BLACKWOOD FARM, CHAPTER ELEVEN
Oct. 10th, 2015 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_sporking_ratI'm reading a spork of The Black Jewels series and I noticed it has something in common with both the Vampire Chronicles and Anita Blake: Only powerful characters matter, and all the good characters are also the most powerful.
Quinn might be an exception, being a very young vampire (but the vampire who turned him was very old, so he might be very powerful, which is the case with Lestat, but there's no indication yet in the book just what level Quinn's at) but other than him, all the vampires that are protagonists and matter enough to have books about them in the series are the most powerful ones. Lestat, Marius, Pandora, Armand...I'm not sure about Louis, granted, and he was her FIRST viewpoint character, but all the others who are of any account are all on the top-tier, hence why Akasha spared them in Queen of the Damned when she wiped out all or nearly all other vampires in the world. Lesser vampires are supposed to be the majority in theory, yet are rarely mentioned, usually only appearing either to be killed (Baby Jenks at the hands of Akasha, for instance) or made inferior by comparison with the powerful vampires Anne Rice favors, like a brief mention of Pandora having hooked up with a vampire named Arjan but should totally be with Marius. Arjan is Indian, which brings me to another point---besides Akasha (who is evil, btw), all the most powerful vampires are white. I should note that there are evil powerful vampires (the most notable being Akasha) but while not all powerful vampires are evil, all good vampires do seem to be powerful. No good character is ever weak.
Likewise with Anita Blake, not all powerful people are evil, but all 'good' people are powerful. Everybody in the harem is a leader, granted power from being in a triumvirate, or granted power from being Anita's Animal Servant, and of course Anita herself is the biggest power of all. Even characters whose weakness is actively fetishized are super-powerful through her. It's like LKH gets off on the weakness of others, but finds weakness too distasteful and gross to possibly exist in a character worth writing about, so she finds a way to have it both ways.
And now from what I'm being told about the Black Jewels series, the same applies. If you're good, you must be powerful. And it's an unearned power, much like most of Anita's abilities and titles.
There is something very, very skeevy and gross here going on. Not to mention it makes for a really shitty story if the good guys are the most powerful, you know?
This might be my last spork, I'm just done with this book, but...
CHAPTER 11
Quinn finds Sugar Devil Island after all of three pages. You know, the one no one was ever able to find and which everyone thought had sunk into the swamp, if it ever existed at all. And he says this took him an hour and a half. Okay then. There's a big house there, with a sign that says it's the property of Manfred Blackwood. It has lots of fancy stuff in it on the first floor, but also bones in chains and on hooks on the second floor, including what is probably the moldering remains of Rebecca (though there are others too). Several times in the swamp and in the house he hears the disembodied voice of Rebecca crying out against something being done to her, presumably torture, as well as hearing other voices he doesn't recognize. Nothing happens though, and he goes home safe and sound with no problems. No, really.
Notable bits include
- No explanation whatsoever for why Quinn could find it so easy when no one else could it ever. Maybe later it will turn out, oh, Rebecca guided him without him knowing or something? Because otherwise it's pretty damn dumb.
-Quinn determining someone seems to be living there and being so "incensed" at the idea of squatters he wished he brought a gun. How dare poor people that need a home be setting up camp in a property of mine that was abandoned and no one was using or knew about! They ought to be shot!
-There's a big tomb behind the house with gold panels set in granite and he spends way too long telling us how the engravings on the tomb are Roman rather than Greek and how/why he could tell because he is oh so learned. Hmmm, there's no one in the house, and there's a big tomb behind it, and we know Quinn becomes a vampire...I wonder what could be in there!
-The contents of the house bookshelf that includes fancy learned books on fancy learned subjects but also childrens picture dictionaries and "what we so arrogantly call popular fiction" (I do not understand what he means by this comment but it sounds snooty as is typical of Quinn) It is not the books on philosophy and anthropology that get Quinn to proclaim his surprise at a "a squatter with taste and intellectual interests" but a gold chair and marble desk. Rice really has a rather vulgar idea of what fancy rich people good taste is.
- He finds earrings and a brooch that belonged to Rebecca, and takes them home with him. Before he goes, he realizes that he can see Blackwood Manor from here in the distance (yet not vice versa, oddly) and that if someone had a telescope or binoculars, they could surely spy on him and the other residents. TOTALLY NOT FORESHADOWING AT ALL!
CHAPTER 12
Quinn comes home and Patsy and Aunt Queen are there. He tells them, Jasmine, and Pops about what he found and wants to get the police out there. All of them tell him no one will believe him and will think he is crazy.
That evening, Aunt Queen tells him about Rebecca, and her story is pretty amazing. It makes me more on Rebecca's side than ever, actually.
After Virginia's untimely death, Manfred started bringing women into the house. He said that they were governesses for the children, but actually they were girls from the red-light part of town for his own pleasure. Specifically Irish girls, Aunt Queen says, which I suppose mattered during those days. And then they would disappear when he was done.
