The witching hour

Seventeen

The Mayfair Family from 1689 to 1900

Narrative Abstract by Aaron Lightner

After Petyr’s death, it was the decision of Stefan Franck that no further direct contact with the Mayfair Witches would be attempted in his lifetime. This judgment was upheld by his successors, Martin Geller and Richard Kramer, respectively.

Though numerous members petitioned the order to allow them to attempt contact, the decision of the governing board was always unanimously against it, and the cautionary ban remained in effect into the twentieth century.

However, the order continued its investigation of the Mayfair Witches from afar. Information was frequently sought from people in the colony who never knew the reason for the inquiry, or the meaning of the information which they sent on.

The Talamasca, during these centuries, was developing an entire network of “observers” worldwide who forwarded newspaper clippings and gossip back to the Motherhouse. And in Saint-Domingue several people were relied upon for such information, including Dutch merchants who thought the inquiries of a strictly financial nature, and various persons in the colony who were told only that people in Europe would pay dearly for information regarding the Mayfair family. No professional investigators, comparable to the twentieth century “private eye,” existed at this time. Yet an amazing amount of information was gathered.

Notes to the archives were brief and often hurried, sometimes no more than a small introduction to the material being transcribed.

Information about the Mayfair legacy was obtained surreptitiously and probably illegally through people in the banks involved who were bribed into revealing it. The Talamasca has always used such means to acquire information and was only a little less unscrupulous than it is now in years past. The standard excuse was then, and is today, that the records obtained in this manner are usually seen by scores of people in various capacities. Never were private letters purloined, or persons’ homes or businesses violated in criminal fashion.

Paintings of the plantation house and of various members of the family were obtained through various means. One portrait of Jeanne Louise Mayfair was obtained from a disgruntled painter after the lady had rejected the work. A daguerreotype of Katherine and her husband, Darcy Monahan, was obtained in similar fashion, as the family bought only five of the ten different pictures attempted at that sitting.

There was evidence from time to time that the Mayfairs knew of our existence and of our observations. At least one observer-a Frenchman who worked for a time as an overseer on the Mayfair plantation in Saint-Domingue-met with a suspicious and violent death. This led to greater secrecy and greater care, and less information in the years that followed.

The bulk of the original material is very fragile. Numerous photocopies and photographs of the materials have been made, however, and this work continues with painstaking care.

THE NARRATIVE YOU ARE NOW READING

The history which follows is a narrative abstract based upon all of the collected materials and notes, including several earlier fragmentary narratives in French and in Latin, and in Talamasca Latin. A full inventory of these materials is attached to the documents boxes in the Archives in London.

I began familiarizing myself with this history in 1945 when I first became a member of the Talamasca, and before I was ever directly involved with the Mayfair Witches. I finished the first “complete version” of this material in 1956. I have updated, revised and added to the material continuously ever since. The full revision was done by me in 1979 when the entire history, including Petyr van Abel’s reports, was entered into the computer system of the Talamasca. It has been extremely easy to fully update the material ever since.

I did not become directly involved with the Mayfair Witches until the year 1958. I shall introduce myself at the appropriate time.

Aaron Lightner, January 1989

Charlotte Mayfair Fontenay lived to be almost seventy-six years old, dying in 1743, at which time she had five children and seventeen grandchildren. Maye Faire remained throughout her lifetime the most prosperous plantation in Saint-Domingue. Several of her grandchildren returned to France, and their descendants perished in the Revolution at the end of the century.

Charlotte’s firstborn, by her husband Antoine, did not inherit his father’s disability, but grew up to be healthy, to marry, and to have seven children. However, the plantation called Maye Faire passed to him only in name. It was in fact inherited by Charlotte’s daughter Jeanne Louise, who was born nine months after Petyr’s death.

All his life Antoine Fontenay III deferred to Jeanne Louise and to her twin brother, Peter, who was never called by the French version of that name, Pierre. There is little doubt that these were the children of Petyr van Abel. Both Jeanne Louise and Peter were fair of complexion, with light brown hair and pale eyes.

Charlotte gave birth to two more boys before the death of her crippled husband. The gossip in the colonies named two different individuals as the fathers. Both these boys grew to manhood and emigrated to France. They used the name Fontenay.

Jeanne Louise went only by the name of Mayfair on all official documents, and though she married young to a dissolute and drunken husband, her lifelong companion was her brother, Peter, who never married. He died only hours before Jeanne Louise, in 1771. No one questioned the legality of her using the name Mayfair, but accepted her word that it was a family custom. Later, her only daughter, Angélique, was to do the same thing.

Charlotte wore the emerald necklace given her by her mother until she died. Thereafter Jeanne Louise wore it, and passed it on to her fifth child, Angélique, who was born in 1725. By the time this daughter was born, Jeanne Louise’s husband was mad and confined to “a small house” on the property, which from all descriptions seems to be the house in which Petyr was imprisoned years before.

It is doubtful that this man was the father of Angélique. And it seems reasonable, though by no means certain, that Angélique was the child of Jeanne Louise and her brother Peter.

Angélique called Peter her “Papa” in front of everyone, and it was said among the servants that she believed Peter was her father as she had never known the madman in the outbuilding, who was chained in his last years rather like a wild beast. It should be noted that the treatment of this madman was not considered cruel or unusual by those who knew the family.

It was also rumored that Jeanne Louise and Peter shared a suite of connecting bedrooms and parlors added to the old plantation house shortly after Jeanne Louise’s marriage.

Whatever gossip circulated about the secret habits of the family, Jeanne Louise wielded the same power over everyone that Charlotte had wielded, maintaining a hold upon her slaves through immense generosity and personal attention in an era that was famed for quite the opposite.

Jeanne Louise is described as an exceptionally beautiful woman, much admired and much sought after. She was never described as evil, sinister, or a witch. Those whom the Talamasca contacted during Jeanne Louise’s lifetime knew nothing of the family’s European origins.

Runaway slaves frequently came to Jeanne Louise to implore her intervention with a cruel master or mistress. She often bought such unfortunates, binding them to her with a fierce loyalty. She was a law unto herself at Maye Faire, and did execute more than one slave for treachery. However, the goodwill of her slaves towards her was well known.

Angélique was Jeanne Louise’s favorite child, and Angélique was devoted to her grandmother, Charlotte, and was with the old woman when she died.

A fierce storm surrounded Maye Faire on the night of Charlotte’s death, which did not abate till early morning, at which time one of Angélique’s brothers was found dead.

Angélique married a very handsome and rich planter by the name of Vincent St. Christophe in the year 1755, giving birth five years later to Marie Claudette Mayfair, who later married Henri Marie Landry and was the first of the Mayfair witches to come to Louisiana. Angélique also had two sons, one of whom died in childhood, and the second of whom, Lestan, lived into old age.

Every evidence indicates that Angélique loved Vincent St. Christophe and was faithful to him all their lives. Marie Claudette was also devoted to him and there seems no question that he was her father.

The pictures which we possess of Angélique show her to be not as beautiful as either her mother or her daughter, her features being smaller and her eyes being smaller. But she was nevertheless extremely attractive, with very curly dark brown hair, and was thought of as a beauty in her prime.

Marie Claudette was exceptionally beautiful, strongly resembling her handsome father Vincent St. Christophe as much as her mother. She had very dark hair and blue eyes, and was extremely small and delicate. Her husband, Henri Marie Landry, was also a good-looking man. In fact, it was said of the family by that time that they always married for beauty, and never for money or for love.

Vincent St. Christophe was a sweet, gentle soul who liked to paint pictures and play the guitar. He spent much time on a small lake built for him on the plantation, making up songs which he would later sing to Angélique. After his death Angélique had several lovers, but refused to remarry. This too was a pattern with the Mayfair women; they usually married once only, or only once with any success.

What characterizes the family through the lifetimes of Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angélique, and Marie Claudette is respectability, wealth, and power. Mayfair wealth was legendary within the Caribbean world, and those who entered into disputes with the Mayfairs met with violence often enough for there to be talk of it. It was said to be “unlucky” to fight with the Mayfair family.

The slaves regarded Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angélique, and Marie Claudette as powerful sorceresses. They came to them for the curing of illnesses; and they believed that their mistresses “knew” everything.

But there is scant evidence that anyone other than the slaves took these stories seriously. Or that the Mayfair Witches aroused either suspicion or “irrational” fear among their peers. The preeminence of the family remained completely unchallenged. People vied for invitations to Maye Faire. The family entertained often and lavishly. Both the men and the women were much sought after in the marriage market.

How much other members of the family understood about the power of the witches is uncertain. Angélique had both a brother and a sister who emigrated to France, and another brother, Maurice, who remained at home, having two sons-Louis-Pierre and Martin-who also married and remained part of the Saint-Domingue family. They later went to Louisiana with Marie Claudette. Maurice and his sons went by the name of Mayfair, as do their descendants in Louisiana to the present day.

Of Angélique’s six children, two girls died early, and two boys emigrated to France, the other, Lestan, going to Louisiana with his sister Marie Claudette.

The men of the family never attempted to claim the plantation or to control the money, though under French law they were entitled to do both. On the contrary, they tended to accept the dominance of the chosen women; and financial records as well as gossip indicate that they were enormously wealthy men.

Perhaps some compensation was paid to them for their submissiveness. Or perhaps they were accepting by nature. No tales of rebellion or quarrels have been passed on. The brother of Angélique who died during the storm on the night of Charlotte’s death was a young boy said to be kindly and acquiescent by nature. Her brother Maurice was known to be an agreeable, likable man, who participated in the management of the plantation.

Several descendants of those who emigrated to France during the 1700s were executed in the French Revolution. None of those emigrating before 1770 used the name Mayfair. And the Talamasca has lost track of these various lines.

During this entire period the family was Catholic. It supported the Catholic church in Saint-Domingue, and one son of Pierre Fontenay, Charlotte’s brother-in-law, became a priest. Two women in the family became Carmelite nuns. One was executed in the French Revolution, along with all the members of her community.

The money of the colonial family, during all these years as their coffee and sugar and tobacco poured into Europe and into North America, was frequently deposited in foreign banks. The degree of wealth was enormous even for the multimillionaires of Hispaniola, and the family seems always to have possessed quite fantastic amounts of gold and jewels. This is not at all typical of a planter family, whose fortunes are generally connected with the land and easily subject to ruin.

As a consequence the Mayfair family survived the Haitian revolution with enormous wealth, though all of its land holdings on the island were irretrievably lost.

It was Marie Claudette, who established the Mayfair legacy in 1789, right before the revolution that forced the family to leave Saint-Domingue. Her parents were by that time dead. The legacy was later enhanced and refined by Marie Claudette after she was settled in Louisiana, at which time she shifted a great portion of her money from banks in Holland and Rome to banks in London and in New York.

The legacy is an immensely complicated and quasi-legal series of arrangements, made largely through the banks holding the money, which establishes a fortune that cannot be manipulated by any one country’s inheritance laws. Essentially it conserves the bulk of the Mayfair money and property in the hands of one person in each generation, this heir to the fortune being designated by the living beneficiary, except that should the beneficiary die without making the designation, the money goes to her eldest daughter. Only if there is no living female descendant will the legacy go to a man. However, the beneficiary may designate a male, if she chooses.

To the knowledge of the Talamasca, the beneficiary of the legacy has never died without designating an heir, and the legacy has never passed to a male child. Rowan Mayfair, the youngest living Mayfair Witch, was designated at birth by her mother Deirdre, who was designated at birth by Antha, who was designated by Stella, and so forth and so on.

However, there have been times in the history of the family when the designee has been changed. For example, Marie Claudette designated her first daughter, Claire Marie, and then later changed this designation to Marguerite, her third child, and there is no evidence that Claire Marie ever knew that she was designated, though Marguerite knew she was the heiress long before Marie Claudette’s death.

The legacy also provides enormous benefits for the beneficiary’s other children (the siblings of the heir) in each generation, the amount for women usually being twice that given to the men. However, no member of the family could inherit from the legacy unless he or she used the name Mayfair publicly and privately. Where laws prohibited the heir from using the name legally, it was nevertheless used customarily, and never legally challenged.

This served to keep alive the name of Mayfair well into the present century. And in numerous instances, members of the family passed the rule on to their descendants along with their fortunes, though nothing legally required them to do so, once they were one step removed from the original legacy.

The original legacy also contains complex provisions for destitute Mayfairs claiming assistance, as long as they have always used the name Mayfair and are descended from those who used it. The beneficiary may also leave up to ten percent of the legacy to other “Mayfairs” who are not her children, but once more, the name Mayfair must be in active use by such a person or the provisions of the will are null and void.

In the twentieth century, numerous “cousins” have received money from the legacy, primarily through Mary Beth Mayfair, and her daughter Stella, but some also through. Deirdre, the money being administered for her by Cortland Mayfair. Many of these people are now “rich,” as the bequest was frequently made in connection with investments or business ventures of which the beneficiary or her administrator approved.

The Talamasca knows today of some five hundred and fifty descendants all using the name Mayfair; easily one half of these people know the core family in New Orleans, and know something about the legacy, though they are many generations removed from their original inheritance.

Stella gathered together some four hundred Mayfairs and related families in 1927 at the house on First Street, and there is considerable evidence that she was interested in the other psychic members of the family, but the story of Stella will be related further on.

The Talamasca has investigated numerous descendants, and found that among them mild psychic powers are common. Some exhibit exceptional psychic powers. It is also common to speak of the ancestors of Saint-Domingue as “witches” and to say that they were “lovers of the devil” and sold their souls to him, and that the devil made the family rich.

These tales are now told lightly and often with humor or with wonder and curiosity, and the majority of the descendants with whom the Talamasca has made limited contact do not really know anything concrete about their history. They do not even know the names of the “witches.” They know nothing of Suzanne or Deborah, though they do banter about statements such as “Our ancestors were burnt at the stake in Europe,” and “We have a long history of witchcraft.” They have rather vague notions about the legacy, knowing that one person is the main beneficiary of the legacy and they know the name of that one person, but not much else.

However, descendants in the New Orleans area know a great deal about the core family. They attend wakes and funerals, and were gathered together on countless occasions by Mary Beth and by Stella, as we shall see. The Talamasca possesses numerous pictures of these people, in family gatherings and singly.

