She joined hands with the two children closest to her, Elizabeth and Augustus. “You think I don’t understand you. That’s true. But I know who you are.” Her eyes traveled from one child to another. “And I love you, my little witches and warlocks. When you are angry at me, or feeling stifled by my protection, remember I would die to see you whole and well. I would give my life for any of you.”
A quietness settled over the table. All seven children dropped their heads and disappeared into their own thoughts over the strange words their mother had spoken.
Irish Colleen took a sip from her wine. “We’ll be going to Ophélie for the summer. We all need a fresh start.”
A low rumble of disappointment passed around the room, but no one challenged her.
“August told me once that there was no place a Deschanel was more themselves than on the land of their ancestors.” Irish Colleen stood. “So, there we will go, and I pray this will re-center all of us and remind us what is truly important.”
SUMMER 1970
* * *
VACHERIE, LOUISIANA
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
Six
The Lines of Blanche and August
Ophelia Deschanel was the last of the very old ones.
Ophelia’s grandfather, Charles, was the same Charles who emigrated the Deschanel family from France in 1844. The man who built Ophélie and established the Deschanels as a formidable clan in Louisiana, first as river country landowners and then as shrewd investors. The man for whom all subsequent Charleses were named, including Colleen’s brother. Ophelia had seen the whole world change in her lifetime and shaped into what it became. Currently a nonagenarian, soon to be a centenarian, Ophelia had watched generations come and go; she’d guided them and sometimes worked against them, when it was necessary. But most of all, she was the only one left living who knew the full story of who they were and what happened in those turbulent early years.
The old, undying belief was that a great curse followed the family, one placed upon them by Charles’ vengeful wife, Brigitte. A curse intended to thwart the prosperity of any descending from Charles, sealed with Brigitte’s blood when she gave her life in the sordid act. Charles initially dismissed her dying words as insanity, until his descendants began to meet cruel and unusual ends. By the time he realized what horrors had befallen his family, there was nothing left to be done to rectify it.
The story behind Brigitte’s suicide was cruel and bloody.
Charles and his family had over a decade of prosperity before the start of the Civil War. With New Orleans captured early and left mostly intact, he capitalized on this by being amenable to Union officers and their companies staying on the large property, inviting them in before they took the home for themselves. Brigitte was against this from the beginning, feeling he was a traitor to the South, but Charles insisted he was only being resourceful, and as a result of his quick-thinking, the house and most of its belongings remained in the Deschanels’ possession, both during and then after the war. But this friendship with the enemy had another cost: Their only daughter, Ophélie.
While Charles drank, smoke, and gambled with the Union men by day, those same men spent their nights sneaking in and out of the poor girl’s room, doing as they pleased with her. Charles either ignored her plight or approved of it, but either motivation was too egregious a sin to be borne in the eyes of Brigitte. When Ophélie ended up pregnant, someone, perhaps a soldier, perhaps Charles, perhaps even Brigitte, snuck into her room one evening and violently murdered her. Brigitte believed the sacrifice of her daughter was the cost of Charles’ long list of sins and took her own life by flinging herself from the top veranda of Ophélie and onto the flagstones below. As she died, she whispered the words of her now infamous curse to Ophelia’s mother, Julianne. “There is a price. Charles and his children will pay it. As will their children, and their children, and all children who attempt to profit from anything Charles has built on the corpse of my daughter. This midnight dynasty will fall, as Ophélie fell, and there will be no more. This I promise, on my mother, and on my beloved Ophélie.”
Julianne never doubted Brigitte’s words would bear out as true, nor did her daughter, Ophelia. Ophelia never had children of her own, but she passed this belief to her brother, Charles’, two children, August and Blanche, and later, to August’s children.
Only some of the present day Deschanels believed in the family curse. Colleen believed it, because Ophelia believed it, and not a single person in this family, past or present, had lived as long as she had. Ophelia said she’d only lived that long because she never married, and as a woman could not further the heir’s line. Colleen wasn’t sure if that was true, but she was grateful her great-aunt had lived long enough to pass down to her the story of the foundation of who they were.
Whether she believed it or not, Colleen decided having children wasn’t worth the risk. When she told Irish Colleen she never planned to start a family, her mother had just accused her of listening to that old coot again and dismissed her.
Colleen believed Ophelia believed, and that was enough. It was the biggest and most important thing the family still had, the faith of this loyal old woman.
The one and only thing Ophelia did not seem to know was how and when the Deschanels came into possession of their rare abilities. She only knew it all started in France, many years before the family came to Louisiana. One day, she said, someone would connect all the right dots and put the story together.
* * *
Colleen lived daily with the fear she might get the call her great-aunt had died. It was an inevitability of living to such an age, and at ninety-two, it didn’t take any serious illness. A cold, a short fever. A fall. Ophelia had first lived out her twilight years with her niece, Blanche, but Blanche was only a few short years from seventy herself, and already some members of her family were trying to oust her from her own manor, Femme Forte, claiming she no longer possessed the faculties to manage it herself. Blanche, having had children from two of her three marriages, often had something akin to turf wars when it came to Femme Forte, though everyone knew it would go to Eugenia Fontenot, the eldest from her favorite marriage.
