The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,284

to be among those people, no matter how much her sons begged her to do so. A little later during the evening, when she was quite intoxicated, she asked our investigator, whose name she did not know, whether or not he believed people could sell their souls to the devil. She said that her husband had done it, and he was “richer than Rockefeller” and so was she and so were her sons. “They will all burn in hell some day,” she told him. “Of that you can be sure.”

When our investigator asked if the lady really believed this sort of thing, she replied that there were witches alive in the modern world who could throw spells.

“They can make you believe you are some place you aren’t, that you’re seeing things when there’s nothing there. They did that to my husband. And you know why? Because my husband is a witch, a powerful witch. Don’t quibble over words like warlock. It doesn’t matter. The man is a witch. I myself saw what he could do.”

Asked point-blank if her husband had ever done any evil to her, Cortland’s wife said (to this apparent stranger) that no, she had to confess he hadn’t. It was what he condoned in others, what he went along with, and what he believed. She then began to cry and to say that she missed her husband, and she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“I’ll tell you this much,” she said when she had recovered herself slightly. “If I wanted my husband to come to me tonight, he’d do it. How he’d do it I couldn’t tell you, but he could make himself materialize in this very room. All his family can do things like that. They could drive you out of your mind with it. But he’d be here in this very room. Sometimes he’s in the room with me when I don’t want him to be. And I can’t make him go away.”

At this point the lady was rescued by a Grady niece, and no further contact was ever accomplished until some years later.

One further circumstance argues for a close bond between Cortland and Stella, and that is that after Julien’s death, Cortland took Stella and her brother Lionel to England and to Asia, for well over a year. Cortland already had five children at this time, all of which he left behind with his wife. Yet he seems to have been the instigator of this trip, and was completely in charge of the arrangements and greatly prolonged the venture so that the party did not actually return to New Orleans for some eighteen months.

After the Great War, Cortland left his wife and children again to travel for a year with Stella. And he seems always to have been on Stella’s side in family disputes.

In sum, this evidence is certainly not conclusive, but if does indicate Cortland might have been Stella’s father. But then again, Julien, in spite of his great age, may have been her father. We don’t know.

Whatever the case, Stella was pretty much “the favorite child” from the time of her birth. Daniel McIntyre certainly seems to have loved her as if she were his own daughter, and it is entirely possible that he never knew she was not.

Of the early childhood of all three children, we know little that is specific, and Richard Llewellyn’s portrait is the most intimate we possess.

As the children grew older, there was more and more talk about dissension, however; and when Carlotta went to board at the Sacred Heart at the age of fourteen, everyone knew it was against Mary Beth’s wishes, and that Daniel, too, was heartbroken, and wanted his daughter to come home more often than she did. Carlotta is never described as a happy child by anyone. But it is difficult to this day to gather information about her, because she is still living, and even people who knew her fifty years ago are extremely afraid of her, and of her influence, and very reluctant to say anything about her at all.

The people who are willing to talk are those who most dislike her. Possibly if the others were not so afraid, we might hear something to balance the picture.

Whatever the case, Carlotta was admired for her brilliance from the time she was a little girl. She was even called a genius by the nuns who taught her. She boarded at Sacred Heart through high school, and went on to Loyola law