Merrick - Anne Rice [73]
“Ah, well, neither did I,” I replied. “There were so many of us, bound together by love, in the Talamasca, and each one is a special case.”
“But this woman, you truly love her,” he pressed gently. “And I’ve asked you to go against your heart.”
“Oh, no, you haven’t,” I confessed. I faltered. “It was inevitable that I contact the Talamasca,” I insisted. “But it should have been contact with the Elders, in writing, and not this.”
“Don’t condemn yourself so much for contacting her,” he said with an uncommon self-confidence. He seemed earnest and, as always, forever young.
“Why not?” I asked. “I had thought you were a specialist in guilt?”
He laughed politely at this, and then again made a silent chuckle. He shook his head.
“We have hearts, don’t we?” he replied. He shifted a little against the pillows of the couch. “You tell me you believe in God. That’s more than the others have ever said to me. Quite truly it is. What do you think God has planned for us?”
“I don’t know that God plans anything,” I said a little bitterly. “I know only that He’s there.”
I thought of how much I loved Louis, and had ever since I had become Lestat’s fledgling. I thought of how deeply I depended upon him, and what I would do for him. It was the love of Louis which had at times crippled Lestat, and enslaved Armand. Louis need have no consciousness of his own beauty, of his own obvious and natural charm.
“David, you have to forgive me,” he said suddenly. “I want so desperately to meet this woman myself that I urge you on for selfish reasons, but I mean it when I say that we do have hearts in every sense of the word.”
“Of course, you do,” I replied. “I wonder if angels have hearts,” I whispered. “Ah, but it doesn’t matter, does it? We are what we are.”
He didn’t answer me, but I saw his face darken for a moment and then he fell into reverie, with his habitual expression of curiosity and quiet grace.
“But when it comes to Merrick,” I said, “I have to face that I’ve contacted her because I need her desperately. I could not have gone on for long without contacting her. Every night that I spend in New Orleans, I think of Merrick. Merrick haunts me as though she was a ghost herself.”
“Tell me the rest of your story,” Louis prodded. “And, if when you’re finished you wish to conclude the matter with Merrick—end the contact, so to speak—then I shall accept it without another word.”
11
I WENT ON with my tale, flashing back once more some twenty years, to the summer of Merrick’s fourteenth year.
It wasn’t hard for the Talamasca to enfold such a friendless orphan as one could easily see.
In the days following Great Nananne’s funeral, we discovered that Merrick had no legal identity of any kind, save for a valid passport obtained through the testimony of Cold Sandra that Merrick was her daughter. The last name was an assumed name.
Where and how Merrick’s birth might have been recorded eluded our most diligent efforts. No baptism of Merrick Mayfair was recorded in any parish church in New Orleans for the year of Merrick’s birth. Few pictures of her existed in the boxes which she had brought with us.
And indeed, no record of Cold Sandra or Honey in the Sunshine existed other than passports which were both under assumed names. Though we calculated a year of death for the two unfortunates, we could find nothing in the newspapers of Lafayette, Louisiana, or anywhere near it to indicate that murdered bodies had been found.
In sum, the Talamasca began with a blank slate for Merrick Mayfair, and using its immense resources it soon created for her the documentation of birth and age which the modern world requires. As for the matter of Catholic baptism, Merrick was adamant that she had indeed been given the sacrament as an infant—Great Nananne had “carried her to church”—and as late as only a few years before I left the Order, Merrick still combed church records, in vain, for proof of this herself.
I never fully understood the significance of