Irish Colleen had offered Ophelia a room in their home many times. August had enjoyed a very close relationship with this aunt, and, had he lived, would have made the same offer. But Ophelia was as stubborn as she was wise and proclaimed that children needed sunshine to thrive, not dust and cobwebs. Irish Colleen hadn’t understood that, but Colleen thought maybe she did. She hadn’t been at all surprised when Ophelia up and moved into The Gardens all by herself, to the distress of everyone else.
While Ophelia had always placed great importance in sharing these tales of who they were and where they’d come from, she emphasized even more the need for the family to open their arms wide to the future, not the past. The past informs us; in showing us how we got here, it informs us how not to do it all again, Ophelia liked to say. The future is our blueprint. We must follow it as far from the past as we can.
When Ophelia asked Colleen to take the empty Council seat, Colleen was beside herself. She may only be the third born in the heir’s line, but she took the responsibility of her family with the gravity it deserved. As some of the older ones died off, Ophelia did not start with the next oldest. Instead, she said this new generation was the future, and she must have time with them, to shape them, instruct them, help them lead, before she gave up the ghost and surrendered to the eternal sleep.
Not counting Ophelia, the oldest of the seven Council members was Pierce Guidry, at forty-four. Eugenia Fontenot was thirty, and Cassius Broussard was turning twenty-eight. All three were Blanche’s children.
The rest of the Council were younger still. Pierce’s daughters, Pansy and Kitty, were twenty-one and sixteen. Colleen, at eighteen, was the only representative from the heir’s line. When Ophelia finally retired—Colleen, though practical about many things, refused to use the other word—Colleen would look to her siblin
gs for the next member of the Council. There were too many from Blanche’s line. August’s line needed better representation.
Evangeline, she thought, was the most likely candidate. Charles had no care for any of this, and Augustus had priorities that did not involve sitting in dusty chambers discussing the matters of witches and warlocks.
This was a refrain at almost any family reunion, which inevitably revealed new faces each time. Are you from the line of Blanche or August? The answer was often obvious before it came, for the line of August was only his seven children, and the line of Blanche was preparing for great-grandchildren. Guidry, Fontenot, Broussard, these names were as authentic and respected as Deschanel, because everyone knew Miss Blanche had replenished the family after all the great tragedies had thinned the line. Blanche had started building her dynasty as soon as she was old enough to leave home. August did not have his first child until he was forty-five.
Ophelia liked to tell Colleen, as they strolled through the endless rows of exotic flora of The Gardens, that none of this was important. Whether of Blanche or August, all interests were intertwined. The flourishment of the family should be important to everyone sharing their blood, and if Blanche’s line held the lion’s share of seats, what of it? When the seven had their children, the dynamics would shift.
Colleen thought of this as she sat with her great-aunt in the parlor adjoining the Collective chambers. It was past two, and Colleen needed to start the long drive back to Vacherie, to Ophélie, soon, or she might fall asleep at the wheel. But her mind was troubled, and so she’d stayed after the Council meeting in hopes some wisdom from Ophelia would settle her.
“You carry the burden of them all,” Ophelia observed. Her tea sloshed against the sides of the mug as her shaking hands drew it slowly to her wrinkled mouth. “Do you not ever wonder, my dearest Colleen, why we take on jobs no one ever asked us to do?”
“What do you mean?” Colleen wanted to reach forward and steady the cup for her great-aunt, but to do so would be offensive.
“You are not Charles,” Ophelia said through her slow, languid drawl, like gravel stretching across silk. “Is it not his responsibility, as the heir?”
“Pardon me, Tante Ophelia, I’m not sure if the question is rhetorical or not,” Colleen said with a frown. “If I waited for Charles to do as everyone expects, I’d carry my disappointment to the grave, I’m afraid.”
Ophelia’s mouth twitched. It was almost a smile. “Charles is who he is. And his children…” A racking cough pitched through her, cutting off her words. “I must remember myself! I cannot go around sharing the future as if it is mine to dole out.”
“What about Charles’ children?”
Ophelia waved a trembling hand through the air. “Neither here. Neither there. That is tomorrow, and we are in today. People rarely change in any meaningful way, Colleen. This is not soothsaying, this is a fact of human nature. I know what troubles you.”
“You do?”
“Why, everything, of course.”
Colleen’s laugh was tinged with exhaustion. “You know me well, Tante.”
“I know you well, because you are so much like me. You are who my daughter would have been, had I chosen the boon of motherhood. I have carried this burden, Colleen, all my life. Blanche and August wanted little to do with who we were, but their children… their children, and their grandchildren, they know. They believe. And when I’m gone—”
“Stop,” Colleen said. “You’re perfectly healthy.”
“I’m way past empty platitudes. I am old and gnarled, like the oaks lining this great mansion. In you, I see my work as complete.” Her arm, that thin vellum of the very old, covered in bluish lines and darkening spots, reached forward and offered a light pat to Colleen’s leg. A cough overtook her again. She drew it back, shaking. “But it is a lonely burden, Colleen. Do you know of the Serenity prayer, my dear?”
