by Rice, Anne
“I think they do,” I said, trying to catch up.
This little speech of his made Aunt Queen laugh and laugh. She had forgotten John McQueen, who had in fact died a long time ago into stories. “What an unusual name, Lestat,” she returned. “Does it have a meaning?”
“None whatsoever, Madam,” Lestat answered. “If memory serves me right, and it does less and less, the name’s compounded of the first letter of each of my six older brothers’ names, all of whom—the brothers and their names—I grew up to cheerfully and vigorously despise.”
Again, Aunt Queen laughed, plainly surprised and utterly seduced. “Seventh son,” she said. “Now that confers a certain power and I’m deeply respecting of it. And you speak with a ready eloquence. You seem a fine and invigorating friend for Quinn.”
“That’s my ambition, to be his fine friend,” said Lestat immediately and sincerely, “but don’t let me intrude.”
“Never even think of it,” Aunt Queen offered. “You’re welcome under my roof. I like you. I know I do. And you, Quinn, where have you been of late?”
“Round and about, Aunt Queen,” I answered. “Bad as Patsy in my roamings, round and about—I don’t know.”
“And have you brought me a cameo?” she asked. “This is our custom, Lestat,” she explained, and then: “It’s been a week since you have been in this room, Tarquin Blackwood. I want my cameo. You must have one. I won’t let you off the hook.”
“Oh, yes, you know I almost forgot about it,” I said. (And with reason!) I felt in my right-hand coat pocket for a little tissue-covered package that I’d put there nights ago. “It’s from New York, this one, a lovely shell cameo.”
I unwrapped the paper and put it before her in all its glory, one of the largest shell cameos that she would own. The image was from the white strata of the shell, naturally, and the background a dark pink. The cameo was a perfect oval with a particularly exquisite scalloped frame of heavy 24-carat gold.
“Medusa,” she said, with obvious satisfaction, identifying the woman’s profile at once by her winged head and the wild snakes for hair. “And so large and so sharply carved.”
“Fearsome,” I said. “The best Medusa I’ve ever seen. Note the height of the wing, and a bit of the orange strata on the wing tip. I meant to bring it sooner. I wish that I had.”
“Oh, there’s no point to that, my darling,” she said. “Don’t regret it when you don’t come to see me. I think I’m timeless. You’re here now and you’ve remembered me. That’s what counts.” She looked up to Lestat eagerly. “You know the story of Medusa, don’t you?” she asked.
Lestat hesitated, only smiling, obviously wanting her to speak more than he wanted to speak himself. He looked rather radiant in his rapture with her, and she was beaming back.
“Once beautiful, then turned into a monster,” said Aunt Queen, clearly enjoying the moment immensely. “With a face that could turn men to stone. Perseus sought her by her reflection in his polished shield, and once he’d slain her the winged horse Pegasus was born from the drops of blood that fell to earth from her severed head.”
“And it was that head,” said Lestat confidingly, “that Athena then emblazoned on her shield.”
“You’re so very right,” said Aunt Queen.
“A charm against harm,” said Lestat softly. “That’s what she became once beheaded. Another wondrous transformation, I think—beauty to monster, monster to charm.”
“Yes, you’re right on all counts,” said Aunt Queen. “A charm against harm,” she repeated. “Here, come, Quinn, help me take off these heavy diamonds,” she said, “and get a gold chain for me. I want to wear Medusa on my neck.”
It was a simple matter to do as she asked. I came around directly to the dressing table and removed the diamonds from her, giving her a sly kiss on the cheek, and put the diamond necklace in its customary leather box. This always sat atop her dressing table on the right-hand side. The gold chains were in a box in the top drawer, each in its plastic pouch.
From these I chose a strong chain of bright 24-carat gold, and one that would give her a snug but good fit. I threaded it through the bail attached to the cameo, and then put the chain around her neck for her and snapped the clasp.
