The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,232

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

THE HISTORY CONTINUES

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