Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [47]
“However, the most evil omen that hung over this odd, private jungle was the disappearance into the swamp of Mad Manfred himself in the year 1924, as Aunt Queen has already described to us, to which our tour guides would invariably add that the Old Man dressed in his tailcoat and white tie and boiled shirt and fine leather shoes before that last excursion, and ranted and raved at himself in the mirror for an hour before bolting out the door.
“Yes, people searched, as the Old Man had been convalescent for two years before this bizarre and desperate flight, but they never found any island, and they had to shoot many a gator just to survive, and came back with the gators to sell for their hides, but not with Manfred.
“And so it was that the idea took hold that there was no real island. And that the Old Man had simply drowned to put an end to his wheezing and choking misery, for he was surely at death’s door when he bolted for the pirogue and headed out as if to cross the River Styx.
“Then, some seven years later, when his will was finally opened, there was found contained within the strong exhortation that no Blackwood or anyone belonging to the Blackwood household was ever to fish or hunt beyond the mud banks of Sugar Devil Swamp, and the admonition, in Manfred’s own hand, that Sugar Devil Island was a danger not only to flesh and blood but to a being’s immortal soul.
“A very good copy of these pages of Manfred’s Last Will and Testament, all notarized in the year 1900, is framed and mounted on the living room wall. Guests adored it. I remember my teachers, Nash in particular, just howling with laughter when they read it. And it did certainly seem to me, as I was growing up, that the lawyer, the notary and Mad Manfred were all poets in Byronic cahoots with one another when they wrote this.
“But it doesn’t seem that way to me now.
“Let me continue. Of William, Manfred’s only surviving son, and Camille, his only surviving daughter, there are huge portraits in the parlor, very handsome paintings if nothing else, and the current tale that William has often appeared to family and guests, rummaging through a desk in the living room, is true.
“The desk is a beautiful piece, Louis XV, I believe, with inlaid wood, cabriole legs and ormolu—you know, the works—and I have myself glimpsed him once hovering near it.
“I have no doubt of what I’ve seen with my own eyes, but I will get to that when I return to the account of me and Goblin. It’s enough to say right now that I never found anything in the desk. There are no secret compartments or documents.
“Camille’s ghost is almost always seen on the attic stairs, a woman with tastefully coiffed gray hair, and in an old-lady black dress and old-lady thick-heeled shoes, with a double strand of pearls around her neck, ignoring those to whom she appears and vanishing at the attic doorway.
“And then there are the rushing feet of little children in the upstairs hall, these ascribed to Manfred’s little daughter Isabel, who died when she was three, and his son Philip, who didn’t live even that long.
“When it came to the rest of the family, it was simply a matter of elegantly painted portraits—Gravier’s is especially fine, but then I did see Gravier, didn’t I? But his wife, Blessed Alice, a lovely portrait subject, and Pops and Sweetheart, who reluctantly posed for their portraits, though it wasn’t their nature, have never appeared to anyone. So far . . .
“Then there’s the living legend of Aunt Queen—Miss Queen to all those of this parish—and of her heroic travels crisscrossing the globe. The guests were delighted to hear that she was ‘presently in Bombay’ or ‘celebrating New Year’s Eve in Rio’ or ‘resting in her villa on Santorini’ or ‘engaged in a major shopping spree in Rome.’ It proved as exciting to them as any ghost story.
“That Aunt Queen was a great collector of cameos was also well known, and in those days, the public days, there was a dainty glass case in the parlor, perched on spindly legs in the corner, which held a display of her finest pieces.