After another quick couple of kisses, very powdery and rather like kissing a person made of pure white confectioners’ sugar, I came around in front of her again. The cameo was perfectly nested against the full gathered silk of the scarf and looked both imposing and rich.
“I have to admit,” I said of my new purchase, “it is really quite a trophy. Medusa is her wicked self in this one, not just a pretty winged girl with snakes, and that’s rare.”
“Yes,” said Lestat agreeably, “and so much stronger is the charm.”
“You think so?” Aunt Queen asked him. For all her dignity, the cameo befitted her more than the roaring diamonds. “You’re a curious young man,” she went on to Lestat. “You speak slowly and reflectively, and the timbre of your voice is deep. I like it. Quinn was a bookworm and swallowed mythology by the mouthful, once he could read, and, mind you, that wasn’t until very late. But you, how do you know about mythology, for surely you do? And obviously something about cameos, or so I judge by your coat.”
“Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind,” said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. “I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can’t reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a new source.”
How they connected, the two of them, it was amazing to me. And then I felt a stab of bitter memory again, of my Maker, that appalling presence, that damnable presence, once connecting with Aunt Queen in this very room and in the very same easy way. The subject had been cameos then too. Cameos. But this was Lestat, not my Maker, this was not that loathsome being. This was my hero under my roof.
“But you love books, then,” Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.
“Oh, yes,” Lestat said. “Sometimes they’re the only thing that keeps me alive.”
“What a thing to say at your age,” she laughed.
“No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope—that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.”
“Oh, yes, I think so, I really do,” Aunt Queen responded, almost gleefully. “It ought to be that way with people and sometimes it is. Imagine—each new person an entire universe. Do you think we can allow that? You’re clever and keen.”
“I think we don’t want to allow it,” Lestat responded. “We’re too jealous, and fearful. But we should allow it, and then our existence would be wondrous as we went from soul to soul.”
Aunt Queen laughed gaily.
“Oh, but you are a specimen,” she said. “Wherever did you come from? Oh, I wish that Quinn’s teacher Nash was here. He’d so enjoy you. Or that little Tommy wasn’t away at school. Tommy is Quinn’s uncle, which is slightly misleading since Tommy is only fourteen, and then there’s Jerome. Where’s little Jerome? Probably fast asleep. Ah, we’ll have to make do with only me—.”
“But tell me if you will, Miss Queen,” asked Lestat, “why do you love the cameos so much? These buttons, I can’t claim to have chosen them with much care, or to have been obsessed with them. I didn’t know they were the Nine Muses until you told me, and for that I’m in your debt. But you have here a fine love affair. How did it come about?”
“Can’t you see with your own eyes?” she asked. She offered him a shell cameo of the Three Graces and he held it up, inspecting it, and then he laid it down reverently before her again.
“They’re works of art,” said Aunt Queen, “of a special sort. They’re pictures, complete little pictures, that’s what matters. Small, intricate and intense. Let’s use your metaphor of the entire universe again; that’s what you find in
many of these.”
She was in a rapture.
“One can wear them,” she said, “but it doesn’t cheapen them to do it. You yourself just spoke of the charm.” She touched the Medusa at her breast. “And of course I find something unique in every one I acquire. In fact, there’s infinite variety in cameos. Here, look,” she said, handing Lestat another example. “You see, it’s a mythical scene of Hercules fighting a bull, and there is a goddess behind him and a graceful female figure in front. I’ve never seen another like it, though I have hundreds of mythological scenes.”
“They are intense, yes,” said Lestat. “I see your point completely, and it’s truly divine, yes.”
She looked about for a moment and then picked up another large shell cameo and offered it to him.
“Now that’s Rebecca at the Well,” she said. “A common scene depicted on cameos, and coming from the Bible, don’t you know, from the book of Genesis, when Abraham sent a messenger to find a wife for his son Isaac, and Rebecca came out to greet this messenger at the village well.”
