The Witching Hour

  Whether Julien did kill the man cannot be known, but if he did, he had--given the attitudes of the day--at least some reason.

  Julien was said to give out foreign gold coins as if they were copper pennies. Waiters at the fashionable restaurants vied with one another to serve his table. He was a fabled horseman and maintained several horses of his own, as well as two carriages and teams in his stables near to First Street.

  Even into old age, he often rode his chestnut mare all the way up St. Charles Avenue to Carrolton and back in the morning. He would toss coins to the black children whom he passed.

  After his death, four different witnesses claimed to have seen his ghost riding through the mist on St. Charles Avenue, and these stories were printed in the newspapers of the period.

  Julien was also a great supporter of the Mardi Gras, which began as we know it today around 1872. He entertained lavishly at the First Street house during the Mardi Gras season.

  It was also said countless times that Julien had the gift of "bilocation," that is, he could be in two places at the same time. This story was widely circulated among the servants. Julien would appear to be in the library, for instance, but then would be sighted almost immediately in the back garden. Or a maidservant servant would see Julien go out the front door, and then turn around to see him coming down the stairway.

  More than one servant quit working in the First Street house rather than cope with the "strange Monsieur Julien."

  It has been speculated that appearances of Lasher might have been responsible for this confusion. Whatever the case, later descriptions of Lasher's clothes bear a remarkable resemblance to those worn by Julien in two different portraits. Lasher as cited throughout the twentieth century is invariably dressed as Julien might have been dressed in the 1870s and 1880s.

  Julien stuffed handfuls of bills into the pockets of the priests who came to call or the visiting Little Sisters of the Poor or other such persons. He gave lavishly to the parish church, and to every charitable fund whose officials approached him. He often said that money didn't matter to him. Yet he was a tireless accumulator of wealth.

  We know that he loved his mother, Marguerite, and though he did not spend much time in her company, he purchased books for her all the time in New Orleans, and ordered them for her from New York and Europe. Only once did a quarrel between them attract attention and that was over Katherine's marriage to Darcy Monahan, at which time Marguerite struck Julien several times in front of the servants. By all accounts he was deeply emotionally hurt and simply withdrew, in tears, from his mother's company.

  After the death of Julien's wife, Suzette, Julien spent less time than ever at Riverbend. His children were brought up entirely at First Street. Julien, who had always been a debonair figure, took a more active role in society. Long before that, however, he appeared at the opera and the theater with his little niece (or daughter) Mary Beth. He gave many charity balls and actively supported young amateur musicians, presenting them in small private concerts in the double parlor at First Street.

  Julien not only made huge profits at Riverbend, he also went into merchandising with two New York affiliates and made a considerable fortune in that endeavor. He bought up property all over New Orleans, which he left to his niece Mary Beth, even though she was the designee of the Mayfair legacy and thereby stood to inherit a fortune larger than Julien's.

  There seems little doubt that Julien's wife, Suzette, was a disappointment to him. Servants and friends spoke of many unfortunate arguments. It was said that Suzette for all her beauty was deeply religious and Julien's high-spirited nature disturbed her. She eschewed the jewels and fine clothes which he wanted her to wear. She did not like to go out at night. She disliked loud music. A lovely creature, with pale skin and shining eyes, Suzette was always sickly and died young after the birth in rapid succession of her four children, and there is no doubt that the one girl, Jeannette, had some sort of "second sight" or psychic power.

  More than once Jeannette was heard by the servants to scream in uncontrollable panic at the sight of some ghost or apparition. Her sudden frights and mad dashes from the house into the street became well-known in the Garden District, and were even written up in the papers. In fact, it was Jeannette who gave rise to the first "ghost stories" surrounding First Street.

  There are several stories of Julien's being extremely impatient with Jeannette and locking her up. But by all accounts he loved his children. All three of his sons went to Harvard, returning to New Orleans to practice civil law, and to amass great fortunes of their own. Their descendants are Mayfairs to this day, regardless of sex or marital connection. And it is the law firm founded by Julien's sons which has, for decades, administered the Mayfair legacy.

