01 The Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice

Author:Anne Rice
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9780345376046
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 1992-01-28T10:00:00+00:00

III

WHEN ANNA BELLA told Marcel that she didn’t care anything for “that man,” she had not been telling a lie. She had not let herself care for Vincent Dazincourt because she was convinced that the life he offered her was wrong.

This was not a heartfelt religious conviction, though Anna Bella was devoted to the Virgin and made special novenas to her on her own. She could have lived without the sacraments and was preparing to live without them now. On the Sunday morning that she saw Marcel, she did not receive Communion but she felt some personal and unshakable confidence that God still heard her prayers. She would go to Mass all her life no matter what she did, and light candles before the saints for all the causes that she knew.

But the Catholic Church was not the church to which she’d been born, and it seemed ornate and alien at times of real trouble, it was a luxury like the lace she’d learned to make, the French language she had acquired. And when she received the offer from Vincent Dazincourt, she had a strong instinct that plaçage, that age-old alliance of a white man and a dark woman, was an evil and unwholesome life.

She had seen it all around her, this alliance, with its promises, its luxuries, its ties. And she had known the haughty dashing ladies of the demi-monde, Dolly Rose and her indomitable mother; and such proud and enduring women as Cecile Ste. Marie. But she had seen the insecurity also, and the ultimate unhappiness that such knots spawn. She had never thought of this for herself.

For Anna Bella, there shone across the vista of childhood the warm light of an earlier time when her father and mother had been with her, and there had been simple hearty meals at the deal table, and soft family conversation by a dying kitchen fire. She could remember snatches of things that still conveyed extraordinary pleasure…white starched curtains, rag dolls in gingham dresses with shining button eyes. Her mother could swing her up on the hip with one arm, and throw the clothes over the line with the other hand. She didn’t remember her mother’s death clearly, it seems they sent her out to play. And coming back into the house, she had seen the mattress stripped of its sheet and had known that her mother was gone forever. She could not remember a funeral or a grave.

But all the rough edges had been worn from these remembrances, and so was the sense of time. She had been innocent in a perfect world, and had those parents lived, Emma and Martin Monroe, Anna Bella was convinced she would not be drawn out of innocence now.

But she had been at the barbershop window when the bullet hit her father, and she had seen him, the blood splattering from his skull, as he fell in the street. He had stepped out with his white barber’s jacket on, saying to the customer in the chair, “Just you wait.

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