Blackwood Farm (The Vampire Chronicles 9)

" 'Because the woman disappeared under violent circumstances, and it was Manfred who grabbed up her things and heaved them into the trunk. And besides, the old madman had been absent when the affair of the poetry took place, and who knew how much he knew? He didn't see the book, or care about it, that's plain enough, and he didn't bother to save the cameos you found in the trunk, either, though he did save five cameos as I'll explain. ¡¯

" 'How did Rebecca disappear? What were the violent circumstances?' I pushed.

" 'She tried to set fire to this house. ¡¯

" 'Ah, of course. ¡¯

" 'She did it with the oil lamps. ¡¯

"I gasped. 'So that's why everybody believed me!' I said. 'Jasmine and Lolly and Pops. They knew the story of what Rebecca had done in the past. ¡¯

"Aunt Queen nodded. 'Rebecca set the lamps on the windowsills of the front rooms. She had a blaze started in four places when Ora Lee and Jerome caught her in the act, and Jerome struck her and shouted for the farmhands to come in and put out the fire. Now you know what a risk that was for Jerome, a black man, to haul off and slap a white woman in those days, but this crazy Rebecca was trying to burn down this house.

" 'The gossip was that Jerome knocked her unconscious. And that she had almost succeeded in her mad designs, the fire really blazing before they caught it, and the repairs costing a mint.

" 'Now, imagine what a danger fire was in those times, Quinn. We didn't have the pumps on the banks of the swamp in those days, Quinn, we didn't have the water out here from town. This house could have really gone up. But it didn't. Blackwood Manor was saved.

" 'Of course Jerome kept Rebecca under close watch in the room without candles or lamps until Manfred came back from the swamp.

" 'You can imagine the tension, Quinn, with Jerome, a black man, taking on this responsibility, and Rebecca being locked up there in the dark, calling him a "nigger" and threatening to have him lynched and every other thing she could think of through the door. There were lynchings in those days, too. They didn't happen hereabouts that I know of, but they happened.

" 'The Irish poor were never great lovers of the black man, I can tell you, Quinn, and the threats Rebecca made, to bring her kin up here from New Orleans, were enough to scare Jerome and Ora Lee and Pepper and all their folks.

" 'But they couldn't let her out, and they wouldn't let her out, so scream and rant in the dark she did.

" 'Well finally Manfred came back, and when he saw the damage and the extent of the repairs, when he realized that the house had almost been lost, he went wild.

" 'He grabbed Rebecca up off the bed where she'd been moaning and crying, and he beat her with his hands and his fists. He slapped her back and forth and punched her until Jerome and Ora Lee screamed to make him stop.

" 'Jerome wasn't strong enough to hold Manfred, and he didn't dare hit him, but Ora Lee stopped the brawl simply by screaming over and over so that all the colored and white staff came flooding into the house and up into the room.

" 'Rebecca, being surely one of the most unwise human beings that ever lived, was roaring that Manfred had promised to marry her, that she would be his wife or die here, that she would never leave. Jasmine's family were all sort of holding her and reaching out to Manfred to please not hit her anymore.

" 'In his raging temper, Manfred sent for her trunk, and it was he, the man himself, who shoved every blessed thing that belonged to her into it, higgledy-piggledy, and told the men to drive her to the edge of the property and throw her off it with all that was hers. He threw fistsful of money at her, raining it down on her where she lay on the floor in a daze.

" 'But the wicked and unwise girl rose up and ran to him and wouldn't let go, screaming, "Manfred, I love you. Manfred, I can't live without you, Manfred, I won't live without you. Manfred, remember Naples. " (Everyone remembered that "Remember Naples. " ) "Manfred, remember, Manfred, I'm your Rebecca at the Well, come out to be your bride. Look at the cameo at my neck, Manfred. Manfred, I've come to the well to be your bride. "

" 'And it was then that he dragged her down the steps, out the doorway, across the lawn and past the cemetery to the landing, where he flung her into the pirogue and pushed away from the bank. When she tried to get up off the floor of the pirogue, he kicked her and she fell back.

" 'That was the last anybody saw of Rebecca Stanford alive or dead.

" 'Two weeks later -- a fortnight as they called it in those days -- Manfred came home. When he saw Rebecca's trunk in the middle of the room he was angry, and told Jerome to put it upstairs.

" 'Later, Ora Lee discovered a velvet box in the top drawer of Rebecca's bureau, and in it several cameos along with a note in Rebecca's hand. It said "First cameos given to me by Manfred. Naples. " And the date. Now, Ora Lee kept these cameos for at least a year, not wanting them thrown away, as they were very pretty, and then she gave them to Manfred, who tried to give them to Camille.

" 'Now, Camille had not gotten over her hatred of Rebecca and frankly never did. She wouldn't touch the cameos, but Manfred kept them, and now and then he was seen taking them out and looking at them and mumbling to himself.

" 'When my father married my mother, Manfred offered her the cameos, but my father wouldn't let her take them because he remembered Rebecca with so much hatred, too.

" 'Then, when I was a little girl, Manfred gave the cameos to me. I was ten years old. The Old Man said strange things to me. Wild things, things I didn't understand. ¡¯

"-- And here, Aunt Queen told me the story that she repeated to both of us tonight, of Manfred's wild ravings, only in that first telling, when I was a boy of eighteen, she included less detail --.

" 'I had no temerity about keeping the cameos,' she declared. 'I had never even heard the story of Rebecca, and wouldn't for many years.

" 'I had already begun collecting cameos by that time, and had a score of them when I finally told my father how Manfred had given me my first few. But it wasn't my father who told me the story of Rebecca. It was Ora Lee who told me -- you know, it was kitchen-table talk -- and to tell the truth, Ora Lee had felt a liking for Rebecca,

an understanding of the poor Irish girl who had wanted to better herself, a girl who was afraid of her own vicious Irish father and German-Irish mother, a girl who had reached the faraway coast of Italy with Manfred, where Manfred at a candlelight dinner had pinned the first cameo of "Rebecca at the Well" to Rebecca's lace blouse himself.