The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

A third group of dark-eyed, dark-haired Mayfairs with very large bones includes Mary Beth Mayfair, and her uncles Clay and Vincent, and also Angelique Mayfair of Saint-Domingue.

Another group of smaller black-eyed, black-haired Mayfairs looks distinctly French, and every one of this group has a small round head and rather prominent eyes and overly curly hair.

Lastly, there is a group of very pale, cold-looking Mayfairs, all blond, with grayish eyes and fairly delicate of build, though always tall, and this group includes Charlotte of Saint-Domingue (the daughter of Petyr van Abel); Marie Claudette, who brought the family to Louisiana; Stella's daughter, Antha Mayfair; and her granddaughter--Dr. Rowan Mayfair.

Members of the order have also noted some very specific resemblances. For instance, Dr. Rowan Mayfair of Tiburon, California, strongly resembles her ancestor Julien Mayfair, much more than she does any blond members of the family.

And Carlotta Mayfair in her youth strongly resembled her ancestor Charlotte.

(This investigator feels obligated to note with regard to this entire subject of looks that he does not see all this in these pictures! There are similarities, but the differences far outweigh them! The family does not look distinctly Irish, French, Scottish, or anything else.)

In any discussion of Irish influence and Irish traits we should remind ourselves that the history of this family is such that one can never be certain who is the father of any child. And as the later "legends" repeated in the twentieth century by descendants will show, the incestuous entanglements of each generation were not really secret. Nevertheless an Irish cultural influence is definitely discernible.

We should also note--for what it's worth--that the family in the late 1800s began to employ more and more Irish domestic servants, and these servants became for the Talamasca priceless sources of information. How much they contributed to our vision of the family as Irish is not easy to determine.

The hiring of these Irish workers had nothing to do with the family's Irish identity, per se. It was the trend in the neighborhood of the period, and many of these Irish-Americans lived in the so-called Irish Channel or riverfront neighborhood lying between the Mississippi wharves and Magazine Street, the southernmost boundary of the Garden District. Some of them were live-in maids and stable boys; others came to work by the day, or only on certain occasions. And as a whole, they were not as loyal to the Mayfair family as the colored and black servants were; and they talked much more freely about what went on at First Street than servants of past decades.

But though the information they made available to the Talamasca is extremely valuable, it is information of a certain kind and must be evaluated carefully.

The Irish servants working in and around the house tended on the whole to believe in ghosts, in the supernatural, and in the power of the Mayfair women to make things happen. They were what we must call highly superstitious. Hence their stories of what they saw or heard sometimes border on the fantastic, and often contain vivid and lurid passages of description.

Nevertheless, this material is--for obvious reasons--extremely significant. And much of what was recounted by the Irish servants has--for us--a familiar ring to it.

All things considered, it is not unfair to say in summary that by the first decade of this century the First Street Mayfairs thought of themselves as Irish, often making remarks to that effect; and that they emerged in the consciousness of many who knew them--servants and peers alike--as almost stereotypically Irish in their madness and eccentricity and penchant for the morbid. Several critics of the family have called them "raving Irish loonies." And a German priest of St. Alphonsus Church once described them as existing in "a perpetual state of Celtic gloom." Several neighbors and friends referred to Mary Beth's son, Lionel, as a "raving Irish drunk," and his father, Daniel McIntyre, was certainly considered to be one, by just about every bartender on Magazine Street.

Perhaps it is safe to say that with the death of "Monsieur Julien" (who was in fact half Irish) the house on First Street lost the very last of its French or Creole character. Julien's sister, Katherine, and his brother, Reny, had already preceded him to the grave, and so had his daughter, Jeannette. Thereafter--in spite of the huge family gatherings which included French-speaking cousins by the hundreds--the core family was an Irish-American Catholic family.

As the years passed, the French-speaking branches lost their Creole identity as well, as have so many other Louisiana Creole families. The French language has all but died out in every known branch. And as we move towards the last decade of the twentieth century, it is difficult to find a true French-speaking Mayfair descendant anywhere.

This brings us to one other crucial observation--which is all too easily overlooked when proceeding with this narrative.