  We have at least seven different photographs of Julien with his children, including some with Jeannette (who died young). In every one, the family seems extremely cheerful, and Barclay and Cortland strongly resemble their father. Though Barclay and Garland both died in their late sixties, Cortland lived to be eighty years old, dying in late October of 1959. This member of the Talamasca made direct contact with Cortland the preceding year, but we shall come to that at the proper time.

  (Ellie Mayfair, adoptive mother of Rowan Mayfair, the present designee of the legacy, is a descendant of Julien Mayfair, being a granddaughter of Julien's son Cortland, the only child of Cortland's son Sheffield Mayfair and his wife, a French-speaking cousin named Eugenie Mayfair, who died when Ellie was seven years old. Sheffield died before Cortland, of a severe heart attack in the family law offices on Camp Street in 1952, at which time he was forty-five. His daughter Ellie was a student at Stanford in Palo Alto, California, at the time, where she was already engaged to Graham Franklin, whom she later married. She never lived in New Orleans after that, though she returned for frequent visits and came back to adopt Rowan Mayfair in 1959.)

  Some of our most interesting evidence regarding Julien himself has to do with Mary Beth, and with the birth of Belle, her first daughter. Upon Mary Beth Julien bestowed everything she could possibly desire, holding balls for her at First Street that rivaled any private entertainment in New Orleans. The garden walks, balustrades, and fountains at First Street were all designed and laid out for Mary Beth's fifteenth birthday party.

  Mary Beth was already tall by the age of fifteen, and in her photographs from this period she appears stately, serious, and darkly beautiful, with large black eyes and very clearly defined and beautifully shaped eyebrows. Her air is decidedly indifferent however. And this apparent absence of narcissism or vanity was to characterize her photographs all her life. Sometimes her mannish posture is almost defiantly casual in these pictures; but it highly doubtful that she was ever defiant so much as simply distracted. It was frequently said that she looked like her grandmother Marguerite and not like her mother, Katherine.

  In 1887, Julien took his fifteen-year-old niece to New York with him. There Julien and Mary Beth visited one of Lestan's grandsons, Corrington Mayfair, who was an attorney and in the merchandising business with Julien. Julien and Mary Beth went on to Europe in 1888, remaining an entire year and a half, during which time New Orleans was informed by numerous letters to friends and relatives that sixteen-year-old Mary Beth had "married" a Scottish Mayfair--an Old World cousin--and given birth to a little girl named Belle. This marriage, taking place in a Scottish Catholic church, was described in rich detail in a letter which Julien wrote to a friend in the French Quarter, a notorious gossip of a woman, who passed the letter around to everyone. Other letters from both Julien and Mary Beth described the marriage in more abbreviated form for other talkative friends and relatives.

  It is worth noting that when Katherine heard of her daughter's marriage, she took to her bed and would not eat or speak for five days. Only when threatened with a private asylum did she sit up and agree to drink some soup. "Julien is the devil," she whispered, at which point Marguerite drove everyone out of the room.

  Unfortunately the mysterious Lor
d Mayfair died in a fall from his ancestral tower in Scotland two months before the birth of his little daughter. Again, Julien wrote home full accounts of everything which took place. Mary Beth wrote tearful letters to her friends.

  This Lord Mayfair is almost certainly a fictitious character. Mary Beth and Julien did visit Scotland; indeed they spent some time in Edinburgh and even visited Donnelaith, where they purchased the very castle on the hill above the town described in detail by Petyr van Abel. But the castle, once the family home of the Donnelaith clan, had been an abandoned ruin since the late 1600s. There is no record anywhere in Scotland of any lord or lords Mayfair.

  However, inquiries made by the Talamasca in this century have unearthed some rather startling evidence about the Donnelaith ruin. A fire gutted it in the year 1689, in the fall, apparently very near the time of Deborah's execution in Montcleve, France. It might have been the very day, but that we have been unable to discover. In the fire, the last of the Donnelaith clan--the old lord, his eldest son, and his young grandson--perished.

