The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,487

of law, but the point of following them to the letter is—and has always been—to avoid even the remotest possibility of anyone ever challenging the inheritance at any point in its history, and with a personal fortune of this size and this … ”

And on and on he went in familiar lawyerly fashion, but she understood. Lasher had won this round. Lasher knew the terms of the legacy, didn’t he? He had simply given her the appropriate wedding present.

Her anger was cold and dark and isolating just as it had always been at its worst. She gazed off, out the office window, not even seeing the soft cloud-filled sky, or the deep winding gash of the river below it.

“I’ll have this gold chain repaired,” Ryan said. “Seems to be broken.”

It was one o’clock when she reached First Street with lunch in a little brown sack—two sandwiches and a couple of bottles of Dutch beer. Michael was all excited. They’d found a treasure trove of old New Orleans red bricks under the earth on the back lot. Beautiful bricks, the kind they couldn’t make anymore. They could now build the new gateposts with the perfect material. And they’d also found a stash of old blueprints in the attic.

“They look like the original plans,” he said. “They may have been drawn by Darcy himself. Come on. I left them up there. They’re so fragile.”

She went with him up the stairs. How fresh it all looked with the new paint; even Deirdre’s room was lovely now, the way it should have always been.

“Nothing’s the matter, is it?” he asked.

Wouldn’t he know? she thought. Wouldn’t he have to sense it? And to think she had to wear the damned thing at the wedding. Her great dream of the Mayfair Medical Center, and everything else would go right out the window if she didn’t. He’d go crazy when she told him. And she couldn’t bear to see the scared look in his eyes again. She couldn’t bear to see him agitated and weak, that was the truth of it.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I was just downtown all morning with the lawyers again, and I missed you.” She threw her arms around him, nuzzling her head under his chin. “I really really missed you.”

Thirty-eight

NO ONE SEEMED the least surprised at the news. Aaron drank a toast with them over breakfast, and then went back to work in the library at First Street, where at Rowan’s invitation he was cataloging the rare books.

Smooth-talking Ryan of the cold blue eyes came by Tuesday afternoon, to shake Michael’s hand. In a few words of pleasant conversation, he made it clear that he was impressed with Michael’s accomplishments, which could only mean of course that Michael had been investigated, through the regular financial channels, just as if he were bidding on a job.

“It’s all sort of annoying, I’m sure,” Ryan admitted finally, “investigating the fiancée of the designee of the Mayfair legacy, but you see, I don’t have much choice in the matter … ”

“I don’t mind,” Michael said with a little laugh. “Anything you couldn’t find out and you wanna know, just ask.”

“Well, for starters, how did you ever do so well without committing a crime?”

Michael laughed off the flattery. “When you see this house in a couple of months,” he said, “you’ll understand.” But he wasn’t fool enough to think his modest fortune had impressed this man. What were a couple of million in blue chip securities compared to the Mayfair legacy? No, this was a little talk about the geography of New Orleans—that he had come from the other side of Magazine Street, and that he still had the Irish Channel in his voice. But Michael had been too long out west to worry about something like that.

They walked together over the newly clipped grass. The new boxwood—small and trim—was now in place throughout the garden. It was possible to see the flower beds as they had been laid out a century before—to see the little Greek statues placed at the four corners of the yard.

Indeed, the entire classical plan was reemerging. The long octagonal shape of the lawn was the same as the long octagonal shape of the pool. The perfectly square flagstones were set in a diamond pattern against the limestone balustrades which broke the patio into distinct rectangles and marked off paths which met at right angles, framing both garden and house. Old trellises had been righted so that they once again defined