Colleen nodded. She wanted to cry, but she didn’t understand why.
“Recite it to me.”
Colleen ran her hands over her jeans. The lump in her throat, the one she had in almost every conversation with her beloved aunt, caused her voice to crack. She cleared her throat. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and—”
“The wisdom to know the difference,” Ophelia finished with her. “This burden cannot be borne if you are unable to separate those people and circumstances you can affect and that you cannot. You stayed tonight because you are worried about your siblings.”
Colleen bowed her head to hide the tears forming. “Yes.”
“They grow weary of your maturity. They wish you would be their sister, not their authority.”
“They don’t understand how much I wish I could let it all go, too.”
“Well, you can let it go. Of course you can.” Ophelia began the slow task of reaching again for her tea. “They do.”
“But—”
“Yes, but,” Ophelia replied. “But someone has to do it, is that what you were about to tell me? Someone has to carry the torch? Lead the family?”
“I suppose, yes.”
“I won’t argue with that.” Tea dribbled down her chin as she took a shaking sip. “My father, Jean, had no interest in it. Nor did my brother, Charles, and then his children—your father, your aunt Blanche—failed to fully appreciate the task. It has always fallen to me, a second born, a woman without issue, without a true home. Your road will be different, Colleen. You will feel alone at times, but that is not because you will be. You have a boyfriend. Rory. How is that going for you?”
Colleen leaned back and shrugged. “I don’t know, to be honest. I care dearly for Rory. He’s one of my oldest friends, and I feel safe around him.”
“Feeling safe with an outsider is not to be taken lightly. Not all Deschanels will find that.”
“The Sullivans are practically family.”
Ophelia grinned. “Go on.”
“I am so torn between how I feel for him and what I know lies ahead for me. Rory has his life picked out for him already. Since he was a boy, he’s known he would go to law school and join the rest of his family at the firm. I suppose I’ve always known I wanted to go to medical school, but it’s different.”
“Tell me how it’s different,” Ophelia said, though her patient eyes conveyed she already knew the answer and only wanted to hear Colleen say it.
“There’s a difference between a dream and an expectation. Rory will make a fine lawyer, I’m sure of it. He’s a good man, with strong convictions. But he has never, not once that I know of, thought of doing something different. It never occurred to him to be anything but what the rest of his family is. I want to be the first surgeon in the Deschanel family. I don’t want to stay in New Orleans for graduate school, and go to Tulane, where everyone else goes, because it’s easy, or the norm. Once I have my degree in hand, I want to go to Scotland, or Paris, and finish my education elsewhere, so when I come back I have more to offer my family than just my heritage. I don’t want the same wheels to spin us around and around until we keep returning to where we are.”
“That is a very astute consideration,” Ophelia said after a pause. “Could Rory not fit into this?”
“Does he have to?”
Ophelia drew her shawl tighter around her. Though the sweltering heat and humidity was at its peak, even in the late evenings, she was often overtaken with bouts of the chills. “Would you like to know if he is in your future? I can divine this for you. I could tell you who you will marry, what your children will be like. Your joys. Your sorrows. Some do better never knowing… others, like us, find comfort in preparation.”
Colleen stared at her. She had always known, of course, that Ophelia could do this, but had never considered she might be given such an offer. To know what the future held… yes, this could give her comfort. It could help her to know if her efforts with her siblings would ever bear fruit, would help to know if pushing Rory away or
letting him in was the right way. Colleen feared the unknown, because it was beyond her control, and what she could not control had the potential to harm her.
But to possess such knowledge took away the gift of making mistakes and learning from them. It dulled the joys and sharpened the losses. There was gain, yes, but she would surrender so much more, if she knew what her life would be like in five, ten, fifty years. And if she saw something terrible, she would live her life in dread of that moment and would forget to live.
“No, thank you, Tante. I think it’s better to take my chances and see where the future takes me.”
Ophelia nodded. “I would not have accepted such a gift, either, despite my pragmatism. But I offer it from a place of love. There will be a time when I cannot give you this gift again.”
“I know.”
“Your sister, Elizabeth. She inherited this, as well, and it is slowly driving her to madness.”
Colleen breathed out. “I know. I don’t know how to help her.”
“You cannot,” Ophelia replied and then shook her head. “Forgive me, Colleen, for that was both wisdom and divination, and you only asked for the former.”
* * *
Colleen arrived at the old plantation house a quarter after three in the morning. The massive structure, with its forty-five rooms and three stories, with its central hall and massive cypress parlors and twinkling chandeliers, was big and lonely, even with the eight of them living there for the summer. August and Blanche had grown up in this monstrous home, and so had their ancestors. August refused to raise his own family in such isolation, and when he married Irish Colleen, he promptly relocated the Deschanels to New Orleans.
The Greek Revival mansion hummed with old life, with a dozen clocks and with the fauna holding courts outside. Each step she took through the central hall set off a new chain of sounds, which echoed through the emptiness.
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