Rebecca was one of these girls, but she was the most beautiful, and she had the refined airs of a lady, which she passed herself off as to everyone. But one night when Manfred was gone and she was upset about it, she got drunk with Ora Lee, Jasmine's ancestor, and told her her real life story.
She's one of those Irish girls herself, one of a family of thirteen children with an abusive father and grandmother, and after being raped while working as a maid, her family almost put her in a convent but put her in a brothel instead. She was glad for this because it was a step up for her, as it was an elegant and fine house and the gentlemen were very gracious. But Rebecca wanted to climb further upward, and so in order for a man to see her as a lady, she started to act like one, and she used her sewing skills to make her very own fancy clothes for herself. The other prostitutes laughed at her and called her "the Countess" but it worked, because Manfred, who was the man of her dreams, indeed came and took her away to his fine manor. Jasmine's family thinks he truly loved her as he did Virginia Lee, and she took his mind off his grief. Rebecca and Manfred then go to Europe together for a year and spend a lot of time in Naples.
For what it's worth, Aunt Queen (and thus Rice) do seem to try for some empathy with Rebecca. AQ emphasizes to "think what it meant" to a girl from Rebecca's background to be whisked away to Southern Italy, and how much Rebecca liked to gush to the servants about all the "Rebecca at the Well" themed cameos that Manfred gave her because it was "named for her". It's done in a manner that suggests Aunt Queen still looks down on her ("the poor creature") but that fits for an old Southern woman from a "good" family, and I don't judge her for it like I do Quinn or Rice, because I don't get the vibe we're supposed to be looking down our noses with her. It's certainly more sympathy than I expected, to be sure.
But when they get back from Europe, things change. Manfred starts spending more and more time out in the swamp, and has the Hermitage house built out there where he would spend weeks at a time. This upsets Rebecca a lot, and she paces and cries and turns "from pretty girl to banshee" while he's gone. Meanwhile, it's become a social scandal that Manfred is keeping Rebecca (I guess the town caught on that she was no governess) and that's why "it couldn't have been a worse time" for Rebecca to start asking him to marry her (they'd been living together two years now). She tells everyone he's going to, and even gets a priest to accost him the next time he came back, to go over how it ought to be done and such. Rumor has it that Manfred beat her for this.
AQ makes a point to emphasize to Quinn how outrageous it was to think that any man in those days would marry a prostitute. I'm a little confused by this. Firstly, I thought Manfred was considered a madman by the town anyway after Virginia Lee died, Aunt Queen said so at the beginning of the story. So why should he care what anyone thinks? And if he does care what the town thinks...how do they know her past? AQ said that Rebecca successfully passed herself off as a proper lady to everyone, and her history only came out to Ora Lee over brandy one night. Did Ora Lee tell everyone or something?
After that, Manfred always brings back fancy gifts for Rebecca and the kids when he goes into the swamps. Quinn says he must have been meeting someone there, how else did he get such things, and AQ says he was indeed, but does not say who. Instead she informs us how the now-adolescent William and Camille "suffered downright meanness and heavy abuse" from Rebecca because Rebecca hated them for being "part of a family to which she did not legally belong." But what AQ apparently means by "heavy abuse" is that Rebecca just went through their rooms whenever they wanted, and when she found a book of Camille's poetry and taunted her about it, Camille threw a bowl of hot soup in her face. Look, going through people's rooms is NOT cool, but it's also not "heavy abuse". In fact, I'd say Camille was worse for throwing hot soup in Rebecca's face, that could SERIOUSLY FUCKING HURT SOMEONE.
I will give Rice this, I like that she gave Rebecca an understandable motivation. I was expecting her to walk in and be mean to everyone for no reason like a Disney villain. But that's not the case; I can completely understand why she'd resent them, and why, having come from a truly abusive household (the kids were all beaten with a strap) and having never been around children before and having no idea how to handle them, she might be nasty to say the least. In fact, I'm rather surprised that her "heavy abuse" is limited to snooping and teasing when Rice could have gone all out. That's high school girl bully shit. I'm not sure if Rice is trying to avoid being over-the-top or if she really and truly thinks that's "heavy abuse" but whatever the case---while I certainly don't like what Rebecca did, and definitely would NOT have approved had she been truly abusive, I *get* it. She seems human to me, not a 2D bully cutout with no personality beyond persecuting the 'good' characters. Even though this is coming from a party biased against her (Aunt Queen) it really seems pretty balanced in terms of painting Rebecca as a person, and that's better than I expected. If I were reading this segment without the context of the rest of the book thus far, in fact, I'd probably be a lot less critical than I am. I'd certainly be surprised at how, say, Patsy is portrayed. And this gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, things will turn around with Patsy too and Rice is just deliberately trying to lead me into thinking she's terrible human trash, and that her coming to Quinn to help him because of a dream (see Notable Bits below) is the first sign of her being revealed as more than Quinn thinks she is.
