The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,301

themselves she would take them to court on behalf of Stella (and later on behalf of Antha, and later on behalf of Deirdre unto the present time).

They were hurt and baffled by her distrust. By 1928 they had made near incalculable amounts of money on behalf of Stella, whose affairs of course were completely entangled with their own. They could not understand Carlotta’s attitude, and they seemed to have persisted in taking it literally over the years.

That is, they patiently answered all her questions, and again and again attempted to explain what they were doing, when of course Carlotta only asked them more questions and demanded more answers and brought up new topics for examination, and called for more meetings, and made more phone calls, and made more veiled threats.

It is interesting to note that almost every legal secretary or clerk who ever worked for Mayfair and Mayfair seemed to understand this “game.” But Julien’s sons continued to be hurt and bitter about it always, as if they did not see through it to the core.

Only reluctantly did they allow themselves to be forced away from the house on First Street where all of them had been born.

By 1928, they were already being forced away but they didn’t know it. Twenty-five years later, when Pierce and Cortland Mayfair asked to examine some of Julien’s belonging in the attic, they were not allowed past the front door. But in 1928 such a thing would have been unimaginable.

Cortland Mayfair probably never guessed that the battle over Antha was the last personal battle with Carlotta that he would ever win.

Meantime, Pierce practically lived at First Street in the fall of 1928. Indeed by the spring of 1929, he was going everywhere with Stella, and had styled himself her “personal secretary, chauffeur, punching bag and crying pillow.” Cortland put up with it, but he didn’t like it. He told friends and family that Pierce was a fine boy, and he would tire of the whole thing and go east to school just as all the other boys had done.

As it turned out, Pierce never really had a chance to tire of Stella. But we have now come to the year 1929, and we should interrupt this story to include the strange case of Stuart Townsend, our brother in the Talamasca, who wanted so badly to make contact with Stella in the summer of that year.

Twenty

THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES

PART VII

The Disappearance of Stuart Townsend

In 1929, Stuart Townsend, who had been studying the Mayfair materials for years, petitioned the council in London to allow him to attempt contact with the Mayfair family.

He felt strongly that Stella’s cryptic message to us on the back of the photograph meant that she wanted such contact.

And Stuart was also convinced that the last three Mayfair Witches—Julien, Mary Beth, and Stella—were not murderers or evildoers in any sense; that it would be entirely safe to contact them, and that, indeed, “wonderful things” might result.

This forced the council to take a hard look at the entire question, and also to reexamine, as it does constantly, the aims and standards of the Talamasca.

Though an immense body of written material exists in our archives as to our aims and standards, as to what we find acceptable and unacceptable, and though this is a constant topic of conversation at our council meetings worldwide, let me summarize for the purposes of this narrative the issues which are relevant here, all of which were raised by Stuart Townsend in 1929.

First and foremost: We had created in the File on the Mayfair Witches an impressive and valuable history of a psychic family. We had proved to ourselves beyond a doubt that the Mayfairs had contact with the realm of the invisible, and that they could manipulate unseen forces to their advantage. But there were still many things about what they did that we did not know.

What if they could be persuaded to talk to us, to share our secrets? What might we then learn?

Stella was not the secretive or guarded person that Mary Beth had been. Maybe, if she could be convinced of our discretion and our scholarly purpose, she would reveal things to us. Possibly Cortland Mayfair would talk to us too.

Second and perhaps less important: Certainly we had over the years violated the privacy of the Mayfair family with our vigilance. We had, according to Stuart, “snooped” into every aspect of their lives. Indeed we had studied these people as specimens, and again and