The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

Who knows? Maybe Mary Beth only liked to look at them.

What we do know for certain is that from the day she met him she loved and cared for Daniel McIntyre, though he certainly began his role in the Mayfair history as Julien's lover.

Richard Llewellyn's story notwithstanding, we know that Julien met Daniel McIntyre sometime around 1896, and that he began to place a great deal of important business with Daniel McIntyre, who was an up-and-coming attorney in a Camp Street firm founded by Daniel's uncle some ten years before.

When Garland Mayfair finished law school at Harvard he went to work in this same firm, and later Cortland joined him, and both worked with Daniel McIntyre until the latter was appointed a judge in 1905.

Daniel's photographs of the period show him to be pale, slender, with reddish-blond hair. He was almost pretty--not unlike Julien's later lover, Richard Llewellyn, and not unlike the darker Victor who died from the fall beneath the carriage wheels. The facial bone structure of all three men was exceptionally beautiful and dramatic, and Daniel had the added advantage of remarkably brilliant green eyes.

Even in the last years of his life, when he was quite heavy and continually red-faced from drink, Daniel McIntyre elicited compliments on his green eyes.

What we know of Daniel McIntyre's early life is fairly cut and dry. He was descended from "old Irish," that is, the immigrants who came to America long before the great potato famines of the 1840s, and it is doubtful that any of his ancestors were ever poor.

His grandfather, a self-made millionaire commission agent, built a magnificent house on Julia Street in the 1830s, where Daniel's father, Sean McIntyre, the youngest of four sons, grew up. Sean McIntyre was a distinguished medical doctor until he died abruptly of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight.

By then Daniel was already a practicing lawyer, and had moved with his mother and unmarried sister to an uptown St. Charles Avenue mansion where Daniel lived until his mother died. Neither McIntyre home is still standing.

Daniel was by all accounts a brilliant business lawyer, and numerous records attest to his having advised Julien well in a variety of business ventures. He also represented Julien successfully in several crucial civil suits. And we have one very interesting little anecdote told to us years later by a clerk in the firm to the effect that, about one of these civil suits, Julien and Daniel had a terrible argument in which Daniel repeatedly said, "Now Julien, let me handle this legally!" to which Julien repeatedly replied, "All right, if you are so damned set on doing it, then do it. But I tell you I could very easily make this man wish he had never been born."

Public records also indicate that Daniel was highly imaginative in finding ways for Julien to do things he wanted to do, and for helping him discover information about people who opposed him in business.

On February 11, 1897, when Daniel's mother died, he moved out of their uptown St. Charles Avenue home, leaving his sister in the care of nurses and maids, and took up residence in an ostentatious and lavish four-room suite at the old St. Louis Hotel. There he began to live "like a king," according to bellhops and waiters and taxi drivers who received enormous tips from Daniel and served him expensive meals in his parlor which fronted on the street.

Julien Mayfair was Daniel's most frequent visitor, and he often stayed the night in Daniel's suite.

If this arrangement aroused any enmity or disapproval in Garland or Cortland, we know nothing of it. They became partners in the firm of McIntyre, Murphy, Murphy, and Mayfair, and after the retirement of the two Murphy brothers, and the appointment of Daniel to the bench, Garland and Cortland became the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair. In later decades, they devoted their entire energies to the management of Mayfair money, and they were almost partners with Mary Beth in numerous ventures; though there were other ventures in which Mary Beth was involved of which Garland and Cortland apparently knew nothing.

Daniel was already by this time a heavy drinker, and there are numerous accounts of hotel staff members having to help him to his suite. Cortland also kept an eye on him continuously, and in later years when Daniel bought a motor car, it was Cortland who was always offering to drive Daniel home so that he wouldn't kill himself or someone else. Cortland seems to have liked Daniel very much. He was the defender of Daniel to the rest of the family, which became--over the years--an ever more demanding role.

We have no evidence that Mary Beth ever met Daniel during this early period. She had already become very active in business, but the family had numerous lawyers and connections, and we have no testimony to indicate that Daniel ever came to the First Street house. It may have been that he was embarrassed by his relationship with Julien, and a bit more puritanical about such things in general than Julien's other lovers had been.

He was certainly the only one of Julien's lovers of whom we know who had a professional career of his own.

Whatever the explanation, he met Mary Beth Mayfair in late 1897, and Richard Llewellyn's version of the meeting--in Storyville--is the only one we have. We do not know whether or not they fell in love as Llewellyn insisted, but we do know that Mary Beth and Daniel began to appear together at numerous social affairs.

Mary Beth was by that time about twenty-five years old and extremely independent. And it was no secret that little Belle--the child of the mysterious Scottish Lord Mayfair--was not right in the head. Though very sweet and amiable, Belle was obviously unable to learn even simple things, and reacted emotionally to life forever as though she were about four years old, or so the cousins later described it. People hesitated to use the word feebleminded.

Everyone knew of course that Belle was not an appropriate designee for the legacy as she might never marry. And the cousins discussed this fairly openly at the time.

