IT IS NOT the story of my life which you require, but let me explain how I came upon my various secrets. As you know I was born in the year 1828, but I wonder if you realize what this means. Those were the very last days of an ancient way of life—the last decades in which the rich landowners of the world lived pretty much as they had for centuries.
We not only knew nothing of railroads, telephones, Victrolas, or horseless carriages. We didn’t even dream of such things!
And Riverbend—with its vast main house crammed with fine furniture and books, and all its many outbuildings sheltering uncles and aunts and cousins, and its fields stretching as far as the eye could see from the riverbank, south, and east and west—truly was Paradise.
Into this world I slipped almost without notice. I was a boy child, and this was a family that wanted female witches. I was a mere Prince of the Blood, and the court was a loving and friendly place, but no one observed that a little boy had been born who possessed probably greater witches’ gifts than any man or woman ever in the family.
In fact, my grandmother Marie Claudette was so disappointed that I was not a girl child that she stopped speaking to my mother, Marguerite. Marguerite had already given birth to one male, my older brother, Rémy, and now, having had the audacity to bring another into the world, she crashed down completely from favor.
Of course Marguerite rectified this mistake as soon as possible, giving birth in 1830 to Katherine, who was to become her heiress and designee of the legacy—my darling little sister. But a coldness by then existed between mother and daughter, and was never healed in Marie Claudette’s lifetime.
Also I personally suspect that Marie Claudette took one look at Katherine and thought, “What an idiot,” for that is just what Katherine turned out to be. But a female witch was needed, and Marie Claudette would lay eyes upon a granddaughter before she died, so on to this little witless baby who was bawling in the cradle Marie Claudette passed the great emerald.
Now as you know, by the time Katherine was a young woman I had come into my own as a family influence, was much valued as a carrier of witches’ gifts, and it was I who fathered, by Katherine, Mary Beth Mayfair, who was the last in fact of the great Mayfair Witches.
I fathered Mary Beth’s daughter Stella, as I am sure you also know, and fathered by Stella her daughter, Antha.
But let me return to the perilous times of my early childhood, when men and women both warned me in hushed voices to be well-behaved, ask no questions, defer to the family customs in every regard, and pay no attention to anything strange that I might see pertaining to the realm of ghosts and spirits.
It was made known to me in no uncertain terms that strong Mayfair males did not do well; early death, madness, exile—those were the fates of the troublemakers.
When I look back on it, I think it is absolutely impossible that I could have become one of the great Passive Well-Behaved, along with my Oncle Maurice and Lestan and countless other goody-two-shoes cousins.
First of all, I saw ghosts all the time; heard spirits; could see life leaving a body when the body died; could read people’s minds, and sometimes even move or hurt matter without even really getting angry or meaning to do it. I was a natural Utile witch or warlock or whatever the word might be.
And I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t see Lasher. He was standing by my mother’s chair many a morning when I went in to greet her. I saw him by Katherine’s cradle. But he never cast his eyes on me, and I’d been warned very early on that I must never speak to him, nor seek to know who or what he was, or say his name, or make him look at me.
My uncles, all very happy men, said, “Remember this, a Mayfair male can have everything he desires—wine, women, and wealth beyond imagining. But he cannot seek to know the family secrets. Leave it in the hands of the great witch, for she sees all and directs all, and upon that principle our vast power has been founded.”
Well, I wanted to know what this was about. I had no intention of merely