AQ then says Rebecca "disappeared under violent circumstances" and that Manfred "the old madman" is the one who threw all her things in the trunk. Quinn asks what these circumstances were, and AQ says that Rebecca tried to burn down the house. She does not say why Rebecca did this, and that makes me wonder if there wasn't some very horrible, very understandable reason for it, especially since we've now seen what's in Manfred's house out in the swamp.
Anyway, she did it with the oil lamps, just like she had Quinn do it last night, but the servants caught her and shut her up in a dark room where she ranted and raved and screamed until Manfred came back. Manfred beats her up and there's some nice victim-blaming about how Rebecca is "one of the most unwise human beings that ever lived" for screaming about how he promised to marry her, that she would never leave, that she would "be his wife or die here". Not exactly subtle foreshadowing. I'd be angry about the victim-blaming but, again, Aunt Queen is clearly a biased party and human herself, and this does a good job showing how she's absorbed the prejudice of William, her father, who I'm guessing did not care for Rebecca at all considering her "heavy abuse" of him (maybe she made fun of his tie-pin once?)
Manfred throws fistfuls of money at her on the floor, then calls for her trunk and begans shoving her things in, and orders the servants to drive her off the property and leave her there. But "the wicked and unwise girl" screams to him about how she loves him, she can't live without him, remember Naples, etc. Manfred then decides instead to drag her outside, kick her into the pirogue, and make off into the swamp with her, and "that was the last anybody saw of Rebecca Stanford, alive or dead." Manfred returned two weeks later, and had the trunk put in the attic.
Now, remember back when Aunt Queen met Lestat and showed him her own "Rebecca at the Well" cameos and told him how they'd started her obsession with cameo jewelry, and how her crazy grandfather Manfred gave them to her? It's the very same ones! Camille didn't want them for herself because she hated Manfred so much, and William didn't want them for his wife for the same reason, and it wouldn't be until years later that Ora Lee told her about Rebecca. And here comes a really good part:
"Ora Lee had felt a liking for Rebecca, an understanding of the poor Irish girl who had wanted to better herself, a girl who was afraid of her own vicious Irish father and German-Irish mother, a girl who had reached the faraway coast of Italy with Manfred, where Manfred at a candelight dinner had pinned the first cameo of "Rebecca at the Well" to Rebecca's lace blouse himself.
And, Ora Lee insisted, Rebecca hadn't started out being mean to the children, or mean to anybody; it was what came as a result from her dissatisfaction over time. It was what came of Manfred's downright meanness."
I really like this! It's a view that is sympathetic to Rebecca, while at the same time acknowledging that she handled her unfortunate lot in life in a pretty crappy way (taking it out on kids) but also not letting Manfred off the hook either for his part in it. It's especially balanced when you consider Aunt Queen, who really clearly hates her despite never knowing her (probably because her father William hated her) as evident by calling her "wicked and unwise" and such, is putting it in at the end, and it makes me think better of Aunt Queen for it too. She's a classist old broad influenced by her time period and her father, but she also makes an effort to tell the side of Ora Lee's sympathetic perspective as much as William's harsh one, which gives a more complete picture since really it's probably both that are true. It's good storytelling from Rice, and it shows a fairminded-but-fallibly-human side to Aunt Queen, which makes me like her more (I liked her when she first showed up, this glam old lady in her heels, but after getting drowned out by boring chapters of Quinn's life story, I'd forgotten she even had a personality till now)
Though the next bit does put a bit of a damper on things when Queen says that Ora Lee "couldn't forgive Rebecca's meanness to Camille" and that Camille was "done in by those days" and "went in to her shell and never came out anymore." Because Rebecca snooped in her room and made fun of some poetry she wrote when she was a teenager? That's really silly, and I'm going to hold out hope that there ends up being more to that story and what REALLY made Camille clam up. Because I really hope it was actually something else. Like maybe some ACTUAL abuse. Not that I want anyone to be abused, but I want for things to make sense, and this chapter has renewed my hopes that perhaps Rice is, unlike LKH, capable of indeed writing a good mystery where information can be faulty and things are not always as they seem.
Anyway, Manfred kept bringing his Irish girls back to the house to have his way with them, but when Aunt Queen was born, William got him to stop (or at least be less blatant about it) for the sake of his granddaughter. By the time he gave the cameos to AQ, however, he was just a pitiful slobbering old crazy man "raving at the empty air".
Aunt Queen tells Quinn that Rebecca's ghost is a danger to him, and Quinn says that though he found the rusted chains he still doesn't really know what happened to her. AQ says the important thing is not to call her up again, Quinn says he never really called her up in the first place, and if talking about her and finding her things is what called her up, why didn't she come when AQ received her cameos? AQ says she doesn't know, that Quinn is the one who has all these interactions with ghosts whereas she's never even seen one. Quinn says he thinks she's seen Goblin, and Goblin appears. Quinn shoos him, and Aunt Queen confesses that while she doesn't see Goblin as Quinn does, she does see an "agitation in the air" and sometimes a vague human shape for just a second, and a lingering sense after that something is there.
