The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,288

gathering, waited on by numerous servants, and always lasting until quite late.

Family loyalty always has made it very difficult for us to determine what the cousins actually thought of Stella, or what they actually knew of her troubles at school.

But by this time, there are numerous mentions on record of Mary Beth telling the servants almost casually that Stella was the heiress, or that “Stella was the one who would inherit everything,” and even the remarkable comment—one of the most remarkable in our entire record—quoted twice and without context: “Stella has seen the man.”

We have no record of Mary Beth’s ever explaining this strange statement. We are told only that she made it to a laundress named Mildred Collins, and to an Irish maid named Patricia Devlin, and we received the stories thirdhand. We were further given to understand that there was no agreement among the descendants of these two women as to what the famous Miss Mary Beth meant by this comment. One person believed “the man” to be the devil, and another that he was “a ghost” who had haunted the family for hundreds of years.

Whatever the case, it seems clear that Mary Beth made remarks like this offhandedly at intimate moments with her servants, and we get the impression that she was confiding something to them, in a moment perhaps of understanding with them, which she could not or would not confide in people of her own rank.

And it is very possible that Mary Beth made similar remarks to other people, for by the 1920s old people in the Irish Channel knew about “the man.” They talked about “the man.” Two sources are simply not enough to explain the extent of this supposed “superstition” about the Mayfair women—that they had a mysterious “male spirit or ally” who helped them work their voodoo or witchcraft or tricks.

Certainly, we see this as an unmistakable reference to Lasher, and its implications are troubling, and it reminds us of how little we really understand about the Mayfair Witches and what went on among them, so to speak.

Is it possible, for instance, that the heiress in each generation has to manifest her power by independently seeing “the man”? That is, did she have to see “the man” when she was alone, and away from the older witch who could act as a channel, and was it required of her that of her own free will she mention what she had seen?

Once more, we must confess that we cannot know.

What we do know is that people who knew of “the man” and spoke of him did not apparently connect him with any dark-haired anthropomorphic figure which they had personally seen. They did not even connect “the man” with the mysterious being once seen with Mary Beth in her taxi, for the stories come from entirely different sources and were never put together by anyone, so far as we know, except us.

And so it is with so much of the Mayfair material. The references which come later to the mysterious dark-haired man at First Street are not connected with this earlier talk of “the man.” Indeed even people who knew of “the man” and who later saw an anonymous dark-haired man about the place did not make the connection, believing that the man they’d seen was simply some stranger or relative they did not know.

Witness Sister Bridget Marie’s statement in 1969 when I asked her specifically about “the man.”

“Ah, that. That was the invisible companion who hovered near that child night and day. The selfsame demon, I might add, who later hovered about her daughter Antha, ever ready to do the child’s bidding. And later around poor little Deirdre, the sweetest and most innocent of them all. Don’t ask me if I ever actually saw the creature. For as God is my witness, I don’t know if I ever saw him, but I tell you, and I’ve told the priest myself many a time, I knew when he was there!”

But it is very likely that at this time Lasher was not eager to be seen by people outside the family. And certainly we have not a single account of his ever showing himself deliberately to anyone, and as I have already mentioned, we get quite a few later on.

To return to the chronology. After Julien’s death, Mary Beth was at the very height of her financial influence and accomplishments. It was as if the loss of Julien left her a driven woman, and for