Stories among all these people of seeing ghosts, of precognition, of “phone calls from the dead,” and of mild telekinesis are by no means uncommon. Mayfairs who know almost nothing of the New Orleans family have been involved in no less than ten different ghost stories contained in various published books. Three different distantly related Mayfairs have exhibited enormous powers. But there is no evidence that they understood or used these powers to any purpose. To the best of our knowledge, they have no connection to the witches, to the legacy, to the emerald necklace, or to Lasher.

There is a saying that all the Mayfairs “feel it” when the beneficiary of the legacy dies.

Descendants of the Mayfair family fear Carlotta Mayfair, the guardian of Deirdre Mayfair, the present beneficiary, and regard her as a “witch,” but the word in this case is more closely related to the vernacular term for an unpleasant woman than to anything pertaining to the supernatural.

SUMMARY OF MATERIALS

RELATING TO THE SAINT-DOMINGUE YEARS

To return to an appraisal of the family in the seventeen hundreds, it is undeniably characterized by strength, success, and wealth, by longevity and enduring relationships. And the witches of the period must be perceived as extremely successful. It can safely be assumed that they controlled Lasher completely to their satisfaction. However, we honestly do not know whether or not this is true. We simply have no evidence to the contrary. There are no specific sightings of Lasher. There is no evidence of tragedy within the family.

Accidents befalling enemies of the family, the family’s continued accumulation of jewels and gold, and the countless stories told by the slaves as to the omnipotence or infallibility of their mistresses constitute the only evidence of supernatural intervention, and none of this is reliable evidence.

Closer observation through trained investigators might have told a very different tale.

THE MAYFAIR FAMILY IN LOUISIANA

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Several days before the Haitian revolution (the only successful slave uprising in history), Marie Claudette was warned by her slaves that she and her family might be massacred. She and her children, her brother Lestan and his wife and children, and her uncle Maurice and his two sons and their wives and children escaped with apparent ease and an amazing amount of personal possessions, a veritable caravan of wagons leaving Maye Faire for the nearby port. Some fifty of Marie Claudette’s personal slaves, half of whom were of mixed blood, and some of whom were undoubtedly the progeny of Mayfair men, went with the family to Louisiana. We can assume that numerous books and written records also went with them, and some of these materials have been glimpsed since, as these reports will show.

Almost from the moment of their arrival in Louisiana, the Talamasca was able to acquire more information about the Mayfair Witches. Several of our contacts in Louisiana were already established on account of two dramatic hauntings that had taken place in that city; and at least two of our members had visited the city, one to investigate a haunting and the other on his way to other places in the South.

Another reason for the increased information was that the Mayfair family itself seems to have become more “visible” to people. Torn from its position of near feudal power and isolation in Saint-Domingue, it was thrown into contact with countless new persons, including merchants, churchmen, slave traders, brokers, colonial officials, and the like. And the wealth of the Mayfairs, as well as their sudden appearance on the scene so to speak, aroused immense curiosity.

All sorts of tales were collected about them from the very hour of their arrival. And the flow of information became even richer as time went on.

Changes in the nineteenth century also contributed, inevitably, to the increased flow of information. The growth of newspapers and periodicals, the increase in the keeping of detailed records, the invention of photography, all made it easier to compile a more detailed anecdotal history of the Mayfair family.

Indeed, the growth of New Orleans into a teeming and prosperous port city created an environment in which dozens of people could be questioned about the Mayfairs without anyone’s ever noticing us or our investigators.

So what must be borne in mind as we study the continued history of the Mayfairs is that, though the family appears tochange dramatically in the nineteenth century, it could be that the family did not change at all. The only change may have been in our investigative methods. We learned more about what went on behind closed doors.

In other words, if we knew more about the Saint-Domingue years, we might have seen greater continuity. But then again, perhaps not.

Whatever the case, the witches of the 1800s-with the exception of Mary Beth Mayfair, who was not born until 1872-appear to have been much weaker than those who ruled the family during the Saint-Domingue years. And the decline of the Mayfair Witches, which became so marked in the twentieth century, can be seen-on the basis of our fragmentary evidence-to have begun before the Civil War. But the picture is more complicated than that, as we shall see.

Changing attitudes and changing times in general may have played a significant role in the decline of the witches. That is, as the family became less aristocratic and feudal, and more “civilized” or “bourgeois,” its members might have become more confused regarding their heritage and their powers, and more generally inhibited. For though the planter class of Louisiana referred to itself as “the aristocracy,” it was definitely not aristocratic in the European sense of that word, and was characterized by what we now define as “middle-class values.”

“Modern psychiatry” also seems to have played a role in inhibiting and confusing the Mayfair Witches, and we will go into that in greater detail when we deal with the Mayfair family in the twentieth century.

But for the most part we can only speculate about these things. Even when direct contact between the order and the Mayfair Witches was established in the twentieth century, we were unable to learn as much as we had hoped.

Bearing all this in mind …

THE HISTORY CONTINUES …

Upon arrival in New Orleans, Marie Claudette moved her family into a large house in the Rue Dumaine, and immediately acquired an enormous plantation at Riverbend, south of the city, building a plantation house that was larger and more luxurious than its counterpart in Saint-Domingue. This plantation was called La Victoire at Riverbend, and was known later simply as Riverbend. It was carried away by the river in 1896; however, much of the land there is still owned by the Mayfairs, and is presently the site of an oil refinery.

Maurice Mayfair, Marie Claudette’s uncle, lived out his life at this plantation, but his two sons purchased adjacent plantations of their own, where they lived in close contact with Marie Claudette’s family. A few descendants of these men stayed on that land up until 1890, and many other descendants moved to New Orleans. They made up the ever increasing number of “cousins” who were a constant factor in Mayfair life for the next one hundred years.

There are numerous published drawings of Marie Claudette’s plantation house and even several photographs in old books, now out of print. It was large even for the period and, predating the ostentatious Greek Revival style, it was a simple colonial structure with plain rounded columns, a pitched roof, and galleries, much like the house in Saint-Domingue. It was two rooms thick, with hallways bisecting it from north to south and east to west, and had a full lower floor, as well as a very high and spacious attic floor.

The plantation included two enormous garçonnières where the male members of the family lived, including Lestan in his later widowhood, and his four sons, all of whom went by the name of Mayfair.” (Maurice always lived in the main house.)

Marie Claudette was every bit as successful in Louisiana as she and her ancestors had been in Saint-Domingue. Once again, she cultivated sugar, but gave up the cultivation of coffee and tobacco. She bought smaller plantations for each of Lestan’s sons, and gave lavish gifts to their children and their children’s children.

From the first weeks of their arrival, the family was regarded with awe and suspicion. Marie Claudette frightened people, and entered into a number of disputes in setting up business in Louisiana, and was not above threatening anyone who stood in her path. She bought up enormous numbers of slaves for her fields, and in the tradition of her ancestors, treated these slaves very well. But she did not treat merchants very well, and drove more than one merchant off her property with a whip, insisting that he had tried to cheat her.

She was described by the local witnesses as “formidable” and “unpleasant,” though still a handsome woman. And her personal slaves and free mixed-blood servants were greatly feared by the slaves she purchased in Louisiana.

Within a short time, she was heralded as a sorceress by the slaves on her land; it was said that she could not be deceived, and that she could give “the evil eye,” and that she had a demon whom she could send after anyone who crossed her. Her brother Lestan was more generally liked, and apparently fell in at once with the drinking and gambling planter class of the area.

Henri Marie Landry, her husband, seems to have been a likable but passive individual who left absolutely everything to his wife. He read botanical journals from Europe and collected rare flowers from all over the South and designed and cultivated an enormous garden at Riverbend.

He died in bed, in 1824, after receiving the sacraments.

In 1799 Marie Claudette gave birth to the last of her children, Marguerite, who later became the designee of the legacy, and who lived in Marie Claudette’s shadow until Marie Claudette’s death in 1831.

There was much gossip about Marie Claudette’s family life. It was said that her oldest daughter, Claire Marie, was feebleminded, and there are numerous stories about this young woman wandering about in her nightgown, and saying strange though often delightful things to people. She saw ghosts and talked to them all the time, sometimes right in the middle of supper before amazed guests.

She also “knew” things about people and would blurt out these secrets at odd moments. She was kept at home, and though more than one man fell in love with her, Marie Claudette never allowed Claire Marie to marry. In her old age, after the death of her husband, Henri Marie Landry, Marie Claudette slept with Claire Marie, to watch her and keep her from roaming about and getting lost.

She was often seen on the galleries in her nightgown.

Marie Claudette’s only son, Pierre, was never allowed to marry either. He “fell in love” twice, but both times gave in to his mother when she refused to grant permission for the wedding. His second “secret fiancée” tried to take her own life when she was rejected by Pierre. After that he seldom went out, but was often seen in the company of his mother.

Pierre was a doctor of sorts to the slaves, curing them with various potions and remedies. He even studied medicine for a while with an old drunken doctor in New Orleans. But nothing much came of this. He also enjoyed botany and spent much time working in the garden, and drawing pictures of flowers. Botanical sketches done by Pierre are in existence today in the famous Mayfair house on First Street.

It was no secret that about the year 1820 Pierre took a quadroon mistress in New Orleans, an exquisite young woman who might have passed for white, according to the gossip. By her Pierre had two children, a daughter who went north and passed into the white race, and a son, François, born in 1825, who remained in Louisiana and later handled substantial amounts of paperwork for the family in New Orleans. A genteel clerk, he seems to have been thought of affectionately by the white Mayfairs, especially the men who came into town to conduct business.

Everyone in the family apparently adored Marguerite. When she was ten years old, her portrait was painted, showing her wearing the famous emerald necklace. This is an odd picture, because the child is small and the necklace is large. As of 1927, the picture was hanging on a wall in the First Street house in New Orleans.

Marguerite was delicate of build, with dark hair and large slightly upturned black eyes. She was considered a beauty, and called La Petite Gypsy by her nurses, who loved to brush her long black wavy hair. Unlike her feebleminded sister and her compliant brother, she had a fierce temper and a violent and unpredictable sense of humor.

At age twenty, against Marie Claudette’s wishes, she married Tyrone Clifford McNamara, an opera singer, and another “very handsome” man, of an extremely impractical nature, who toured widely in the United States, starring in operas in New York, Boston, St. Louis, and other cities. It was only after he had left on one such tour that Marguerite returned from New Orleans to Riverbend and was received once more by her mother. In 1827 and 1828, she gave birth to boys, Rémy and Julien. McNamara came home frequently during this period, but only for brief visits. In New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other places where he appeared he was famous for womanizing and drinking, and for getting into brawls. But he was a very popular “Irish tenor” of the period, and he packed houses wherever he went.

In 1829, Tyrone Clifford McNamara and an Irishwoman, presumably his mistress, were found dead after a fire in a little house in the French Quarter which had been bought for the woman by McNamara. Police reports and newspaper stories of the time indicate the pair was overcome with smoke when trying vainly to escape. The lock on the front door had been broken. There was a child from this union, apparently, who was not in the house at the time of the fire. He later went north.

This fire engendered considerable gossip in New Orleans, and it was at this time that the Talamasca gained more personal information about the family than it had been able to acquire in years.

A French Quarter merchant told one of our “witnesses” that Marguerite had sent her devil to take care of “those two” and that Marguerite knew more about voodoo than any black person in Louisiana. Marguerite was reputed to have a voodoo altar in her home, to work with unguents and potions as cures and for love, and to go everywhere in the company of two beautiful quadroon servants, Marie and Virginie, and a mulatto coachman named Octavius. Octavius was said to be a bastard son of one of Maurice Mayfair’s sons, Louis-Pierre, but this was not a well-circulated tale.

Marie Claudette was still living then, but seldom went out anymore, and it was said that she had taught her daughter the black arts learned in Haiti. It was Marguerite who drew attention everywhere that she went, especially in view of the fact that her brother Pierre lived a fairly respectable life, was very discreet about his quadroon mistress, and Uncle Lestan’s children were also entirely respectable and well liked.

Even by her late twenties, Marguerite had become a gaunt and somewhat frightening figure, with often unkempt hair and glowing dark eyes, and a sudden disconcerting laugh. She always wore the Mayfair emerald.

She received merchants and brokers and guests in an immense book-lined study at Riverbend which was full of “horrible and disgusting” things such as human skulls, stuffed and mounted swamp animals, trophy heads from African safaris, and animal-skin rugs. She had numerous mysterious bottles and jars, and people claimed to have seen human body parts in these jars. She was reputed to be an avid collector of trinkets and amulets made by slaves, especially those who had recently been imported from Africa.

There were several cases of “possession” among her slaves at the time, which involved frightened slave witnesses running away and priests coming to the plantation. In every case, the victim was chained up and exorcism was tried without success, and the “possessed” creature died either from hunger because he could not be made to eat, or from some injury sustained in his wild convulsions.

There were rumors that such a possessed slave was chained in the attic, but the local authorities never acted upon this investigation.

At least four different witnesses mention Marguerite’s “mysterious dark-haired lover,” a man seen in her private apartments by her slaves, and also seen in her suite at the St. Louis Hotel when she came into New Orleans, and in her box at the French Opera. Much gossip surrounded the question of this lover or companion. The mysterious manner in which he came and went puzzled everyone.

“Now you see him, now you don’t,” was the saying.

These constitute the first mentions of Lasher in over one hundred years.

Marguerite married almost immediately after Tyrone Clifford McNamara’s death, a tall penniless riverboat gambler named Arlington Kerr who vanished completely six months after the marriage. Nothing is known about him except that he was “as beautiful as a woman,” and a drunkard, and played cards all night long in the garçonnière with various drunken guests and with the mulatto coachman. It is worth noting that more was heard about this man than was ever seen of him. That is, most of our stories about him are thirdhand or even fourthhand. It is interesting to speculate that perhaps such a person never existed.

He was however legally the father of Katherine Mayfair, born 1830, who became the next beneficiary of the legacy and the first of the Mayfair Witches in many generations who did not know her grandmother, as Marie Claudette died the following year.

Slaves up and down the river coast circulated the tale that Marguerite had murdered Arlington Kerr and put his body in pieces in various jars, but no one ever investigated this tale, and the story let out by the family was that Arlington Kerr could not adapt to the planter’s life, and so left Louisiana, penniless as he had come, and Marguerite said “good riddance.”

In her twenties, Marguerite was famous for attending the dances of the slaves, and even for dancing with them. Without doubt she had the Mayfair power to heal, and presided at births regularly. But as time passed she was accused of stealing the babies of her slaves, and this is the first Mayfair Witch whom the slaves not only feared but came to personally abhor.