Quinn is angry with her for never telling him this. AQ says she never denied Goblin's existence, she just also didn't want to reinforce him, because she didn't know if Goblin was good or bad. She also says Big Ramona and Jasmine can see about as much as she can of Goblin too. Quinn feels they've lied to him and is really upset, and wishes for Lynelle to be alive, or for her ghost to come to him, as he feels she can help him make sense of everything that's just gone on.
AQ tells him that she's always taken his powers seriously, but never knew if they were good. Quinn feels suddenly certain that they are not, and confesses to her about his suicidal thoughts. She cries, and Goblin re-appears and is crying too. Goblin reaches out to him, but Quinn yells at him to go away, that he doesn't want him here, to go find Lynelle for him. Goblin looks hurt and goes away. I really feel bad for Goblin, he seems to have the intellect of a toddler and really cares about Quinn, and Quinn just keeps being a dick to him.
Quinn says he has to find out what was done to Rebecca, and find justice for her. This is the first unselfish thing I think he's ever said. He might be just interested because she promised him more sex, sure, but at least he's finally got some kind of GOAL. About time. Again, I feel like this book should have started at a much later point than it did. Or maybe it's just all the excess filler.
He notices AQ is crying and he hugs her.
Then he gets down on the floor and kisses the instep of her foot, then her toes.
Oh.
k.
yeah I do that to my family members all the time, sure, perfectly normal behavior
She just laughs and calls him crazy (jokingly, unfortunately) and they have some champagne and talk some more about Rebecca and she doesn't want him going back to the Hermitage, certainly not alone, and btw Rebecca used sex so she's bad. She suggests he talk to a priest, Fr. Kevin first. Quinn scoffs at him because he's new and young and doesn't say Mass with "flair" like the old priests. Quinn, is there ANYTHING you're not absurdly snobby about? AQ gives him a rosary and Quinn says Kevin won't believe any of this anyway so why bother. AQ says she's going to talk to him anyway, and to get a gold crucifix on a chain made for Quinn and have Kevin bless it.
Quinn plans to take the cameo he found out there to get DNA tested. AQ brings up how Rebecca tried to bring down the house, Quinn says he won't let that happen again but he does want justice for her. He thinks about how he loves AQ, but he's going to deceive her, "protect her from protecting me", and he plans to go back into the swamp and invoke Rebecca's spirit again but he doesn't know how.
Notable bits include
- Jasmine waiting on the porch when Quinn returns to scold him for being out with no one knowing where he is, because Quinn is clearly a small child and not an 18 year old boy who just wasn't around this morning in a tiny section of a very vast property
- Jasmine tells him Patsy was worried too because she had a dream Quinn was in danger and that's why she drove up here. Quinn mentally scoffs and figures she's just here for money (oh shut up Quinn, it's not like you've ever needed any in your life) but when he asks Patsy about it, she says she dreamed the manor was on fire and some people had Quinn and were going to hurt him and that Virginia Lee appeared and told her to go help him. Quinn is amazed because, according to him, she hadn't been told about the fire. I would point out to Quinn that the others could have told her about it before he got home, but I think we're meant to take this as indeed true...which means Patsy actually does give a shit about Quinn.
- She does still make fun of him about Goblin though, and Quinn realizes from a look Aunt Queen gives her that Aunt Queen doesn't like Patsy "any more than Pops". So, she fucking hates her then? Look, making fun of a (from an outsider's POV) probably-crazy shut-in teenager from a weird family isn't cool, but said entire family loathing Patsy's existence while pampering Quinn at every turn makes her seem less like a bully and more like someone who is jealous and lashing out. Like Harry Potter making fun of Dudley Dursley. Not that it makes it ok, but it's understandable. Again, Patsy is actually the most interesting, and part of that is her very human FLAWS.
- Also how long does it take Quinn to notice shit like that in his own family? Aunt Queen and Patsy may not be around 24/7 like Pops and the staff, but it seems like something he should have picked up on before. I admittedly didn't learn some stuff about the relationships between adults in my own extended family until I was an adult myself, but I only saw these people on holidays.
- Quinn may have just come out of a house full of rotting bones on hooks and chains a mere PAGE ago yet has mind to note how Aunt Queen is wearing a green silk dress and how she always wears silk and he always thinks of silk when he thinks of hugging her.
