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"Check her vital signs lately?" Mona asked, turning to the nurse. But the nurse had already seen the blood. "I don't think there's much chance of waking her up. Why don't you call my cousin Anne Marie? She's down in the lobby. Tell her to come up here immediately."
The nurse was an old woman; she picked up the dead woman's hand. At once she set it down, and then she backed away from the bed, and out of the room.
"Wait a minute," said Mona. "Did you see anybody come in here?"
But in an instant she knew the question was pointless. This woman was too afraid of being blamed for this to even respond. Mona followed her, and watched her rush down to the station, walking about as fast as a person can walk without running. Then Mona went back to the bed.
She felt the hand. Not ice-cold. She gave a long sigh; she could hear footsteps in the corridor, the muffled sound of rubber-soled shoes. She leaned over the bed, and brushed her mother's hair back from her face, and kissed her. The cheek held only a tiny bit of fading warmth. Her forehead was already cold.
She thought sure her mother would turn her head and look up at her and shout out: "Be careful what you wish for. Didn't I tell you? It might come true."
Within minutes the room was filled with staff. Anne Marie was in the hallway, wiping her eyes with a paper handkerchief. Mona backed off.
For a long time she stood at the nurses' station just listening to everything. An intern had to be called to say that Alicia was legally dead. They had to wait for him, and that would take twenty minutes. It was past eight o'clock. Meantime the family doctor had been summoned. And Ryan, of course. Poor Ryan. Oh, God help Ryan. The phone was ringing now continuously. And Lauren? What shape was she in?
Mona walked off down the hall. When the elevator door opened, it was the young intern who came out--a kid who didn't look old enough to know if somebody was dead. He passed her without even looking at her.
In a daze Mona rode down to the lobby and walked out the doors. The hospital was on Prytania Street, only one block from Amelia and St. Charles, where Mona lived. She walked slowly along the pavement, under the lunar light of the street lamps, thinking quietly to herself.
"I don't mink I want to wear dresses like this anymore." She said it out loud when she stood on the corner. "Nope, it's time to dump this dress and this ribbon." Across the street, her home was brightly lighted for once. There were people climbing out of cars. All the crisp excitement already begun.
Several Mayfairs had seen her; one was pointing to her. Someone was walking to the corner to reach out towards her as if that might mean she might not be run down as she crossed the street.
"Well, I don't think I like these clothes anymore," she said under her breath as she walked fast before the distant oncoming traffic. "Nope, sick of it Won't do it anymore."
"Mona, darling!" said her cousin Gerald.
"Yeah, well, it was just a matter of time," said Mona. "But I sure didn't count on both of them dying. No, didn't see that coming at all." She walked past Gerald, and past the Mayfairs assembled around the gate and the path to the steps.
"Yeah, OK," she said to those who tried to speak to her. "I've got to get out of these ridiculous clothes."
Fourteen
JULIEN'S STORY
IT IS NOT the story of my life which you require, but let me explain how I came upon my various secrets. As you know I was born in the year 1828, but I wonder if you realize what this means. Those were the very last days of an ancient way of life--the last decades in which the rich landowners of the world lived pretty much as they had for centuries.
We not only knew nothing of railroads, telephones, Victrolas, or horseless carriages. We didn't even dream of such things!
And Riverbend--with its vast main house crammed with fine furniture and books, and all its many outbuildings sheltering uncles and aunts and cousins, and its fields stretching as far as the eye could see from the riverbank, south, and east and west--truly was Paradise.
Into this world I slipped almost without notice. I was a boy child, and this was a family that wanted female witches. I was a mere Prince of the Blood, and the court was a loving and friendly place, but no one observed that a little boy had been born who possessed probably greater witches' gifts than any man or woman ever in the family.
In fact, my grandmother Marie Claudette was so disappointed that I was not a girl child that she stopped speaking to my mother, Marguerite. Marguerite had already given birth to one male, my older brother, Remy, and now, having had the audacity to bring another into the world, she crashed down completely from favor.