After the age of thirty-five, she did not actively manage the plantation but put everything in the hands of her cousin Augustin, a son of her uncle Lestan, who proved a more than capable manager. Pierre, Marguerite’s brother, helped somewhat in the decisions that were made; but it was principally Augustin, answering only to Marguerite, who ran things.

Augustin was feared by the slaves, but they apparently regarded him as predictable and sane.

Whatever, the plantation during these years made a fortune. And the Mayfairs continued to make enormous deposits in foreign banks and northern American banks, and to throw money around wherever they went.

By forty, Marguerite was “a hag,” according to observers, though she could have been a handsome woman had she bothered to pin up her hair and give even the smallest attention to her clothing.

When her eldest son, Julien, was fifteen, he began to manage the plantation along with his cousin Augustin, and gradually Julien took over the management completely. At his eighteenth birthday supper, an unfortunate “accident” took place with a new pistol, at which time “poor Uncle Augustin” was shot in the head and killed by Julien.

This may have been a legitimate accident, as every report of it indicates that Julien was “prostrate with grief afterwards. More than one story maintains that the two were wrestling with the gun when the accident happened. One story says that Julien had challenged Augustin’s honesty, and Augustin had threatened to blow his own brains out on account of this, and Julien was trying to stop him. Another story says that Augustin accused Julien of a “crime against nature” with another boy and on that account they began to quarrel, and Augustin brought out the gun, which Julien tried to take from him.

Whatever the case, no one was ever charged with any crime, and Julien became the undisputed manager of the plantation. And even at the tender age of fifteen, Julien had proved well suited to it, and restored order among the slaves, and doubled the output of the plantation in the next decade. Throughout his life he remained the true manager of the property, though Katherine, his younger sister, inherited the legacy.

Marguerite spent the last decades of her very long life reading all the time in the library full of “horrible and disgusting” things. She talked to herself out loud almost all the time. And would stand in front of mirrors and have very long conversations in English with her reflection. She would also talk at length to her plants, many of which had come from the original garden created by her father, Henri Marie Landry.

She was very fond of her many cousins, children and grandchildren of Maurice Mayfair and Lestan Mayfair, and they were fiercely loyal to her, though she engendered talk continuously.

The slaves grew to hate Marguerite and would not go near her, except for her quadroons Virginie and Marie, and it was said that Virginie bullied her a bit in her old age.

A runaway in 1859 told the parish priest that Marguerite had stolen her baby and cut it up for the devil. The priest told the local authorities and there were inquiries, but apparently Julien and Katherine, who were very well liked and admired by everyone and quite capably running Riverbend, explained that the slave woman had miscarried and there was no baby to speak of, but that it had been baptized and buried properly.

Whatever else was going on, Rémy, Julien, and Katherine grew up apparently happy and inundated with luxury, enjoying all that antebellum New Orleans had to offer at its height, including the theater, the opera, and endless private entertainments.

They frequently came to town as a trio, with only a quadroon governess to watch over them, staying in a lavish suite at the St. Louis Hotel and buying out the fashionable stores before their return to the country. There was a shocking story at the time that Katherine wanted to see the famous quadroon balls where the young women of mixed blood danced with their white suitors; and so she went with her quadroon maid to the balls, and had herself presented there as being of mixed blood, and fooled everyone. She had very dark hair and dark eyes and pale skin, and did not look in the least African, but then many of the quadroons did not. Julien had a hand in the affair, introducing his sister to several white men who had not met her before and believed her to be a quadroon.

The tale stunned the old guard when they heard it. The young white men who had danced with Katherine, believing her to be “colored,” were humiliated and outraged. Katherine and Julien and Rémy thought the story was amusing. Julien fought at least one duel over the affair, badly wounding his opponent.

In 1857, when Katherine was seventeen, she and her brothers bought a piece of property on First Street in the Garden District of New Orleans and hired Darcy Monahan, the Irish architect, to build a house there, which is the present Mayfair home. It is likely that the purchase was the idea of Julien, who wanted a permanent city residence.

Whatever the case, Katherine and Darcy Monahan fell deeply in love, and Julien proved to be insanely jealous of his sister and would not permit her to marry so young. An enormous family squabble ensued. Julien moved out of the family home at Riverbend and spent some time in a fiat in the French Quarter with a male companion of whom we know little except that he was from New York and rumored to be very handsome and devoted to Julien in a way that caused people to whisper that the pair were lovers.

The gossip further relates that Katherine stole away to New Orleans to be alone with Darcy Monahan in the unfinished house at First Street, and there the two lovers pledged their fealty in roofless rooms, or in the wild unfinished garden. Julien became increasingly miserable in his anger and disapproval, and implored his mother, Marguerite, to interfere, but Marguerite would take no interest in the matter.

At last Katherine threatened to run away if her wishes were not granted; and Marguerite gave her official consent to a small church wedding. In a daguerreotype taken after the ceremony, Katherine is wearing the Mayfair emerald.

Katherine and Darcy moved into the house on First Street in 1858, and Monahan became the most fashionable architect and builder in uptown New Orleans. Many witnesses of the period mention Katherine’s beauty and Darcy’s charm, and what fun it was to attend the balls given by the two in their new home. The Mayfair emerald is mentioned any number of times.

It was no secret that Julien. Mayfair was so bitter about the marriage, however, that he would not even visit his sister. He did go back to Riverbend, but spent much time in his French Quarter flat. At Riverbend, in 1863, Julien and Darcy and Katherine had a violent quarrel. Before the servants and some guests, Darcy begged Julien to accept him, to be affectionate to Katherine, and to be “reasonable.”

Julien threatened to kill Darcy. And Katherine and Darcy left, never returning as a couple to Riverbend.

Katherine gave birth to a boy named Clay in 1859 and thereafter to three children who all died in babyhood. Then in 1865, she gave birth to another boy named Vincent, and to two more children who died in babyhood.

It was said that these lost children broke her heart, that she took their deaths as a judgment from God, and that she changed somewhat from the gay, high-spirited girl she had been to a diffident and confused woman. Nevertheless her life with Darcy seems to have been rich and full. She loved him very much, and did everything to support him in his various building enterprises.

We should mention here that the Civil War had brought no harm whatever to the Mayfair family or fortune. New Orleans was captured and occupied very early on, with the result that it was never shelled or burned. And the Mayfairs had much too much money invested in Europe to be affected by the occupation or subsequent boom-and-bust cycles in Louisiana.

Union troops were never quartered on their property, and they were in business with “the Yanquees” almost as soon as the occupation of New Orleans began. Indeed Katherine and Darcy Monahan entertained Yanquees at First Street much to the bitter disgust of Julien and Rémy, and other members of the family.

This happy life came to an end when Darcy himself died in 1871 of yellow fever. Katherine, broken-hearted and half mad, pleaded with her brother Julien to come to her. He was in his French Quarter flat at the time, and came to her immediately, setting foot in the First Street house for the first time since its completion.

Julien then remained with Katherine night and day while the servants took care of the forgotten children. He slept with her in the master bedroom over the library on the north side of the house, and even people passing in the street below could hear Katherine’s continued crying and miserable exclamations of grief over Darcy and her dead babies.

Twice, Katherine tried to take her life through poison. The servants told stories of doctors rushing to the house, of Katherine being given antidotes and made to walk about though she was only semiconscious and ready to drop, and of a distraught Julien who could not keep back his tears as he attended to her.

Finally Julien brought Katherine and the two boys back home to Riverbend, and there in 1872 Katherine gave birth to Mary Beth Mayfair, who was baptized and registered as Darcy Monahan’s child, though it seems highly unlikely that Mary Beth was Darcy’s child, since she was born ten and one-half months after the death of her father. Julien is almost certainly Mary Beth’s father.

As far as the Talamasca could determine the servants spread the tale that Julien was, and so did various nurses who took care of the children. It was common knowledge that Julien and Katherine slept in the same bed, behind closed doors, and that Katherine could not have had a lover after Darcy’s death as she never went out of the house except to make the journey home to the plantation.

But this tale, though circulated widely among the servant class, never seems to have been accepted or acknowledged by the peers of the Mayfairs.

Katherine was not only completely respectable in every other regard, she was enormously rich and generous and well liked for it, often giving money freely to family and friends whom the war had devastated. Her attempts at suicide had aroused only pity. And the old tales of her having gone to the quadroon balls had been completely erased from the public memory. Also the financial influence of the family was so far-reaching at the time as to be almost immeasurable. Julien was very popular in New Orleans society. The talk soon died away and it is doubtful that it ever had any impact whatsoever on the private or public life of the Mayfairs.

Katherine is described in 1872 as still pretty, in spite of being prematurely gray, and was said to have a wholesome and engaging manner that easily won people over. A lovely and very well-preserved tintype of the period shows her seated in a chair with the baby in her lap, asleep, and the two little boys beside her. She appears healthy and serene, an attractive woman with a hint of sadness in her eyes. She is not wearing the Mayfair emerald.

While Mary Beth and her older brothers, Clay and Vincent, were growing up in the country, Julien’s brother, Rémy Mayfair, and his wife-a Mayfair cousin and grandchild of Lestan Mayfair-took possession of the Mayfair house, and lived there for years, having three children, all of whom went by the name of Mayfair and two of whom have descendants in Louisiana.

It was during this time that Julien began to visit the house, and to make an office for himself in the library there. (This library, and master bedroom above it, were part of a wing added to the original structure by Darcy in 1867.) Julien had bookcases built into two walls of the room, and stocked them with many of the Mayfair family records that had always been kept at the plantation. We know that many of these books were very very old and some were written in Latin. Julien also moved many old paintings to the house, including “portraits from the 1600s.”

Julien loved books and filled the library as well with the classics and with popular novels. He adored Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, and also Charles Dickens.

There is some evidence that quarrels with Katherine drove Julien into town, away from Riverbend, though he never neglected his duties there. But if Katherine drove him away, certainly his little niece (or daughter) Mary Beth brought him back, for he was always swooping down upon her with cartloads of gifts and stealing her away for weeks on end in New Orleans. This devotion did not prevent him from getting married, in 1875, to a Mayfair cousin, a descendant of Maurice and a celebrated beauty.

Her name was Suzette Mayfair, and Julien so loved her that he commissioned no less than ten portraits of her during the first years of their marriage. They lived together in the First Street house apparently in complete harmony with Rémy and his family, perhaps because in every respect Rémy deferred to Julien.

Suzette seems to have loved little Mary Beth, though she had four children of her own in the next five years, including three boys and a girl, named Jeannette.

Katherine never voluntarily returned to the First Street house. It reminded her too much of Darcy. When in old age she was forced to return, it unsettled her mind; and at the turn of the century she became a tragic figure, eternally dressed in black, and roaming the gardens in search of Darcy.

Of all the Mayfair Witches studied to date, Katherine was perhaps the weakest and the least significant. Her children Clay and Vincent were both entirely respectable and unremarkable. Clay and Vincent married early and had large families, and their descendants now live in New Orleans.

What we know seems to indicate that Katherine was “broken” by Darcy’s death. And is thereafter never described as anything but “sweet” and “gentle” and “patient.” She never took part in the management of Riverbend, but left it all to Julien, who eventually put it in the hands of Clay and Vincent Mayfair and of paid overseers.

Katherine spent more and more of her time with her mother, Marguerite, who had become with each decade ever more peculiar. A visitor in the 1880s describes Marguerite as “quite impossible,” a crone who went about night and day in stained white lace, and spent hours reading aloud in a horrid unmodulated voice in her library. She is said to have insulted people carelessly and at random. She was fond of her niece Angeline (Rémy’s daughter) and of Katherine. She constantly mistook Katherine’s children Clay and Vincent for their uncles, Julien or Rémy. Katherine was described as gray-haired and worn, and always at work on her embroidery.

Katherine seems to have been a strict Catholic in later life. She went to daily Mass at the parish church and lavish christening parties were held for all of Clay’s children and Vincent’s children.

Marguerite did not die until she was ninety-two, at which time Katherine was sixty-one years old.

But other than the tales of incest, which characterize the Mayfair history since the time of Jeanne Louise and Pierre, there are no occult stories about Katherine.

The black servants, slave or free, were never afraid of Katherine. There are no sightings of any mysterious dark-haired lover. And there is no evidence to indicate that Darcy Monahan died of anything but plain old yellow fever.

It has even been speculated by the members of the Talamasca that Julien was actually “the witch” of this entire period-that perhaps no other natural medium was presented in this generation of the family, and as Marguerite grew old, Julien began to exhibit the power. It has also been speculated that Katherine was a natural medium but that she rejected her role when she fell in love with Darcy, and that is why Julien was so against her marriage, for Julien knew the secrets of the family.

Indeed, we have an abundance of information to suggest that Julien was a witch, if not the witch of the Mayfair family.

It is therefore imperative that we study Julien in some detail. As late as the 1950s, fascinating information about Julien was recounted to us. At some point, the history of Julien must be enlarged through further investigation and further collation and examination of the existing documents. Our reports on the Mayfairs throughout these decades are voluminous and repetitive. And there are numerous public and recorded mentions of Julien, and there are three oil portraits of him in American museums, and one in London.

Julien’s black hair turned completely white while he was still quite young, and his numerous photographs as well as these oil paintings show him to be a man of considerable presence and charm, as well as physical beauty. Some have said that he resembled his opera singer father, Tyrone Clifford McNamara.

But it has struck some members of the Talamasca that Julien strongly resembled his ancestors Deborah Mayfair and Petyr van Abel, who of course in no way resembled each other. Julien seems a remarkable combination of these two forebears. He has Petyr’s height, profile, and blue eyes, and Deborah’s delicate cheekbones and mouth. His expression in several of his portraits is amazingly like that of Deborah.

It is as if the nineteenth-century portraitist had seen the Rembrandt of Deborah-which was of course impossible as it has always been in our vault-and consciously sought to imitate the “personality” captured by Rembrandt. We can only assume that Julien evinced that personality. It is also worth noting that in most of his photographs, in spite of the somber pose and other formal aspects of the work, Julien is smiling.

It is a “Mona Lisa” smile, but it is nevertheless a smile, and strikes a bizarre note since it is wholly out of keeping with nineteenth-century photographic conventions. Five tintypes of Julien in our possession show the same subtle little smile. And smiles in tintypes of this era are completely unknown. It is as if Julien found “picture taking” amusing. Photographs taken near the end of Julien’s life, in the twentieth century, also show a smile, but it is broader and more generous. It is worth noting that in these later pictures he appears extremely good-natured, and quite simply happy.

