Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [24]
Lestat didn’t know, and he gave me a curious glance and a slight teasing smile.
“Country music,” I said quickly. “Patsy Blackwood is her name. She’s got a powerful voice.”
“Very much diluted country music,” said Aunt Queen with a vague tone of disapproval. “I think she calls it country pop, and that can account for a lot. She has a good voice, however, and she writes occasional lyrics that aren’t too bad. She’s good at a sort of mournful ballad, almost Celtic, though she doesn’t know it—but you know, a little minor-key bluegrass sound is what she really likes to do, and if she did what she likes to do rather than what she thinks she ought to do she might have the very fame she so desires.” Aunt Queen sighed.
I marveled, not only at the wisdom of what she’d said, but at the curious disloyalty, because Aunt Queen was never one to criticize her own flesh and blood. But something seemed to have been stirred inside her by Lestat’s gaze. Perhaps he had worked a vague charm, and she was giving forth her deepest thoughts.
“But you, young man,” she said, “I’m your Aunt Queen from now on and forever, certainly; but what is your name?”
“Lestat, Madam,” he answered, pronouncing it “Les-dot,” with the accent on the second syllable. “I’m not really very famous either. And I don’t sing anymore at all actually, except to myself when I’m driving my black Porsche madly or riding my motorcycle at a raging speed on the roads. Then I’m a regular Pavarotti—.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t go speeding!” Aunt Queen declared with a sudden attack of pure seriousness. “That’s how I lost my husband, John McQueen. It was a new Bugatti, you know what a Bugatti is” (Lestat nodded), “and he was so proud of it, his fine European sports car, and we were racing down the Pacific Coast Highway One, and on an unclouded summer day, screeching around the turns, down to Big Sur, and he lost control of the wheel and went right through the windshield. Dead like that. And I came to my senses with a crowd around me, only inches from a cliff that went sheer down into the sea.”
“Appalling,” said Lestat earnestly. “Was it very long ago?”
“Of course, decades ago, when I was foolish enough to do such things,” said Aunt Queen, “and I never remarried; we Blackwoods, we don’t remarry. And John McQueen left me a fortune, some consolation, I’ve never found another like him, with so much passion and so many happy delusions, but then I never much looked.” She shook her head at the pity of it. “But that’s a dreary subject, all that, he’s buried in the Blackwood tomb in the Metairie Cemetery; we have a large tomb there, an inspiring little chapel of a tomb, and I’ll soon be in it too.”
“Oh, my God, no,” I whispered, with a little too much fear.
“You hush now,” she said, glancing up at me. “And Lestat, my darling Lestat, tell me about your clothes, your odd and bold taste. I love it. I must confess that to picture you in that frock coat, rushing along on a motorcycle, is quite amusing, to be sure.”
“Well Madam,” he said, laughing softly, “my longing for the stage and the microphone is gone, but I won’t give up the fancy clothes. I can’t give them up. I’m the prisoner of capricious fashion and am actually quite plain tonight. I think nothing of piling on the lace and the diamond cuff links, and I envy Quinn that snappy leather coat he’s wearing. You could call me a Goth, I think.” He glanced at me very naturally, as though we were both simple humans. “Don’t they call us snappy antique dressers Goth now, Quinn?”
“I think they do,” I said, trying to catch up.
This little speech of his made Aunt Queen laugh and laugh. She had forgotten John McQueen, who had in fact died a long time ago into stories. “What an unusual name, Lestat,” she returned. “Does it have a meaning?”
“None whatsoever, Madam,” Lestat answered. “If memory serves me right, and it does less and less, the name’s compounded of the first letter of each of my six older brothers’ names, all of whom—the brothers and their names—I grew up to cheerfully and vigorously despise.”
Again, Aunt