The Witching Hour

"I'm surprised you haven't hit upon the obvious answer," she said, "the one that is so clear and so neat."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Maybe your purpose is simple. It's to kill me."

  "God, how could you think of such a thing?" He drew closer to her, brushing her hair back out of her face, and gathering her near to him.

  She looked at him as if from a long long distance away.

  "Honey, listen to me," he said. "Anybody can take a human life. It's easy. Very easy. There are a million ways. You know ways I don't know because you're a doctor. That woman, Carlotta, small as she was, she killed a man strong enough to strangle her with one hand. When I sleep next to any woman, she can kill me if she wants to. You know that. A scalpel, a hat pin, a bit of lethal poison. It's easy. And we don't do those things, nothing on earth can make most of us ever even think of them, and that's how it's been all your life with you. And now you find you've got a mutant power, something that exceeds the laws of choice and impulse and self-control, something that calls for a more subtle understanding, and you have that understanding. You have the strength to know your own strength."

  She nodded; but she was still shaking all over. And he could tell that she didn't believe him. And in a way, he wasn't sure he believed himself. What was the use of denying it? If she didn't control this power, she would inevitably use it again.

  But there was something else he had to say, and it had to do with the visions and the power in his hands.

  "Rowan," he said, "you asked me to take off the gloves the first night we met. To hold your hands. I've made love to you without the gloves. Just your body and my body, and our hands touching and my hands touching you all over, and what is it I see, Rowan? What do I feel? I feel goodness and I feel love."

  He kissed her cheek. He kissed her hair and brought it back off her forehead with his hand.

  "You're right in many things you've said, Rowan, but not in that. I'm not meant to hurt you. I owe my life to you." He turned her head towards him and kissed her, but she was still cold and trembling, and far far beyond his reach.

  She took his hands and moved them down and away from her, gently, nodding, and then she kissed him gently, but she didn't want to be touched now. It didn't do any good.

  He sat there for a while, thinking, looking at the long ornate room. Looking at the high mirrors in their dark carved frames, and the dusty old Bozendorfer piano at the far end, and the draperies like long streaks of faded color in the gloom.

  Then he climbed to his feet. He couldn't sit still any longer. He paced the floor in front of the couch, and found himself at the side window, looking out over the dusty screen porch.

  "What did you say a moment ago?" he asked, turning around. "You said something about passivity and confusion. Well, this is it, Rowan, the confusion."

  She didn't answer him. She was sitting crouched there, staring at the floor.

  He went back to her and gathered her up, off the couch and into his arms. Her cheeks were still splotched with pink, and very pale. Her lashes were dark and long as she looked down.

  He pressed his lips against her mouth softly, feeling no resistance, almost no awareness, as if it were the mouth of someone unconscious or deep asleep. Then slowly she came back to life. She slipped her hands up around his neck, and kissed him back.

  "Rowan, there is a pattern," he whispered in her ear. "There is a great web and we're in it, but I believe now as I believed then, they were good, the people who brought us together. And what they want of me is good. I gotta figure it out, Rowan. I have to. But I know it's good. Just as I know that you are good, too."

  He heard her sigh against him, felt the lift of her warm breasts against his chest. When at last she slipped away, it was with great tenderness, kissing his fingers as she let them go.

  She walked out towards the center of the long room. She stood under the high broad archway that divided the space into two parlors, and she looked up at the beautiful carving in the plaster, and at the way the arch curved down to meet the cornices at either end. She seemed to be studying this, to be lost in contemplating the house.

  He felt bruised and quiet. The whole exchange had hurt him. He couldn't shake a feeling of misery and suspicion, though it was not suspicion of her.

  "Who gives a damn!" she whispered as if she were talking to herself, but she seemed fragile and uncertain.

  The dusty sunlight crept in from the screened porch and showed the amber wax on the old boards. The motes of dust swirled around her.

  "Talk, talk, talk," she said. "The next move is theirs. You've done everything you could. And so have I. And here we are. And let them come to us."

  "Yes, let them come."

  She turned to him, inviting him silently to draw closer, her face imploring and almost sad. A split second of dread shocked him, and left him empty. The love he felt for her was so precious to him, and yet he was afraid, actually afraid.