With the death of Julien, the Mayfair family may have lost the last member who really knew its history. We cannot know. But it seems more than likely. And as we converse more with descendants and gather more of their preposterous legends about the plantation days, it seems a certainty.

As a consequence, from 1914 on, any member of the Talamasca investigating the Mayfair family could not help but be aware that he or she knew more about the family than the family appeared to know about itself. And this has led to considerable confusion and stress on the part of our investigators.

Even before Julien's death, the question of whether or not to attempt contact with the family had become a pressing one for the order.

After the death of Mary Beth, it became agonizing.

But we must now continue our story, backtracking to the year 1891, so that we may focus sharply upon Mary Beth Mayfair, who will carry us into the twentieth century, and who was perhaps the last of the truly powerful Mayfair Witches.

We know more about Mary Beth Mayfair than we know about any other Mayfair Witch since Charlotte. Yet when all the information is examined, Mary Beth remains a mystery, revealing herself to us in only occasional blinding flashes through the anecdotes of servants and family friends. Only Richard Llewellyn gave us a truly intimate portrait, and as we have already seen, Richard knew very little about Mary Beth's business interests or her occult powers. She seems to have fooled him, as she fooled everyone around her, into believing that she was very simply a strong woman, when the truth was far more complex than that.

*

THE CONTINUING STORY OF MARY BETH MAYFAIR

The week after Marguerite's death in 1891, Julien removed Marguerite's personal possessions from Riverbend to the First Street house. Hiring two wagons to transport the goods, he moved numerous jars and bottles, all properly crated, several trunks of letters and other papers, and some twenty-five cartons of books, as well as several trunks of miscellaneous contents.

We know that the jars and bottles disappeared into the third floor of the First Street house, and we never heard of these bottles and jars again from any contemporary witness.

Julien made his bedroom on the third floor at this time, and this is the room in which he died as described by Richard Llewellyn:

Many of Marguerite's books, including obscure texts in German and French having to do with black magic, were put on the shelves in the ground-floor library.

Mary B

eth was given the old master bedroom in the north wing, above the library, which has always since been occupied by the beneficiary of the legacy. Little Belle, too young perhaps to be displaying signs of feeblemindedness, was given the first bedroom across the hall, but Belle often slept with her mother in the early years.

Mary Beth began to wear the Mayfair emerald regularly. And it may be said that she came into her own at this time as an adult and as mistress of the house. New Orleans society certainly became more aware of her, and the first business transactions bearing her signature appear in the public records at this time.

She appears in numerous photographic portraits wearing the emerald, and many people talked about it and spoke of it with admiration. And in many of these photographs she is wearing men's clothing. In fact, scores of witnesses verify Richard Llewellyn's statement that Mary Beth cross-dressed, and that it was common for her to go out, dressed as a man, with Julien. Before Mary Beth's marriage to Daniel McIntyre, these wanderings included not only the bordellos of the French Quarter, but an entire spectrum of social activity, Mary Beth even appearing at balls in the handsome "white tie and tails" of a man.

Though society in general was shocked by this behavior, the Mayfairs continued to pave the way for it with money and charm. They lent money freely to those who needed it during the various postwar depressions. They gave to charities almost ostentatiously, and under the management of Clay Mayfair, Riverbend continued to make a fortune with one bountiful sugar crop after another.

In these early years, Mary Beth herself seems to have aroused little enmity in others. She is never spoken of, even by her detractors, as vicious or cruel, though she is often much criticized as cold, businesslike, indifferent to people's feelings, and mannish in manner.

For all her strength and height, however, she was not a mannish woman. Numerous people describe her as voluptuous, and occasionally she is described as beautiful. Numerous photographs bear this out. She presented an alluring figure in male attire, particularly in these early years. And more than one member of the Talamasca has observed that whereas Stella, Antha, and Deirdre Mayfair--her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter respectively--were delicate "southern belle" women, Mary Beth greatly resembled the striking and "larger than life" American film stars who came after her death, particularly Ava Gardner and Joan Crawford. Mary Beth also bore a strong resemblance in photographs to Jenny Churchill, the celebrated American mother of Winston Churchill.