The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,440

with food. Of Mayfairs and Mayfairs.”

Michael gazed in silence at her profile. She held a delicate stem glass in her right hand, letting it catch the fragile sun.

“It’s all so graceful, so seductive,” she said. “I didn’t know life could be the way that it seems here. I didn’t know there were houses like this anywhere in America. How strange it all is. I’ve traveled the whole world, and never been to a place like this. It’s as if time forgot this place completely.”

Michael couldn’t help but smile. “Things change very slowly here,” he said. “Thank God for that.”

“Yet it’s as if I dreamed of these rooms, and of a way of life that can be lived here, and never remembered on waking. But something in me, something in me must have remembered. Something in me felt alien and lost in the world we made out there.”

They wandered out into the sunshine together, roaming around the old pool and through the ruined cabana. “This is all solid,” Michael explained as he examined the sliding doors, and the washbasin and shower. “It can be repaired. Look, this is built of cypress. And the pipes are copper. Nothing destroys cypress. I could fix that plumbing in a couple of days.”

Back into the high grass they walked, where the old outbuildings had once stood. Nothing remained but one lone sad tumbledown wooden structure on the very inside edge of the rear lot.

“Not so bad, not so bad at all,” Michael said, peering through the dusty screens. “Probably the menservants lived out here, it’s a sort of garçonniére.”

Here was the oak tree in which Deirdre had sought refuge, soaring to perhaps eighty feet over their heads. The foliage was dark and dusty and tight with the heat of the summer. It would break into a glorious mint green in the spring. Great clumps of banana trees sprang like monstrous grass in patches of sunlight. And a long beautifully built brick wall stretched across the back of the property, overgrown with ivy and tangled wisteria right to the hinges of the Chestnut Street gates.

“The wisteria is still blooming,” Michael said. “I love these purple blossoms—how I used to love to touch them when I went walking, to see the petals shiver.”

Why the hell can’t you take off the gloves for a moment, just to feel those tender little petals in your hand?

Rowan stood with her eyes closed. Was she listening to the birds? He found himself staring at the long back wing of the main house, at the servants’ porches with their white wooden railings and white privacy lattice, and just the sight of this lattice subdued him and made him feel happy. These were all the random colors and textures of home.

Home. As if he had ever lived in such a place. Well, had any wandering observer ever loved it more? And in a way he had always lived in it, it was the place he had longed for when he went away, the place he had dreamed of …

You cannot imagine the strength of the assault …

“Michael?”

“What is it, honey?” He kissed her, catching the delicious smell of the sun in her hair. The warmth gave a glisten to her skin. But the frisson of the visions lingered. He opened his eyes wide, letting the burnt afternoon light fill them, letting the soft hum of the insects lull him.

tangle of lies …

Rowan went before him in the high grass.

“There are flagstones here, Michael.” Her voice so thin in the great openness. “All of this is flagstone. It’s covered over.”

He wandered after her, back into the front garden. They found little Greek statues, cement satyrs beautifully weathered, peeping with blind eyes from beneath the overgrown boxwood; a marble nymph lost in the dark waxen leaf camellias, and the tiny yellow lantana blooming beautifully wherever the sun broke in.

“Bacon and eggs, we called this little flower,” he said, picking a sprig of it for her. “See the tiny brown and yellow petals, mingled with the orange. And there, there’s the blue kind. And see that flower, that’s impatiens, and look, that’s hollyhock—the big blue flowers growing by the porch, but we always called it althaea.”

“Althaea, that’s so lovely.”

“That vine there is the Queen’s Wreath, or the Coral Wreath, but we called it Rose of Montana.”

They could just see the white streak of Deirdre’s old rocking chair above the lace of the vines. “They must have trimmed them for her to see out,” he said. “See