Lasher (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 2)

Only a great and rich family, a family that could be challenged by none, in which the history had been relegated to fireside tales to tantalize the children.

Of course I enjoyed these years. I did. No one in this long line of Mayfairs has ever prospered any more than I did. I never worked as hard as Mary Beth, I never personally cared for so many.

I did found the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair with my sons, Cortland, Barclay and Garland. Mary Beth and I worked together on this, as the legacy took even greater and greater legal form. But I reveled in pleasure.

When not chatting happily with my sons and their wives, or playing with my grandchildren, or laughing at Stella, I was off to Storyville, the remarkable red-light district of those times, to sleep with the best of women. And though Mary Beth, now the dutiful mother of three, would not go with me on my romps anymore, I took my young lovers with me, and had the double pleasure of the women and my young men with them.

Ah, Storyville, that is another wondrous tale, an experiment gone awry so to speak, a part of our great history. But we must pass over that too.

I lied to my sons in those years. I lied to them about my sins, my debauchery, my powers, about Mary Beth, and about her Stella. I tried to turn their eyes to the world, to the practical, to truths in nature and in books, which I had learnt when I was so little. I did not dare to pass my secrets to them, and also, as they grew to manhood, I knew that none of them was a proper recipient of this knowledge. They were all so solid, my boys, so good. So keen on the making of money and the fostering of the family. I had made three engines of my good self in them. I dared not trust them with the bad self.

And every time I tried to tell Stella anything, she either fell asleep or started laughing. "You needn't scare me with all that," she said once. "Mother's told me your fantasies and dreams. Lasher is my dearest spirit and will do as I say. That's all that matters. You know, Julien, it's quite a thing to have one's own family ghost."

I was stupefied. This was a girl of modern times. She didn't know what she was saying! Ah, to have lived so long to see the truth come down to this--Carlotta, the elder, a vicious clerical-minded monster; and this sparkling child, who thought the whole thing quaint though she could see the spirit with her own eyes! I am going mad, I thought.

Even as I lived on in comfort and luxury, even as I spent my days tasting the pleasures of the new age, driving my automobile and listening to my Victrola, even as I read, I dreaded the future.

I knew the daemon was evil. I knew it lied. I knew it was a lethal mystery. And I feared those scholars in Amsterdam. I feared that man who had spoken to me so briefly in the church.

And when my professor wrote to me from Edinburgh, saying that the Talamasca had pestered him to see his letters to me, I at once admonished him that he was to reveal nothing. I doubled his income on that account. He gave me his assurances. And I never doubted him.

It did not make sense, you see, the conduct of those scholars. Or the conduct of the spirit in front of them. Why had the man been so sinister with me? And why had the spirit deliberately made such a show of itself? I sensed something politic in all this. And wondered if the spirit did not enjoy teasing those men, but was it just childishness?

Finally in my last years, I retired to the attic room, and took with me one of the most splendid of all the new inventions, the portable windup Victrola. I can't tell you what a delight these things were to us, to be able to listen to music from those old records. To go out onto the lawn with the thing, and play a song from an opera.

I adored it. And of course when the music played, Lasher could not come into my head, though he did this less and less anyhow.

He had both Mary Beth and little Stella to content him. And both of them he adored in different ways, drawing strength from each and passing back and forth between the two of them. Indeed, his happiest moments were when he had mother and daughter together.

I had no need of Lasher by this time. No need at all. I wrote in my books, storing them under my bed; I had my lover Richard Llewellyn, a charming young man who worshiped the ground I walked on and was ever congenial company to me, and in whom I never dared to confide, for his own safety's sake.

My life was rich in other ways. My nephew Clay lived with us then, Remy's daughter Millie, and my sons were growing hale and fine, and steps were being taken to strengthen the law firm of Mayfair and Mayfair, or the beginnings of it in any event--which would control our family enterprises.

At last, when Carlotta was twelve, I sought to confide in her. I tried to tell her the whole story. I showed her the books. I tried to warn her. I told her that Stella would inherit the emerald, and she would be the darling of the daemon, and how tricky the daemon was, and that it was a ghost, it had lived before, and that to live again was its only objective.

I shall never forget her reaction, the names she heaped upon me, the curses. "Devil, witch, sorcerer. Always I have known this evil lived in the shadows here. Now you give it a name and history."

