“Like you, Julien.”
“And why not like you were at first-brown-haired and brown-eyed?”
“That was only for Suzanne, that was what Suzanne would see, and so I took that shape and grew in that shape, a Scotsman of her village. I would be you. You are beautiful.”
I pondered much. I gambled, drank, danced until dawn, fought and argued with Confederate patriots and Yankee enemies, made and lost fortunes in various realms, fell in love a couple of times, and in general came to realize I grieved night and day for my Katherine. Perhaps I needed a purpose to my life, something beyond the making of money and the lavishing of it upon cousins far and wide, something besides the building of new bungalows on our lands, and the acquisition of more and more property. Katherine had been a purpose of sorts. I had never had any other.
Except for the fiend, of course. To play with him, to mutate flesh, to court and use him. Ah, I began to see through everything!
Then came the year 1871. Summer, and yellow fever, as it always struck, running rampant among the newest of the immigrants.
Darcy and Katherine and their boys had lately been abroad. In fact, for six months, they had been in Europe, and no sooner had the handsome Irishman set foot on shore than he came down with the fever.
He’d lost his immunity to it in foreign lands, I suppose, or whatever, I don’t honestly know, except that the Irish were always dying of this disease, and we were never affected by it. Katherine went mad. She sent letters to me in the Rue Dumaine; please come and cure him.
I said to Lasher, “Will he die?”
Lasher appeared at the foot of my bed, collected, arms folded, dressed as I had been dressed the day before, all illusion of course.
“I think he will die,” he said. “And perhaps it’s time. Don’t fret. There is nothing even a witch can do against this fever.”
I wasn’t so sure. But when I called upon Marguerite she began to cackle and dance: “Let the bastard die and all his spawn with him.”
This disgusted me. What had little Clay and Vincent done, those innocent children, except be born boys as I had been with my brother, Remy?
I went back to the city, pondering what to do, consulting doctors and nurses, and of course the fever raged as it always did in hot weather, and the bodies piled high at the cemeteries. The city stank of death. Great fires were burned to drive away the evil effluvia.
The rich cotton factors and merchandising giants who had come south to make a buck after the war went down to the Grim Reaper as easily as the Irish peasants off the ships.
Then Darcy died. He died. And there was Katherine’s coachman at my door.
“He’s dead, Monsieur. Your sister begs you to come!”
What could I do? I had never set foot in that First Street house since it had been completed. I did not even know poor little Clay or Vincent by sight! I had not seen my sister in a year, except to argue with her once in a public street. Suddenly all my riches and my pleasures seemed nothing to me. My sister was begging me to come.
I had to go and I had to forgive her.
“Lasher, what do I do?”
“You will see,” he said.
“But there is no female to carry on the line! She will wither as a widow behind closed doors. You know it. I know it.”
“You will see,” he said again. “Go to her.”
The whole family held its breath. What will happen?
I went to the First Street house. It was a rainy night, very hot and simmering, and in the Irish slums only blocks away, the bodies of fever victims were stacked in the gutters.
A stench wafted on the breeze from the river. But there stood this house as it always has, majestic among its oaks and magnolia trees, a narrow and high-flung castle complete with battlements and walls that appear indestructible. A deep secretive house, full of graceful designs yet somehow ominous.
I saw the window of the master bedroom to the north. I saw a sight which many have seen since, and which you have seen, the flicker of candles against the shutters.
I came into the house, forcing the door, with Lasher’s help or my own strength I do not know, only that it yielded to me, and the lock broke and was thereafter useless.
I took off my rain-drenched coat and went up the stairs. The door to the master bedroom lay open.
Of course I expected to see the dead Irish architect lying there putrefying on summer schedule. But I soon realized he had been taken away on account of the contagion. The superstitious Irish maids came to tell me this, that Darcy, poor soul, was already buried, and with the bells of St. Alphonsus tolling night and day, there had been no time for a Requiem.
Within the room, all had been scrubbed down and cleaned, and it was Katherine who lay on the bed, a giant four-poster with black carved lions’ heads in its posts, crying softly into the embroidered pillow.
She looked so small and so frail; she looked like my little sister. Indeed, I called her that. I sat by her and comforted her. She sobbed on my shoulder. Her long black hair was still thick and soft, and her face held its beauty. All those babies lost had not taken away her charms or her innocence, or the radiant faith in her eyes when she looked at me.
“Julien, take me home to Riverbend,” she said. “Take me home. Make Mother forgive me. I cannot live here alone. Everywhere I look I see Darcy, only Darcy.”
“I will try, Katherine,” I said. But there was no doubt in my mind, I could not make a reconciliation with Mother. Mother was so crazy now, she might not even know who Katherine was, or where she’d been. Things were that out of hand there. Last I saw Mother, she and Lasher had been making flowers spring early from their seeds. And Lasher had told Mother secrets of plants which could make a brew to make her see visions. That was Mother’s life of late. I might tell her Katherine had died and come back to earth and we had to be good to her. And who knows? She might have bought it.
“Don’t worry, my beautiful girl,” I said. “I’ll take you home if you want to go, and your little babies with you. All the family is there as always.”
She nodded her head, and gestured in a helpless graceful way as if to say it was in my hands.
I kissed her and held her in my arms, and then laid her down to rest, assuring her that I would sit with her until morning.
The door was closed. The nurse was gone. The little boys were quiet, wherever they were. I went out of the room to have a smoke.
I saw Lasher.
He stood at the foot of the staircase looking up at me. He said in his silent voice, Study this house. Study its doors, its rooms, its patterns. Riverbend will perish as did the citadel we built in far-off Saint-Domingue, but this house will last to serve its purpose.
A dreamy feeling came over me. I went down the stairs, and began to do what you have done, Michael, a thousand times. Walk about this house slowly, in and around, laying my hands upon its doorframes and its brass knobs and musing at the paintings in the dining room and the lovely plaster ornament that everywhere decorated its ceilings.
Yes, a beautiful house, I thought. Poor Darcy. No wonder his designs had been so much the fashion. But he had had no witch’s blood I supposed. I suspected my nephews Clay and Vincent were as innocent as my brother, Remy. I went out into the gardens. I perceived what had been done, a great octagon of a lawn, with an octagon carved in the stone posts that ended the limestone balustrades. And everywhere flagstones at angles, so that one was beset in the moonlight with lines and designs and patterns.
“Behold the roses in the iron,” said Lasher to me. By this he meant the cast-iron railings. And I saw what he pointed out, lines at angles, echoing the angles of the flags, as well as the roses.
He walked with his arm around me now, and I felt a thrill in this, this closeness with him. I had half a mind to invite him into the trees, and give myself over to him. I was addicted as I said. But I had to remember my beloved sister. She might wake and cry and think that I had left her.