- It's mentioned that one of the reasons people will think Quinn is talking crazy about this house is because they already might think he's crazy due to Goblin, which is interesting because that suggests anyone outside of the manor, where Quinn always is, knows about Goblin. When has he gone off and told anyone in town about Goblin? Not since he was getting expelled from kindergartens. Given how he detailed so many irrelevant bits about his trips as an older kid to New Orleans and NYC, I feel like he'd have told us if he'd at any point gone into town and had to deal with unwashed commoners who just didn't ~understand~ his special ghost friend.
- It is mentioned that they share Aunt Queen's favorite supper, which is scrambled eggs with caviar, along with some champagne. I get it, they're disgustingly rich and they revel in it.
- By the way, Aunt Queen is wearing silver spike heels. In case you forgot HEELS ARE HER THING OMFG!
- Rebecca was very nice to William and Camille for the first two weeks but they "didn't fall for it" and were "just waiting for her to disappear like all the rest" (I expect they didn't have a high opinion of their dad's mistresses). I have a hunch the translation is that they were brats to her even though she tried with them. Especially since Ora Lee says she didn't start out as a mean person when she first arrived, so how did they not "fall for it" if it wasn't a trick?
- Rebecca was surely a jerk to them, make no mistake, but the degree that they HATE her...I feel like snooping and teasing isn't enough to explain it, unless they were selfish brats like Quinn. I wonder if either she had some secrets of her own about what she was doing to them that even Ora Lee didn't know...or maybe if Manfred was abusing them himself, and they transferred the blame on to her because it was easier for them to hate their father's mistress than it was to hate their father, or because they blamed it on her since maybe he got worse over time and that just happened to line up with when he brought her home, etc. Maybe because he started spending more time in the swamp after he brought her home, and it upset them just as much as he did her. It could be a lot of things. I just really, really want it to be more than "she made fun of my poetry once" because that's ridiculous. Especially if Camille really was as "done in by those days" as Aunt Queen claims.
- AQ is sure to note that when Jerome, the black servant, stops Rebecca from burning down the house, that Rebecca called him "the n-word." Now of course that's shitty but like...are we supposed to think she's exceptionally bad for this? Because I don't think that was exceptional at all during her time period. But oh, apparently it's not due to her time, but her class: "The Irish poor were never great lovers of the black man, I can tell you Quinn." Yeah, not like the Blackwoods, who don't pay their black staff to this very day, or let them sleep in the manor unless it's with their grownass creepy son. This is very typical classism, framing other prejudices (racism, homophobia, etc.) as problems unique to "poor white trash" and often used by wealthy people/liberals/etc. so that they can shit on poor people while also exempting themselves from ever having to examine their own prejudices cuz gosh THEY'RE not like that! It's those gross poor people who are, not them!
- AQ is also sure to note that the repairs to the house from Rebecca's arson attempt "cost a mint." Excuse me for sneering, but after having it rubbed in my face over and over how much money these people have and have always had, I hardly care much. I don't like to judge people for how little *or* how much they have, and I actually dislike it when the rich are automatically classed as villains in other works, but Rice's overt classism and wealth-fixation has succeeded in making me hate people with money in this book.
- AQ's mother became the official lady of Blackwood Manor because "Aunt Camille was a wounded being who could never take such a place" YEAH, SOMETHING BAD BETTER HAVE HAPPENED TO HER THAT WE JUST DON'T KNOW YET, THIS IS GETTING STUPID
Oh, and I was flipping ahead...there's a bit where he's pressuring Jasmine, HIS EMPLOYEE, to have sex with him and he calls her "Milk Chocolate" and says he's being "kind" to her because he doesn't "take up" with just anybody you know, and while he's looking at her tits he tells us how she "lived like a nun" since her husband died and is sure to note that her sister Lolly has had three husbands.
...yeah, he's not gay, he's the grossest kind of man who just also happens to like men as well as women, I think. Difference is, he also RESPECTS men. You don't see him talking to Lestat or Stirling or whoever else he seems attracted to like this, nor making such remarks in his head. Disgusting. I mean, it makes sense for his upbringing, definitely, I just wish I could be sure this is going to be at all painted as being as sexist and classist and racist as it is on his part (white men sexually exploiting their black female servants and slaves is something with a long, nasty history, and it's especially hard to ignore when Quinn literally lives in an antebellum mansion, ffs)
Quinn might be an exception, being a very young vampire (but the vampire who turned him was very old, so he might be very powerful, which is the case with Lestat, but there's no indication yet in the book just what level Quinn's at) but other than him, all the vampires that are protagonists and matter enough to have books about them in the series are the most powerful ones. Lestat, Marius, Pandora, Armand...I'm not sure about Louis, granted, and he was her FIRST viewpoint character, but all the others who are of any account are all on the top-tier, hence why Akasha spared them in Queen of the Damned when she wiped out all or nearly all other vampires in the world. Lesser vampires are supposed to be the majority in theory, yet are rarely mentioned, usually only appearing either to be killed (Baby Jenks at the hands of Akasha, for instance) or made inferior by comparison with the powerful vampires Anne Rice favors, like a brief mention of Pandora having hooked up with a vampire named Arjan but should totally be with Marius. Arjan is Indian, which brings me to another point---besides Akasha (who is evil, btw), all the most powerful vampires are white. I should note that there are evil powerful vampires (the most notable being Akasha) but while not all powerful vampires are evil, all good vampires do seem to be powerful. No good character is ever weak.
