“Remember all these things,” he said again. “For this house will last.”
As I came into the hallway, I saw him in the high dining room door with his hands on the frame. How it soared above him with its tapered keyhole shape, more narrow above, and thereby looking higher.
I turned to note that the front door, through which I’d just come, which I had left wide open, was of the same design, and there he stood, as if he had never been in the other place at all, a man like me with his hands on the frame, peering back at me.
“Would you live after death, Julien? Of all my witches you ask me so little about that final darkness.”
“You don’t know anything about it, Lasher,” I commented. “You said so yourself.”
“Don’t be cruel with me, Julien. Not tonight of all nights. I am glad to be here. Would you live after death? Would you hover and stay, that is what I am asking you?”
“I don’t know. If the Devil was trying to take me into hell I might hover and stay, if that’s what you mean, a purgatorial soul wandering about, appearing to voodoo queens and spiritualists. I suppose I could do it.” I crushed out my cigar in the ashtray on the marble table, which is there now, this very day, in the lower hallway.
“Is that what you’ve done, Lasher? Are you some vile human being become a ghost, hovering forever, and seeking to wrap yourself in an undeserved mystery?”
I saw something in the face of the fiend change. One moment he was my twin and then he had smiled. Indeed, he was imitating my very smile and to perfection. I had not seen him do this trick before very often. And as he slumped against the door frame, he folded his arms as I might, and he made a little sound of cloth brushing the wood, to let me know how strong he was.
“Julien,” he said, actually shaping his mouth with the words, he was so strong, “maybe all mysteries are nothing at the core. Maybe the world is made from waste.”
“And you were there when it happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said, imitating my own sarcastic tone exactly. He raised his eyebrows as I raise mine. I had never seen him so strong.
“Shut the door, Lasher,” I said, “if you are so very mighty.”
And to my astonishment, he reached for the knob and stepped aside, and made the door close exactly as if he were a man doing it. That was the limit for him, for it had been an astonishing feat. He was gone. The air held the heat as it always did.
“Admirable,” I whispered.
“Remember this place if you would linger or come back; remember its patterns. In the dim world beyond they will shine in your eyes, they will guide you home. This is a house for centuries to come. This is a house worthy of the spirits of the dead; this is a house in which you may safely remain. War or revolution or fire, or the river’s current, will not trouble you. I was held once…by two patterns. Two simple patterns. A circle, and stones in the form of a cross…two patterns.”
I memorized this. More proof that he was not the great Devil himself.
I went up the stairs. I had gotten just a little more out of him than I usually did, but nothing much really. And then there was Katherine.
This time I found her awake, and standing by the window.
“Where did you go?” she asked me breathlessly. And then she threw her arms around me again and leant against me. It seemed I felt Lasher stirring near us. I told him through the mind, Do not come here now, you’ll scare her. I lifted her chin as men do to women, though how the little things stand it, I don’t know, and I kissed her.
At that very second, something caught me by surprise. It was the pressure of her breasts against me. She wore nothing but a soft white dressing gown, and I felt her nipples, her heat, and then a stream of heat it seemed from her lips. But when I drew back and looked at her I saw only innocence.
I also saw a woman. A beautiful woman. A woman whom I had loved, who had risen up against me and cast me aside for another, a body loved by me as a brother should love his sister, with nothing about it unfamiliar to me from all our childhood romps and swims, and yet it was a woman’s body, and it was in my arms, and in a moment of daring, I kissed her again, and then again, and then even once more, and I felt her begin to burn against me.
I was repelled. This was my baby sister, Katherine. I took her to the bed and laid her down; she seemed confused, looking at me. Dare I say spellbound? Did she think it was Darcy come back?
“No,” she whispered. “I know it is you. I have always loved you. I’m sorry. You must forgive my little sins, but when I was a little girl I used to dream we would marry. We would walk down the aisle. It was only when Darcy came that I gave up that silly incestuous dream. God forgive me.”
She made the Sign of the Cross, and drew up her knees, and reached for the covers.
I don’t know what came over me. Fury? I looked down at this little feminine thing, this creature with her outstretched hand and ragged veil of black hair, and pale shivering face, and I saw her make the Sign of the Cross, and I became enraged.
“How dare you play with me in this way!” I said, and I threw her back on the bed. Her dressing gown opened and there were her breasts, a luscious enticement.
Within seconds, I was ripping open my own clothes. She had begun to scream. She was terrified.
“No, no Julien, don’t!” she cried.
But I was on top of her, and spreading her legs, and ripping what cloth was left out of my way.
“Oh Julien, please, please, don’t,” she cried in the most heartbreaking voice. “It’s me, it’s Katherine.”
But it was done. I had raped her and I took my time in finishing it and then climbed off the bed and went to the window. I thought my heart would burst. And I could not believe what I had done.
Meantime, she had gone from a little curl of a sobbing woman in the bed, to rushing to me, and suddenly flinging her arms around me and crying again my name, “Julien, Julien!”
What did this mean? That she wanted me to protect her from myself?
“Oh, darling child,” I said. And I broke down utterly, kissing her.
And then we did it again, and again, and again.
And Mary Beth was born to us nine months after.
By then we had been at Riverbend all that time, and I could scarcely stand the sight of Katherine.
I had not dared to trouble her under our own roof, and I doubt she would have received me anyway. She had blotted the truth from her mind. She thought the thing in her belly was Darcy’s baby. She said her rosary all the time, for Darcy’s unborn child.
And everyone, everyone knew what I had done to her. Julien the evil one. Julien had got his sister with child. The cousins stared at me as if I were anathema. Out of Fontevrault, Augustin’s son Tobias came especially to curse me and tell me I was the Devil. Far and wide people knew who did not dare to show their displeasure.
And then there were all my gambling, whoring friends, who thought it strange and unmanly, but when I did not falter a step in my usual dance, they merely gave a shrug and accepted it. That’s one thing I found out, you can carry off most any sin, if you just do nothing.
Ah, but the baby was coming. Once again, the whole family held its breath.
And Lasher? When I saw him at all, he was as impassive as he had ever been. He hovered near Katherine all the time, unseen by her.
“It was his doing,” my mother said. “He pushed you into her arms. Stop fretting. She has to have more babies, everyone knows, she has to have a daughter. Why not you for the father, a powerful witch? I think it’s a fine idea.”
I didn’t bother to talk about it again with her.
And I didn’t know if it had been his doing. I don’t know now. All I knew was it was the most expensive pleasure I’d ever bought, this rape, and that I, Julien, who could kill men at any time without a qualm, felt filthy and acquainted with cruelty and with evil.
Katherine really lost her mind before Mary Beth was born. But nobody knew it.
From the time of the rape, really, she was never anything any more than a mumbling woman saying her beads, and talking about angels and saints, good for playing with little children.
But then came the night of Mary Beth’s birth; Katherine was huge with the child, and screaming in agony. I was in the room, with the black midwives and the white doctor, and with Marguerite and all those who were to attend and help. You never saw such a committee assembled.