Julien was certainly the magnate of the family all of his life, more or less governing nieces and nephews as well as his sister, Katherine, and his brother, Rémy.

That he incited fear and confusion in his enemies was well-known. It was reported by one furious cotton factor that Julien had, in a dispute, caused another man’s clothing to burst into flame. The fire was hastily put out, and the man recovered from his rather serious burns, and no action was ever taken against Julien. Indeed, many who heard the story-including the local police-did not believe it. Julien laughed whenever he was asked about it. But there is also a story, told by only one witness, that Julien could set anything on fire by his will, and that his mother teased him about it.

In another famous incident, Julien caused all the objects of a room to fly about when he went into a rage, and then could not bring a halt to the confusion. He went out, shut the door on the little storm, and sank into helpless laughter. There is also an isolated story, dependent upon one witness, that Julien murdered one of his boyhood tutors.

None of the Mayfairs up to this period attended any regular school. But all were well educated privately. Julien was no exception, having several tutors during his youth. One of these, a handsome Yankee from Boston, was found drowned in a bayou near Riverbend, and it was said that Julien strangled him and threw him in the water. Again, this was never investigated, and the entire Mayfair family was indignant at this gossip. Servants who spread the story at once retracted it.

This Boston schoolteacher had been a great source of information about the family. He gossiped continuously about Marguerite’s strange habits, and about how the slaves feared her. It is from him that we gained our descriptions of her bottles and jars full of strange body parts and objects. He claimed to have fought off advances from Marguerite. Indeed, so vicious and unwise was his gossip that more than one person warned the family about it.

Whether Julien did kill the man cannot be known, but if he did, he had-given the attitudes of the day-at least some reason.

Julien was said to give out foreign gold coins as if they were copper pennies. Waiters at the fashionable restaurants vied with one another to serve his table. He was a fabled horseman and maintained several horses of his own, as well as two carriages and teams in his stables near to First Street.

Even into old age, he often rode his chestnut mare all the way up St. Charles Avenue to Carrolton and back in the morning. He would toss coins to the black children whom he passed.

After his death, four different witnesses claimed to have seen his ghost riding through the mist on St. Charles Avenue, and these stories were printed in the newspapers of the period.

Julien was also a great supporter of the Mardi Gras, which began as we know it today around 1872. He entertained lavishly at the First Street house during the Mardi Gras season.

It was also said countless times that Julien had the gift of “bilocation,” that is, he could be in two places at the same time. This story was widely circulated among the servants. Julien would appear to be in the library, for instance, but then would be sighted almost immediately in the back garden. Or a maidservant servant would see Julien go out the front door, and then turn around to see him coming down the stairway.

More than one servant quit working in the First Street house rather than cope with the “strange Monsieur Julien.”

It has been speculated that appearances of Lasher might have been responsible for this confusion. Whatever the case, later descriptions of Lasher’s clothes bear a remarkable resemblance to those worn by Julien in two different portraits. Lasher as cited throughout the twentieth century is invariably dressed as Julien might have been dressed in the 1870s and 1880s.

Julien stuffed handfuls of bills into the pockets of the priests who came to call or the visiting Little Sisters of the Poor or other such persons. He gave lavishly to the parish church, and to every charitable fund whose officials approached him. He often said that money didn’t matter to him. Yet he was a tireless accumulator of wealth.

We know that he loved his mother, Marguerite, and though he did not spend much time in her company, he purchased books for her all the time in New Orleans, and ordered them for her from New York and Europe. Only once did a quarrel between them attract attention and that was over Katherine’s marriage to Darcy Monahan, at which time Marguerite struck Julien several times in front of the servants. By all accounts he was deeply emotionally hurt and simply withdrew, in tears, from his mother’s company.

After the death of Julien’s wife, Suzette, Julien spent less time than ever at Riverbend. His children were brought up entirely at First Street. Julien, who had always been a debonair figure, took a more active role in society. Long before that, however, he appeared at the opera and the theater with his little niece (or daughter) Mary Beth. He gave many charity balls and actively supported young amateur musicians, presenting them in small private concerts in the double parlor at First Street.

Julien not only made huge profits at Riverbend, he also went into merchandising with two New York affiliates and made a considerable fortune in that endeavor. He bought up property all over New Orleans, which he left to his niece Mary Beth, even though she was the designee of the Mayfair legacy and thereby stood to inherit a fortune larger than Julien’s.

There seems little doubt that Julien’s wife, Suzette, was a disappointment to him. Servants and friends spoke of many unfortunate arguments. It was said that Suzette for all her beauty was deeply religious and Julien’s high-spirited nature disturbed her. She eschewed the jewels and fine clothes which he wanted her to wear. She did not like to go out at night. She disliked loud music. A lovely creature, with pale skin and shining eyes, Suzette was always sickly and died young after the birth in rapid succession of her four children, and there is no doubt that the one girl, Jeannette, had some sort of “second sight” or psychic power.

More than once Jeannette was heard by the servants to scream in uncontrollable panic at the sight of some ghost or apparition. Her sudden frights and mad dashes from the house into the street became well-known in the Garden District, and were even written up in the papers. In fact, it was Jeannette who gave rise to the first “ghost stories” surrounding First Street.

There are several stories of Julien’s being extremely impatient with Jeannette and locking her up. But by all accounts he loved his children. All three of his sons went to Harvard, returning to New Orleans to practice civil law, and to amass great fortunes of their own. Their descendants are Mayfairs to this day, regardless of sex or marital connection. And it is the law firm founded by Julien’s sons which has, for decades, administered the Mayfair legacy.

We have at least seven different photographs of Julien with his children, including some with Jeannette (who died young). In every one, the family seems extremely cheerful, and Barclay and Cortland strongly resemble their father. Though Barclay and Garland both died in their late sixties, Cortland lived to be eighty years old, dying in late October of 1959. This member of the Talamasca made direct contact with Cortland the preceding year, but we shall come to that at the proper time.

(Ellie Mayfair, adoptive mother of Rowan Mayfair, the present designee of the legacy, is a descendant of Julien Mayfair, being a granddaughter of Julien’s son Cortland, the only child of Cortland’s son Sheffield Mayfair and his wife, a French-speaking cousin named Eugenie Mayfair, who died when Ellie was seven years old. Sheffield died before Cortland, of a severe heart attack in the family law offices on Camp Street in 1952, at which time he was forty-five. His daughter Ellie was a student at Stanford in Palo Alto, California, at the time, where she was already engaged to Graham Franklin, whom she later married. She never lived in New Orleans after that, though she returned for frequent visits and came back to adopt Rowan Mayfair in 1959.)

Some of our most interesting evidence regarding Julien himself has to do with Mary Beth, and with the birth of Belle, her first daughter. Upon Mary Beth Julien bestowed everything she could possibly desire, holding balls for her at First Street that rivaled any private entertainment in New Orleans. The garden walks, balustrades, and fountains at First Street were all designed and laid out for Mary Beth’s fifteenth birthday party.

Mary Beth was already tall by the age of fifteen, and in her photographs from this period she appears stately, serious, and darkly beautiful, with large black eyes and very clearly defined and beautifully shaped eyebrows. Her air is decidedly indifferent however. And this apparent absence of narcissism or vanity was to characterize her photographs all her life. Sometimes her mannish posture is almost defiantly casual in these pictures; but it highly doubtful that she was ever defiant so much as simply distracted. It was frequently said that she looked like her grandmother Marguerite and not like her mother, Katherine.

In 1887, Julien took his fifteen-year-old niece to New York with him. There Julien and Mary Beth visited one of Lestan’s grandsons, Corrington Mayfair, who was an attorney and in the merchandising business with Julien. Julien and Mary Beth went on to Europe in 1888, remaining an entire year and a half, during which time New Orleans was informed by numerous letters to friends and relatives that sixteen-year-old Mary Beth had “married” a Scottish Mayfair-an Old World cousin-and given birth to a little girl named Belle. This marriage, taking place in a Scottish Catholic church, was described in rich detail in a letter which Julien wrote to a friend in the French Quarter, a notorious gossip of a woman, who passed the letter around to everyone. Other letters from both Julien and Mary Beth described the marriage in more abbreviated form for other talkative friends and relatives.

It is worth noting that when Katherine heard of her daughter’s marriage, she took to her bed and would not eat or speak for five days. Only when threatened with a private asylum did she sit up and agree to drink some soup. “Julien is the devil,” she whispered, at which point Marguerite drove everyone out of the room.

Unfortunately the mysterious Lord Mayfair died in a fall from his ancestral tower in Scotland two months before the birth of his little daughter. Again, Julien wrote home full accounts of everything which took place. Mary Beth wrote tearful letters to her friends.

This Lord Mayfair is almost certainly a fictitious character. Mary Beth and Julien did visit Scotland; indeed they spent some time in Edinburgh and even visited Donnelaith, where they purchased the very castle on the hill above the town described in detail by Petyr van Abel. But the castle, once the family home of the Donnelaith clan, had been an abandoned ruin since the late 1600s. There is no record anywhere in Scotland of any lord or lords Mayfair.

However, inquiries made by the Talamasca in this century have unearthed some rather startling evidence about the Donnelaith ruin. A fire gutted it in the year 1689, in the fall, apparently very near the time of Deborah’s execution in Montcleve, France. It might have been the very day, but that we have been unable to discover. In the fire, the last of the Donnelaith clan-the old lord, his eldest son, and his young grandson-perished.

It is tantalizing to suppose that the old lord was the father of Deborah Mayfair. It is also tantalizing to suppose that he was a wretched coward, who did not dare to interfere with the burning of the poor simpleminded peasant girl Suzanne, even when their “merry-begot” daughter Deborah was in danger of the same awful fate.

But we cannot know. And we cannot know whether or not Lasher played any role in starting the fire that wiped out the Donnelaith family. History tells us only that the old man’s body was burnt, while the infant grandson smothered in the smoke, and several women in the family leapt to their death from the battlements. The eldest son apparently died when a wooden stairway collapsed under him.

History also tells us that Julien and Mary Beth purchased Donnelaith castle after only one afternoon spent in the ruins. It remains the property of the Mayfair family to this day, and other Mayfairs have visited it.

It has never been occupied or restored, but it is kept cleared of all debris and rather safely maintained, and during Stella’s life in the twentieth century, it was open to the public.

Why Julien bought the castle, what he knew about it and what he meant to do with it has never been known. Surely he had some knowledge of Deborah and Suzanne, either through the family history, or through Lasher.

The Talamasca has devoted an enormous amount of thought to this whole question-who knew what and when-because there is strong evidence to indicate that the Mayfairs of the nineteenth century did not know their full history. Katherine confessed on more than one occasion that she really didn’t know much about the family’s beginnings, only that they had come from Martinique to Saint-Domingue sometime in the sixteen hundreds. Many other Mayfairs made similar remarks.

And even Mary Beth as late as 1920 told the parish priests at St. Alphonsus Church that it was “all lost in the dust.” She seemed even a little confused when talking to local architecture students about who built Riverbend and when. Books of the period list Marguerite as the builder when, in fact, Marguerite was born there. When asked by the servants to identify certain persons in the old oil portraits at First Street, Mary Beth said that she could not. She wished somebody back then had had the presence of mind to write the names on the backs of the pictures.

As far as we have been able to ascertain, the names are on the backs of at least some of the pictures.

Perhaps Julien, and Julien alone, read the old records, for certainly there were old records. And Julien had started to move them from Riverbend to First Street as early as 1872.

Whatever the case, Julien went to Donnelaith in 1888 and bought the ruined castle. And Mary Beth Mayfair told the story to the end of her days that Lord Mayfair was the father of her poor sweet little daughter Belle, who turned out to be the very opposite of her powerful mother.

In 1892, an artist was hired to paint a picture of the ruin, and this oil painting hangs in the house on First Street.

To return to the chronology, the supposed uncle and niece returned home with baby Belle in late 1889, at which time Marguerite, aged ninety and extremely decrepit, took a special interest in the baby.

In fact, Katherine and Mary Beth had to keep watch on the child all the time it was at Riverbend, lest Marguerite go walking with it in her arms and then forget about it, and drop it or lay it on a stairstep or a table. Julien laughed at these cautions and said before the servants numerous times that the baby had a special guardian angel who would take care of it.

By this time there seems to have been no talk at all about Julien having been Mary Beth’s father, and none whatsoever about his being the father, by his daughter, of Belle.

But for the purposes of this record, we are certain that he was Mary Beth’s father and the father of her daughter Belle.

Mary Beth, Julien, and Belle all lived together happily at First Street, and Mary Beth, though she loved to dance and to go to the theater and to parties, showed no immediate interest in finding “another” husband.

Eventually, she did remarry, as we shall see, a man named Daniel McIntyre, giving birth to three more children-Carlotta, Lionel, and Stella.

The night before Marguerite’s death in 1891, Mary Beth woke up in her bedroom on First Street, screaming. She insisted she had to leave for Riverbend at once, that her grandmother was dying. Why had no one sent for her? The servants found Julien sitting motionless in the library of the first floor, apparently weeping. He seemed not to hear or see Mary Beth as she pleaded with him to take her to Riverbend.

A young Irish maid then heard the old quadroon housekeeper remark that maybe that wasn’t Julien at all sitting at the desk, and they ought to go look for him. This terrified the maid, especially since the housekeeper began to call out to “Michie Julien” about the house while this motionless weeping individual remained at the desk, staring forward as if he could not hear her.

At last Mary Beth set out on foot, at which point Julien leapt up from the desk, ran his fingers through his white hair, and ordered the servants to bring round the brougham. He caught up with Mary Beth before she had reached Magazine Street.

It is worth noting that Julien was sixty-three at this time, and described as being a very handsome man with the flamboyant appearance and demeanor of a stage actor. Mary Beth was nineteen and exceedingly beautiful. Belle was only two years old and there is no mention of her in this story.

Julien and Mary Beth arrived at Riverbend just as messengers were being sent to fetch them. Marguerite was almost comatose, a wraith of a ninety-two-year-old woman, clutching a curious little doll with her bony fingers, which she called her maman much to the confusion of the attending doctor and nurse, who told all of New Orleans about it afterwards. A priest was also in attendance and his detailed account of the whole matter has also worked its way into our records.

The doll was reputedly a ghastly thing with real human bones for limbs, strung together by means of black wire, and a mane of horrid white hair affixed to its head of rags with its crudely drawn features.