  It is tantalizing to suppose that the old lord was the father of Deborah Mayfair. It is also tantalizing to suppose that he was a wretched coward, who did not dare to interfere with the burning of the poor simpleminded peasant girl Suzanne, even when their "merry-begot" daughter Deborah was in danger of the same awful fate.

  But we cannot know. And we cannot know whether or not Lasher played any role in starting the fire that wiped out the Donnelaith family. History tells us only that the old man's body was burnt, while the infant grandson smothered in the smoke, and several women in the family leapt to their death from the battlements. The eldest son apparently died when a wooden stairway collapsed under him.

  History also tells us that Julien and Mary Beth purchased Donnelaith castle after only one afternoon spent in the ruins. It remains the property of the Mayfair family to this day, and other Mayfairs have visited it.

  It has never been occupied or restored, but it is kept cleared of all debris and rather safely maintained, and during Stella's life in the twentieth century, it was open to the public.

  Why Julien bought the castle, what he knew about it and what he meant to do with it has never been known. Surely he had some knowledge of Deborah and Suzanne, either through the family history, or through Lasher.

  The Talamasca has devoted an enormous amount of thought to this whole question--who knew what and when--because there is strong evidence to indicate that the Mayfairs of the nineteenth century did not know their full history. Katherine confessed on more than one occasion that she really didn't know much about the family's beginnings, only that they had come from Martinique to Saint-Domingue sometime in the sixteen hundreds. Many other Mayfairs made similar remarks.

  And even Mary Beth as late as 1920 told the parish priests at St. Alphonsus Church that it was "all lost in the dust." She seemed even a little confused when talking to local architecture students about who built Riverbend and when. Books of the period list Marguerite as the builder when, in fact, Marguerite was born there. When asked by the servants to identify certain persons in the old oil portraits at First Street, Mary Beth said that she could not. She wished somebody back then had had the presence of mind to write the names on the backs of the pictures.

  As far as we have been able to ascertain, the names are on the backs of at least some of the pictures.

  Perhaps Julien, and Julien alone, read the old records, for certainly there were old records. And Julien had started to move them from Riverbend to First Street as early as 1872.

  Whatever the case, Julien went to Donnelaith in 1888 and bought the ruined castle. And Mary Beth Mayfair told the story to the end of her days that Lord Mayfair was the father of her poor sweet little daughter Belle, who turned out to be the very opposite of her powerful mother.

  In 1892, an artist was hired to paint a picture of the ruin, and this oil painting hangs in the house on First Street.

  To return to the chronology, the supposed uncle and niece returned home with baby Belle in late 1889, at which time Marguerite, aged ninety and extremely decrepit, took a special interest in the baby.

  In fact, Katherine and Mary Beth had to keep watch on the child all the time it was at Riverbend, lest Marguerite go walking with it in her arms and then forget about it, and drop it or lay it on a stairstep or a table. Julien laughed at these cautions and said before the servants numerous times that the baby had a special guardian angel who would take care of it.

  By this time there seems to have been no talk at all about Julien having been Mary Beth's father, and none whatsoever about his being the father, by his daughter, of Belle.

  But for the purposes of this record, we are certain that he was Mary Beth's father and the father of her daughter Belle.

  Mary Beth, Julien, and Belle all lived together happily at First Street, and Mary Beth, though she loved to dance and to go to the theater and to parties, showed no immediate interest in finding "another" husband.

  Eventually, she did remarry, as we shall see, a man named Daniel McIntyre, giving birth to three more children--Carlotta, Lionel, and Stella.

  The night before Marguerite's death in 1891, Mary Beth woke up in her bedroom on First Street, screaming. She insisted she had to leave for Riverbend at once, that her grandmother was dying. Why had no one sent for her? The servants found Julien sitting motionless in the library of the first floor, apparently weeping. He seemed not to hear or see Mary Beth as she pleaded with him to take her to Riverbend.