  "What are we going to do, Michael?" she said. And suddenly she smiled, a very beautiful and warm smile.

  He laughed softly. "I don't know, honey." He shrugged and shook his head. "I don't know."

  "You know what I want from you right now?"

  "No. But whatever it is, you can have it."

  She reached out for his hand. "Tell me about this house," she said, looking up into his eyes. "Tell me everything you know about a house like this, and tell me if it really can be saved."

  "Honey, it's just waiting for that, just waiting. It's solid as any castle in Montcleve or Donnelaith."

  "Could you do it? I don't mean with your own hands ... "

  "--I'd love to do it with my own hands." He looked at them suddenly, these wretched gloved hands. How long since he'd held a hammer and nails, or the handle of a saw, or laid a plane to wood. And then he looked up at the painted arch above them, at the long sweep of the ceiling with its fractured and peeling paint. "Oh, how I'd love to," he said.

  "What if you had carte blanche, what if you could hire anybody and everybody you wanted--plasterers, painters, roofers, people to bring it all back, to restore every nook and cranny ... "

  Her words went on, slow yet exuberant. But he knew everything she was saying, he understood. And he wondered if she could possibly understand all that it really meant to him. To work on a house like this had always been his greatest dream, but it wasn't merely a house like this, it was this house. And back and back he traveled in memory, until he was a boy again, outside at the gate, a boy who went off to the library to pull down off the shelves the old picture books which had this house inside them, this very room and that hallway, because he never dreamed he would see these rooms except in books.

  And in the vision the woman had said, converging upon this very moment in time, in this house, in this crucial moment when ...

  "Michael? You want to do it?"

  Through a veil, he saw her face had lighted up like the face of a child. But she seemed so far away, so brilliant and happy and far away.

  Is that you, Deborah?

  "Michael, take off the gloves," Rowan said, her sudden sharpness startling him. "Go back to work! Go back to being you. For fifty years nobody's been happy in this house, nobody's loved in this house, nobody's won! It's time for us to love here and to win here, it's time for us to win the house back itself. I knew that when I finished the File on the Mayfair Witches. Michael, this is our house."

  But you can alter ... Never think for a moment that you do not have the power, for the power derives from ...

  "Michael, answer me."

  Alter what? Don't leave me like this. Tell me!

  But they were gone, just as if they'd never come near, and here he stood, with Rowan, in the sunshine and on the warm amber-colored floor, and she was waiting for him to answer.

  And the house waited, the beautiful house, beneath its layers of rust and soil, beneath its shadows and its tangled ragged vines, and in its heat and its dampness, it waited.

  "Oh, yes, honey, yes," he said as if waking
from a dream, his senses flooded suddenly with the fragrance of the honeysuckle on the screens, and the singing of the birds outside, and the warmth of the sun itself coming in on them.

  He turned around in the middle of the long room. "The light, Rowan, we have to let in the light. Come on," he said, taking her hand. "Let's see if these old shutters still open."

  Thirty-one

  QUIETLY, REVERENTLY, THEY began to explore the house. At first it was as if they had crept away from the guards in a museum, and dared not abuse their accidental freedom.

  They were too respectful to touch the personal belongings of those who had once lived here. A coffee cup lying on a glass table in the sun room. A magazine folded on a chair.

  Rather they traveled the rooms and the hallways, opening the drapes and shutters, merely peeking now and then into closets and cabinets and drawers, with the greatest care.

  But slowly, as the shadowy warmth became more and more familiar, they grew bolder.

  In the library alone, they browsed for an hour, examining the spines of the leather-bound classics and the old plantation ledgers from Riverbend, saddened when they saw the pages were spongy and ruined. Almost nothing of the old accounts could be read.

  They did not touch the papers on the desk which Ryan Mayfair would collect and examine. They studied the framed portraits on the walls.

  "That's Julien, it has to be." Darkly handsome, smiling at them as they stood in the hallway. "What is that in the background?" It had darkened so badly Michael couldn't make it out. Then he realized. Julien was standing on the front porch of this house.