Of course Marguerite rectified this mistake as soon as possible, giving birth in 1830 to Katherine, who was to become her heiress and designee of the legacy--my darling little sister. But a coldness by then existed between mother and daughter, and was never healed in Marie Claudette's lifetime.
Also I personally suspect that Marie Claudette took one look at Katherine and thought, "What an idiot," for that is just what Katherine turned out to be. But a female witch was needed, and Marie Claudette would lay eyes upon a granddaughter before she died, so on to this little witless baby who was bawling in the cradle Marie Claudette passed the great emerald.
Now as you know, by the time Katherine was a young woman I had come into my own as a family influence, was much valued as a carrier of witches' gifts, and it was I who fathered, by Katherine, Mary Beth Mayfair, who was the last in fact of the great Mayfair Witches.
I fathered Mary Beth's daughter Stella, as I am sure you also know, and fathered by Stella her daughter, Antha.
But let me return to the perilous times of my early childhood, when men and women both warned me in hushed voices to be well-behaved, ask no questions, defer to the family customs in every regard, and pay no attention to anything strange that I might see pertaining to the realm of ghosts and spirits.
It was made known to me in no uncertain terms that strong Mayfair males did not do well; early death, madness, exile--those were the fates of the troublemakers.
When I look back on it, I think it is absolutely impossible that I could have become one of the great Passive Well-Behaved, along with my Oncle Maurice and Lestan and countless other goody-two-shoes cousins.
First of all, I saw ghosts all the time; heard spirits; could see life leaving a body when the body died; could read people's minds, and sometimes even move or hurt matter without even really getting angry or meaning to do it. I was a natural Utile witch or warlock or whatever the word might be.
And I can't remember a time when I couldn't see Lasher. He was standing by my mother's chair many a morning when I went in to greet her. I saw him by Katherine's cradle. But he never cast his eyes on me, and I'd been warned very early on that I must never speak to him, nor seek to know who or what he was, or say his name, or make him look at me.
My uncles, all very happy men, said, "Remember this, a Mayfair male can have everything he desires--wine, women, and we
alth beyond imagining. But he cannot seek to know the family secrets. Leave it in the hands of the great witch, for she sees all and directs all, and upon that principle our vast power has been founded."
Well, I wanted to know what this was about. I had no intention of merely accepting the situation. And my grandmother, never someone not to catch the eye, became for me an extreme magnet of curiosity.
Meantime, my mother, Marguerite, grew rather distant. She snatched me up and kissed me whenever we chanced to meet but that wasn't often. She was always going into the city to shop, to see the opera, to dance, to drink, to do God knows what, or locking herself in her study screaming if anyone dared to disturb her.
I found her most fascinating of course. But my grandmother Marie Claudette was more a constant figure. And she became for me in my idle moments--which were few--a great irresistible attraction.
First let me explain about my other learning. The books. They were everywhere. That wasn't so common in the Old South, believe me. It has never been common among the very rich to read; it is more a middle-class obsession. But we had all been lovers of books; and I cannot remember a time when I couldn't read French, English and Latin.
German? Yes, I had to teach myself that, as well as Spanish and Italian.
But I cannot recall a point in childhood where I had not read some of every book we possessed, and in this case that meant a library of such glory you cannot envision it. Most of those volumes have over the years simply rotted away; some have been stolen; some I entrusted many decades later to those who would cherish them. But then I had all I wanted of Aristotle, Plato, Plautus and Terence, Virgil and Horace. And I read the night away with Chapman's Homer, and Golding's Metamorphoses, a mammoth and charming translation of Ovid. Then there was Shakespeare, whom I adored, naturally enough, and lots of very funny English novels. Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe.
I read it all. I read it when I didn't know what it meant until I did. I dragged my books with me about the house, pulling on skirts and jackets and asking, "What does this mean?" and even asking uncles, aunts, cousins or slaves to read various puzzling passages aloud to me.
