The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,303

and his investigations of cases of possession cover some one hundred and fourteen different files.

THE LIFE OF STUART TOWNSEND

How much of Stuart’s life is relevant to what happened to him, or to the story of the Mayfair Witches, I cannot say. I know that I am including more of it here than I need to include. And especially in view of what little I say of Arthur Langtry, I must explain.

I think I have included this material here as some sort of memorial to Stuart, and as some sort of warning. Be that as it may .…

Stuart came to the attention of the order when he was twenty-two years old. Our offices in London received from one of its many investigators in America a small newspaper article about Stuart Townsend, or “The Boy Who Had Been Somebody Else for Ten Years.”

Stuart had been born in a small town in Texas in the year 1895. His father was the local doctor, a deeply intellectual and widely respected man. Stuart’s mother was from a well-to-do family, and engaged in charity work of the fashionable sort for a lady of her position, having two nurses for her seven children, of which Stuart was the firstborn. They lived in a large white Victorian house with a widow’s walk, on the town’s one and only fashionable street.

Stuart went to boarding school in New England when he was six years old. He was from the beginning an exceptional student, and during his summer vacations home, he was something of a recluse, reading in his attic bedroom until late in the night. He did have a number of friends, however, among the town’s small but vigorous aristocracy—sons and daughters of city officials, lawyers, and well-to-do ranchers; and he seems to have been well liked.

When he was ten years old Stuart came down with a serious fever which could not be diagnosed. His father concluded finally that it was of infectious origin, but no real explanation was ever found. Stuart went into a crisis during which he was delirious for two days.

When he recovered, he wasn’t Stuart. He was somebody else. This somebody else claimed to be a young woman named Antoinette Fielding who spoke with a French accent and played the piano beautifully, and seemed generally confused about how old she was, where she lived, or what she was doing in Stuart’s house.

Stuart himself did know some French; but he did not know how to play the piano. And when he sat down at the dusty grand in the parlor and began to play Chopin the family thought they were losing their minds.

As for his believing he was a girl, and crying miserably when he saw his reflection in a mirror, his mother could not endure this and actually ran from the room. After about a week of hysterical and melancholic behavior, Stuart-Antoinette was persuaded to stop asking for dresses, to accept the fact that she had a boy’s body now, and to believe that she was Stuart Townsend, and get back to doing what Stuart was expected to do.

However, any return to school was out of the question. And Stuart-Antoinette, who became known to the family as Tony for the sake of simplicity, spent his or her days playing the piano endlessly and scribbling out memories in a huge diary as she-he tried to solve the mystery of who she was.

As Dr. Townsend perused these scribbled recollections he perceived that the French in which they were written was far beyond the level of expertise which ten-year-old Stuart had attained. He also began to realize that the child’s memories were all of Paris, and of Paris in the 1840s, as direct references to operas and plays and modes of transportation clearly showed.

It emerged from these written documents that Antoinette Fielding had been of English-French parentage, that her Frenchman father had not married her English mother—Louisa Fielding—and that she had lived a strange and reclusive life in Paris, the pampered daughter of a high-class prostitute who sought to protect her only child from the filth of the streets. Her great gift and consolation was her music.

Dr. Townsend, enthralled, and reassuring his wife that they would get to the bottom of this mystery, began an investigation by mail with a view to discovering whether or not this person Antoinette Fielding had ever existed in Paris.

This occupied him for some five years.

During that time, “Antoinette” remained in Stuart’s body, playing the piano obsessively, venturing out only to get lost or