  "Yes, and there, that old photograph, that's apparently Julien with his sons. The one closest to Julien is Cortland. That's my father." Once again, they were grouped on the porch, smiling through the faded sepia, and how cheerful, even vivacious, they seemed.

  And what would you see if you touched them, Michael? And how do you know it isn't what Deborah wants you to do?

  He turned away quickly. He wanted to follow Rowan. He loved the way Rowan walked, her long loose strides, the way her hair swayed with the rhythm. She turned in the dining room doorway and smiled back at him. Coming?

  In the small high-ceilinged pantry, they discovered shelves on top of shelves of gorgeous china: Minton, Lenox, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton--flowered patterns, Oriental patterns, patterns bordered in silver and gold. Old white ware and Oriental porcelain, antique Blue Willow, and old Spode.

  There were chests upon chests of sterling, heavy ornate pieces by the hundreds, nestled in felt, including very old sets with the English marks and the initial M in the European style engraved on the back.

  Michael was the one who knew such things; his long love affair with Victoriana in all forms stood him well. He could identify the fish knives and the oyster forks and the jelly spoons, and dozens of other tiny special items, of which there were a countless number in a dozen different ornate patterns.

  Sterling candlesticks they found, elaborate punch bowls and serving platters, bread plates and butter dishes and old water pitchers, and coffee urns and teapots and carafes. Exquisite chasing. Magically the darkest tarnish gave way to a hard rub of the finger, revealing the old luster of pure silver beneath.

  Cut-glass bowls of all sizes were pushed to the back of the cabinets, leaded crystal dishes and plates.

  Only the tablecloths and the piles of old napkins were too far gone, the fine linen and lace having rotted in the inevitable damp, the letter M showing proudly still here and there beneath the dark stain of mildew.

  Yet even a few of these had been carefully preserved in a dry cedar-lined drawer, wrapped in blue paper. Heavy old lace that had yellowed beautifully. And tumbled among them were napkin rings of bone and silver and gold.

  Touch them? Did the MBM stand for Mary Beth Mayfair? And here, here is a ring with the letters JM and you know to whom that must have belonged. He put it back, gloved fingers now as agile as bare fingers, though his hands were hot and uncomfortable, and the cross as she called it was biting into him with its weight.

  The late afternoon sun came in long slanting rays through the dining room windows. Look at her again in this setting. Rowan Mayfair. The murals sprang to life, revealing a whole population of little figures lost in the dreamy plantation fields. The great oblong table stood sturdy and fine as it had perhaps for a century. The Chippendale chairs, with their intricately carved backs, lined the walls.

  Shall we dine here together soon with high flickering candles?

  "Yes," she whispered. "Yes!"

  Then in the butler's pantry they found the delicate glassware, enough for a royal banquet. They found thin fine-spun goblets and thick-bottomed tumblers etched with flowers--sherry glasses, glasses for brandy, for champagne, for white wine and red wine, and shot glasses, and dessert glasses, and decanters to go with them, with glass stoppers, and crystal cut-glass pitchers, and pretty dishes again, stacks of them, glimmering in the light.

  So many treasures, Michael thought, and all of them waiting it seemed for the touch of a wand to bring them back into service.

  "I'm dreaming of parties," Rowan said, "of parties like in the old days, of bringing them all together, and piling the table with food. Of Mayfairs and Mayfairs."

  Michael gazed in silence at her profile. She held a delicate stem glass in her right hand, letting it catch the fragile sun.

  "It's all so graceful, so seductive," she said. "I didn't know life could be the way that it seems here. I didn't know there were houses like this anywhere in America. How strange it all is. I've traveled the whole world, and never been to a place like this. It's as if time forgot this place completely."

  Michael couldn't help but smile. "Things change very slowly here," he said. "Thank God for that."

  "Yet it's as if I dreamed of these rooms, and of a way of life that can be lived here, and never remembered on waking. But something in me, something in me must have remembered. Something in me felt alien and lost in the world we made out there."