She would turn to the Catholic Church to destroy the thing, she said, "to the power of Christ, and His Holy Mother, and the saints."

We fought a terrible battle of words. I cried out: "Don't you see that that is nothing but another form of witchcraft?"

"And what do you teach me, you evil old man, that I must have intercourse with devils? To defeat it, I must know it? I shall stamp it out. I shall stamp out the line itself!" she cried. "You wait and you shall see. I shall leave the legacy without an heir. I shall see an end to it."

I was in despair. I begged her to listen, to refine her concepts, to accept counsel and not to believe such a thing was possible. We were now an immense family! But she had taken all these mysteries, put them under her Catholic foot, and relied upon her rosary and her Masses to save her.

Later Mary Beth told me to put no store in her words whatsoever. "She is a sad child," she said. "I do not love her. I tried to love her, but I do not. I love Stella. And Carlotta knows this, and knows she will not inherit the emerald. She has always known, and she is shaped in hate and jealousy."

"But she is the cunning one, don't you see? Not Stella. I love Stella too but Carlotta's the one with the head."

"It's all done, it was done many a year ago," said Mary Beth. "Carlotta's soul is closed to me. It's closed to him and he will not abide her here except as something to serve the family case, in the shadows."

"Ah, but you see how he controls things now. How can Carlotta serve the family case? How do those scholars in Amsterdam serve it? There is something I have to unravel. This thing can kill those it would not suffer to live."

"You are simply thinking too much for an old man," she said. "You don't sleep enough. Scholars in Amsterdam, what is all that? Who cares about people who tell tales of us, and that we are witches? We are, that is our strength. You try to put it all in some kind of order. There is no order."

"You're wrong," I said. "You are miscalculating."

Every time I looked into Stella's innocent eyes, I realized I could not tell her the full burden of what I knew. And to see her play with the emerald necklace made me shudder.

I showed her where I had hidden my books, beneath my bed; I told her someday she must read all of it. I told her the mystery of the Talamasca, the scholars of Amsterdam who knew of the thing, but these men could be very dangerous to us. They were nothing to play with, these men. I told her how to distract the fiend. I described its vanity. I told her what I could. But not the whole story.

That was the horror. Mary Beth alone knew the whole story. And Mary Beth had changed with the times. Mary Beth was a woman of the twentieth century. Yet Mary Beth taught Stella what Mary Beth felt she should know. Mary Beth gave her the dolls of the witches to play with! Mary Beth gave her a doll made from my mother's skin and nails and bone; and another of Katherine.

One day, I came down the stairs, and I saw Stella perched on the side of her bed, pink legs crossed, holding these two dolls and making a conversation be

tween them.

"That's rot and stupidity!" I declared, but Mary Beth took me away.

"Come on, Julien, she must know what she is. It's an old custom."

"It means nothing."

But I was talking to the air. Mary Beth was in her prime. I was dying.

Ah, that night I lay in bed, unable to shake the vision of the little girl with those worthless dolls, thinking how to separate the real from the unreal and give Stella some warning of how it might go wrong with this devil. What worked against me as well was the dour nature of Carlotta. Carlotta warned and so did I. And Stella listened to neither of us!

Finally I slept, deep and sound, and during the night dreamed again of Donnelaith and the Cathedral.

When I awoke, it was to a dreadful discovery. But I did not make it immediately.

I sat up in bed, drank my chocolate, read for a while, some Shakespeare, I think, for one of my boys had pointed out to me not long before that I had never read one of the plays, ah yes, The Tempest. In any account, I read some of it and loved it and found it deep as the tragedies were deep, only with a different rhythm and rules to it. Then came time to write.

I climbed from bed, dropped down to my knees, and reached for my books. They were gone. The space there was empty.

In a hideous instant I knew they were gone from me forever. No one in this house troubled my things. Only one person would have dared in the night to come into my rooms and take those books. Mary Beth. And if Mary Beth had taken them, they were no more.

I rushed down the stairs, nearly falling. Indeed, I was so out of breath by the time I came to the garden windows of the house that I was sick with a pain in my side and in my head, and had to call for the servants to help me.

Then Lasher himself came to wrap himself round me and steady me. "Be calm, Julien," he said in his soft voice. "I have always been good to you."