Katherine, then aged sixty-one, and her two sons were both sitting by the bed, as they had been for hours. Rémy was also there, having been at the plantation for a month before his mother took ill.

The priest, Father Martin, had just given Marguerite the last sacraments, and the blessed candles were burning on the altar.

When Marguerite breathed her last, the priest watched with curiosity as Katherine rose from her chair, went to the jewel box on the dresser which she had always shared with her mother, took out the emerald necklace, and gave it to Mary Beth. Mary Beth received it gratefully, put it around her neck, and then continued to weep.

The priest then observed that it had begun to rain, and the wind about the house was extremely strong, banging the shutters and causing the leaves to fall. Julien seemed to be delighted by this and even laughed.

Katherine appeared weary and frightened. And Mary Beth cried inconsolably. Clay, a personable young man, seemed fascinated by what was going on. His brother Vincent merely looked indifferent.

Julien then opened the windows to let in the wind and rain, which frightened the priest somewhat and certainly made him uncomfortable, as it was winter. He nevertheless stayed at the bedside as he thought proper, though rain was actually falling on the bed. The trees were crashing against the house. The priest was afraid one of the limbs might come right through the window nearest him.

Julien, quite unperturbed and with his eyes full of tears, kissed the dead Marguerite and closed her eyes, and took the doll from her, which he put inside his coat. He then laid her hands on her chest and made a speech to the priest explaining that his mother had been born at the end of the “old century” and had lived almost a hundred years, that she had seen and understood things which she could never tell anyone.

“In most families,” Julien declared in French, “when a person dies, all that the person knows dies with that person. Not so with the Mayfairs. Her blood is in us, and all she knew is passed into us and we are stronger.”

Katherine merely nodded sadly to this speech. Mary Beth continued to weep. Clay stood in the corner with his arms folded, watching.

When the priest asked timidly if the window might be closed, Julien told him that the heavens were weeping for Marguerite, and that it would be disrespectful to close the window. Julien then knocked the blessed candles off the Catholic altar by the bed, which offended the priest. It also startled Katherine.

“Now, Julien, don’t go crazy!” Katherine whispered. At which Vincent laughed in spite of himself, and Clay smiled unwillingly also. All glanced awkwardly at the priest, who was horrified. Julien then gave the company a playful smile and a shrug, and then looking at his mother again, he became miserable, and knelt down beside the bed, and buried his face in the covers beside the dead woman.

Clay quietly left the room.

As the priest was taking his leave, he asked Katherine about the emerald. Rather offhandedly she said that it was a jewel she had inherited from her mother, but never much liked, as it was so big and so heavy. Mary Beth could have it.

The priest then left the house and discovered that within a few hundred yards, the rain was not falling and there was no wind. The sky was quite clear. He came upon Clay sitting in a white straight-backed chair by the picket fence at the very end of the frontage of the plantation; Clay was smoking and watching the distant storm which was quite visible in the darkness. The priest greeted Clay but Clay did not appear to hear him.

This is the first detailed account of the death of a Mayfair witch that we possess since Petyr van Abel’s description of the death of Deborah.

There are many other stories about Julien which could be included here, and indeed perhaps they should be in future. We will hear more of him as the story of Mary Beth unfolds.

But we should not move on to Mary Beth without treating one more aspect of Julien, that is, his bisexuality. And it is worthwhile to recount in detail the significant stories told of Julien by one of his lovers, Richard Llewellyn.

As indicated above, Julien was mentioned in connection with a “crime against nature” very early in his life, at which point he killed-either accidentally or deliberately-one of his uncles. We have also made mention of his male companion in the French Quarter in the late 1850s.

Julien was to have such companions throughout his life, but of most of them we know nothing.

Two of whom we have some record are a quadroon named Victor Gregoire and an Englishman named Richard Llewellyn.

Victor Gregoire worked for Julien in the 1880s, as a private secretary of sorts, and even a sort of valet. He lived in the servants’ quarters on First Street. He was a remarkably handsome man as were all Julien’s companions, male or female. And he was rumored to be a Mayfair descendant.

Investigation has confirmed in fact that he was the great-grandson of a quadroon maid who emigrated from Saint-Domingue with the family, a possible descendant of Peter Fontenay Mayfair, brother of Jeanne Louise, and son of Charlotte and Petyr van Abel.

Whatever, Victor was much beloved by Julien, but the two had a quarrel in about 1885, around the time of Suzette’s death. The one rather thin story we have about the quarrel indicates that Victor accused Julien of not treating Suzette in her final illness with sufficient compassion. And Julien, outraged, beat Victor rather badly. Cousins repeated this tale within the family enough for outsiders to hear of it.

The consensus seemed to be that Victor was probably right, and as Victor was a most devoted servant to Julien he had a servant’s right to tell his master the truth. It was common knowledge at this time that no one was closer to Julien than Victor, and that Victor did everything for Julien.

It should also be added, however, that there is strong evidence that Julien loved Suzette, no matter how disappointed he was in her, and that he took good care of her. His sons certainly thought that he loved their mother; and at Suzette’s funeral, Julien was distraught. He comforted Suzette’s father and mother for hours after; and took time off from all business pursuits to remain with his daughter Jeannette, who “never recovered” from her mother’s death.

We should also note that Julien was near hysteria at Jeannette’s funeral, which occurred several years later. Indeed, at one point he held tight to the coffin and refused to allow it to be placed in the crypt. Garland, Barclay, and Cortland had to physically support their father as the entombment took place.

Descendants of Suzette’s sisters and brothers say in the present time that “Great-aunt Suzette” who once lived at First Street was, in fact, driven mad by her husband Julien-that he was perverse, cruel, and mischievous in a way that indicated congenital insanity. But these tales are vague and contain no real knowledge of the period.

To proceed with the story of Victor, the young man died tragically while Julien and Mary Beth were in Europe.

Walking home one night through the Garden District, Victor stepped in the path of a speeding carriage at the corner of Philip and Prytania streets, and suffered a dreadful fall and a blow to the head. Two days later he succumbed from massive cerebral injuries. Julien received word on his return to New York. He had a beautiful monument built for Victor in the St. Louis No. 3 Cemetery.

What argues for this having been a homosexual relationship is circumstantial except for a later statement by Richard Llewellyn, the last of Julien’s male companions. Julien bought enormous amounts of clothes for Victor. He also bought Victor beautiful riding horses, and gave him exorbitant amounts of money. The two spent days and nights together, traveled together to and from Riverbend, and to New York, and Victor often slept on the couch in the library at First Street, rather than retire to his room at the very back of the house.

As for the statement of Richard Llewellyn, he never knew Victor, but he told this member of the order personally that Julien had once had a colored lover named Victor.

*

Richard Llewellyn is the only observer of Julien ever personally interviewed by a member of the order, and he was more than a casual observer.

What he had to say-concerning other members of the family as well as Julien-makes his testimony of very special interest even though his statements are for the most part uncorroborated. He has given some of the most intimate glimpses of the Mayfair family which we possess.

Therefore, we feel that it is worthwhile to quote our reconstruction of his words in its entirety.

Richard Llewellyn came to New Orleans in 1900 at the age of twenty and he became an employee of Julien, just as Victor had once been, for Julien, though he was then seventy-two years old, still maintained enormous interests in merchandizing, cotton factoring, real estate, and banking. Until the week of his death some fourteen years later, Julien kept regular business hours in the library at First Street.

Llewellyn worked for Julien until his death, and Llewellyn admitted candidly to me in 1958, when I first began my field investigation of the Mayfair Witches, that he had been Julien’s lover.

Llewellyn was in 1958 just past seventy-seven years of age. He was a man of medium height, healthy build, and had curly black hair, heavily streaked with gray, and very large and slightly protruding blue eyes. He had acquired by that time what I would call a New Orleans accent, and no longer sounded like a Yankee or a Bostonian, though there are definite similarities between the ways that New Orleanians and Bostonians speak. Whatever the case, he was unmistakably a New Orleanian and he looked the part as well.

He owned an antiquarian bookstore in the French Quarter, on Chartres Street, specializing in books on music, especially opera. There were always phonograph records of Caruso playing in the store, and Llewellyn, who invariably sat at a desk to the rear of the shop, was always dressed in a suit and tie.

It was a bequest from Julien which had enabled him to own the building, where he also lived in the second floor flat, and he worked in his shop until one month before his death in 1959.

I visited him several times in the summer of 1958 but I was only able to persuade him to talk at length on one occasion, and I must confess that the wine he drank, at my invitation, had a great deal to do with it. I have of course shamelessly employed this method-lunch, wine, and then more wine-with many a witness of the Mayfair family. It seems to work particularly well in New Orleans and during the summer. I think I was a little too brash and insistent with Llewellyn, but his information has proved invaluable.

An entirely “causal” meeting with Llewellyn was effected when I happened into his bookstore one July afternoon, and we commenced to talk about the great castrati opera singers, especially Farinelli. It was not difficult to persuade Llewellyn to lock up the shop for a Caribbean siesta at two-thirty and come with me for a late lunch at Galatoire’s.

I did not broach the subject of the Mayfair family for some time, and then only timidly and in connection with the old house on First Street. I said frankly that I was interested in the place and the people who lived there. By then Llewellyn was pleasantly “high” and plunged into reminiscences of his first days in New Orleans.

At first he would say nothing about Julien but then began to speak of Julien as if I knew all about the man. I supplied various well-known dates and facts and that moved the conversation along briskly. We left Galatoire’s finally for a small, quiet Bourbon Street café and continued our conversation until well after eight-thirty that evening.

At some point during this conversation Llewellyn realized that I had no prejudice whatsoever against him on account of his sexual preferences, indeed that nothing he was saying came as a shock to me, and this added to his relaxed attitude towards the story he told.

This was long before our use of tape recorders, and I reconstructed the conversation as best I could as soon as I returned to my hotel, trying to capture Llewellyn’s particular expressions. But it is a reconstruction. And throughout I have omitted my own persistent questions. I believe the substance to be accurate.

Essentially, Llewellyn was deeply in love with Julien Mayfair, and one of the early shocks of Llewellyn’s life was to discover that Julien was at least ten to fifteen years older than Llewellyn ever imagined, and Llewellyn only discovered this when Julien suffered his first stroke in early 1914. Until that time Julien had been a fairly romantic and vigorous lover of Llewellyn, and Llewellyn remained with Julien until he died, some four months later. Julien was partially paralyzed at that time, but still managed to spend an hour or two each day in his office.

Llewellyn supplied a vivid description of Julien in the early 1900s, as a thin man who had lost some of his height, but was generally spry and energetic, and full of good humor and imagination.

Llewellyn said frankly that Julien had initiated him in the erotic secrets of life, and not only had Julien taught Llewellyn how to be an attentive lover, he also took the young man with him to Storyville-the notorious red-light district of New Orleans-and introduced him to the better houses operating there.

But let us move on directly to his account:

“Oh, the tricks he taught me,” Llewellyn said, referring to their amorous relationship, “and what a sense of humor he had. It was as if the whole world were a joke to him, and there was never the slightest bitterness in it. I’ll tell you a very private thing about him. He made love to me just as if I were a woman. If you don’t know what I mean, there’s no use explaining it. And that voice he had, that French accent. I tell you when he started talking in my ear …

“And he would tell me the funniest stories about his antics with his other lovers, about how they fooled everyone, and indeed, one of his boys, Aleister by name, used to dress up as a woman and go to the opera with Julien and no one ever had the slightest suspicion about it. Julien tried to persuade me to do that, but I told him I could never carry it off, never! He understood. He was extremely good-natured. In fact, it was impossible to involve him in a quarrel. He said he was done with all that, and besides he had a horrible temper, and couldn’t bear to lose it. It exhausted him.

“The one time I was unfaithful and came back after two days, fully expecting a terrible argument, he treated me with what would you call it? Bemused cordiality. It turned out he knew everything that I had done and with whom, and in the most pleasant and sincere way he asked me why I had been such a fool. It was positively eerie. At last I burst into tears and confessed that I had meant to show my independence. After all he was such an overwhelming man. But I was then ready to do anything to get back into his good graces. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d thrown me out!

“He accepted this with a smile. He patted my shoulder and said not to worry. I’ll tell you it cured me of wandering out forever! It was no fun at all to feel so dreadful and have him so calm and so accepting. Taught me a few things, it really did.

“And then he went into all that about being a reader of minds, and of being able to see what was going on in other places. He talked a lot about that. I could never tell whether or not he meant it, or if it was just another one of his jokes. He had the prettiest eyes. He was a very handsome old man, really. And there was a flare to the way he dressed. I suppose you might say he was something of a dandy. When he was dressed up in a fine white linen suit with a yellow silk waistcoat and a white Panama hat, he looked splendid.

“I think I imitate him to this day. Isn’t that sad? I go about trying to look like Julien Mayfair.

“Oh, but that reminds me, I’ll tell you, he did the strangest thing to frighten me once! And to this day I don’t really know what happened. We had been talking the night before about what Julien looked like when he was young, how handsome he appeared in all the photographs, and you know it was like going through a veritable history of photography to study all that. The first pictures of him were daguerreotypes, and then came the tintypes and the later genuine photographs in sepia on cardboard, and finally the sort of black-and-white pictures we have today. Anyway, he had shown me a batch of them and I had said, ‘Oh, I wish I’d known you when you were young, I imagine you were truly beautiful.’ Then I’d stopped. I was so ashamed. I thought perhaps I’d hurt him. But there be was, merely smiling at me. I shall never forget it. He was seated at the far end of his leather couch, legs crossed, just looking at me through the smoke from his pipe, and he said, ‘Well, Richard, if you’d like to know how I was then, maybe I’ll show you. I’ll surprise you.’

“That night, I was downtown. I don’t remember why I went out. I had to get out perhaps. You know sometimes that house could be so oppressive! It was full of children and old people, and Mary Beth Mayfair was always about, and she was such a presence, to put it politely. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Mary Beth, everybody liked Mary Beth. And I liked her a great deal, until Julien died, at least. She was easy to talk to, actually. She would really listen to you when you talked to her, that is one thing I always found rather unusual about her. But she had a way of filling up a room when she came in. She outshined everyone else, you might say, and men there was her husband, Judge McIntyre.

