foully murdered, and of voodoo in the islands long years ago. She knew stories of pirates, oh, they were the worst, the things she would tell about the pirates. It was positively shocking. And all this had the ring of truth to it, to hear her tell it. But you knew she had to be making it up. What did she know of the thoughts and feelings of some group of poor souls on a captured galleon in the hours before a brute of a pirate made them walk the plank?
“But I’ll tell you, some of the things she said were most interesting, and I always wanted to ask someone else about them, you know, someone who read the history books and really knew.
“But the girls had nightmares from the things she told them and wouldn’t you know it, the parents were coming and asking us, ‘Now, Sister, where did my little girl ever hear such a thing!’
“We were always calling Miss Mary Beth. ‘Keep her home for a few days,’ we’d ask. For that was the thing about Stella. You couldn’t take it day in and day out. Nobody could take it.
“And thank the Lord she’d get tired of school and disappear on her own for months at a time.
“Sometimes it went on so long we thought she was never coming back. We heard she was running wild over there on First and Chestnut, playing with the servants’ children and making a voodoo altar with the cook’s son, him black as coal, you can be sure of it, and we’d think, well, somebody ought to go round and talk to Miss Mary Beth about it.
“Then lo and behold, one morning, perhaps ten o’clock it would be-the child never did care what time she came to school-the limousine would appear on the corner of Constance and Saint Andrew and out would step Stella in her little uniform, a perfect doll, if you can imagine, but with a great big ribbon in her hair. And what would she have with her, but a sack of gaily wrapped presents for each of the sisters she knew by name, and hugs for all of us, too, you can be sure of it. ‘Sister Bridget Marie,’ she’d whisper in my ear, ‘I missed you.’ And sure enough, I’d open the box, and I can tell you this happened more than once, and there’d be some little thing I so wanted with all my heart. Why, one time it was a tiny Infant Jesus of Prague she gave me, all dressed in silk and satin, and another time, the most beautiful rosary of crystal and silver. Ah, what a child. What a strange child.
“But it was God’s will, she stopped coming as the years went on. She had a governess all the time teaching her, and I think she was bored with St. Alphonsus, and they said she could get the chauffeur to drive her anywhere that she pleased. Lionel didn’t go to high school either as I recollect. He started just running around with Stella, and seems it was about that time or maybe a little after that old Mr. Julien died.
“Oh, how that child cried at his funeral. We didn’t go to the cemetery of course, none of the sisters did in those days, but we went to the Mass, and there was Stella, slumped over in the pew, just sobbing, and Carlotta holding her. You know, after Stella died, they said Carlotta never liked her. But Carlotta was never mean to that child. Never. And I remember at Julien’s Mass, the way Carlotta held her sister, and Stella just cried and cried and cried.
“Miss Mary Beth, she was in a trance of sorts. It was deep grief I saw in her eyes as she came down the aisle after the coffin. She had the children with her, but it was a faraway look I saw in her eye. ’Course her husband wasn’t with her, no, not him. Judge McIntyre never was with her when she needed him, or at least that’s how I heard it. He was dead drunk when old Mr. Julien passed, they couldn’t even wake him up, though they shook him and threw cold water on him and stood him up out of the bed. And on the day of the funeral, the man was nowhere to be seen at all. Heard later they’d carried him home from a tavern on Magazine Street. It’s a wonder that man lived as long as he did.”
Sister Bridget Marie’s view of Carlotta’s affection for her sister has been corroborated by many witnesses, though of course Richard Llewellyn would not have agreed. There are several accounts of Julien’s funeral, and in all of them, Carlotta is mentioned as holding on to her sister, and even wiping her tears.
In the months following Julien’s death, Lionel left school altogether and he and Stella went to Europe, with Cortland and Barclay, making the Atlantic crossing on a great luxury liner only months before the outbreak of the Great War.
As travel in continental Europe was all but impossible, the party spent several weeks in Scotland, visiting Donnelaith Castle, and then set out for more exotic climes. At considerable risk, they made their way to Africa, spent some time in Cairo and Alexandria, and then went on to India, sending home countless crates of carpets, statuary, and other relics as they went along.
In 1915, Barclay, sorely missing his family, and very weary of traveling, left the party and made the dangerous crossing back to New York. The
Conditions were no better six months later when Cortland, Stella, and Lionel decided to come home. However, luxury liners were making the crossing in spite of all dangers, and the trio managed to make the journey without mishap, arriving in New Orleans just before Christmas of 1916.
Stella was then fifteen years old.
In a photograph taken that year, Stella is wearing the Mayfair emerald. It was common knowledge that she was the designee of the legacy. Mary Beth seems to have been exceptionally proud of her, called her “the intrepid” on account of her wanderings, and though she was disappointed that Lionel did not want to go back to school with a view to going on to Harvard, she seemed to have been accepting of all her children. Carlotta had her own apartment in one of the outbuildings, and went to Loyola University every day in a chauffeur-driven car.
Anyone passing on Chestnut Street in the evening could see the family, through the windows, seated at dinner, an enormous gathering, waited on by numerous servants, and always lasting until quite late.
Family loyalty always has made it very difficult for us to determine what the cousins actually thought of Stella, or what they actually knew of her troubles at school.
But by this time, there are numerous mentions on record of Mary Beth telling the servants almost casually that Stella was the heiress, or that “Stella was the one who would inherit everything,” and even the remarkable comment-one of the most remarkable in our entire record-quoted twice and without context:
We have no record of Mary Beth’s ever explaining this strange statement. We are told only that she made it to a laundress named Mildred Collins, and to an Irish maid named Patricia Devlin, and we received the stories thirdhand. We were further given to understand that there was no agreement among the descendants of these two women as to what the famous Miss Mary Beth meant by this comment. One person believed “the man” to be the devil, and another that he was “a ghost” who had haunted the family for hundreds of years.
Whatever the case, it seems clear that Mary Beth made remarks like this offhandedly at intimate moments with her servants, and we get the impression that she was confiding something to them, in a moment perhaps of understanding with them, which she could not or would not confide in people of her own rank.
And it is very possible that Mary Beth made similar remarks to other people, for by the 1920s old people in the Irish Channel knew about “the man.” They talked about “the man.” Two sources are simply not enough to explain the extent of this supposed “superstition” about the Mayfair women-that they had a mysterious “male spirit or ally” who helped them work their voodoo or witchcraft or tricks.
Certainly, we see this as an unmistakable reference to Lasher, and its implications are troubling, and it reminds us of how little we really understand about the Mayfair Witches and what went on among them, so to speak.
Is it possible, for instance, that the heiress in each generation has to manifest her power by independently seeing “the man”? That is, did she have to see “the man” when she was alone, and away from the older witch who could act as a channel, and was it required of her that of her own free will she mention what she had seen?
Once more, we must confess that we cannot know.
What we do know is that people who knew of “the man” and spoke of him did not apparently connect him with any dark-haired anthropomorphic figure which they had personally seen. They did not even connect “the man” with the mysterious being once seen with Mary Beth in her taxi, for the stories come from entirely different sources and were never put together by anyone, so far as we know, except us.
And so it is with so much of the Mayfair material. The references which come later to the mysterious dark- haired man at First Street are not connected with this earlier talk of “the man.” Indeed even people who knew of “the man” and who later saw an anonymous dark-haired man about the place did not make the connection, believing that the man they’d seen was simply some stranger or relative they did not know.
Witness Sister Bridget Marie’s statement in 1969 when I asked her specifically about “the man.”
“Ah, that. That was the invisible companion who hovered near that child night and day. The selfsame demon,