Likewise with Anita Blake, not all powerful people are evil, but all 'good' people are powerful. Everybody in the harem is a leader, granted power from being in a triumvirate, or granted power from being Anita's Animal Servant, and of course Anita herself is the biggest power of all. Even characters whose weakness is actively fetishized are super-powerful through her. It's like LKH gets off on the weakness of others, but finds weakness too distasteful and gross to possibly exist in a character worth writing about, so she finds a way to have it both ways.
And now from what I'm being told about the Black Jewels series, the same applies. If you're good, you must be powerful. And it's an unearned power, much like most of Anita's abilities and titles.
There is something very, very skeevy and gross here going on. Not to mention it makes for a really shitty story if the good guys are the most powerful, you know?
This might be my last spork, I'm just done with this book, but...
CHAPTER 11
Quinn finds Sugar Devil Island after all of three pages. You know, the one no one was ever able to find and which everyone thought had sunk into the swamp, if it ever existed at all. And he says this took him an hour and a half. Okay then. There's a big house there, with a sign that says it's the property of Manfred Blackwood. It has lots of fancy stuff in it on the first floor, but also bones in chains and on hooks on the second floor, including what is probably the moldering remains of Rebecca (though there are others too). Several times in the swamp and in the house he hears the disembodied voice of Rebecca crying out against something being done to her, presumably torture, as well as hearing other voices he doesn't recognize. Nothing happens though, and he goes home safe and sound with no problems. No, really.
Notable bits include
- No explanation whatsoever for why Quinn could find it so easy when no one else could it ever. Maybe later it will turn out, oh, Rebecca guided him without him knowing or something? Because otherwise it's pretty damn dumb.
-Quinn determining someone seems to be living there and being so "incensed" at the idea of squatters he wished he brought a gun. How dare poor people that need a home be setting up camp in a property of mine that was abandoned and no one was using or knew about! They ought to be shot!
-There's a big tomb behind the house with gold panels set in granite and he spends way too long telling us how the engravings on the tomb are Roman rather than Greek and how/why he could tell because he is oh so learned. Hmmm, there's no one in the house, and there's a big tomb behind it, and we know Quinn becomes a vampire...I wonder what could be in there!
-The contents of the house bookshelf that includes fancy learned books on fancy learned subjects but also childrens picture dictionaries and "what we so arrogantly call popular fiction" (I do not understand what he means by this comment but it sounds snooty as is typical of Quinn) It is not the books on philosophy and anthropology that get Quinn to proclaim his surprise at a "a squatter with taste and intellectual interests" but a gold chair and marble desk. Rice really has a rather vulgar idea of what fancy rich people good taste is.
- He finds earrings and a brooch that belonged to Rebecca, and takes them home with him. Before he goes, he realizes that he can see Blackwood Manor from here in the distance (yet not vice versa, oddly) and that if someone had a telescope or binoculars, they could surely spy on him and the other residents. TOTALLY NOT FORESHADOWING AT ALL!
CHAPTER 12
Quinn comes home and Patsy and Aunt Queen are there. He tells them, Jasmine, and Pops about what he found and wants to get the police out there. All of them tell him no one will believe him and will think he is crazy.
That evening, Aunt Queen tells him about Rebecca, and her story is pretty amazing. It makes me more on Rebecca's side than ever, actually.
After Virginia's untimely death, Manfred started bringing women into the house. He said that they were governesses for the children, but actually they were girls from the red-light part of town for his own pleasure. Specifically Irish girls, Aunt Queen says, which I suppose mattered during those days. And then they would disappear when he was done.
Rebecca was one of these girls, but she was the most beautiful, and she had the refined airs of a lady, which she passed herself off as to everyone. But one night when Manfred was gone and she was upset about it, she got drunk with Ora Lee, Jasmine's ancestor, and told her her real life story.
She's one of those Irish girls herself, one of a family of thirteen children with an abusive father and grandmother, and after being raped while working as a maid, her family almost put her in a convent but put her in a brothel instead. She was glad for this because it was a step up for her, as it was an elegant and fine house and the gentlemen were very gracious. But Rebecca wanted to climb further upward, and so in order for a man to see her as a lady, she started to act like one, and she used her sewing skills to make her very own fancy clothes for herself. The other prostitutes laughed at her and called her "the Countess" but it worked, because Manfred, who was the man of her dreams, indeed came and took her away to his fine manor. Jasmine's family thinks he truly loved her as he did Virginia Lee, and she took his mind off his grief. Rebecca and Manfred then go to Europe together for a year and spend a lot of time in Naples.