Another Mayfair tragedy was also a topic of conversation and that was the destruction, by the river, of the plantation of Riverbend.

The house, built by Marie Claudette before the beginning of the century, was built on a thumb of land jutting into the river, and sometime around 1896 it became clear that the river was determined to take this thumb of land. Everything was tried, but nothing could be done. The levee had to be built behind the house and finally the house had to be abandoned; the ground around the house was slowly flooded; then one night the house itself collapsed into the, marsh, and within a week it was gone altogether, as if it had never been there.

That Mary Beth and Julien regarded this as a tragedy was obvious. There was much talk in New Orleans of the engineers they consulted, in attempting to avert the tragedy. And no small part of it was Katherine, Mary Beth's aging mother, who did not want to move to New Orleans to the house Darcy Monahan had built for her decades ago.

At last, Katherine had to be sedated for the move to the city, and as stated earlier, she never recovered from the shock, and soon went insane, wandering around the First Street gardens, talking all the time to Darcy, and searching also for her mother, Marguerite, and endlessly turning out the contents of drawers to find things which she claimed to have lost.

Mary Beth tolerated her, and was heard to say once, much to the shock of the doctor in attendance, that she was happy to do what she could for her mother, but she did not find the woman or her plight "particularly interesting," and she wished there was some drug they could give the woman to quiet her down.

Julien was present at the time, and naturally found this very funny and went into one of his disconcerting riffs of laughter. He was understanding of the doctor's shock, however, and explained to him that the great virtue of Mary Beth was that she always told the truth, no matter what the consequences.

If they did give Katherine "some drug," we know nothing of it. She began to wander the streets around 1898, and a young mulatto servant was hired simply to follow her around. She died in bed at First Street, in a rear bedroom, in 1905, on the night of January 2, to be exact, and to the best of our knowledge there was no storm to mark her death, and no unusual event of any kind. She had been in a coma for days

, according to the servants, and Mary Beth and Julien were at her side when she died.

On January 15, 1899, in an enormous wedding held at St. Alphonsus Church, Mary Beth married Daniel McIntyre. It is interesting to note that up until this time the family had worshiped at the Notre Dame church (the French church of the tri-church parish), but for the wedding it chose the Irish church, and thereafter went to all services at St. Alphonsus.

Daniel seems to have been on very friendly terms with the Irish-American priests of the parish, and to have been lavish in his support of the parish. He also had a cousin in the Irish-American Sisters of Mercy who taught at the local school.

It seems safe therefore to assume that the change to the Irish church was Daniel's idea. And it is also safe to assume that Mary Beth was almost indifferent to the matter, though she did go to church often with her children and great-nieces and nephews, though what she believed about it one cannot say. Julien never went to church, except for the customary weddings, funerals, and christenings. He also seems to have preferred St. Alphonsus to the humbler French church of Notre Dame.

The wedding of Daniel and Mary Beth was, as already mentioned, an enormous affair. A reception of dazzling proportions was held at the First Street house, with cousins coming from as far away as New York. Daniel's family, though much much smaller than the Mayfair family, was also in attendance, and by all reports the couple were deeply in love and deeply happy, and the dancing and singing went on late into the night.

The couple went to New York for a honeymoon trip, and from there to Europe, where they remained for four months, cutting short their journey in May because Mary Beth was already expecting a child.

Indeed, Carlotta Mayfair was born seven and one-half months after her parents' marriage, on September 1, 1899.

On November 2 of the following year, 1900, Mary Beth gave birth to Lionel, her only son. And finally, on October 10 of the year 1901, she gave birth to her last child, Stella.

These children were of course all the legal offspring of Daniel McIntyre, but one can legitimately ask for the purposes of this history, who was their real father?

There is overwhelming evidence, both from medical records and from pictures, to indicate that Daniel McIntyre was Carlotta Mayfair's father. Not only did Carlotta inherit Daniel's green eyes, she also inherited his beautiful reddish-blond curly hair.

As for Lionel, he was also of the same blood type as Daniel McIntyre, and also tended to resemble him though he bore a strong resemblance to his mother as well, having her dark eyes and her "expression," especially as he grew older.

As for Stella, her blood type, as recorded in her superficial postmortem examination in 1929, indicates that she could not have been Daniel McIntyre's daughter. We know that this information came to the notice of her sister Carlotta at the time. In fact, talk about Carlotta's request for blood typing is what brought it to the attention of the Talamasca.

It is perhaps superfluous to add that Stella bore no resemblance to Daniel. On the contrary, she resembled Julien with her delicate bones, black curling hair, and very brilliant, if not twinkling dark eyes.

As we have no blood type for Julien, and do not know that any was ever recorded, we cannot add that scrap of evidence to the case.

Stella might have been fathered by any of Mary Beth's lovers, though we do not know that she had a lover in the year before Stella was born. Indeed, the gossip concerning Mary Beth's lovers came after, but that may only mean that she grew careless about her lovers as the years passed.

