"Tell me what happened," Rowan said again, softly, bitterly.
Through the long front parlor they walked, the old woman leading the way, listing slightly to the left as she followed her cane, Rowan coming patiently behind her.
The pale light of the candle slowly crept throughout the whole room, lighting it thinly to the ceiling. Even in decay, it was a beautiful room, its marble fireplaces and high mantel mirrors shining in the dreary shadows. All its windows were floor-length windows. Mirrors at the far ends gazed across the length of the room into each other. Dimly Rowan saw the chandeliers reflected again and again and into infinity. Her own small figure was there, repeated over and over and vanishing finally in darkness.
"Yes," said the old woman. "It is an interesting illusion. Darcy Monahan bought these mirrors for Katherine. Darcy Monahan tried to take Katherine away from all the evil around her. But he died in this house of yellow fever. Katherine wept for the rest of her life. But the mirrors stand today, there and there, and over the fireplaces, just as Darcy fixed them."
She sighed, once more resting her two hands on the crook of her cane.
"We have all ... from time to time ... been reflected in these mirrors. And you see yourself in them now, caught in the same frame."
Rowan didn't respond. Sadly, distantly, she longed to see the room in the light, to see the carvings in the marble fireplaces, to see the long silk draperies for what they really were, to see the plaster medallions fixed to the high ceilings.
The old woman proceeded to the nearest of the two side floor-length windows. "Raise it for me," she said. "It slides up. You are strong enough." She took the candle from Rowan and set it on a small lamp table by the fireplace.
Rowan reached up to unsnap the simple lock, and then she raised the heavy nine-paned window, easily pushing it until it was almost above her head.
Here was the screened porch, and the night outside, and the air fresh as it was warm, and full of the breath of the rain again. She felt a rush of gratitude, and stood silently letting the air kiss her face and her hands. She moved to the side as the old woman passed her.
The candle, left behind, struggled in an errant draft. Then went out. Rowan stepped out into the darkness. Again that strong perfume came on the breeze, drenchingly sweet.
"The night jasmine," said the old woman.
All around the railings of this porch vines grew, tendrils dancing in the breeze, fine tiny leaves moving like so many little insect wings beating against the screen. Flowers glimmered in the dark, white and delicate and beautiful.
"This is where your mother sat day after day," said the old woman. "And there, out there on the flagstones is where her mother died. Where she died when she fell from that room above which had been Julien's. I myself drove her out of that window. I think I would have pushed her with my own hands if she hadn't jumped. With my own hands I'd scratched at her eyes, the way I'd scratched at Julien's."
She paused. She was looking out through the rusted screen into the night, perhaps at the high faint shapes of the trees against the paler sky. The cold light of the street lamp reached long and bright over the front of the garden. It fell upon the high unkempt grass. It even shone on the high back of the white wooden rocking chair.
Friendless and terrible the night seemed to Rowan. Awful and dismal this house, a terrible engulfing place. Oh, to live and die here, to have spent one's life in these awful sad rooms, to have died in that filth upstairs. It was unspeakable. And the horror rose like something black and thick inside her, threatening to stop her breath. She had no words for what she felt. She had no words for the loathing inside her for the old woman.
"I killed Antha," the old woman said. Her back was turned to Rowan, her words low and indistinct. "I killed her as surely as if I did push her. I wanted her to die. She was rocking Deirdre in the cradle and he was there, by her side, he was staring down at the baby and making the baby laugh! And she was letting him do it, she was talking to him in her simpering, weak little voice, telling him he was her only friend, now that her husband was dead, her only friend in this whole world. She said, 'This is my house. I can put you out if I want to.' She said that to me.
"I said, 'I'll scratch your eyes out of your head if you don't give him up. You can't see him if you don't have eyes. You won't let the baby see him.' "
The old woman paused. Sickened and miserable, Rowan waited in the muffled silence of the night sounds, of things moving and singing in the dark.
"Have you ever seen a human eye plucked out of its socket, hanging on a woman's cheek by the bloody threads? I did that to her. She screamed and sobbed like a child, but I did that. I did it and chased her up the stairs as she ran from me, trying to hold her precious eye in her hands. And do you think he tried to stop me?"
