The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,290

husband, wasn’t interested in marriage in general, and would have her baby with all appropriate pomp and ceremony, as she was utterly delighted at the prospect of being a mother, and would name the baby Julien if it was a boy or Antha if it was a girl.

Antha was born in November of 1921, a healthy, eight-pound baby girl. Blood tests indicate that Lionel could have been the father. But Antha in no way resembled Lionel, for what that is worth, and there is simply something wrong with the picture of Lionel being the father. But more on that as we go on.

In 1922 the Great War was over, and Stella declared that she would make the Grand Tour of Europe which she had been denied before. With a nurse for the baby, and Lionel in tow quite reluctantly (he had been reading law with Cortland and he did not want to go), and Cortland happy to take off from the firm though his wife disliked his doing it, the party went to Europe first class, and spent a full year wandering about.

Stella was now an exceptionally beautiful young girl with a reputation for doing anything that she pleased. Cortland, as he grew older, more and more resembled his father Julien, except that his hair remained black until the end of his long life. In his photographs Cortland is lean and handsome at this period. The resemblance between him and Stella was frequently remarked upon.

According to the gossip of Cortland’s descendants, the Grand Tour was a drunken bash from start to finish, with Stella and Lionel gambling at Monte Carlo for weeks on end. In and out of luxury hotels all over Europe they went, and in and out of museums and ancient ruins, often carrying their bottles of bourbon with them in paper sacks. To this day the grandchildren of Cortland talk about his letters home, full of humorous descriptions of their antics. And countless presents arrived for Cortland’s wife, Amanda, and his sons.

Family legend also maintains that the party suffered one tragedy while abroad. The nurse who went along to take care of baby Antha experienced some sort of “breakdown” while they were in Italy, and took a severe fall on the Spanish Steps in Rome. She died in the hospital within hours of the fall.

Only recently have our investigators been able to shed some light on this incident, uncovering a simple written record (in Italian) of the incident in the Holy Family Hospital in Rome.

The woman’s name was Bertha Marie Becker. And we have verified that she was half Irish and half German, born in New Orleans in the Irish Channel in 1905. She was admitted with severe head wounds and went into a coma about two hours afterwards from which she never revived.

But before that time she did a considerable amount of talking to the English-speaking doctor who was called to assist her and to the English-speaking priest who arrived later on.

She told the doctors that Stella, Lionel, and Cortland were “witches” and “evil” and that they had cast a spell on her and that “a ghost” traveled with the party, a dark evil man who appeared by baby Antha’s cradle at all hours of the night and day. She said the baby could make the man appear, and would laugh with delight when he stood over her; and that the man did not want Bertha to see him, and he had driven Bertha to her death, stalking her through the crowds at the Spanish Steps.

The doctor and the priest concurred that Bertha, an illiterate servant girl, was insane. Indeed the record ends with the doctor noting that the girl’s employers, very gracious, well-to-do people who spared no expense to make her comfortable, were heartbroken at her deterioration, and arranged for her body to be shipped home.

To our knowledge no one in New Orleans ever heard this story. Only Bertha’s mother was living at the time of the girl’s death, and she apparently suspected nothing when she heard that her daughter had died from a fall. She was given an enormous sum of money by Stella in compensation for her lost daughter, and descendants of the Becker family were talking about that as late as 1955.

What interests us about the story is that the dark man is obviously Lasher. And except for the one mention of a mysterious man in a taxi with Mary Beth, we have no other mention of him in the twentieth century