One other definite possibility is Cortland Mayfair, Julien's second son, who was, at the time of Stella's birth, twenty-two years old and an extremely appealing young man. (His blood type was finally obtained in 1959 and is compatible.) He was in residence off and on at First Street, as he was studying law at Harvard and did not finish until 1903. That he was very fond of Mary Beth was well-known to everyone, and that he took an interest all his life in the family legacy is also well-known.

Unfortunately for the Talamasca, Cortland was throughout most of his life a very secretive and guarded man. He was known even to his brothers and his children as a reclusive individual who disliked any sort of gossip outside the family. He loved reading, and was something of a genius at investment. To our knowledge, he confided in no one. Even those closest to him give contradictory versions of what Cortland did, and when, and why.

The one aspect of the man of which everyone is certain is that he was devoted to the management of the legacy and to making money for himself, his brothers and their children, and Mary Beth. His descendants are among the richest of the Mayfair clan to this day.

When Mary Beth died, it was Cortland who prevented Carlotta Mayfair from virtually dismantling her mother's financial empire by taking over its complete management on behalf of Stella, who was in fact the designee, and did not care what happened to it as long as she could do as she pleased.

Stella never "cared a thing about money" by her own admission. And over Carlotta's wishes, she placed her interests entirely in Cortland's hands. Cortland and his son Sheffield continued to manage the bulk of the fortune on behalf of Antha after Stella's death.

We should stress here, however, that after Mary Beth died her empire began to fall apart. No one individual could take her place. And though Cortland did a marvelous job of consolidating and investing and preserving, the dizzying expansion which had gone on under Mary Beth essentially came to an end.

But to return to our principal concern here, there are other indications that Cortland was Stella's father. Cortland's wife, Amanda Grady Mayfair, had a deep aversion to Mary Beth and to the entire Mayfair family, and she would never accompany Cortland to the First Street house. This did not stop Cortland from visiting there all the time, and he took all of his five children there, so that they grew up knowing his family quite well.

Amanda eventually left Cortland when their youngest son, Pierce Mayfair, finished Harvard in 1935, leaving New Orleans forever and going to live with her younger sister, Mary Margaret Grady Harris, in New York.

In 1936 Amanda told one of our investigators at a cocktail party (a casual chance meeting had been arranged) that her husband's family was evil, that if she were to tell the truth about it people would think she was crazy, and that she would never go south again to be among those people, no matter how much her sons begged her to do so. A little later during the evening, when she was quite intoxicated, she asked our investigator, whose name she did not know, whether or not he believed people could sell their souls to the devil. She said that her husband had done it, and he was "richer than Rockefeller" and so was she and so were her sons. "They will all burn in hell some day," she told him. "Of that you can be sure."

When our investigator asked if the lady really believed this sort of thing, she replied that there were witches alive in the modern world who could throw spells.

"They can make you believe you are some place you aren't, that you're seeing things when there's nothing there. They did that to my husband. And you know why? Because my husband is a witch, a powerful witch. Don't quibble over words like warlock. It doesn't matter. The man is a witch. I myself saw what he could do."

Asked point-blank if her husband had ever done any evil to her, Cortland's wife said (to this apparent stranger) that no, she had to confess he hadn't. It was what he condoned in others, what he went along with, and what he believed. She then began to cry and to say that she missed her husband, and she didn't want to talk about it anymore.

"I'll tell you this much," she said when she had recovered herself slightly. "If I wanted my husband to come to me tonight, he'd do it. How he'd do it I couldn't tell you, but he could make himself materialize in this very room. All his family can do things like that. They could drive you out of your mind with it. But he'd be here in this very room. Sometimes he's in the room with me when I don't want him to be. And I can't make him go away."

At this point the lady was rescued by a Grady niece, and no further cont

act was ever accomplished until some years later.

One further circumstance argues for a close bond between Cortland and Stella, and that is that after Julien's death, Cortland took Stella and her brother Lionel to England and to Asia, for well over a year. Cortland already had five children at this time, all of which he left behind with his wife. Yet he seems to have been the instigator of this trip, and was completely in charge of the arrangements and greatly prolonged the venture so that the party did not actually return to New Orleans for some eighteen months.

After the Great War, Cortland left his wife and children again to travel for a year with Stella. And he seems always to have been on Stella's side in family disputes.

In sum, this evidence is certainly not conclusive, but if does indicate Cortland might have been Stella's father. But then again, Julien, in spite of his great age, may have been her father. We don't know.

Whatever the case, Stella was pretty much "the favorite child" from the time of her birth. Daniel McIntyre certainly seems to have loved her as if she were his own daughter, and it is entirely possible that he never knew she was not.

Of the early childhood of all three children, we know little that is specific, and Richard Llewellyn's portrait is the most intimate we possess.

As the children grew older, there was more and more talk about dissension, however; and when Carlotta went to board at the Sacred Heart at the age of fourteen, everyone knew it was against Mary Beth's wishes, and that Daniel, too, was heartbroken, and wanted his daughter to come home more often than she did. Carlotta is never described as a happy child by anyone. But it is difficult to this day to gather information about her, because she is still living, and even people who knew her fifty years ago are extremely afraid of her, and of her influence, and very reluctant to say anything about her at all.