The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

I do not know when I fell to sleep. Or how late it was when I awoke and saw that Charlotte had come, and was seated inside by the candle. I roused myself to pour another glass of wine, for I was now completely taken up with drinking, and conceived an insupportable thirst within minutes of the last drink.

I said nothing to her, but I was frightened by the beauty she held for me, and that at the very first sight of her, my body had quickened and wanted her, and expected the old games to begin. I gave myself stern lectures in silence; but my body is no schoolboy.

It laughed in my face, so to speak. And I shall never forget the expression on her face as she looked at me, and looked into my heart.

I went to her, as she came to me. And this affection humiliated us both.

Finally when we were finished with it again, and sitting quietly, she began to talk to me.

"There are no laws for me," she said. "Men and women are not merely cursed with weaknesses. Some of us are cursed with virtues as well. And my virtue is strength. I can rule those around me. I knew it when I was a child. I ruled my brothers, and when my mother was accused, I begged to remain in Montcleve, for I felt certain I could turn their testimony to her side.

"But she would not allow it, and she I never could rule. I rule my husband and have from our first meeting. I rule the house so skillfully that the other planters remark upon it, and come to me for advice. One might say that I rule the parish, as I am the richest planter in it, and I could rule the colony perhaps if I chose.

"I have always had this strength, and I see that you too have it. It is the strength which enables you to defy all civil and church authority, to go into villages and towns with a pack of lies, and believe in what you do. You have submitted to but one authority on earth, and that is the Talamasca, and you are not entirely in submission even to them."

I had never thought of this, but it was true. You know, Stefan, we have members who cannot do the work in the field for they haven't the skepticism regarding pomp and ceremony. And so she was right.

I did not tell her so, however. I drank the wine, and looked out over the sea. The moon had risen and made a path across it. I wondered that I had spent so little time in my life regarding the sea.

It seemed I had been a long time on the edge of this cliff in my little prison, and there was nothing remarkable about it now.

She continued to talk to me. "I have come to the very place in which my strength can be best used," she said. "And I mean to have many children before Antoine dies. I mean to have many! If you remain with me as my lover, there is nothing that you cannot have."

"Don't say such things. You know that cannot be."

"Consider it. Envision it. You learn by observation. Well, what have you learned by observing things here? I could make a house for you on my land, a library as large as you like. You could receive your friends from Europe. You could have whatever you wish."

I thought for a long time before I answered, as this was her request.

"I need more than what you offer me," I said. "Even if I could accept that you are my daughter and that we are outside the laws of nature, so to speak."

"What laws," she sneered.

"Allow me to finish and then I shall tell you," I explained. "I need more than the pleasures of the flesh, and even more than the beauty of the sea, and more than my every wish granted. I need more than money."

"Why?"

"Because I am afraid of death," I said. "I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing, I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give to my life. The saving of witches, the study of the supernatural, these are my lasting pleasures; they make me forget that I do not know why we are born, or why we die, or why the world is here.

"Had my father not died, I would have been a surgeon, and studied the workings of the body, and made beautiful drawings of my studies as he did. And had not the Talamasca found me after my father's death, I might have been a painter, for they make worlds of meaning on the canvas. But I cannot be those things now, as I have no training in them, and it is too late for that, and so I must return to Europe and do what I have always done. I must. It is not a matter of choice. I should go mad in this savage place. I should come to hate you more than I already do."

This greatly intrigued her, though it hurt her and disappointed her. Her face took on the look of soft tragedy as she studied me, and never did my heart go out to her so much as it did at that moment, when she heard my answer and sat there pondering it before me, without a word.

"Talk to me," she said. "Tell me all your life."

"I will not!"

"Why?"

"Because you want it, and you hold me against my will."

She thought again in silence, her eyes very beautiful in their sadness as before.

"You came here to sway me and to teach me, did you not?"

I smiled at her, for it was true. "All right, then, daughter. I'll tell you everything I know. Will it do the trick?"

And at that moment, on my second day in this prison, it was changed, changed until the very hour many days later when I went free. I did not yet realize it, but it was changed.

For after that, I fought her no more. And I fought no more my love for her, and my lust for her, which were not always mingled, but always very much alive.

Whatever happened in the days that followed, we talked together by the hour, I in my drunkenness and she in her pointed sobriety, and all the story of my life came out for her to examine and discuss and a great deal which I knew of the world.

It seemed then that my life was nothing but drunkenness, making love to her, and talking to her; and then those long periods of dreaminess in which I continued my studies of the changing sea.

Some time and I do not know how long it was after--perhaps five days, perhaps more--she brought pen and paper to me and asked that I write for her what I knew of my lineage--of my father's people, and how he had come to be a physician as was his father, and how they had both studied at Padua, and what they had learnt and written. And the names of my father's books.

This I did with pleasure, though I was drunk so much that it took me hours, and after I lay, trying to remember my former self as she took my writing away.

Meantime, she had had fine clothes made for me, and she had her

maids dress me each day, though I lay now indifferent to such things, and in a similar indifference I allowed them to pare my fingernails and trim my hair.

I suspected nothing in this, only that it was their regular meticulous attention to which I had become accustomed, but she then revealed to me a cloth mannequin made from the shirt I had worn when I first came to her, and explained to me that within its various knots were my fingernails, and that the hair affixed to its head was my hair.

I was stuporous then, as she had planned, no doubt. And in silence I watched as she slit my finger with her knife, and let my blood fall into the body of this doll. Nay, all of it she stained with my blood until it was a red thing with blond hair.

"What do you mean to do with this hideous thing?" I asked her.

"You know what I mean to do," she said.

"Ah, then my death is assured."

"Petyr," she said most imploringly, the tears springing to her eyes, "it may be years before you die, but this doll gives me power."

I said nothing. When she had gone I took up the rum which had always been there for me, and which was naturally much stronger than the wine, and I drank myself into horrid dreams with that.

But late in the night, this little incident of the doll produced in me a great horror, and so I went once more to the table, and took up my pen, and wrote for her all I knew of daimons, and this time it was with no hope of warning her, so much as guiding her.

I felt she must know that:

--the ancients had believed in spirits as we do, but they believed that they might grow old and die away; and there was in Plutarch the story of the Great Pan dying finally and all the daimons of the world weeping for they realized they would one day die as well.

--when a people of ancient times were conquered, it was believed that their fallen gods became daimons and hovered about the ruins of their cities and temples. And she must remember that Suzanne had called up the daimon Lasher at the ancient stones in Scotland, though what people had assembled those stones no one knows.

--the early Christians believed that the pagan gods were daimons, and that they could be called up for curses and spells.

And that in summary, all of these beliefs have to them a consistency, for we know that daimons are strengthened by our belief in them. So naturally, they might become as gods to those who invoke them, and when their worshipers are conquered and scattered, the daimons would once more lapse back into chaos, or be but minor entities answering the occasional magician's call.