“Judge McIntyre was a terrible sot. He was always drunk. And what a quarrelsome drunk. I tell you I had to go looking for him more than once and bring him home from the Irish bars on Magazine Street. You know, the Mayfairs weren’t his kind of people, really. He was an educated man, lace curtain Irish, to be sure. Yet I think Mary Beth made him feel inferior. She was always saying little things to him, such as that he ought to put his napkin in his lap, or not smoke his cigars in the dining room, or that he was biting the edge of his silver when he ate, and the noise annoyed her. He was eternally offended by her. But I think he really loved her. That’s why she could hurt him so easily. He really loved her. You would have had to have known her to understand. She wasn’t beautiful. That wasn’t it. But she was … she was absolutely captivating! I could tell you about her and the young men, but then I don’t want to talk about all that. But what I was trying to say was that they would sit there at the table till all hours after dinner, Mary Beth and Judge McIntyre and Julien, of course, and Clay Mayfair, too, while he was there. I never saw people who liked to talk so much after dinner.

“Julien could put away half a fifth of brandy. And little Stella would fall asleep in his lap. Ah, Stella with the ringlets, dear pretty Stella. And beautiful little Belle. She’d come wandering in with her doll. And Millie Dear. They called her Millie Dear then but they stopped later on. She was younger than Belle, but she, you know, sort of watched out for Belle. It took a long time to catch on about Belle. You just thought she was sweet at first, an angel of a girl, if you know what I mean. There were some other cousins who used to come. Seems Julien’s boy, Garland, was around plenty after he came home from school. And Cortland, I really liked Cortland. And for a while there was talk he might marry Millie, but she was only a first cousin, being Rémy’s girl, and people didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. Millie has never married. What a sad thing …

“But you know, Judge McIntyre was the kind of Irishman who really can’t stand to be around his wife, if you follow my meaning. He had to be with men, drinking and arguing all the time, and not men like Julien, but men like himself, hard-drinking, hard-talking Irishmen. He spent a great deal of time downtown at his club, but many an evening he went to those rougher drinking places on Magazine Street.

“When he was home, he was always very noisy. He was a good judge however. He wouldn’t drink till he came home from court, and since he always came home early he had plenty of time to be completely drunk by ten o’clock. Then he would go wandering, and round midnight Julien would say, ‘Richard, I think you had better go look for him.’

“Julien just took it all in stride. He thought Judge McIntyre was funny. He would laugh at anything Judge McIntyre said. Judge McIntyre would go on and on about Ireland and the political situation over there, and Julien would wait until he was finished and say cheerfully and with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I don’t care if they all kill each other.’ Judge McIntyre would go crazy. Mary Beth would laugh and shake her head and kick Julien under the table. But Judge McIntyre was so far gone in those last years. How he ever managed to live so long I cannot imagine. Didn’t die till 1925, three months after Mary Beth died. They said it was pneumonia. The hell it was pneumonia! They found him in the gutter, you know. And it was Christmas Eve and so cold the pipes were freezing. Pneumonia. I heard when Mary Beth was dying, she was in such pain they gave her almost enough morphia to kill her. She would be lying there out of her mind, and in he’d come, drunk, and wake her up, saying, ‘Mary Beth, I need you.’ What a poor drunken fool he was. And she would say to him, ‘Come, Daniel, lie beside me, Daniel.’ And to think she was in such pain. It was Stella who told me that … the last time I ever saw her. Alive that is. I went up there one last time after that-for Stella’s funeral. And there she was in the coffin, it was a miracle the way Lonigan closed up that wound. Just beautiful she was, lying there, and all the Mayfairs in that room. But that was the last time I saw her alive, as I was saying … And the things she said about Carlotta, of how Carlotta was cold to Mary Beth in those last months, why, it would make your hair stand on end.

“Imagine a daughter being cold to a mother who was dying like that. But Mary Beth took no notice of it. She just lay there, in pain, half dreaming, Stella said, not knowing where she was, sometimes talking out loud to Julien as if she could see him in the room, and of course Stella was by her night and day, you can be sure of that; how Mary Beth loved Stella.

“Why, Mary Beth told me once that she could put all her other children in a sack and throw them in the Mississippi River, for all she cared. Stella was the only one that mattered. ’Course she was joking. She was never mean to those children. I remember how she used to read by the hour to Lionel when he was little, and help him with his schooling. She got him the best teachers when he didn’t want to go to school. None of the children did well in school, except for Carlotta, naturally. Stella was expelled from three different schools, I believe. Carlotta was the only one who really did well, and a lot of good it did her.

“But what was I saying? Oh, yes. Sometimes I felt I had no place in the house. Whatever the case, I went out. I went to the Quarter. It was the days of Storyville, you know, when prostitution was legal here, and Julien had taken me down to Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall himself one night and to the other fashionable places, and he didn’t much care if I went on my own.

“Well, I said I was going that night. And Julien didn’t mind. He was up there snug in the third-floor bedroom with his books and his hot chocolate, and his Victrola. Besides, he knew I was only looking. And so I went down there, strolling past all those little houses-you know, the cribs they used to call them-with the girls in the front doors beckoning for me to come in, and of course I had not the slightest intention of doing it.

“Then my eyes fell on this beautiful young man, I mean a simply beautiful young man. And he stood in one of the alleyways down there, with his arms folded, leaning against the side of the house, simply looking at me. ‘Bon soir, Richard,’ he said to me and I recognized the voice at once, the French accent. It was Julien’s. And I saw that the man was Julien! Only he couldn’t have been past twenty! I tell you I never had such a start. I almost cried out. It was worse than seeing a ghost. And the fellow was gone, like that, vanished.

“I couldn’t get to a cab fast enough and I went right straight home to First Street. Julien opened the front door for me. He was wearing his robe, and puffing on his obnoxious pipe and laughing. ‘I told you I would show you what I looked like when I was twenty!’ he said. He laughed and laughed.

“I remember I followed him into the parlor. And it was such a lovely room, then, nothing like it is now, you should have seen it. Absolutely lovely French pieces, mostly Louis Cinque, which Julien had bought himself in Europe when he went with Mary Beth. So light and elegant and simply lovely. That art deco furniture was all Stella’s doing. She thought it was quite the thing, what with potted palms everywhere! The only good piece of furniture was that Bözendorfer piano. The place looked perfectly mad when I went up there for the funeral, and you know of course that Stella was buried from the house. No funeral parlor for Stella. Why, Stella was laid out in the very front room in which she’d been shot, do you know that? I kept looking around, wondering where exactly it had happened. And don’t you know everybody else was doing that, and they had already locked up Lionel, of course. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. Lionel had been such a sweet boy, and so good-looking. And he and Stella used to go everywhere together. But what was I saying?

“Oh, yes, that incredible night. I’d just seen young Julien downtown, beautiful young Julien, speaking French to me, and then I was home again and following old Julien into the parlor and he sat down on the couch there, and stretched out his legs and said, ‘Ah, Richard, there are so many things I could tell you, so many things I could show you. But I’m old now. And what’s the point? One very fine consolation of old age is you don’t need to be understood anymore. A sort of resignation sets in with the inevitable hardening of the arteries.’

“Of course I was still upset. ‘Julien,’ I said. ‘I demand to know how you did it.’ He wouldn’t answer me. It was as if I wasn’t there. He was staring at the fire. He always had both fires going in that room in winter. It has two fireplaces, you know, and one is slightly smaller than the other.

“A little later he waked from his dream and he reminded me that he was writing his life story. I might read that after his death, perhaps. He wasn’t sure.

“ ‘I have enjoyed my life,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a person shouldn’t enjoy his life as much as I have enjoyed mine. Ah, there is so much misery in the world and I have always had such a splendid time! Seems unfair, doesn’t it? I should have done more for others, much more. I should have been more inventive! But all of that is in my book. You can read it later.’

“He said more than once that he was writing his life story. He really had quite an interesting life, you know, being born so long before the Civil War, and seeing so very much. I used to ride with him uptown, and we would ride through Audubon Park and he would talk about the days when all that land had been a plantation. He talked about taking the steamboat from Riverbend. He talked about the old opera house and the quadroon balls. On and on, he talked. I should have written it down. He used to tell little Lionel and Stella those stories too, and how they both listened. He’d take them downtown in the carriage with us, and he would point out places in the French Quarter to them, and tell them wonderful little tales.

“I tell you I wanted to read that life story. I remember several occasions on which I came into the library and he was writing away, and remarked that it was the autobiography. He wrote by hand, though he did have a typewriter. And he didn’t mind at all that the children were underfoot. Lionel would be in there reading by the fire, or Stella would be playing with her doll on the couch, didn’t matter one bit, he would just be writing away on his autobiography.

“And what do you think? When he died, there was no life story. That’s what Mary Beth told me. I begged her to let me see whatever he’d written. She said offhandedly there was nothing. She would not let me touch anything on his desk. She locked me out of the library. Oh, I hated her for it, positively hated her. And she did it in such an offhanded way. She would have convinced anybody else she was telling the truth, that’s how sure of herself she was. But I had seen the manuscript. She did give me something which belonged to him, and I’ve always been grateful.”

At that point Llewellyn produced a beautiful carbuncle ring and showed it to me. I complimented him on it, and told him I was curious about the days of Storyville. What had it been like to go there with Julien? His answer was quite lengthy:

“Oh, Julien loved Storyville, he really did. And the women at Lulu White’s Hall of Mirrors adored him, I can tell you. They waited on him as if he were a king. Same thing everywhere he went. Lots of things happened down there, however, that I don’t much like to talk about. It wasn’t that I was jealous of Julien. It was very simply shocking to a clean-living Yankee boy such as I had been.” Llewellyn laughed. “But you’ll understand better what I mean if I tell you.

“The first time Julien took me it was winter, and he had his coachman drive us up to the front doors of one of the best houses. There was a pianist playing there then-I’m not sure who it was now, maybe Manuel Perez, maybe Jelly Roll Morton-I was never the fan of jazz and ragtime that Julien was. He just loved that pianist-they always called those pianists the professor, you know-and we sat in the parlor listening, and drinking champagne, and it was quite good champagne, and of course the girls came in with all their tawdry finery and foolish airs-there was the Duchess this and the Countess that-and they tried to seduce Julien, and he was just perfectly charming to all of them. Then finally he made his choice and it was this older woman, rather plain, and that puzzled me, and he said we were both going upstairs. Of course I didn’t want to be with her; nothing could have persuaded me to be with her, but Julien only smiled at that, and said that I should watch and that way I’d learn something of the world. Very typical Julien.

“And what do you think happened when we went into the bedroom? Well, it wasn’t the woman Julien was interested in, it was her two daughters, nine and eleven years old. They sort of helped with preparations-the examination of Julien, to put it delicately, to make certain that he didn’t have you know … and then the washing. I tell you I was stunned to watch those children perform these intimate duties, and do you know that when Julien went to it with the mother, the two little girls were there on the bed? They were both very pretty, one with dark hair, the other with blond curls. They wore little chemises, and dark stockings, if you can imagine, and they were enticing, I think even to me. Why, you could see their little nipples through the chemises. Didn’t have hardly any breasts at all. I don’t know why that was so enticing. They sat against the high carved back of the bed-you know, it was one of those machine-made atrocities that went clear to the ceiling with the half tester and the crown-and they even kissed him like attending angels when he … he … mounted the mother, so to speak.

“I’ll never forget those children, the way it all seemed so natural to them! And natural to Julien.

“Of course he behaved throughout all this as gracefully in such a situation as a human being could possibly behave. You would have thought that he was Darius, King of Persia, and that these ladies were his harem, and there was not the slightest bit of self-consciousness in him or crudery. Afterwards, he drank some more champagne with them, and even the little girls drank it. The mother tried to work her charms on me, but I would have none of it. Julien would have stayed there all night if I hadn’t asked him to leave. He was teaching both the girls ‘a new poem.’ Seems he taught them a poem every time he came down; and they recited three or four of the past lessons for him, one a Shakespeare sonnet. The new one was Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

“I couldn’t wait to leave that place. And on the way home, I really lit into him. ‘Julien, whatever we are, we are grown people. Those were just children,’ I said. He was his usual genial self. ‘Come on, now, Richard,’ he said, ‘don’t be foolish. Those were what are called trick babies. They were born in a house of prostitution; and they’ll live out their lives that way. I didn’t do anything to them that would hurt them. And if I hadn’t been with their mother this evening, somebody else would have been with her and with them. But I’ll tell you what strikes me, Richard, about the whole matter. It’s the way that life asserts itself, no matter what the circumstances. Of course it must be a miserable existence. How could it not be? Yet those little girls manage to live; to breathe; to enjoy themselves. They laugh and they are full of curiosity and tenderness. They adjust, I believe that’s the word. They adjust and they reach for the stars in their own way. I tell you it’s wondrous to me. They make me think of the wildflowers that grow in the cracks of the pavements, just pushing up into the sun, no matter how many feet crush them down.’

“I didn’t argue with him any further. But I remember that he talked on and on. He said there were children in every city in the country who were more miserable than those children. Of course that didn’t make it all right.

“I know he went to Storyville often, and he didn’t take me along. But I’ll tell you something else rather strange … ” (Here he hesitated. He required some prodding.) “He used to take Mary Beth with him. He took her to Lulu White’s and to the Arlington, and the way they managed it was that Mary Beth dressed as a man.

“I saw them go out together on more than one occasion, and of course if you ever saw Mary Beth you would understand. She was not an ugly woman in any sense, but she wasn’t delicate. She was tall and strongly built, and she had rather large features. In one of her husband’s three-piece suits, she made a damned good-looking man. She’d wrap her long hair up under a hat, and wear a scarf around her neck, and sometimes she wore glasses, though I’m not sure why, and off she went with Julien.

“I remember that happening at least five times. And I heard them talking about it after, how she fooled everyone. And Judge McIntyre sometimes went with them, but I think in truth that Julien and Mary Beth didn’t want him along.

“And then once Julien told me that that was how Judge McIntyre had met Mary Beth Mayfair-that it was in Storyville about two years before I came. He wasn’t Judge McIntyre yet, then, just Daniel McIntyre. And he’d met Mary Beth down there and spent the evening gambling with her and with Julien, and didn’t know till the next morning that Mary Beth was a woman, and when he discovered that he wouldn’t leave her alone.

“Julien told me all about it. They had gone down just to roam around and to catch what they could of the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band. Now you’ve heard of them, I imagine, and they were good, they really were. And somehow Julien and Mary Beth, who went by the name of Jules on these excursions, went into Willie Piazza’s and there they ran into Daniel McIntyre, and after that they wandered from place to place, looking for a good pool game, because Mary Beth was very good at pocket billiards, always was.

