Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(81)
Author: Anne Rice

“God damn, you don’t mean it,” said Mona.

“You all are sooooo divinely inbred!” said Mary Jane. “It’s like royalty. And here sits the Czarina herself!”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” said Ryan. “Mona, have you taken any medicine?”

“Certainly not, would I do that to my daughter?”

“Well, I have no choice but to go,” he said. “Do try to behave yourselves. Remember the house is surrounded by guards. I don’t want you going out, and please don’t devil Eugenia!”

“Shucks,” said Mona. “Don’t leave. You’re the life of the party. What do you mean ‘devil Eugenia’?”

“When you’ve returned to your senses,” said Ryan, “would you please call me? And what if this child is a boy? Certainly you aren’t going to risk his life with one of those tests to determine gender.”

“He’s not a boy, silly,” said Mona. “She’s a girl and I’ve already named her Morrigan. I’ll call you. Okay? Okay.”

And away he went, hurrying in his own special quiet way of hurrying. Kind of like the way nuns hurry, or doctors. With a minimum of sound and fuss.

“Don’t touch those papers,” he called out from the butler’s pantry.

Mona relaxed, took a deep breath. That was the last adult scheduled to be looking in on them, as far as she knew.

And what was this about Michael? “God, you think it’s true? Hey, Mary Jane, when we’re finished, let’s go up and look at those papers.”

“Oh, Mona, I don’t know, he just said those were Rowan’s papers, didn’t he just say that? ‘Don’t touch those papers.’ Mona, have some cream gravy. Don’t you want the chicken? That’s the best chicken I ever fixed.”

“Cream gravy! You didn’t say it was cream gravy. Morrigan doesn’t want meat. Doesn’t like meat. Look, I have a right to look at those papers. If he wrote things, if he left anything in writing.”

“Who’s he?”

“Lasher. You know who he is. Don’t tell me your Granny didn’t tell you.”

“She told me, all right, you believe in him?”

“Believe in him, dollface, he almost attacked me. I almost became a statistic like my mother and Aunt Gifford and all those other poor dead Mayfair women. Of course I believe in him, why he’s …” She caught herself pointing to the garden, in the direction of the tree. No, don’t tell her that, she’d sworn to Michael, never tell anyone, buried out there, and the other one, the innocent one, Emaleth, the one that had to die, though she’d never done anything to anyone ever.

Not you, Morrigan, don’t you worry, baby girl!

“Long story, no time for it,” she said to Mary Jane.

“I know who Lasher is,” said Mary Jane. “I know what happened. Granny told me. The others didn’t come right out and say he was killing the women. They just said Granny and I had to come to New Orleans and stay with everybody else. Well, you know? We didn’t do it and nothing happened to us!”

She shrugged and shook her head.

“That could have been a terrible mistake,” said Mona. The cream gravy tasted wonderful with the rice. Why all this white food, Morrigan?

The trees were filled with apples, and their meat was white, and the tubers and roots we pulled from the earth were white and it was paradise. Oh, but look at the stars. Was the unspoiled world really unspoiled, or were the everyday menaces of nature so terrible that everything was just as ruined then as it was now? If you live in fear, what does it matter….

“What’s the matter, Mona?” said Mary Jane. “Hey, snap out of it.”

“Oh, nothing, actually,” said Mona. “I just had a flash of the dream I had out there in the garden. I was having a hell of a conversation with somebody. You know, Mary Jane, people have to be educated to understand one another. Like right now, you and I, we are educating each other to understand each other, you get what I mean?”

“Oh yeah, exactly, and then you can pick up your phone and call me down at Fontevrault and say, ‘Mary Jane, I need you!’ and I’d just leap up and get in the pickup and take off and be at your side.”

“Yes, that’s it, exactly, you know I really, really meant it, you’d know all kinds of things about me, and I’d know all kinds of things about you. It was the happiest dream I ever had. It was such a … such a happy dream. We were all dancing. A bonfire that big would normally scare me. But in the dream I was free, just perfectly free. I didn’t care about anything. We need another apple. The invaders didn’t invent death. That’s a preposterous notion, but one can see why everybody thought that they had … well, sort of, everything depends on perspective, and if you have no sure concept of time, if you don’t see the basic relevance of time, and of course hunter-gatherer people did and so did agricultural people, but perhaps those in tropical paradises don’t ever develop that kind of relationship because for them there are no cycles. The needle’s stuck on heaven. You know what I mean?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, pay attention, Mary Jane! And you’ll know! It was that way in the dream, the invaders had invented death. No, I see now, what they had invented was killing. That’s a different thing.”

“There’s a bowl full of apples over there, you want me to get you an apple?”

“Right, later. I want to go upstairs to Rowan’s room.”

“Well, lemme finish my meal,” pleaded Mary Jane. “Don’t go without me. Matter of fact, I don’t know if we have any right to go up there at all.”

“Rowan won’t mind, Michael might mind. But you know???” said Mona, imitating Mary Jane. “It doesn’t matter???”

Mary Jane nearly fell out of the chair laughing. “You are the worst child,” she said. “Come on. Chicken’s always better cold, anyway.”

And the meat from the sea was white, the meat of the shrimps and the fishes, and of the oysters and the mussels. Pure white. The eggs of gulls were beautiful, because they were all white outside, and when you broke them open one great golden eye stared at you, floating in the clearest fluid.

“Mona?”

She stood still in the door to the butler’s pantry. She closed her eyes. She felt Mary Jane grip her hand.

“No,” she said with a sigh, “it’s gone again.” Her hand moved to her belly. She spread her fingers out over the rounded swelling, feeling the tiny movements within. Beautiful Morrigan. Hair as red as my hair. Is your hair so very red, Mama?