Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [20]
Again, I nodded. I had gone rapidly from embarrassment to an embarrassing sense of pride. All my life people had capitulated to Blackwood Manor. They had positively raved about it, and I wondered now that I had been so mortified. But this being, this strangely compelling and handsome individual into whose hands I’d put my very life, had grown up in a castle, and I had feared he would laugh at what he saw.
On the contrary, he seemed thrilled by the golden harp and the old Pleyel piano. He glanced at the huge somber portrait of Manfred Blackwood, my venerable ancestor. And then slowly he turned enthusiastically to the dining room on the other side of the hall.
I made a motion for him to enter.
The antique crystal chandelier was showering a wealth of light on the long table, a table which could seat some thirty people, made especially for the room. The gilded chairs had only recently been re-covered in green satin damask, and the green and gold was repeated in the wall-to-wall carpet, with a gold swirl on a green ground. Gilded sideboards, inset with green malachite, were ranged between the long windows on the far wall.
A need to apologize stole over me again, perhaps because Lestat seemed lost in his judgment of the place.
“It’s so unnecessary, Blackwood Manor,” I told him. “And with Aunt Queen and me its only regular inhabitants, I have the feeling that someone will come and make us turn it over for some more sensible use. Of course there are other members of the family—and then there’s the staff, who are so damned rich in their own right that they don’t have to work for anybody.” I broke off, ashamed of rambling.
“And what would a more sensible use be?” he asked in the same comfortable manner he had adopted before. “Why should the house not be your gracious home?”
He was looking at the huge portrait of Aunt Queen when she was young—a smiling girl in a sleeveless white beaded evening gown that might have been made yesterday rather than seventy years ago, as it was; and at another portrait—of Virginia Lee Blackwood, Manfred’s wife, the first lady ever to live in Blackwood Manor.
It was murky now, this portrait of Virginia Lee, but the style was robust and faintly emotional, and the woman herself, blond with eyes of blue, was very honest to look at, and modest, and smiling, with small features and an undeniably pretty face. She was dressed ornately in the style of the 1880s, in a high-necked dress of sky blue with long sleeves puckered at the shoulders, and her hair heaped on the top of her head. She had been the grandmother of Aunt Queen, and I always saw a certain likeness in these portraits, in the eyes and the shape of the faces, though others claimed they could not. But then . . .
And they had more than casual associations for me, these portraits, especially that of Virginia Lee. Aunt Queen I had still with me. But Virginia Lee . . . I shuddered but repressed those alien memories of ghosts and grotesqueries. Too much was taking my mind by storm.
“Yes, why not your home, and the repository of your ancestors’ treasures?” Lestat remarked innocently. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, when I was growing up,” I said in answer to his question, “my grandma and grandpa were living then, and this was a sort of hotel. A bed-and-breakfast was what they called it. But they served dinner down here in the dining room as well. Lots of tourists came up this way to spend some time in it. We still have the Christmas banquet every year, with singers who stand on the staircase for the final caroling, while the guests gather here in the hall. It all seems very useful at times like that. This last year I had a midnight Easter banquet as well, just so I could attend it.”
A sense of the past shook me, frightening me with its vitality. I pressed on, guiltily trying to wring something from the earliest memories. What right had I to good times now, or memories?
“I love the singers,