Merrick - Anne Rice [5]
I had stared again at the old glass daguerreotypes. Not a one among any of these individuals looked anything but rich—top hats and full taffeta skirts against studio backdrops of drapery and lavish plants. Here was a young woman beautiful as Merrick was now, sitting so prim and upright, in a high-backed Gothic chair. How to explain the remarkably clear evidence of African blood in so many of them? It seemed no more in some than an uncommon brightness of the eye against a darkened Caucasian face, yet it was there.
“Here, this is the oldest,” she said, “this is Angelique Marybelle Mayfair.” A stately woman, dark hair parted in the middle, ornate shawl covering her shoulders and full sleeves. In her fingers she clasped a barely visible pair of spectacles and a folded fan.
“She’s the oldest and finest picture that I have. She was a secret witch, that’s what they told me. There’s secret witches and witches people come to. She was the secret kind, but she was smart. They say she was lovers with a white Mayfair who lived in the Garden District, and he was by blood her own nephew. I come down from her and from him. Oncle Julien, that was his name. He let his colored cousins call him Oncle Julien, instead of Monsieur Julien, the way the other white men might have done.”
Aaron had tensed but sought to hide it. Perhaps he could hide it from her, but not from me.
So he’s told her nothing of that dangerous Mayfair family. They haven’t spoken of it—the dreadful Garden District Mayfairs, a tribe with supernatural powers, whom he had investigated for years. Our files on the Mayfairs went back for centuries. Members of our Order had died at the hands of the Mayfair Witches, as we were wont to call them. But this child mustn’t know about them through us, I had realized quite suddenly, at least not until Aaron had made up his mind that such an intervention would serve the good of both parties, and do no harm.
As it was, such a time never came to pass. Merrick’s life was complete and separate from that of the white Mayfairs. There is nothing of their story in these pages that I now write.
But on that long ago evening, Aaron and I had sought rather desperately to make our minds blank for the little witch who sat before us.
I don’t remember whether or not Merrick had glanced at us before she went on.
“There are Mayfairs living in that Garden District house even now,” she had said matter-of-factly, “—white people, who never had much to do with us, except through their lawyers.” How worldly her little laugh had sounded—the way people laugh when they speak of lawyers.
“The lawyers would come back of town with the money,” she said with a shake of her head. “And some of those lawyers were Mayfairs too. The lawyers sent Angelique Marybelle Mayfair north to a fine school, but she came home again to live and die right here. I would never go to those white people.” The remark had been almost off-handed. She went on.
“But Great Nananne talks about Oncle Julien just as if he was living now, and they all said it when I was growing up, that Oncle Julien was a kind man. Seems he knew all his colored relations, and they said that man could kill his enemies or yours with the look in his eye. He was a houn’gan if there ever was one. I have more to say about him by and by.”
She had glanced quite suddenly at Aaron and I’d seen him glance away from her almost shyly. I wonder if she had seen the future—that the Talamasca File on the Mayfair Witches would swallow Aaron’s life, as surely as the Vampire Lestat had swallowed mine.
I wondered what she thought about Aaron’s death even now, as we sat at the café table, as I spoke softly to the handsome and well-defended woman whom that little girl had become.
The feeble old waiter brought her the fifth of rum she had requested, the St. James from Martinique, dark. I caught the powerful scent of it as he filled her small, heavy octagonal glass. Memories flooded my mind. Not the beginning with her, but other times.
She drank it just the way I knew she would, in the manner I remembered, as