“Yes, I know the story,” Lestat said quietly. “And it’s an excellent cameo too.”
She looked at him eagerly, as much into his eyes as at his hands, with their lustrous fingernails.
“That was one of the first cameos I ever saw,” she said, taking it back from him, “and it was with Rebecca at the Well that my collection began. I was given ten altogether of that exact same theme, Rebecca at the Well, though all were different in their carvings, and I have them all here. There’s a story to it, to be sure.”
He was obviously curious, and seemed to possess all the time in the world.
“Tell me,” he said simply.
“Oh, but how I have behaved!” she suddenly remarked, “allowing you to stand there as if you were bad boys brought before the principal. Forgive me, you must sit down. Oh, but I am witless to be so remiss in my own boudoir! For shame!”
I was about to object, to declare it unnecessary, but I saw that Lestat wanted to know her, and she was having such a wonderful time.
“Quinn,” she declared, “you bring those two chairs here. We’ll make a cozy circle, Lestat, if I’m to tell a tale.”
I knew there was no arguing. Besides, I was painfully stimulated that these two liked each other. I was crazy again.
As to the chairs, I did as I was told, crossing the room, taking up two of the straight-back chairs from Aunt Queen’s round writing table between the back windows, and setting the chairs down right where we had stood so that we could face her again.
She took the plunge:
“It came about in this very room, my introduction to the passion for the cameo,” she said, her eyes flitting over both of us and then fixing firmly on Lestat. “I was nine years old then and my grandfather was dying in here, a dreadful old man, Manfred Blackwood, the great monster of our history, the man who built this house, a man of whom everybody was afraid. My father, his only living son, William, tried to keep me away from him, but one day when the old beast was alone he saw me peeping in at that door.
“He ordered me to come inside and I was too afraid not to do it, and curious besides. He was sitting here where I am now, only there was no fancy dressing table here. Just his easy chair, and he sat in it, with a blanket over his lap, and both his hands on his silver-knobbed cane. His face was stubbly with his rough beard, and he wore a bib of sorts, and dribbled from the edge of his mouth.
“Oh, what a curse to live to that age to be slobbering as he was, like a bulldog. I think of a bulldog every time I think of him. And mind you, a sickroom in those days, no matter how well attended, wasn’t what a sickroom is today! It reeked, I tell you. If I ever become that old and start to slobber, Quinn has my express permission to blow my brains out with my own pearl-handled gun, or to sink me with morphine! Remember that, Little Boy.”
“Of course,” I rejoined, winking at her.
“Oh, you little devil, I’m serious—you can’t imagine how revolting it can be, and all I ask is permission to say my Rosary before you execute the sentence, and then I’ll be gone.” She looked at the cameos and then about herself and back to Lestat.
“The Old Man, yes, the Old Man,” she said, “and he was staring blankly into nothing before he saw me, mumbling to himself until he started to mumble to me. There was a little chest of drawers beside him where it was rumored he kept his money, but how I knew this I don’t now recall.
“As I was saying, the old reprobate told me to come in, and then he unlocked the top drawer of this chest and he took out a small velvet box and, letting his cane fall over on the floor, he put the box in my hands. ‘Open that up and hurry,’ he said. ‘Because you’re my only granddaughter and I want you to have it, and your mother is too foolish to want it. I said hurry up.’
“Well, I did precisely what he told me, and inside were all these cameos, and I thought they were fascinating with all their tiny little people on them and their frames of gold.
“ ‘Rebecca at the Well,’ he said. ‘All of them of the same story, Rebecca at the Well.’ And then, ‘If they tell you I murdered her they’re telling you the truth. She couldn’t be satisfied with cameos and diamonds and pearls, not that one. I killed her, or more truthfully, and it’s time for the truth, I dragged her to her death.’
“Of course I was awestruck by his words,” said Aunt Queen, “but instead of being suspicious and horrified, I was impressed that he was addressing these words to me. And he went on talking, the slobber coming down the side of his mouth to his chin. I should have helped him wipe his face, but I was too young to do anything as compassionate as that.
