The Blood: A Denouement

The

Testament

Of

Augustus Dunharrow

There were five plantations here once. You needn’t look for them, this was long ago, and these lands are hot and wet, so even had they not been burned down you would see little of them. Long Lees is the remaining one, and it takes much upkeep, magical and otherwise, for it to maintain its pristine condition.

You see about the house portraits, wonder who they are, especially these white men, these white women, in their powdered wigs and fancy gowns. Imagine the road into here as it is now, and imagine the land behind the house much as it is, but that past what is not the pool was a kitchen house, and beyond that were the cabins of slaves playfully called servants. Imagine earthen palisades raised so they could not escape, and then all those green fields, all those forest around? Imagine them leveled for the growing of rice, for the marshlands came closer in those days. There was rice all the way to the joining of the other plantation whose name we will not say.

Now, the name of this house and this land is Long Lees, but in those times, when an avenue of shaggy moss took rich proto Americans to the doors, the family who owned it was called Waverly and that was the plantation’s name. In 1759, the Waverly daughters were Catherine, of whom you may not know, and Susanna, whom you have seen with your own eyes. Yes, my dear Loreal, your very grandmama, Susanna Dunharrow, who you saw as a white haired hag, but never knew was so old.

How fair she was once! But how is she a part of this story, and where do I come in? I will make the connection quick. A ship of Africans led by a great queen full of power, from the old lands east of Dahomey, raised her magic and the ship crashed on the coasts of Cornwall rather than reach the West Indies. Some would be slaves married each other, but the son of this witch queen married a Cornish girl. She was witch born, the granddaughter of the witch of that village and her power went back to times of old.

That line continued until the great granddaughter of those two witches, the black and the white, came to the Carolinas. In those days lawless men, pirates, men fleeing slavery as well as men fleeing society came to live in the numerous islands and in the marshes. It was along that coast that Margaret Carew lived and there she had two daughters, many say by a quadroon descended of those Africans and those Cornish like she was. One of those daughters caught the eye of Frederick Waverly, the planter and became his wife. Thus, in time, were two daughters born, Susanna and Catherine.

But the story only begins here, for when that ship had left Africa another ship with the remainder of that house of powerful mages headed to the Caribbean. It had not ship wrecked but come to Jamaica, as you, my dear Mr. Ashby, know. It was on this ship that Melek and his people were, and it was from this ship that his descendants, through whom he was sometimes reborn, came.You yourself helped and loved Malachy in the Carolinas, but before this he had the raising of his nephews, my brother Octavian and, of course me.

What is more, that Margaret Carew of whom I spoke, had a cousin of the same blood, though darker of skin, Edwine, and it was Edwine who married the brother of Malachy and Edwine who was my mother. So, my brother and I grew up, second cousins to the Waverly girls, and Octavian loved Catherine, but I loved Susanna, for there was witchcraft in her.

What happened?

Things happened?

Oh, yes. Things happened.

They always do.

Catherine was promised in marriage to a wealthy planter from Savannah. From then on she was forbidden to come to the marshes and islands, told to live as a lady. Likely, her father suspected she had Negro blood and did not want it known to the man she was going to marry. More likely, he’d made mulatto children on his own slaves. Not merely likely, but certainly.

Octavian could not abide that he be separated from Catherine and, like a fool, went in the night to bring her back, and this is how he was captured by Frederick Waverly, and by his clan. This is how we learned he was to be made an example of. He was hung up like an X and whipped till his back was a web of tracks. News of his execution was put about, possibly, to lure us out of the marshes. It did.

We were already planning to take Waverly, but had not thought how, or rather, I had thought how, but no one would agree to it. See, when we had come to the Carolinas, we came with the Sword of Melek and the Kernows, the Cornish witches, possessed the Golden Lantern. The Orb had gone missing, and so had the Cup but we were re establishing the great houses. The land we came from had many names, but it is known in the West, to White Men, as the Land of the Saracens, for they assumed only Saracens or Muslims lived East of Dahomey. So, though our ancestors called the land many names, it was known to the west as—

Sarras!

Yes, Kristian Strauss. Sarras, of King Arthur’s fame. And it was even said that the reason one ship blew itself to Cornwall is because they knew this was the land of that ancient king. The fathers of the fathers of the Dunharrows lived in that land, and the records of it are kept even if not remembered. Priests and priestly kings they were. They guarded the ancient treasures and we, for lack of better words, guarded its treasures, though the most famous of them was a Cup. It’s common name, I will not insult you by saying.

The Holy Grail.

Some have called it such. Ah, but what I am about to relate is anything but holy.

Was it holy how I went in the night through the plantations of the land, sowing descent, giving the watch word to rebellion? Or was it holy how I stopped the war drums and the drums of dance from being beaten? Was it holy how I saw that the descendants of the pirates who had married with the descendants of slaves and Cornishmen guarded the roads by which planting families might flee? The nighr before my brother was to die, my soul flew out in the form of a bird and released him, and if release was all I was after, then we would have been done with it. Susanna and Catherine aided me, taking the Treasures and a wagon, and leaving the house in the night. Their mother was dead and their father had taken to raping the women of the plantation.