  They wandered out into the sunshine together, roaming around the old pool and through the ruined cabana. "This is all solid," Michael explained as he examined the sliding doors, and the washbasin and shower. "It can be repaired. Look, this is built of cypress. And the pipes are copper. Nothing destroys cypress. I could fix that plumbing in a couple of days."

  Back into the high grass they walked, where the old outbuildings had once stood. Nothing remained but one lone sad tumbledown wooden structure on the very inside edge of the rear lot.

  "Not so bad, not so bad at all," Michael said, peering through the dusty screens. "Probably the menservants lived out here, it's a sort of garconniere."

  Here was the oak tree in which Deirdre had sought refuge, soaring to perhaps eighty feet over their heads. The foliage was dark and dusty and tight with the heat of the summer. It would break into a glorious mint green in the spring. Great clumps of banana trees sprang like monstrous grass in patches of sunlight. And a long beautifully built brick wall stretched across the back of the property, overgrown with ivy and tangled wisteria right to the hinges of the Chestnut Street gates.

  "The wisteria is still blooming," Michael said. "I love these purple blossoms--how I used to love to touch them when I went walking, to see the petals shiver."

  Why the hell can't you take off the gloves for a moment, just to feel those tender little petals in your hand?

  Rowan stood with her eyes closed. Was she listening to the birds? He found himself staring at the long back wing of the main house, at the servants' porches with their white wooden railings and white privacy lattice, and just the sight of this lattice subdued him and made him feel happy. These were all the random colors and textures of home.

  Home. As if he had ever lived in such a place. Well, had any wandering observer ever loved it more? And in a way he had always lived in it, it was the place he had longed for when he went away, the place he had dreamed of ...

  You cannot imagine the strength of the assault ...
>
  "Michael?"

  "What is it, honey?" He kissed her, catching the delicious smell of the sun in her hair. The warmth gave a glisten to her skin. But the frisson of the visions lingered. He opened his eyes wide, letting the burnt afternoon light fill them, letting the soft hum of the insects lull him.

  tangle of lies ...

  Rowan went before him in the high grass.

  "There are flagstones here, Michael." Her voice so thin in the great openness. "All of this is flagstone. It's covered over."

  He wandered after her, back into the front garden. They found little Greek statues, cement satyrs beautifully weathered, peeping with blind eyes from beneath the overgrown boxwood; a marble nymph lost in the dark waxen leaf camellias, and the tiny yellow lantana blooming beautifully wherever the sun broke in.

  "Bacon and eggs, we called this little flower," he said, picking a sprig of it for her. "See the tiny brown and yellow petals, mingled with the orange. And there, there's the blue kind. And see that flower, that's impatiens, and look, that's hollyhock--the big blue flowers growing by the porch, but we always called it althaea."

  "Althaea, that's so lovely."

  "That vine there is the Queen's Wreath, or the Coral Wreath, but we called it Rose of Montana."

  They could just see the white streak of Deirdre's old rocking chair above the lace of the vines. "They must have trimmed them for her to see out," he said. "See how they've grown up the other side, fighting the bougainvillea? Ah, but it's the queen of the wall, isn't it?"

  Almost violent the fluorescent purple bracts that everyone thought were flowers.

  "Lord God, how many times did I try to make all this in some little backyard in California, before I turned over the key to the new owner. After I'd hung the Quaker Lace curtains on the windows, and done the floors with Minwax Golden Oak, and found the claw-footed tub from the salvage yard. And here the place looms, the genuine article ... "

  "And it's yours, too," she said. "Yours and mine." How innocent she seemed now, how full of eager sincerity her soft smile.

  She wound her arm around him again, squeezed his gloved hand with her naked fingers. "But what if it's all decayed inside, Michael? What would it take to cure everything that's wrong?"

  "Come here, stand back here, and look," he said. "See the way the servants' porches run completely straight up there? There's no weakness in the foundation of this house at all. There are no leaks visible on the first floor, no dampness seeping through. Nothing! And in the old days those porches were the hallways by which the servants came and went. That's why there are so many floor-length windows and doors, and by the way every window and door I've tried is level. And the house is all open on this side to catch the river breeze. All over the city, you'll see that, houses open on the river side, to catch the river breeze."