Part 18 (2/2)

”She was wearing silver spike heels and a loose-fitting silk-and-lace dress. She had a cameo at her throat, centered perfectly on her collar --Jasmine must have helped her --and we had the earrings 107.

and the cameo brooch from the island with us.

”The brooch was 'Rebecca at the Well,' the earrings were tiny heads, as is usually the case with small cameos.

”I began by telling her all about Rebecca's trunk in the attic, and then Rebecca's ghost and what had happened, and then I went over again everything that was on the island and how perfectly strange it was out there, and that there was clear evidence of murder on the second floor of the house.

” 'All right,' she said. 'You've heard many a story of Manfred, and you know now that after Virginia Lee died and left him a widower he was considered a madman in these parts.'

”I nodded for her to go on. I also took note that Goblin was right behind her, some distance from her, just watching me with a kind of abstracted expression on his face. He was also leaning against the wall kind of casually, and something about that struck a bad note with me --that he would present such an image of comfort, but my mind was really not on Goblin but on Rebecca and Aunt Queen.

”Aunt Queen went on with her tale.

” 'But what you don't know,' she said, 'is that Manfred brought women here to Blackwood Manor, always claiming they were governesses for William and Camille, when in fact they were nothing more than playthings for him --starry-eyed Irish girls he got from Storyville, the red-light district in New Orleans --whom he kept for as long as it suited his purposes, and then from the picture they were abruptly erased.'

” 'G.o.d, you're telling me he killed more than one of them?' I asked.

” 'I don't know that he did any such thing,' said Aunt Queen. She went on. 'It's your story about this island that has put it in my mind that perhaps he did murder them. But no one knew what became of them, and it was an easy thing to get rid of a poor Irish girl in those days. You simply dropped her down in the middle of New Orleans. What more need be done?'

” 'But Rebecca, did you hear tell of Rebecca?'

” 'Yes, indeed, I did,' said Aunt Queen. 'You know I did. I heard plenty tell of her. And I'm telling you now. Now let me go on in my fas.h.i.+on. Some of these Irish girls were kind to little William and Camille, but in the main they didn't bother with them one way or another, and so they don't come down to us with any names or faces, or even mysterious trunks in the attic, though that would have been a significant clue.'

” 'No, there were no other suspicious trunks in the attic,' I interjected. 'But there are clothes, heaps of old clothes, clothes museums would pay for, I think. But only Rebecca's trunk.'

” 'Slow down and let me talk,' Aunt Queen said with a little graceful exasperation. 'Quinn, you're overexcited and it's a marvelous thing to see,' she said, smiling, 'but let me talk.'

”And talk she did.

” 'Now, while all of that was going on,' she said, 'Manfred was up to his famous tricks of riding his black gelding over the land, and disappearing into the swamp for weeks at a time.

” 'Then came Rebecca. Now Rebecca was not only more beautiful than the other women, she was also very refined and pa.s.sed herself off for a lady with a gracious manner, which won everyone over to her side.

” 'But one night when Manfred was off in the swamps she got to cursing Manfred for his absence, and in the kitchen she got drunk on brandy with Ora Lee --that was Jasmine's great-greatgrandmother --and she told Ora Lee her story, of how she, Rebecca, had been born in the Irish Channel in New Orleans and was as ”common as dirt,” as she put it, in a world ”as narrow as the gutter,” she declared, one of thirteen children, and how she had gotten raped in a Garden District mansion where she'd been working as a maid, and the whole Irish neighborhood knew about it, and when her family wanted her to go into the convent on account of it she went downtown to Storyville, instead, and they took her into a house of prost.i.tution as she had hoped. Now, Rebecca was pregnant from the rape, but 108.

whether she lost the child or got rid of it, this part was unclear.

” 'To Ora Lee, she said flat out that being in an elegant and fine house in Storyville, with the piano always playing and the gentlemen being so gracious, was far superior to being at home in a miserable shotgun house at St. Thomas and Was.h.i.+ngton by the river where her Irish father and her German grandmother used to beat her and her brothers and sisters with a strap.

” 'But Rebecca did not want to end her upward climb in Storyville, so she started to put on the airs of a lady and use what she knew of manners to make herself more refined. She also loved to do embroidery and crocheting, which had been beaten into her at home, and used her sewing abilities to make herself fine clothes.

” 'Wait a minute,' I interrupted her. 'Didn't Patsy say something about the embroidery in her dream, that Virginia Lee was embroidering? That's important. And you should see the embroidered things upstairs in that trunk. Yes, she knew embroidery, Rebecca --they're confused in Patsy's dream, but you know about the oil lamps and what I almost did.'

” 'I do know, of course I know,' said Aunt Queen. 'Why do you think I came home? But you need knowledge to arm you against this cozy lovemaking ghost. So listen to what the story was.

” 'The other prost.i.tutes in the house in Storyville laughed at Rebecca, and they called her the Countess, but she knew that sooner or later a man would come who would see her attributes and take her out of that place. She sat right in the room where the women congregated for the man to make his choice, and she embroidered as if she was a great lady, and gave each gentleman her lovely smile.

