayfair Witches in many generations who did not know her grandmother, as Marie Claudette died the following year.
Slaves up and down the river coast circulated the tale that Marguerite had murdered Arlington Kerr and put his body in pieces in various jars, but no one ever investigated this tale, and the story let out by the family was that Arlington Kerr could not adapt to the planter’s life, and so left Louisiana, penniless as he had come, and Marguerite said “good riddance.”
In her twenties, Marguerite was famous for attending the dances of the slaves, and even for dancing with them. Without doubt she had the Mayfair power to heal, and presided at births regularly. But as time passed she was accused of stealing the babies of her slaves, and this is the first Mayfair Witch whom the slaves not only feared but came to personally abhor.
After the age of thirty-five, she did not actively manage the plantation but put everything in the hands of her cousin Augustin, a son of her uncle Lestan, who proved a more than capable manager. Pierre, Marguerite’s brother, helped somewhat in the decisions that were made; but it was principally Augustin, answering only to Marguerite, who ran things.
Augustin was feared by the slaves, but they apparently regarded him as predictable and sane.
Whatever, the plantation during these years made a fortune. And the Mayfairs continued to make enormous deposits in foreign banks and northern American banks, and to throw money around wherever they went.
By forty, Marguerite was “a hag,” according to observers, though she could have been a handsome woman had she bothered to pin up her hair and give even the smallest attention to her clothing.
When her eldest son, Julien, was fifteen, he began to manage the plantation along with his cousin Augustin, and gradually Julien took over the management completely. At his eighteenth birthday supper, an unfortunate “accident” took place with a new pistol, at which time “poor Uncle Augustin” was shot in the head and killed by Julien.
This may have been a legitimate accident, as every report of it indicates that Julien was “prostrate with grief afterwards. More than one story maintains that the two were wrestling with the gun when the accident happened. One story says that Julien had challenged Augustin’s honesty, and Augustin had threatened to blow his own brains out on account of this, and Julien was trying to stop him. Another story says that Augustin accused Julien of a “crime against nature” with another boy and on that account they began to quarrel, and Augustin brought out the gun, which Julien tried to take from him.
Whatever the case, no one was ever charged with any crime, and Julien became the undisputed manager of the plantation. And even at the tender age of fifteen, Julien had proved well suited to it, and restored order among the slaves, and doubled the output of the plantation in the next decade. Throughout his life he remained the true manager of the property, though Katherine, his younger sister, inherited the legacy.
Marguerite spent the last decades of her very long life reading all the time in the library full of “horrible and disgusting” things. She talked to herself out loud almost all the time. And would stand in front of mirrors and have very long conversations in English with her reflection. She would also talk at length to her plants, many of which had come from the original garden created by her father, Henri Marie Landry.
She was very fond of her many cousins, children and grandchildren of Maurice Mayfair and Lestan Mayfair, and they were fiercely loyal to her, though she engendered talk continuously.
The slaves grew to hate Marguerite and would not go near her, except for her quadroons Virginie and Marie, and it was said that Virginie bullied her a bit in her old age.
A runaway in 1859 told the parish priest that Marguerite had stolen her baby and cut it up for the devil. The priest told the local authorities and there were inquiries, but apparently Julien and Katherine, who were very well liked and admired by everyone and quite capably running Riverbend, explained that the slave woman had miscarried and there was no baby to speak of, but that it had been baptized and buried properly.
Whatever else was going on, Remy, Julien, and Katherine grew up apparently happy and inundated with luxury, enjoying all that antebellum New Orleans had to offer at its height, including the theater, the opera, and endless private entertainments.
They frequently came to town as a trio, with only a quadroon governess to watch over them, staying in a lavish suite at the St. Louis Hotel and buying out the fashionable stores before their return to the country. There was a shocking story at the time that Katherine wanted to see the famous quadroon balls where the young women