“ ‘Those were the old days,’ he said to me, ‘and she wore those high-collared lace blouses, and the cameos looked so very precious at her throat. She was so precious when I first brought her here. They’re all so precious in the beginning and then they turn rotten. Except my poor dead Virginia Lee. My lovely, unforgettable Virginia Lee. Would she had lived forever, my own Virginia Lee. But the others, rotten, I tell you, greedy and rotten every time.
“ ‘But she was the worst of all my disappointments,’ he told me, fixing me with his mean eyes. ‘Rebecca, and Rebecca at the Well,’ he said. ‘It was he who gave me the first cameo for her, when he’d heard her name, telling me the story of it, and he that brought several more, all of Rebecca, all gifts for her, he said, he being the evil spy that he was, ever watching us; they all came from him, all these cameos, if truth be known, from him, though there’s no taint on it, and you’re just a child.’ ”
Aunt Queen paused, appealing to Lestat mutely to assure herself, I think, that she had an audience, and then when she saw that both of us were rapt, she went on.
“I remember all those words,” she said, “and in my girl’s heart I wanted the enchanting cameos, of course. I wanted them, the whole box! And so I held it tight as he went on, barking his words, or maybe even gnashing them out, it’s hard to say. ‘She grew to love the cameos,’ the old beast said, ‘as long as she could still dream and be content at the same time. But women aren’t gifted with contentment. And it was he that killed her for me, a bloody sacrifice, that’s what she was, an offering up to him, you might say and I would say, but I was the one who dragged her to it. And it wasn’t the first time that I’d taken some poor misshapen soul to those bloody chains, to be sure.’ ”
I shivered. These words sounded a deep dark chord in me. I had a passel of secrets that weighed on me like so many stones. I couldn’t do anything except listen in a vague spell as she went on.
“I remembered those words ‘to those bloody chains,’ ” said Aunt Queen, “and all his other words as he yammered away: ‘She gave me no choice, if the truth be known.’ He was almost bellowing. ‘Now you take those cameos and wear them, no matter what you think of me. I have something there sweet and costly to give you, and you’re just a little girl and my grandchild, and that’s what I wish it to be.’
“Of course, I didn’t know how to answe
r him,” Aunt Queen went on. “I don’t think for a moment I believed he was a real murderer, and I certainly didn’t know of this strange accomplice to whom he referred, this he, of whom he spoke with such mystery, and I never did find out who the man was, not to this very day. But he knew. And he continued as if I’d lanced a wound. ‘You know, I confess it, over and over,’ he said, ‘to the priest and to the sheriff, and neither believes me, and the sheriff just says she’s been gone some thirty-five years and I’m imagining, and as for him, what if his gold built this house; he’s a liar and a cheat and he’s left me this house as a prison, as a mausoleum, and I can’t go any longer to him, though I know he’s out there, he’s out there on Sugar Devil Island, I can feel him, I can feel his eyes on me in the night when he comes near. I can’t catch him. I never could. And I can’t go out there anymore to curse him to his face, I’m too old now, and too weak.
“Oh, it was a powerful mystery,” said Aunt Queen. “ ‘What if his gold built this house?’ I kept it secret what he’d said. I didn’t want my mother to take the cameos away. She wasn’t a Blackwood, of course, and that’s what they always said of her, ‘She’s not a Blackwood,’ as though that explained her intelligence and common sense. But the point was, my room upstairs was full of clutter. It was an easy thing to hide the cameos away. I’d take them out at night and look at them and they bewitched me. And so my obsession began.
“Now, my grandfather did within a few months’ time get right up out of this room and stagger down to the landing and put himself right into a pirogue and row off with a pole into Sugar Devil Swamp. Of course the farmhands were hollering at him to stop, but he went off and vanished. And no one ever saw him again, ever. He was forever gone.”