” 'Well, Manfred Blackwood was the man of her dreams, and the tale came down in Jasmine's family that he had actually and truly loved Rebecca much in the same way that he had loved Virginia Lee. Indeed it was Rebecca, pet.i.te Rebecca with her brilliant smile and charming ways that finally took his mind off the grief.

” 'He was obsessed with giving her jewelry, and she loved it, and she was gracious and sweet to him and even sang old songs to him, which she had learned growing up.

” 'Of course, in her first weeks here she was all honey and spice to little William and Camille, but they didn't fall for it, or so the story says, just waiting for her to disappear like all the rest.

” 'Then Manfred and Rebecca went to Europe for a year, the two of them, and it was rumored they spent a very long time in Naples, because Rebecca loved it so, and they even had a villa for a while on the famous Amalfi coast. If you saw that coast, and you will someday, Quinn, you'll understand that it is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

” 'Imagine it, this poor girl from the Irish Channel in the dreamland of southern Italy, and think what it meant. It was there that Rebecca cultivated a love of cameos, apparently, as she had quite a collection when she returned, and it was then that she showed them off to Ora Lee and Jerome and their niece, Pepper, explaining all about ”Rebecca at the Well,” the theme that was named for her, she exclaimed --poor creature. And ever after that she wore a cameo at her neck and earrings such as those you've found out there.

” 'Now, speaking of out there --right after their return from Naples Manfred took to spending more time in the swamps than ever before. And within months there came all the workmen from New Orleans and the deliveries of lumber and metal and all manner of things to make the notorious Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island --this place you've now seen with your own eyes.

” 'But as you know, Manfred paid off the hirelings when the secret place was completed, and he took to spending weeks out there, leaving Rebecca at home to fret and cry and pace the floor while my poor father --William --watched the woman change from pretty girl to banshee, as he put it to me later on.

” 'Meanwhile, it had become the scandal of the parish that Manfred kept Rebecca in his own bedroom --and that was your room, Quinn, the room with the front parlor to it; it became your room as soon as you were born. Pops, as you know, wants the back room upstairs so he can see out the back 109.

windows and keep an eye on the shed and the garages and the men and the cars and all that. So you inherited that front room.

” 'But I digress, and it will probably happen more than once. Now, let me see. We left Rebecca, with a cameo at her neck, in her fancy clothes, pacing the floor up there crying and murmuring for Manfred, who was gone for as long, sometimes, as two weeks.

” 'And, happy with his new retreat, he often took expensive provisions with him, while at other times he said he would hunt for what he ate.

” 'Now, it couldn't have been a worse time for her to do it, but Rebecca wanted Manfred to marry her --make her an honest woman as they used to say in those days, you know --and she told everyone that he would. She even got the priest up here to accost him on one of his rare visits home and talk to him about it, how he ought to do it, and how Rebecca was a proper wife for Manfred no matter what her past.

” 'But you know, Quinn, in those days, what man was going to marry a prost.i.tute from Storyville with whom he'd been living for over two years? Bringing the priest proved a terrible mistake, as Manfred was ashamed and annoyed. And the rumor spread that Manfred beat Rebecca for doing it, and Ora Lee had to interfere to make him stop.

” 'Somehow or other they made it up, and Manfred went back out into the swamp. Thereafter, when he came back from these forays into the depths of the bog he often had gifts not only for Rebecca, to whom he gave lovely cameos, but gifts of pearls and diamonds for Camille, and even fine stickpins and cuff links with diamonds for William to wear.'

” 'So he was meeting someone out there in the swamp,' I said. 'He had to be. How else could he come back with gifts?'

” 'Precisely, he was meeting someone. And his absences from the house grew longer and longer, and his conduct at home reclusive and peculiar, and when he was gone, William (my father) and Camille suffered downright meanness and heavy abuse from Rebecca, who grew to hate them for what they were part of a family to which she did not legally belong.

” 'Imagine it, the poor children, now adolescents, at the pure mercy of this young stepmother, all left alone in this house with only the colored servants, the devoted and loving Jerome and Ora Lee and their niece, Pepper, trying to interfere.

” 'Rebecca would pyroot through their rooms whenever she wanted, and then came the incident of her finding Camille's poetry in a leather-bound book, and reciting the poems at dinner to taunt poor Camille, wounding Camille all but mortally so that Camille threw a hot bowl of soup in Rebecca's face.'

” 'I have Camille's book,' I told Aunt Queen. 'I found it in Rebecca's trunk. But why didn't someone else find it when the trunk was packed? Why were there cameos in the trunk? I know everything was thrown in there but still --?'

” 'Because the woman disappeared under violent circ.u.mstances, and it was Manfred who grabbed up her things and heaved them into the trunk. And besides, the old madman had been absent when the affair of the poetry took place, and who knew how much he knew? He didn't see the book, or care about it, that's plain enough, and he didn't bother to save the cameos you found in the trunk, either, though he did save five cameos as I'll explain.'

” 'How did Rebecca disappear? What were the violent circ.u.mstances?' I pushed.

” 'She tried to set fire to this house.'

” 'Ah, of course.'

” 'She did it with the oil lamps.'

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