“Anyway, it must have been daylight when they decided to go home, and Judge McIntyre had talked a lot of business with Julien, since he wasn’t the Judge yet of course and he was a lawyer, and it was determined they would meet uptown for lunch and that maybe Julien would do something to help McIntyre get into a firm. And at that point, when the Judge was giving ‘Jules’ a big hug of farewell, she pulled off her fedora, and down came all her black hair, and she told him she was a woman, and he almost died on the spot.

“I think he was in love with her from that day on. I came the year after they were married, and they already had Miss Carlotta, a baby in the crib, and Lionel came along within ten months, and then a year and half later, Stella, the prettiest of them all.

“To tell you the truth, Judge McIntyre never fell out of love with Mary Beth. That was his trouble. Nineteen hundred thirteen was the last full year I spent in that house, and of course he had been a judge for over eight years by then, thanks to Julien’s influence, and I tell you he was just as much in love with Mary Beth as he had ever been. And in her own way she was in love with him, too. Don’t guess she could have put up with him if she hadn’t been.

“Of course there were the young men. People talked about those young men. You know, her stable boys and her messenger boys, and they were good-looking, they really were. You’d see them coming down the back steps, you know, looking scared sort of, as they went out the back door. But she loved Judge McIntyre, she really did, and I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t think he ever guessed. He was so damned drunk all the time. And Mary Beth was just as cool about all that as she was about anything else. Mary Beth was the calmest person I ever knew, in a way. Nothing ruffled her, not for very long, at any rate. She didn’t have much patience with anyone who opposed her, but she wasn’t interested in being enemies with a person, you know. She wasn’t one to fight or pit her will against anyone else.

“It always amazed me the way she put up with Carlotta. Carlotta was thirteen years old when I left. She was a witch, that child! She wanted to go to school away from home, and Mary Beth tried to persuade her not to do it, but that girl was determined, and so Mary Beth finally just let her go.

“Mary Beth dismissed people like that, that’s the way it was, really, and you might say she dismissed Carlotta. Part of her coldness, I suppose, and it could be maddening. When Julien died, the way she locked me out of the library, and out of the third-floor bedroom, that I’ll never forget. She never did get the least bit excited. ‘Go on, now Richard, you go downstairs, and have some coffee, and then you best get packed,’ she said, as if she was talking to a little child. She bought a building for me down here, lickety split. I mean Julien wasn’t in the ground when she had bought that building and moved me downtown. Of course, it was Julien’s money.

“But no, she never got excited. Except when I told her Julien was dead. Then she got excited. Yes, to tell the truth, she went mad. But just for a little while. Then when she saw he really was gone, she just snapped to and started straightening him up and straightening up the bedcovers. And I never saw her shed another tear.

“I’ll tell you a strange thing about Julien’s funeral, though. Mary Beth did a strange thing. It was in that front room, of course, and the coffin was open and Julien was a handsome corpse and every Mayfair in Louisiana was there. Why, there were carriages and automobiles lined up for blocks on First and Chestnut streets. And it rained, oh, did it rain! I thought it would never stop. It was so thick it was like a veil around the house. But the main thing was this. They were waking Julien, you know, and it wasn’t really what you’d call an Irish wake, of course, because they were far too high-toned for that sort of thing, but there was wine and food, and the Judge was blind drunk naturally. And at one point, with all those people in the room and all the goings-on, and people all over the hallway and back in the dining room and in the library and up the steps, well, with all that just going on, Mary Beth just moved a straight-backed chair up, right beside the coffin, and she put her hand in the coffin and clasped Julien’s dead hand, and she just went to dozing right there, in that chair, with her head to one side, holding on to Julien as the cousins came and went to see him, and kneel on the prie-dieu and so forth and so on.

“It was a tender thing that. But jealous as I had always been of her, I loved her for it. I wish I could have done it. Julien certainly did look fine in the coffin. And you should have seen the umbrellas in the Lafayette Cemetery the next day! I tell you when they slipped that coffin inside the vault, I died myself inside. And Mary Beth came up to me at that very moment, and she put her arm around my shoulder, and so that I could hear it, she whispered, ‘Au revoir, mon cher Julien!’ She did it for me, I know she did. She did it for me, but that was about the warmest thing she ever did. And to her dying day, she denied that he had ever written any autobiography.”

I prodded him at this point, asking him if Carlotta had cried at the funeral.

“Indeed not. I don’t even remember seeing her there. She was such an awful child. So humorless and antagonistic to everyone. Mary Beth could take it in stride. But Julien used to get so upset with her. It was Mary Beth who calmed him down. Julien told me once that Carlotta would waste her life the same way his sister, Katherine, had wasted hers.

“ ‘Some people don’t like living,’ he said to me. Wasn’t that strange? ‘They just can’t stand life. They treat it like it’s a terrible disease.’ I laughed at that. I’ve thought about it since many a time. Julien loved being alive. He really did. He was the first one in the family to ever buy a motor car. A Stutz Bearcat it was, quite incredible! And we went riding in that thing, all over New Orleans. He thought it was wonderful!

“He would sit on the front seat next to me-I had to do the driving, of course-all wrapped up in a lap rug, and with his goggles on, just laughing and enjoying the whole affair, what with me climbing out to crank the thing! It was fun, though, it really was. Stella loved that car too. I wish I had that car now. You know, Mary Beth tried to give it to me. And I refused it. Didn’t want the responsibility of the thing, I suppose. I should have taken it.

“Mary Beth later gave that car to one of her men, some young Irish fella she’d hired as a coachman. Didn’t know a thing about horses as I recall. Didn’t have to. I believe he went back to being a policeman later on. But she gave him that car. I know because I saw him in it once and we talked and he told me about it. Of course he didn’t say a word against her to me. He knew better than that. But imagine, your lady employer giving you a car like that. I tell you, some of the things she did just drove the cousins up the wall. But they didn’t dare talk about it. And it was her manner that carried things through. She just acted as if the strangest things she did were perfectly normal.

“But for all her coolness, you know, you might say that she loved being alive as much as Julien. She really did. Yes, Julien loved being alive. He was never old, not really.

“Julien told me all about how it had been with his sister Katherine in the years before the war. He had done the same tricks with her he did with Mary Beth later on. Only there was no Storyville in those days. They’d gone to Gallatin Street, to the roughest riverfront bars in town. Katherine had dressed up as a young sailor, and she put a bandage on her head to cover up her hair.

“ ‘She was adorable,’ Julien said, ‘you should have seen her. Then that Darcy Monahan destroyed her. She sold her soul to him. I tell you, Richard, if you ever get ready to sell your soul, don’t bother to sell it to another human being. It’s bad business to even consider such a thing.’

“Julien said so many strange things. Of course by the time I came along, Katherine was a burnt-out, crazy old woman. Just crazy, I tell you, the stubborn repetitious kind of crazy that gets on people’s nerves.

“She would sit on a bench in the back garden talking to her dead husband, Darcy. It disgusted Julien. So did her religion. And I think she had some influence on Carlotta, little as she was. Though I was never sure of it. Carlotta used to go to Mass at the Cathedral with Katherine.

“I recall once later on Carlotta had a terrible fight with Julien, but I never knew what it was about. Julien was such an ingratiating man; he was so easy to like. But that child couldn’t stand him. She couldn’t stand to be near him. And then they were shouting at each other behind closed doors in the library. They were shouting in French, and I couldn’t understand a word. Finally Julien came out and went upstairs. There were tears in his eyes. And there was a cut on his face, and he was holding his handkerchief to it. I think that little beast actually struck him. That’s the only time I ever saw him cry.

“And that awful Carlotta, she was such a cold mean little person. She just stood there watching him go upstairs, and then she said she was going out on the front steps to wait for her daddy to come home.

“Mary Beth was there, and she said, ‘Well you are going to be waiting a very long time, because your father is drunk right now at the club, and they won’t load him into a carriage till about ten o’clock. So you had better wear a coat when you go outside.’

“This wasn’t said in a mean way, really, just matter-of-fact, the way she said everything, but you should have seen the way that girl looked at her mother. I think she blamed her mother for her father’s drinking, and if she did what a little fool of a child she was. A man like Daniel McIntyre would have been a drunk if he had married the Virgin Mary or the Whore of Babylon. Didn’t matter a particle at all. He told me himself how his father had died of drink, and his father before him. And both of them at the age of forty-eight, no less. And he was afraid he’d die at forty-eight. I don’t know whether he made it past forty-eight or not. And you know his family had money. Plenty of money. You ask me, Mary Beth kept Judge McIntyre up and running a bit longer than anyone else might have been able to do.

“But Carlotta never understood. Never for a moment. I think Lionel understood, and Stella too. They loved both their parents, at least it always seemed that way to me. Maybe Lionel was a little embarrassed by the Judge from time to time, but he was a good boy, a devoted boy. And Stella, why, Stella adored her mother and father.

“Ah, that Julien. I can remember that last year, he did the damnedest thing. He took Lionel and Stella both with him down to the French Quarter to see the unseemly sights, so to speak, when they were no more than ten and eleven years old, I kid you not! And you know, I don’t think it was the first time either. I think it was just the first time that he couldn’t keep it from me, the mischief he was up to. And you know he had Stella dressed as a little sailor boy and did she ever look cute. And they had driven around all evening down there, with him pointing out the fancy clubs to them, though of course he didn’t take them in, not even Julien could have pulled that off, I suppose, but they’d been drinking, I can tell you.

“I was awake when they came home. Lionel was quiet, he was always quiet. But Stella was all fired up with everything she’d seen down there in those cribs, you know, with the women right on the street. And we sat on the steps together, Stella and I, talking about it in whispers long after Lionel had helped Julien up to the third floor and put him to bed.

“Stella and I went out and opened up a bottle of champagne in the kitchen. She said she was old enough to have a few drinks, and of course she didn’t listen to me, and who was I to stop her. And she and Lionel and I ended up dancing out on the back patio as the sun came up. Stella was doing some ragtime dance she’d seen down there. She said Julien was going to take them to Europe, and to see the whole world, but of course that never happened. I don’t think they really knew how old Julien was, any more than I did. When I saw the year 1828 written on that stone, I was shocked, I tell you. But then so much about Julien made sense to me. No wonder he had such a peculiar perspective. He had seen an entire century pass, he really had.

“Stella should have lived so long, really she should have. I remember she said something to me I never forgot. It was long after Julien died. We had lunch down here together at the Court of Two Sisters. She had already had Antha by then, and of course she hadn’t bothered to marry or even identify the father. Now, that’s a story, let me tell you. She just about turned society on its ear with that one. But what am I trying to say? We had lunch, and she told me she was going to live to be as old as Julien. She said Julien had looked into her palm and told her so. A long life, she would have.

“And think of it, shot dead like that by Lionel when she wasn’t even thirty years old. Good God! But you know it was Carlotta all along, don’t you?”

Llewellyn was by this time almost incoherent. I pressed on the matter of Carlotta and the shooting, but he would say no more about it. The whole subject began to frighten him. He returned to the subject of Julien’s “autobiography” and how much he wanted it. And what he wouldn’t give to get into that house some day and lay hands on those pages if they were still in that upstairs room. But then so long as Carlotta was there, he didn’t have a chance of it.

“You know there were storage rooms up there, right along the front of the house under the roof. You can’t see the roof slope from the street, but they’re there. Julien had trunks in there. I’ll bet that’s where she put the autobiography. She didn’t bother to burn it. Not Mary Beth. She just didn’t want it to fall into my hands. But then that beast Carlotta, who knows what she’s done with all those things?”

Not wanting to miss an opportunity, I pressed as to whether there was ever anything strange in the house, anything supernatural. (That is, other than Julien’s power to cause apparitions.) This was of course the kind of leading question that I try not to ask, but I had been with him for hours and he had volunteered nothing on this score other than his strange experiences with Julien. I was searching for something more.

His reaction to my question about a ghost was very strong. “Oh, that,” he said. “That was awful, just awful. I can’t tell anyone about that. Besides, it must have been my imagination.” He all but passed out.

I helped him back to his flat above the bookstore on Chartres Street. Over and over, he mentioned that Julien had left him the money for the building, and for the opening of a shop. Julien knew Llewellyn loved poetry and music and really despised his work as a clerk. Julien sought to set him free, and he had done it. But the one book he wished he had was Julien’s life story.

I was never able to obtain another interview of similar depth and length.

When I tried to talk to Llewellyn again a few days later, he was very polite but cautious. He apologized for having gotten so drunk and talked so much, though he said he had enjoyed it. And I could never persuade him to lunch with me again or to speak again at any length about Julien Mayfair.

Several times after that, I stopped in his shop. I asked him many questions about the family and its various members. But I could never regain his trust. Once I asked again if that house on First Street was haunted as people said. There were so many stories.

The very same expression came over him that I had seen the first night I spoke with him. He looked away, his eyes wide, and he shuddered. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might have been what you call a ghost. I don’t like to think about those things. I always thought it was my … guilt, you know, that I was imagining it.”

When I found myself pressing, perhaps a little too much, he said to me that the Mayfair family was a hard and strange family. “You don’t want to run afoul of those people. That Carlotta Mayfair, she’s a monster. A real monster.” He looked very uncomfortable.

I asked if she had ever given him trouble, to which he replied dismissively that she gave everyone trouble. He seemed distracted, troubled. Then he said a most curious thing, which I wrote down as soon as I returned to my hotel room. He said that he had never believed in life after death, but when he thought of Julien, he was convinced that Julien was still in existence somewhere.

“I know you think I’m out of mind to say something like that,” he said, “but I could swear it’s true. The night after we first met, I could swear I dreamed of Julien and Julien told me a lot of things. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember the dream clearly, but I felt that Julien didn’t want us to talk again. I don’t even like talking about it now except that … well, I feel I have to tell you.”

I said I believed him. He went on to say that Julien in the dream wasn’t the Julien he remembered. Something was definitely changed. “He seemed wiser, kinder, just the way you hope someone would be who has crossed over. And he didn’t look old. Yet he wasn’t exactly young either. I shall never forget that dream. It was … absolutely real. I could swear he was standing at the foot of my bed. And I do remember one thing he said. He said that certain things were destined but that they could be averted.”

“What sort of things?” I asked.

He shook his head. He would say nothing more after that, no matter how I pressed. He did admit that he could recall no censure from Julien on account of our conversation. But the sense of Julien’s being there again had made him feel disloyal. I could not even get him to repeat the story when next I asked him about it.

