The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,241

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