As you know, she fell in love with Darcy! Indeed it was Lasher who revealed the plot to me. I was headed uptown, for Katherine had not come home, and I did not like it that she stayed late after the builders had gone, roaming around the half-built house alone with that wicked Irishman.
Lasher sought to divert me. First he would talk. Then he would have a victim to possess.
"Not now," says I. "I must find Katherine."
And finally, in manly form, he did his worst trick, affrighting my coachman and driving us off the Nyades Road, where we broke a wheel, and I was soon sitting on the curb as the repairs went on, perfectly furious. But I could see now that the daemon did not want me to go uptown.
So the next night, I sought to deflect it. I sent it upon a mission to find for me some rare coins which I would have, and then off I went alone on my mare, singing the entire time, lest it come near enough to read my thoughts and intentions.
It was twilight when I reached this house. Like a great castle it stood, its brick plastered over to imitate stone, its columns in place, its windows ready for the glass to be installed. And it was dark and deserted.
I came inside, and on the floor of the parlor found my blessed sister and her man. I almost killed him. Indeed, I had him by the neck and was pounding him with my fist, when Katherine, to my horror, cried out:
"Come now, my Lasher. Be my avenger. Stop him from destroying the one I love."
Shrieking and sobbing, she fell to the floor in a faint. But Lasher was there. I felt him surrounding me in the darkness, as if he were a great creature of the sea and I a helpless victim. Darkness wrapped itself around me in the shell of the double parlor below, and then I felt the thing stretch out and stroke the walls, and come together again.
"Hold back, Julien," Lasher said. "The witch loves this mortal man. Be careful. She has used ancient and sanctified words to call me."
Darcy Monahan rose to his feet and came to assault me. Lasher stayed his hand. He was superstitious as anyone with Irish blood, and he looked around sensing the presence in the dark, and then he saw his lovely Katherine in a heap, moaning, and he went to revive her.
I stalked out in a rage. I went back to my flat in the Rue Dumaine and brought several quadroon ladies of the night to my house, and there coupled with them one after another, in an abandon of grief. Katherine and that Irish beast; uptown in the land of the Americans.
I see when I look back upon the story that I had kept too much knowledge from her. She thought the man was a ghost or a simple thing. She had no knowledge of what Lasher could do when she called upon him.
"Well," I told her, "if you want to kill me, just call on him again like that, and he will try to do your bidding."
I wasn't sure this was true, but I didn't want her flinging curses at me. First she had betrayed me with Darcy and then with Lasher himself, and she was the witch, and all my life I had shielded her. "You don't know what you command," I said, "I've saved you from it."
She was horrified and tearful and sad, but she was also resolved to marry Darcy Monahan. "You don't need to save me anymore," she said. "I shall marry with the emerald around my neck as our family laws require, but I marry in God's house before His altar, and my children shall be baptized at His font, and they shall turn their back on evil."
I shrugged. We had always married at a Catholic altar, had we not? We were all baptized. What was this? But I said nothing to her.
My mother and I set out to turn her away from Darcy. But there was no doing it. Indeed, she was ready to renounce the legacy for this Irish fool, or so she told everyone. The cousins came to me en masse. What will happen? What is the law? Will we lose our good fortune? And then it was clear how much they knew of the dark secret furnace of evil which fueled the entire enterprise and how willing they were to go along with it.
But it was Lasher who gave the bride away.
"Let her marry the Celt," he said. "Your father had the Irish blood, and in it rode the witches' gifts which have ridden in such blood for centuries. The Irish, the Scots, they are gifted with second sight. Your father's blood made you strong. Let us see what this Irishman can do with your sister."
But you know the story. Katherine lost two babies, both boys; then had by Darcy two sons. Then despite her prayers, her Masses, her rosaries and her priests, she lost one baby after another.
As the Civil War raged, as the city fell, as fortunes were destroyed overnight, as Yankee troops went through our streets, she reared her boys in the First Street house, among American friends and traitors. Katherine thought she had left the family curse behind. Indeed, she had given back the emerald on her wedding day.
The family was frantic. The witch was gone. For the first time I heard many of them whispering the word. "But she is the witch!" they would say. "How can she desert us?"
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, Remy?
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 a public street. Suddenly all my riches and my pleasures seemed nothing to me. My sister was begging me to come.