  A young Irish maid then heard the old quadroon housekeeper remark that maybe that wasn't Julien at all sitting at the desk, and they ought to go look for him. This terrified the maid, especially since the housekeeper began to call out to "Michie Julien" about the house while this motionless weeping individual remained at the desk, staring forward as if he could not hear her.

  At last Mary Beth set out on foot, at which point Julien leapt up from the desk, ran his fingers through his white hair, and ordered the servants to bring round the brougham. He caught up with Mary Beth before she had reached Magazine Street.

  It is worth noting that Julien was sixty-three at this time, and described as being a very handsome man with the flamboyant appearance and demeanor of a stage actor. Mary Beth was nineteen and exceedingly beautiful. Belle was only two years old and there is no mention of her in this story.

  Julien and Mary Beth arrived at Riverbend just as messengers were being sent to fetch them. Marguerite was almost comatose, a wraith of a ninety-two-year-old woman, clutching a curious little doll with her bony fingers, which she called her maman much to the confusion of the attending doctor and nurse, who told all of New Orleans about it afterwards. A priest was also in attendance and his detailed account of the whole matter has also worked its way into our records.

  The doll was reputedly a ghastly thing with real human bones for limbs, strung together by means of black wire, and a mane of horrid white hair affixed to its head of rags with its crudely drawn features.

  Katherine, then aged sixty-one, and her two sons were both sitting by the bed, as they had been for hours. Remy was also there, having been at the plantation for a month before his mother took ill.

  The priest, Father Martin, had just given Marguerite the last sacraments, and the blessed candles were burning on the altar.

  When Marguerite breathed her last, the priest watched with curiosity as Katherine rose from her chair, went to the jewel box on the dresser which she had always shared with her mother, took out the emerald necklace, and gave it to Mary Beth. Mary Beth received it gratefully, put it around her neck, and then continued to weep.

  The priest then observed that it had begun to rain, and the wind about the house was extremely strong, banging the shutters and causing the leaves to fall. Julien seemed to be delighted by this and even laughed.

  Katherine appeared weary and frightened. And Mary Beth cried inconsolably. Clay, a personable young man, seemed fascinated by what was going on. His brother Vincent merely lo
oked indifferent.

  Julien then opened the windows to let in the wind and rain, which frightened the priest somewhat and certainly made him uncomfortable, as it was winter. He nevertheless stayed at the bedside as he thought proper, though rain was actually falling on the bed. The trees were crashing against the house. The priest was afraid one of the limbs might come right through the window nearest him.

  Julien, quite unperturbed and with his eyes full of tears, kissed the dead Marguerite and closed her eyes, and took the doll from her, which he put inside his coat. He then laid her hands on her chest and made a speech to the priest explaining that his mother had been born at the end of the "old century" and had lived almost a hundred years, that she had seen and understood things which she could never tell anyone.

  "In most families," Julien declared in French, "when a person dies, all that the person knows dies with that person. Not so with the Mayfairs. Her blood is in us, and all she knew is passed into us and we are stronger."

  Katherine merely nodded sadly to this speech. Mary Beth continued to weep. Clay stood in the corner with his arms folded, watching.

  When the priest asked timidly if the window might be closed, Julien told him that the heavens were weeping for Marguerite, and that it would be disrespectful to close the window. Julien then knocked the blessed candles off the Catholic altar by the bed, which offended the priest. It also startled Katherine.

  "Now, Julien, don't go crazy!" Katherine whispered. At which Vincent laughed in spite of himself, and Clay smiled unwillingly also. All glanced awkwardly at the priest, who was horrified. Julien then gave the company a playful smile and a shrug, and then looking at his mother again, he became miserable, and knelt down beside the bed, and buried his face in the covers beside the dead woman.

  Clay quietly left the room.

  As the priest was taking his leave, he asked Katherine about the emerald. Rather offhandedly she said that it was a jewel she had inherited from her mother, but never much liked, as it was so big and so heavy. Mary Beth could have it.