And the emerald. It lay on Mother’s dresser among all her voodoo trash, like a hideous trinket. I picked it up, finally, and hung it round the neck of the nearby plaster Virgin.
This for me was a dark time, a time of great freedom and also great learning. Katherine was gone, and nothing else much mattered to me. If I had ever doubted it, I knew it now—my family was my world. I could have gone to Europe then; I could have gone to China. I could have gone beyond war and pestilence and poverty. I could have lived as a potentate. But this small part of the earth was my home, and without my loved ones around me, nothing had any flavor.
Pathetic, I thought. But it was true. And I learned what only a powerful and rich man can ever know—what it was I truly wanted.
Meantime, the fiend was ever urging me to new lovers; and watching what went on as eagerly as ever. He imitated me more and more. Even when he visited Mother now, he came in a guise so like me that others thought it was I. He seemed to have lost any sense of himself, if he had ever had any.
“What do you really look like?” I asked.
“Laughter. Why ask me such a question?”
“When you are flesh what will you be?”
“Like you, Julien.”
“And why not like you were at first—brown-haired and brown-eyed?”
“That was only for Suzanne, that was what Suzanne would see, and so I took that shape and grew in that shape, a Scotsman of her village. I would be you. You are beautiful.”
I pondered much. I gambled, drank, danced until dawn, fought and argued with Confederate patriots and Yankee enemies, made and lost fortunes in various realms, fell in love a couple of times, and in general came to realize I grieved night and day for my Katherine. Perhaps I needed a purpose to my life, something beyond the making of money and the lavishing of it upon cousins far and wide, something besides the building of new bungalows on our lands, and the acquisition of more and more property. Katherine had been a purpose of sorts. I had never had any other.
Except for the fiend, of course. To play with him, to mutate flesh, to court and use him. Ah, I began to see through everything!
Then came the year 1871. Summer, and yellow fever, as it always struck, running rampant among the newest of the immigrants.
Darcy and Katherine and their boys had lately been abroad. In fact, for six months, they had been in Europe, and no sooner had the handsome Irishman set foot on shore than he came down with the fever.
He’d lost his immunity to it in foreign lands, I suppose, or whatever, I don’t honestly know, except that the Irish were always dying of this disease, and we were never affected by it. Katherine went mad. She sent letters to me in the Rue Dumaine; please come and cure him.
I said to Lasher, “Will he die?”
Lasher appeared at the foot of my bed, collected, arms folded, dressed as I had been dressed the day before, all illusion of course.
“I think he will die,” he said. “And perhaps it’s time. Don’t fret. There is nothing even a witch can do against this fever.”
I wasn’t so sure. But when I called upon Marguerite she began to cackle and dance: “Let the bastard die and all his spawn with him.”
This disgusted me. What had little Clay and Vincent done, those innocent children, except be born boys as I had been with my brother, Rémy?
I went back to the city, pondering what to do, consulting doctors and nurses, and of course the fever raged as it always did in hot weather, and the bodies piled high at the cemeteries. The city stank of death. Great fires were burned to drive away the evil effluvia.
The rich cotton factors and merchandising giants who had come south to make a buck after the war went down to the Grim Reaper as easily as the Irish peasants off the ships.
Then Darcy died. He died. And there was Katherine’s coachman at my door.
“He’s dead, Monsieur. Your sister begs you to come!”
What could I do? I had never set foot in that First Street house since it had been completed. I did not even know poor little Clay or Vincent by sight! I had not seen my sister in a year, except to argue with her once in