"I would have tried," Rowan said thickly, bitterly. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you wanted to know! And to know what happened to one, you must know what happened to the one before her. And you must know, above all, that this is what I did to break the chain."
The woman turned and stared at Rowan, the cold white light shining in her glasses and making them blind mirrors suddenly. "This I did for you, and for me, and for God, if there is a God I drove her through that window. 'Let's see if you can see him if you're blind,' I cried. 'Then can you make him come!' And your mother, your mother screaming in the cradle in that very room there I should have taken her life. I should have snuffed it out then and there while Antha lay dead outside on the flagstones. Would to God I had had the courage."
Again the old woman paused, raising her chin slightly, the thin lips once again spreading in a smile. "I feel your anger I feel your judgment."
"Can I help it?" Rowan whispered.
The old woman bowed her head. The light of the street lamp settled on her white hair, her face in shadow. "I couldn't kill such a small thing," she said wearily. "I couldn't bring myself to take the pillow and put it over Deirdre's face I thought of the stones from the old days of the witches who had sacrificed babies, who'd stirred the baby fat in the cauldron at the Sabbats. We are witches, we Mayfairs. And was I to sacrifice this tiny thing as they had done? There I stood ready to take the life of a small baby, a crying baby, and I could not bring myself to do what they had done."
Silence once again.
"And of course he knew I couldn't do it! He would have ripped the house apart to stop me had I tried."
Rowan waited, until she could wait no longer, until the hate and anger in her were silently choking her. In a thick voice, she asked:
"And what did you do to her later on--my mother--to break the chain, as you've said?"
Silence.
"Tell me."
The old woman sighed. She turned her head slightly, gazing through the rusted screen.
"From the time she was a small child," she said, "playing in that garden there, I begged her to fight him. I told her not to look at him. I schooled her in turning him away! And I had won my fight, won over her fits of melancholy and madness and crying, and sickening confessions that she had lost the battle and let him come into her bed, I had won, until Cortland raped her! And then I did what I had to do to see that she gave you up and she never went after you.
"I did what I had to do to see that she never gained the strength to run away, to search for you, to claim you ag
ain and bring you back into her madness, and her guilt and her hysteria. When they wouldn't give her electric shock at one hospital, I took her to another. And if they wanted to take her off the drugs at that hospital, I took her to another. And I told them what I had to tell them to make them tie her to her bed, and give her the drugs, and give her the shock. I told her what I had to tell her to make her scream so they would do it!"
"Don't tell me any more."
"Why? You wanted to know, didn't you? And yes, when she writhed in her bedcovers like a cat in heat, I told them to give her the shots, give them to her--"
"Stop!"
"--twice a day or three times a day. I don't care if you kill her, but give it to her, I won't have her lie there, his plaything writhing in the dark, I won't--"
"Stop it. Stop."
"Why? Till the day she died, she was his. Her last and only word was his name. What good was it all, except that it was for you, for you, Rowan!"
"Stop it!" Rowan hissed at her, her own hands rising helplessly in the air, fingers splayed. "Stop it. I could kill you for what you are telling me! How dare you speak of God and life when you did that to a girl, a young girl that you had brought up in this filthy house, you did that to her, you did that to her when she was helpless and sick and you ... God help you, you are the witch, you sick and cruel old woman, that you could do that to her, God help you, God help you, God damn you!"
A look of sullen shock swept the old woman's face. For one second in the weak light, she seemed to go blank, with her round blank glass eyes shining like two buttons, and her mouth slack and empty.
Rowan groaned, her own hands moved to the sides of her head, slipping into her hair, her lips pressed shut to stop her words, to stop her rage, to stop the hurt and pain. "To hell with you for what you did!" she cried, half swallowing the words, her body bent with the rage she couldn't swallow.
The old woman frowned. She reached out, and the cane fell from her hand. She took a single shuffling step forward. And then her right hand faltered, and plunged towards the left knob of the rocking chair in front of her. Her frail body twisted slowly and sank down into the chair. As her head fell back against the high slats, she ceased to move. Then her hand slipped off the arm of the chair and dangled beside it.