For what it's worth, Aunt Queen (and thus Rice) do seem to try for some empathy with Rebecca. AQ emphasizes to "think what it meant" to a girl from Rebecca's background to be whisked away to Southern Italy, and how much Rebecca liked to gush to the servants about all the "Rebecca at the Well" themed cameos that Manfred gave her because it was "named for her". It's done in a manner that suggests Aunt Queen still looks down on her ("the poor creature") but that fits for an old Southern woman from a "good" family, and I don't judge her for it like I do Quinn or Rice, because I don't get the vibe we're supposed to be looking down our noses with her. It's certainly more sympathy than I expected, to be sure.
But when they get back from Europe, things change. Manfred starts spending more and more time out in the swamp, and has the Hermitage house built out there where he would spend weeks at a time. This upsets Rebecca a lot, and she paces and cries and turns "from pretty girl to banshee" while he's gone. Meanwhile, it's become a social scandal that Manfred is keeping Rebecca (I guess the town caught on that she was no governess) and that's why "it couldn't have been a worse time" for Rebecca to start asking him to marry her (they'd been living together two years now). She tells everyone he's going to, and even gets a priest to accost him the next time he came back, to go over how it ought to be done and such. Rumor has it that Manfred beat her for this.
AQ makes a point to emphasize to Quinn how outrageous it was to think that any man in those days would marry a prostitute. I'm a little confused by this. Firstly, I thought Manfred was considered a madman by the town anyway after Virginia Lee died, Aunt Queen said so at the beginning of the story. So why should he care what anyone thinks? And if he does care what the town thinks...how do they know her past? AQ said that Rebecca successfully passed herself off as a proper lady to everyone, and her history only came out to Ora Lee over brandy one night. Did Ora Lee tell everyone or something?
After that, Manfred always brings back fancy gifts for Rebecca and the kids when he goes into the swamps. Quinn says he must have been meeting someone there, how else did he get such things, and AQ says he was indeed, but does not say who. Instead she informs us how the now-adolescent William and Camille "suffered downright meanness and heavy abuse" from Rebecca because Rebecca hated them for being "part of a family to which she did not legally belong." But what AQ apparently means by "heavy abuse" is that Rebecca just went through their rooms whenever they wanted, and when she found a book of Camille's poetry and taunted her about it, Camille threw a bowl of hot soup in her face. Look, going through people's rooms is NOT cool, but it's also not "heavy abuse". In fact, I'd say Camille was worse for throwing hot soup in Rebecca's face, that could SERIOUSLY FUCKING HURT SOMEONE.
I will give Rice this, I like that she gave Rebecca an understandable motivation. I was expecting her to walk in and be mean to everyone for no reason like a Disney villain. But that's not the case; I can completely understand why she'd resent them, and why, having come from a truly abusive household (the kids were all beaten with a strap) and having never been around children before and having no idea how to handle them, she might be nasty to say the least. In fact, I'm rather surprised that her "heavy abuse" is limited to snooping and teasing when Rice could have gone all out. That's high school girl bully shit. I'm not sure if Rice is trying to avoid being over-the-top or if she really and truly thinks that's "heavy abuse" but whatever the case---while I certainly don't like what Rebecca did, and definitely would NOT have approved had she been truly abusive, I *get* it. She seems human to me, not a 2D bully cutout with no personality beyond persecuting the 'good' characters. Even though this is coming from a party biased against her (Aunt Queen) it really seems pretty balanced in terms of painting Rebecca as a person, and that's better than I expected. If I were reading this segment without the context of the rest of the book thus far, in fact, I'd probably be a lot less critical than I am. I'd certainly be surprised at how, say, Patsy is portrayed. And this gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, things will turn around with Patsy too and Rice is just deliberately trying to lead me into thinking she's terrible human trash, and that her coming to Quinn to help him because of a dream (see Notable Bits below) is the first sign of her being revealed as more than Quinn thinks she is.
AQ then says Rebecca "disappeared under violent circumstances" and that Manfred "the old madman" is the one who threw all her things in the trunk. Quinn asks what these circumstances were, and AQ says that Rebecca tried to burn down the house. She does not say why Rebecca did this, and that makes me wonder if there wasn't some very horrible, very understandable reason for it, especially since we've now seen what's in Manfred's house out in the swamp.
Anyway, she did it with the oil lamps, just like she had Quinn do it last night, but the servants caught her and shut her up in a dark room where she ranted and raved and screamed until Manfred came back. Manfred beats her up and there's some nice victim-blaming about how Rebecca is "one of the most unwise human beings that ever lived" for screaming about how he promised to marry her, that she would never leave, that she would "be his wife or die here". Not exactly subtle foreshadowing. I'd be angry about the victim-blaming but, again, Aunt Queen is clearly a biased party and human herself, and this does a good job showing how she's absorbed the prejudice of William, her father, who I'm guessing did not care for Rebecca at all considering her "heavy abuse" of him (maybe she made fun of his tie-pin once?)
