Twenty
In 1929, Stuart Townsend, who had been studying the Mayfair materials for years, petitioned the council in London to allow him to attempt contact with the Mayfair family.
He felt strongly that Stella’s cryptic message to us on the back of the photograph meant that she wanted such contact.
And Stuart was also convinced that the last three Mayfair Witches-Julien, Mary Beth, and Stella-were not murderers or evildoers in any sense; that it would be entirely safe to contact them, and that, indeed, “wonderful things” might result.
This forced the council to take a hard look at the entire question, and also to reexamine, as it does constantly, the aims and standards of the Talamasca.
Though an immense body of written material exists in our archives as to our aims and standards, as to what we find acceptable and unacceptable, and though this is a constant topic of conversation at our council meetings worldwide, let me summarize
First and foremost: We had created in the File on the Mayfair Witches an impressive and valuable history of a psychic family. We had proved to ourselves beyond a doubt that the Mayfairs had contact with the realm of the invisible, and that they could manipulate unseen forces to their advantage. But there were still many things about what they did that we did not know.
What if they could be persuaded to talk to us, to share our secrets? What might we then learn?
Stella was not the secretive or guarded person that Mary Beth had been. Maybe, if she could be convinced of our discretion and our scholarly purpose, she would reveal things to us. Possibly Cortland Mayfair would talk to us too.
Second and perhaps less important: Certainly we had over the years violated the privacy of the Mayfair family with our vigilance. We had, according to Stuart, “snooped” into every aspect of their lives. Indeed we had studied these people as specimens, and again and again, we justify the lengths to which we go by arguing that we will, and do, make our records available to those we study.
Well, we had not done that with the Mayfairs ever. And perhaps there was no excuse for not trying now.
Third: We existed in an absolutely unique relationship to the Mayfairs because the blood of Petyr van Abel, our brother, ran in their veins. They were “related” to us, one might say. Should we not seek to make contact merely to tell them about this ancestor? And who knows what would follow from there?
Fourth: Could we do some real good by making contact? And here of course we come to one of our highest purposes. Could the reckless Stella benefit from knowing about other people like herself? Would she not enjoy knowing there were people who studied such persons, with a view to understanding the realm of the invisible? In other words, would Stella not like to talk to us, and not like to know what we knew about the psychic world at large?
Stuart argued vociferously that we were obligated to make contact. He also raised the pertinent question: what did Stella already know? He also insisted that Stella needed us, that the entire Mayfair clan needed us, that little Antha in particular needed us, and it was time that we introduced ourselves and offered what we knew.
The council considered everything that Stuart had to say; it considered what it knew of the Mayfair Witches, and it concluded that the good reasons for making contact far outweighed any bad reasons.
In a welter of excitement, Stuart sailed for New York the very next day. The Talamasca received two letters from him postmarked New York. He wrote again when he reached New Orleans, on stationery from the St. Charles Hotel, saying that he had contacted Stella and indeed had found her extremely receptive, and that he was going to meet her for lunch the next day.
Stuart Townsend was never seen or heard from again. We do not know where or when or even if his life ended. We simply know that sometime in June of 1929 he vanished without a trace.
When one looks back upon these council meetings, when one reads over the transcript, it is very easy to see that the Talamasca made a tragic mistake. Stuart was not really prepared for this mission. A narrative should have been written embracing all the materials, so that the Mayfair history could be seen as a whole. Also the question of danger should have been more carefully evaluated. Throughout the anecdotal history of the Mayfairs there are references to violence being done to the enemies of the Mayfair Witches.
But in all fairness, it must be admitted that there were no such stories associated with Stella or her generation. And certainly no such stories in relationship to other contemporary residents of the First Street house. (The exceptions, of course, are the playground stories concerning Stella and Antha. They were accused of using their invisible friend to hurt other little children. But there is nothing comparable about Stella as an adult.)
Also the full story of Antha’s nurse who died of a fall in Rome was not then known to the Talamasca. And it is possible that Stuart knew nothing about this incident at all.
Nevertheless Stuart was not fully prepared for such a mission. And when one reviews his comments to the council and to other members it becomes obvious that Stuart had fallen in love with Stella Mayfair. He had fallen in love with her under the very worst circumstances-that is, he had fallen in love with her image in her photographs, and with the Stella who emerged from people’s descriptions of her. She had become a myth to him. And so, full of zeal and romance, he went to meet her, dazzled not only by her powers but by her proverbial charms.
It is also obvious to anyone who considers this case dispassionately that Stuart was not the best person for this mission, for a number of reasons.
And before we go with Stuart to New Orleans, allow us to explain briefly who Stuart was. A full file on Stuart exists in the archives, and it is certainly worth reading in its own right. For some twenty-five years, he was a devoted and conscientious member of the order and his investigations of cases of possession cover some one hundred and fourteen different files.
How much of Stuart’s life is relevant to what happened to him, or to the story of the Mayfair Witches, I cannot say. I know that I am including more of it here than I need to include. And especially in view of what little I say of Arthur Langtry, I must explain.
I think I have included this material here as some sort of memorial to Stuart, and as some sort of warning. Be that as it may.…
Stuart came to the attention of the order when he was twenty-two years old. Our offices in London received from one of its many investigators in America a small newspaper article about Stuart Townsend, or “The Boy Who Had Been Somebody Else for Ten Years.”
Stuart had been born in a small town in Texas in the year 1895. His father was the local doctor, a deeply intellectual and widely respected man. Stuart’s mother was from a well-to-do family, and engaged in charity work of the fashionable sort for a lady of her position, having two nurses for her seven children, of which Stuart was the firstborn. They lived in a large white Victorian house with a widow’s walk, on the town’s one and only fashionable street.
Stuart went to boarding school in New England when he was six years old. He was from the beginning an exceptional student, and during his summer vacations home, he was something of a recluse, reading in his attic bedroom until late in the night. He did have a number of friends, however, among the town’s small but vigorous aristocracy-sons and daughters of city officials, lawyers, and well-to-do ranchers; and he seems to have been well