The next night we came out of the marshes, out of the trees and from the swamp. The whole country was alight with flame and red with blood. There, Seth, are your ghosts. I did not lead alone. Octavian was with me as well as Susanna and Catherine, but I was at the head of them. It was I who gave the command that none should live, that their children who tried to escape should be struck down. The roads were lined with the dead. At the MacCrae plantation, I took Delilah MacCrae’s newborn son, slit his throat and handed him back to her dazed arms before her maid Josephine sliced her in two with a machete. Delilah MacCrae used to wake her slaves in the night and bid them dance for her entertainment, and once, when they did not dance quickly enough, she smashed the girl Chloe in the face with a beer tankard. Her killer, Josephine, was also her supposed rival, and when Josephine was pregnant with the child of good Master MacCrae’s rape, Delilah kicked her in the stomach until she miscarried, so I felt no sadness in her end and feel none to this day.

There were who said the children should be saved and raised among us. Surprisingly it was our English allies who disagreed. I think it was because they looked at this in the light of war, and never having nursed these children or been tender to them, unlike their fellow rebels, they knew with a cold reason that these children would grow up conflicted or run away. So they did not grow up.

In the very gracious parlor that you walk into now, we rounded up some of the last planters.

“You are brutish, goddamn filthy niggers, every one of you,” Mr. Beckworth said, and well he could say it, for he was at his end, and his stately house, one mile south, was now a bonfire in the night.

“Teach him to be better spoken,” I said to Gensher.

Perhaps I meant Gensher to strike him, but instead Gensher, who was the servant of his young son Geoffrey, neatly struck the little boy on the head, and then bashed his head into the wall and the child fell dead, making a bloody mark on the white surface.

Adeline Beckworth screamed to see the death of one of her children, and you should hear this that you do not think that what happened was one bit kinder than it was. Gensher took the next one, a girl called Mary, but this time, more to be merciful than from any vengeance, I killed the girl neatly with a dagger. I killed the other two, twins, quickly, and then Gensher killed their mother and, because he had scores to settle with Beckworth, who had now dissolved into screaming madness, I let Gensher finish him off too.

In gunshots and machete chops, with daggers, in bayonet stabbings as well as throat slicings, we finished our work. Three hundred and sixteen souls died that night.

You’re a monster.

Yes, Seth. Most likely. Anything that lives beyond the normal span of human years most likely becomes a monster. I cannot be the exception.

Neither can you, My Ashby. But we both know the blood between us. Sure Malachy told you of the tragedy of Long Lees, and if Lewis has forgotten it, then I don’t see how you did. We know it. But know this: What I did, though I alone live to tell of it, I did not do alone. And I do not only mean my dear wife Susanna, who surely in her old age repented of the murder of her father. Octavian, my brother was there with his wife Catherine who was the mother of my nephews and nieces—

Nephews and nieces?

Yes, Loreal. The various mothers and fathers of the other lines of our clans. You have met some of them. Onnalee came from them. But the most powerful and closest to me was my oldest nephew, Tiberius. Lewis knows, though I would think Seth, one as simple as you might not, that Tiberius had a granddaughter, Mary Agnes, and she had three children, Drusilla, Claudius, Nero and Owen…. Why the sudden change in names? Ran out of Emperors I suppose. Lewis, the keeper of our family’s secrets and knowledge knows Drusilla was his grandmother and Owen is, of course, Owen. But Nero, a mulatto—

Mixed race.

Please! A mulatto, took his chances and married a white woman whose name eludes me. Nero’s grandson was Kyle who was about as magical as he was black. But there must have been something in your white mother, Seth, or something in Kyle we did not see, for that long haired, vaguely tanned hippie managed to produce you, who have proved to be far useless than most of us thought.

But…. But…. This whole place…. Everything here… was made in blood.

Did you think most things came clean? With a let there be light and there was light, a divine wave of the hand? Everything you see was made in blood, Seth. You fool. Ask the werewolves. Ask the blood drinkers you keep company with. Ask the history books though they will lie and say it was justified. Trace the tracks down the Negro slave’s back or see the gaping wound where greedy white men cut off his genitals after a hanging. Every family on earth is conceived from one who was conceived in a rape in a dark nighr or a dark room or a field in the middle of the day while no one came to help. See your grandmother’s grandmother staggering home, holding her reddened thighs together, knowing what will be born before the year is over. See what the cunning woman did to prevent it, and her tools all red by the light of a candle or a lamp or an electric light, for this still goes on today.

Look at the battlefields. Or, if you will, the car wreck that took your parents and made it so you came to Owen where you learned what they would never have taught you. See the infant taken from his mother’s insides, squalling and covered in effluvium. Everything is made in blood.

It always was.