The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,234

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

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