I did. I pushed every Mayfair with a witch’s gift into Katherine’s face for all the good it did. She was a dreamy sweet sort. She never argued.
But then the unthinkable occurred.
It began innocently enough. She wanted a house in the city. I should hire the Irish architect Darcy Monahan to build it for her, in the Faubourg uptown where all the Americans had settled.
“You must be mad,” I said. My father had been Irish, true, but I had never known him. I was a Creole, and spoke only French. “Why would we want to live up there with those splashy Americans? With merchants and trash such as that?”
I bought from Darcy a town house in the Rue Dumaine which he had already completed for a man who’d gone bankrupt and blown his brains out. I could see the ghost of this man from time to time, but it didn’t bother me. It was like that ghost of Marie Claudette, something lifeless and unable to communicate.
I moved into this flat, and made lavish rooms for Katherine. Not good enough. And so I said, “All right, we shall buy the square of land at Chestnut Street and First, and we will build some grand horror of a Greek temple to suit your tastes, go ahead. Go wild. What do I care?”
Darcy commenced at once to design and build the house in which I am now standing. I was disdainful, but Lasher came to me, leaning over my shoulder, duplicating me, and then fading back into that brown-haired man he preferred to be, and said:
“Make it full of pattern; make it full of ornament and design: make it beautiful.”
“Tell Katherine these things,” I urged, and the daemon obeyed, putting these thoughts in her head and guiding the plans, and she as guileless as ever.
“This shall be a great house,” the fiend said to me when we rode uptown together, the thing materializing to step out of the very carriage and stand at the gate. “In this house miracles will happen.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“I see now. I see the way. You are my beloved Julien.”
What does that mean, I wondered, but I was in too thick to think about it much, that was certain. I threw myself into my business dealings, the acquiring of land, my investments abroad, and in general tried to keep my mind off Katherine’s plan for this American house, this Greek Revival house, this uptown house, and to lure her back to the Quarter to sup with me whenever possible.
As you know, she fell in love with Darcy! Indeed it was Lasher who revealed the plot to me. I was headed uptown, for Katherine had not come home, and I did not like it that she stayed late after the builders had gone, roaming around the half-built house alone with that wicked Irishman.
Lasher sought to divert me. First he would talk. Then he would have a victim to possess.
“Not now,” says I. “I must find Katherine.”
And finally, in manly form, he did his worst trick, affrighting my coachman and driving us off the Nyades Road, where we broke a wheel, and I was soon sitting on the curb as the repairs went on, perfectly furious. But I could see now that the daemon did not want me to go uptown.
So the next night, I sought to deflect it. I sent it upon a mission to find for me some rare coins which I would have, and then off I went alone on my mare, singing the entire time, lest it come near enough to read my thoughts and intentions.
It was twilight when I reached this house. Like a great castle it stood, its brick plastered over to imitate stone, its columns in place, its windows ready for the glass to be installed. And it was dark and deserted.
I came inside, and on the floor of the parlor found my blessed sister and her man. I almost killed him. Indeed, I had him by the neck and was pounding him with my fist, when Katherine, to my horror, cried out:
“Come now, my Lasher. Be my avenger. Stop him from destroying the one I love.”
Shrieking and sobbing, she fell to the floor in a faint. But Lasher was there. I felt him surrounding me in the darkness, as if he were a great creature of the sea and I a helpless victim. Darkness wrapped itself around me in the shell of the double parlor below, and then I felt the thing stretch out and stroke the walls, and come together again.
“Hold back, Julien,” Lasher said. “The witch loves this mortal man. Be careful. She has used ancient and sanctified words to call me.”
Darcy Monahan rose to his feet and came to assault me. Lasher stayed his hand. He was superstitious as anyone with Irish blood, and he looked around sensing the presence in the dark, and then he saw his lovely Katherine in a heap, moaning, and he went to revive her.
I stalked out in a rage. I went back to my flat in the Rue Dumaine and brought several quadroon ladies of the night to my house, and there coupled with them one after another, in an abandon of grief. Katherine and that Irish beast; uptown in the land of the Americans.
I see when I look back upon the story that I had kept too much knowledge from her. She thought the man was a ghost or a simple thing. She had no knowledge of what Lasher could do when she called upon him.
“Well,” I told her, “if you want to kill me, just call on him again like that, and he will try to do your bidding.”
I wasn’t sure this was true, but I didn’t want her flinging curses at me. First she had betrayed me with Darcy and then with Lasher himself, and she was the witch, and all my life I had shielded her. “You don’t know what you command,” I said, “I’ve saved you from it.”
She was horrified and tearful and sad, but she was also resolved to marry Darcy Monahan. “You don’t need to save me anymore,” she said. “I shall marry with the emerald around my neck as our family laws require, but I marry in God’s house before His altar, and my children shall be baptized at His font, and they shall turn their back on evil.”
I shrugged. We had always married at a Catholic altar, had we not? We were all baptized. What was this? But I said nothing to her.
My mother and I set out to turn her away from Darcy. But there was no doing it. Indeed, she was ready to renounce the legacy for this Irish fool, or so she told everyone. The cousins came to me en masse. What will happen? What is the law? Will we lose our good fortune? And then it was clear how much they knew of the dark secret furnace of evil which fueled the entire enterprise and how willing they were to go along with it.
But it was Lasher who gave the bride away.
“Let her marry the Celt,” he said. “Your father had the Irish blood, and in it rode the witches’ gifts which have ridden in such blood for centuries. The Irish, the Scots, they are gifted with second sight. Your father’s blood made you strong. Let us see what this Irishman can do with your sister.”
But you know the story. Katherine lost two babies, both boys; then had by Darcy two sons. Then despite her prayers, her Masses, her rosaries and her priests, she lost one baby after another.
As the Civil War raged, as the city fell, as fortunes were destroyed overnight, as Yankee troops went through our streets, she reared her boys in the First Street house, among American friends and traitors. Katherine thought she had left the family curse behind. Indeed, she had given back the emerald on her wedding day.
The family was frantic. The witch was gone. For the first time I heard many of them whispering the word. “But she is the witch!” they would say. “How can she desert us?”
And the emerald. It lay on Mother’s dresser among all her voodoo trash, like a hideous trinket. I picked it up, finally, and hung it round the neck of the nearby plaster Virgin.
This for me was a dark time, a time of great freedom and also great learning. Katherine was gone, and nothing else much mattered to me. If I had ever doubted it, I knew it now-my family was my world. I could have gone to Europe then; I could have gone to China. I could have gone beyond war and pestilence and poverty. I could have lived as a potentate. But this small part of the earth was my home, and without my loved ones around me, nothing had any flavor.
Pathetic, I thought. But it was true. And I learned what only a powerful and rich man can ever know-what it was I truly wanted.
Meantime, the fiend was ever urging me to new lovers; and watching what went on as eagerly as ever. He imitated me more and more. Even when he visited Mother now, he came in a guise so like me that others thought it was I. He seemed to have lost any sense of himself, if he had ever had any.
“What do you really look like?” I asked.
“Laughter. Why ask me such a question?”
“When you are flesh what will you be?”
