Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [103]
“ ‘But the wicked and unwise girl rose up and ran to him and wouldn’t let go, screaming, “Manfred, I love you. Manfred, I can’t live without you, Manfred, I won’t live without you. Manfred, remember Naples.” (Everyone remembered that “Remember Naples.”) “Manfred, remember, Manfred, I’m your Rebecca at the Well, come out to be your bride. Look at the cameo at my neck, Manfred. Manfred, I’ve come to the well to be your bride.”
“ ‘And it was then that he dragged her down the steps, out the doorway, across the lawn and past the cemetery to the landing, where he flung her into the pirogue and pushed away from the bank. When she tried to get up off the floor of the pirogue, he kicked her and she fell back.
“ ‘That was the last anybody saw of Rebecca Stanford alive or dead.
“ ‘Two weeks later—a fortnight as they called it in those days—Manfred came home. When he saw Rebecca’s trunk in the middle of the room he was angry, and told Jerome to put it upstairs.
“ ‘Later, Ora Lee discovered a velvet box in the top drawer of Rebecca’s bureau, and in it several cameos along with a note in Rebecca’s hand. It said “First cameos given to me by Manfred. Naples.” And the date. Now, Ora Lee kept these cameos for at least a year, not wanting them thrown away, as they were very pretty, and then she gave them to Manfred, who tried to give them to Camille.
“ ‘Now, Camille had not gotten over her hatred of Rebecca and frankly never did. She wouldn’t touch the cameos, but Manfred kept them, and now and then he was seen taking them out and looking at them and mumbling to himself.
“ ‘When my father married my mother, Manfred offered her the cameos, but my father wouldn’t let her take them because he remembered Rebecca with so much hatred, too.
“ ‘Then, when I was a little girl, Manfred gave the cameos to me. I was ten years old. The Old Man said strange things to me. Wild things, things I didn’t understand.’
“—And here, Aunt Queen told me the story that she repeated to both of us tonight, of Manfred’s wild ravings, only in that first telling, when I was a boy of eighteen, she included less detail—.
“ ‘I had no temerity about keeping the cameos,’ she declared. ‘I had never even heard the story of Rebecca, and wouldn’t for many years.
“ ‘I had already begun collecting cameos by that time, and had a score of them when I finally told my father how Manfred had given me my first few. But it wasn’t my father who told me the story of Rebecca. It was Ora Lee who told me—you know, it was kitchen-table talk—and to tell the truth, Ora Lee had felt a liking for Rebecca, an understanding of the poor Irish girl who had wanted to better herself, a girl who was afraid of her own vicious Irish father and German-Irish mother, a girl who had reached the faraway coast of Italy with Manfred, where Manfred at a candlelight dinner had pinned the first cameo of “Rebecca at the Well” to Rebecca’s lace blouse himself.
“ ‘And, Ora Lee insisted, Rebecca hadn’t started out being mean to the children, or mean to anybody; it was what came as the result of her dissatisfaction over time. It was what came of Manfred’s downright meanness.
“ ‘And as Ora Lee put it, in old age she was more able to understand Rebecca, and make no mistake, Quinn, Ora Lee thought Rebecca was murdered out there—you can be sure of it—but the point I was making was that in old age, Ora Lee was more forgiving of Rebecca and what she had done, though she couldn’t forgive Rebecca’s meanness to Camille.
“ ‘Even as Ora Lee told me these things, she begged me never to mention Rebecca’s name to my father or to my Aunt Camille.
“ ‘ “Your Aunt Camille was done in by those days,” Ora Lee told me. “That poor child was always morbid, but she went deep into her shell and never came out anymore.”
“ ‘To return to the history of your illustrious ancestor,’ Aunt Queen went on, ‘I didn’t need Ora