The last time I saw him was in late August 1959. He had obviously been ill. He had a bad tremor affecting both his mouth and his left hand, and his speech was no longer entirely distinct. I could understand him, but it was difficult. I told him frankly that what he had told me of Julien meant a great deal to me, that I was still interested in the Mayfair history.

At first I thought he did not remember me or the incident in question, so vague did he seem. Then he appeared to recognize me. He became excited.

“Come in the back with me,” he said, and as he struggled to rise from the desk I lent him a hand. He was unsteady on his feet. We passed through a dusty curtained doorway into a small storage room, and there he stopped just as if he were staring at something, but I could see nothing.

He gave a strange little laugh and made a dismissive gesture with his hand. Then he took out a box, and with trembling hands, he removed a packet of photographs. These were all of Julien. He gave them to me. It seemed he wanted to say something but he couldn’t find the words.

“I cannot tell you what this means to me,” I said.

“I know,” he answered. “That is why I want you to have them. You are the only person who has ever understood about Julien.”

I felt sad then, dreadfully sad. Had I understood? I suppose I had. He had caused the figure of Julien Mayfair to come to life for me, and I had found it a seductive figure.

“My life might have been different,” he said, “had I not met Julien. No one ever after seemed to measure up, you see. And then the store, well, I fell back on the store, and didn’t really accomplish very much in the long run.”

Then he appeared to shrug it all off, and he smiled.

I put several questions to him but he only shrugged them off too. Finally one caught his attention.

“Did Julien suffer when he died?” I asked.

He became absorbed, then he shook his head. “No, not really. He didn’t much care for being paralyzed, of course. Who would? But he loved books. I read to him all the time. He died in the early morning. I know because I was with him till two o’clock, and then I blew out the lamp and went downstairs.

“Well, around six o’clock a storm waked me. It was raining so hard it was coming in at the windowsills. And the limbs of the maple tree outside were making quite a racket. I ran up at once to see to Julien. His bed was right by the window.

“And what do you think? He had somehow managed to sit up, and open the window; and there he was, dead, across the windowsill, his eyes closed, looking quite peaceful, as if he’d wanted a breath of fresh air, and when he had had it he gave up, just like that, falling dead as if he were falling asleep, with his head to one side. Would have been a very peaceful scene if it hadn’t been for the storm, for the rain pouring in on him and even the leaves blowing into the room.

“They said later it was a massive stroke. They couldn’t figure how he had ever managed to open the window. I never said anything, but you know it occurred to me … ”

“Yes?” I prodded him.

He gave a little shrug and then went on, his speech extremely slurred. “Mary Beth went mad when I called her. She pulled him off the windowsill and back onto the pillow. She even slapped him. ‘Wake up, Julien,’ she said. ‘Julien, don’t leave me yet!’ I had a hell of a time closing that window. Then one of the panes blew out. It was dreadful.

“And that horrible Carlotta came up. All the others were coming to kiss him, you know, and to pay their respects, and Millie Dear, Rémy’s daughter, you know, was helping us with the bedcovers. But that dreadful Carlotta wouldn’t go near him, wouldn’t even help us. She stood there on the landing, with her hands clasped, like a little nun, just staring at the door.

“And Belle, precious Belle. Belle, the angel. She came in with her doll, and she started crying. Then Stella climbed in the bed and lay beside him, with her hand over his chest.

“Belle said, ‘Wake up, Oncle Julien.’ I guess she had heard her mama say it. And Julien, poor sweet Julien. He was such a peaceful picture, finally, with his head on the pillow, and his eyes closed.”

Llewellyn smiled and shook his head, then he began to laugh softly under his breath as though remembering something that aroused tenderness in him. He said something but it wasn’t clear. Then he cleared his throat with difficulty. “That Stella,” he said. “Everybody loved Stella. Except Carlotta. Carlotta never did … ” His voice trailed off.

I pressed him further, once more asking the sort of leading questions I made it a rule to avoid. I broached the subject of a ghost. So many people said the house was haunted.

“I should think if it was, you would have known,” I said.

I could not tell if he understood me. He made his way back to his desk and sat down, and just when I was quite certain he’d forgotten me altogether, he said that there was something in the house, but he didn’t know how to explain it.

“There were things,” he said, and that look of revulsion came over him again. “And I could have sworn they all knew about it. Sometimes it was just a sense … a sense of somebody always watching.”

“Was there more to it than that?” I pressed, being young and ruthless and full of curiosity, and not knowing yet what it means to be old.

“I told Julien about it,” he said, “I said it was there in the room with us, you know, that we weren’t alone, and that it was … watching us. But he would just laugh it off, the way he laughed at everything. He would tell me not to be so self-conscious. But I could swear it was there! It came when, you know, Julien and I were … together.”

“Was it something you saw?”

“Only at the end,” he said. He said something else but I couldn’t understand it. When I pressed, he shook his head, and pressed his lips together for emphasis as he did it. Then he dropped his voice to a whisper. “Must have imagined it. But I could swear in those last days when Julien was so sick, that the thing was there, definitely there. It was in Julien’s room, it was in the bed with him.”

He looked up at me to gauge my reaction. His mouth turned down at the ends and he was scowling, his eyes glaring up at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

“Awful, awful thing,” he whispered, shaking his head. He shivered. “Did you see it?”

He looked away. I asked him several more questions, but I knew I had lost him. When he answered again, I caught something about the others knowing about that thing, knowing and pretending they didn’t.

Then he looked up at me again and he said, “They didn’t want me to know that they knew. They all knew. I told Julien, ‘There’s somebody else in this house, and you know it, and you know what it likes, and what it wants, and you won’t tell me you know,’ and he said, ‘Come now, Richard,’ and he’d use all his … persuasion, so to speak, to you know, make me forget about it. And then that last week, that awful last week, it was there, in that bed. I know it was. I woke up in the chair and I saw it. I did. I saw it. It was the ghost of a man, and it was making love to Julien. Oh, God, what a sight. Because you see, I knew it wasn’t real. Wasn’t real at all. Couldn’t be. And yet I could see it.”

He looked away, the tremor in his mouth worsening. He tried to take out his pocket handkerchief but was merely fumbling with it. I did not know whether or not I should help him.

I asked more questions as gently as I could. He either didn’t hear me or didn’t care to answer. He sat slumped in the chair, looking as if he might die of old age at any moment.

Then he shook his head and said he couldn’t talk anymore. He did seem quite exhausted. He said he didn’t stay in the shop all day anymore and he would soon be going upstairs. I thanked him profusely for the pictures, and he murmured that yes, he was glad I’d come, he’d been waiting for me to give me those pictures.

I never saw Richard Llewellyn again. He died about five months after our last interview, in early 1959. He was buried in the Lafayette Cemetery not far from Julien.

There are many other stories which could be included here about Julien. There is much more that might be discovered.

It is sufficient for the purposes of this narrative to add nothing more at this point except that Julien had one other male companion of whom we know, a man to whom he was very strongly attached, and this was the man already described in this narrative as Judge Daniel McIntyre, who later married Mary Beth Mayfair.

But we can discuss Daniel McIntyre in connection with Mary Beth. Therefore it is appropriate to move on now to Mary Beth herself, the last great nineteenth-century Mayfair Witch, and the only female Mayfair Witch of the nineteenth century to rival her eighteenth-century forebears in power.

It was ten minutes past two. Michael stopped only because he had to stop. His eyes were closing, and there was nothing to do but give in and sleep for a while.

He sat still for a long moment, staring at the folder, which he had just closed. He was startled by the knock on the door.

“Come in,” he said.

Aaron entered quietly. He was dressed in his pajamas and a quilted silk robe, sashed at the waist. “You look tired,” he said. “You should go to bed now.”

“I have to,” Michael said. “When I was young, I could just keep swilling the coffee. But it’s not like that anymore. My eyes are shutting down on me.” He sat back in the leather chair, fished in his pocket for a cigarette, and lighted it. The need to sleep was suddenly so heavy, he closed his eyes and almost let the cigarette slip from his fingers. Mary Beth, he thought, have to get on to Mary Beth. So many questions …

Aaron settled into the wing chair in the corner. “Rowan canceled her midnight flight,” he said. “She’ll have a layover tomorrow, and won’t reach New Orleans before afternoon.”

“How do you find out things like that?” Michael asked sleepily. But that was the least of the questions on his mind. He took another lazy drag off the cigarette and stared at the plate of uneaten sandwiches before him. A sculpture now. He had not wanted any supper. “That’s good,” he said. “If I wake up at six, and read right on through, I’ll make it by evening.”

“And then we should talk,” Aaron said. “We should talk a great deal before you go to see her.”

“I know. Believe me, I know. Aaron, why the hell am I involved in this? Why? Why have I been seeing that man since I was a kid?” He took another drag off the cigarette. “Are you afraid of that spirit thing?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” Aaron answered without the slightest hesitation.

Michael was surprised. “You believe all this then? And you yourself have seen him?”

Aaron nodded. “I have,” he said.

“Thank God. Every word of this story has a different meaning for us than it would for someone else who hasn’t seen! Someone who doesn’t know what it’s like to see an apparition like that.”

“I believed before I saw,” Aaron said. “My colleagues have seen him. They have reported what they’ve seen. And as a seasoned member of the Talamasca, I accepted the testimony.”

“Then you accept that this thing can kill people.”

Aaron reflected for a moment. “Look, I might as well tell you this now. And try to remember it. This thing can do harm, but it has a devil of a time doing it.” He smiled. “No pun intended there,” he said. “What I’m trying to say is, Lasher kills largely through trickery. He can certainly cause physical effects-move objects, cause tree limbs to fall, rocks to fly-that sort of thing. But he wields this power awkwardly and often sluggishly. Trickery and illusion are his strongest weapons.”

“He forced Petyr van Abel into a tomb,” Michael said.

“No, Petyr was found trapped in a tomb. What likely happened was that he went into it himself in a state of madness in which he could no longer distinguish illusion from reality.”

“But why would Petyr do that when he was terrified of … ”

“Oh, come now, Michael, men are often irresistibly drawn to the very thing they fear.”

Michael didn’t say anything. He drew on the cigarette again, seeing in his mind’s eye the surf crashing on the rocks off Ocean Beach. And remembering the moment of standing there, his scarf blowing in the wind, his fingers frozen.

“To put it bluntly,” Aaron said, “never overestimate this spirit. It’s weak. If it wasn’t it wouldn’t need the Mayfair family.”

Michael looked up. “Say that again.”

“If it wasn’t weak, it wouldn’t need the Mayfair family,” Aaron said. “It needs their energy. And when it attacks, it uses the victim’s energy.”

“You just reminded me of something I said to Rowan. When she asked whether or not these spirits I saw had caused me to fall from the rock into the ocean, I told her they couldn’t do something like that. They weren’t that strong. If they were strong enough to knock a man into the sea and cause him to drown, they wouldn’t need to come to people in visions. They wouldn’t need to give me a crucial mission.”

Aaron didn’t reply.

“You see my point?” Michael asked.

“Yes, I do. But I see the point of her question also.”

“She asked me why I assumed that they were good, these spirits. I was shocked by that. But she thought it was a logical question.”

“Maybe it is.”

“Oh, but I know they are good.” Michael stubbed out the cigarette. “I know. I know that it was Deborah I saw. And that she wants me to oppose that spirit, Lasher. I know that as surely as I know … who I am. Remember what Llewellyn told you? I just finished reading it. Llewellyn told you that when Julien came to him in a dream Julien was different. Julien was wiser than he had been when he was alive. Well, that’s how it was with Deborah in my vision. Deborah wants to stop this thing that she and Suzanne brought into the world and into this family!”

“Then comes the question. Why has Lasher shown himself to you?”

“Yes. We’re going in a circle.”

Aaron switched off the light in the corner, and then the lamp on the desk. This left only the lamp on the bedside table. “I’ll have them call you at eight. I think you can finish the entire file by late afternoon, perhaps a little sooner. Then we can talk, and you can come to some sort of … well … decision.”

“Have them call me at seven. That’s one good thing about being this age. I get sleepy but I sleep less. I’ll be fine if they ring me at seven. And Aaron … ”

“Yes?”

“You never really answered me about last night. Did you see that thing when he was standing right in front of me on the other side of the fence! Did you or didn’t you?”

Aaron opened the door. He seemed reluctant to speak. Then he said, “Yes, Michael. I saw him. I saw him very clearly and distinctly. More clearly and distinctly than ever before. And he was smiling at you. It even seemed he was … reaching out for you. I would say from what I saw that he was welcoming you. Now, I must go, and you must go to sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Lights out, Michael.”

The phone woke him up. The sunlight was pouring through the windows on either side of the head of the bed. For one moment he was completely disoriented. Rowan had just been talking to him, saying something about how she wanted him to be there before they closed the lid. What lid. He saw a dead white hand lying against black silk.

Then he sat up, and he saw the desk, and the briefcase, and the folders heaped there, and he whispered: “The lid of her mother’s coffin.”

Drowsily he stared at the ringing phone. Then he picked up the receiver. It was Aaron.

“Come down for breakfast, Michael.”

“Is she on the plane yet, Aaron?”

“She’s just left the hospital. As I believe I told you last night, she’ll have a layover. I doubt she’ll reach the hotel before two o’clock. The funeral begins at three. Look, if you won’t come down we’ll send something up, but you must eat.”

“Yes, send it up,” he said. “And Aaron. Where is this funeral?”

“Michael, don’t bolt on me after you’ve finished. That wouldn’t be fair to anyone.”

“No, I’m not going to do that, Aaron. Believe me. But I just want to know. Where is the funeral?”

“Lonigan and Sons. Magazine Street.”

“Oh, yeah, do I ever know that place.” Grandmother, grandfather, and his father, too, all buried from Lonigan and Sons. “Don’t worry, Aaron, I’ll be right here. Come up and keep me company if you want. But I’ve got to get started.”

He took a quick shower, put on fresh clothes, and came out of the bathroom to find his breakfast waiting for him under a series of high polished silver domes on a lace-covered tray. The old sandwiches were gone. And the bed was made. There were fresh flowers by the window. He smiled and shook his head. He had a flash of Petyr van Abel in some fine little chamber in the seventeenth-century Motherhouse in Amsterdam. Was Michael a member now? Would they enfold him with all these trappings of security and legitimacy and safety? And what would Rowan think of that? There was so much he had to explain to Aaron about Rowan …

Drinking his first cup of coffee absently, he opened the next folder, and began to read.