Manfred throws fistfuls of money at her on the floor, then calls for her trunk and begans shoving her things in, and orders the servants to drive her off the property and leave her there. But "the wicked and unwise girl" screams to him about how she loves him, she can't live without him, remember Naples, etc. Manfred then decides instead to drag her outside, kick her into the pirogue, and make off into the swamp with her, and "that was the last anybody saw of Rebecca Stanford, alive or dead." Manfred returned two weeks later, and had the trunk put in the attic.
Now, remember back when Aunt Queen met Lestat and showed him her own "Rebecca at the Well" cameos and told him how they'd started her obsession with cameo jewelry, and how her crazy grandfather Manfred gave them to her? It's the very same ones! Camille didn't want them for herself because she hated Manfred so much, and William didn't want them for his wife for the same reason, and it wouldn't be until years later that Ora Lee told her about Rebecca. And here comes a really good part:
"Ora Lee had felt a liking for Rebecca, an understanding of the poor Irish girl who had wanted to better herself, a girl who was afraid of her own vicious Irish father and German-Irish mother, a girl who had reached the faraway coast of Italy with Manfred, where Manfred at a candelight dinner had pinned the first cameo of "Rebecca at the Well" to Rebecca's lace blouse himself.
And, Ora Lee insisted, Rebecca hadn't started out being mean to the children, or mean to anybody; it was what came as a result from her dissatisfaction over time. It was what came of Manfred's downright meanness."
I really like this! It's a view that is sympathetic to Rebecca, while at the same time acknowledging that she handled her unfortunate lot in life in a pretty crappy way (taking it out on kids) but also not letting Manfred off the hook either for his part in it. It's especially balanced when you consider Aunt Queen, who really clearly hates her despite never knowing her (probably because her father William hated her) as evident by calling her "wicked and unwise" and such, is putting it in at the end, and it makes me think better of Aunt Queen for it too. She's a classist old broad influenced by her time period and her father, but she also makes an effort to tell the side of Ora Lee's sympathetic perspective as much as William's harsh one, which gives a more complete picture since really it's probably both that are true. It's good storytelling from Rice, and it shows a fairminded-but-fallibly-human side to Aunt Queen, which makes me like her more (I liked her when she first showed up, this glam old lady in her heels, but after getting drowned out by boring chapters of Quinn's life story, I'd forgotten she even had a personality till now)
Though the next bit does put a bit of a damper on things when Queen says that Ora Lee "couldn't forgive Rebecca's meanness to Camille" and that Camille was "done in by those days" and "went in to her shell and never came out anymore." Because Rebecca snooped in her room and made fun of some poetry she wrote when she was a teenager? That's really silly, and I'm going to hold out hope that there ends up being more to that story and what REALLY made Camille clam up. Because I really hope it was actually something else. Like maybe some ACTUAL abuse. Not that I want anyone to be abused, but I want for things to make sense, and this chapter has renewed my hopes that perhaps Rice is, unlike LKH, capable of indeed writing a good mystery where information can be faulty and things are not always as they seem.
Anyway, Manfred kept bringing his Irish girls back to the house to have his way with them, but when Aunt Queen was born, William got him to stop (or at least be less blatant about it) for the sake of his granddaughter. By the time he gave the cameos to AQ, however, he was just a pitiful slobbering old crazy man "raving at the empty air".
Aunt Queen tells Quinn that Rebecca's ghost is a danger to him, and Quinn says that though he found the rusted chains he still doesn't really know what happened to her. AQ says the important thing is not to call her up again, Quinn says he never really called her up in the first place, and if talking about her and finding her things is what called her up, why didn't she come when AQ received her cameos? AQ says she doesn't know, that Quinn is the one who has all these interactions with ghosts whereas she's never even seen one. Quinn says he thinks she's seen Goblin, and Goblin appears. Quinn shoos him, and Aunt Queen confesses that while she doesn't see Goblin as Quinn does, she does see an "agitation in the air" and sometimes a vague human shape for just a second, and a lingering sense after that something is there.
Quinn is angry with her for never telling him this. AQ says she never denied Goblin's existence, she just also didn't want to reinforce him, because she didn't know if Goblin was good or bad. She also says Big Ramona and Jasmine can see about as much as she can of Goblin too. Quinn feels they've lied to him and is really upset, and wishes for Lynelle to be alive, or for her ghost to come to him, as he feels she can help him make sense of everything that's just gone on.
AQ tells him that she's always taken his powers seriously, but never knew if they were good. Quinn feels suddenly certain that they are not, and confesses to her about his suicidal thoughts. She cries, and Goblin re-appears and is crying too. Goblin reaches out to him, but Quinn yells at him to go away, that he doesn't want him here, to go find Lynelle for him. Goblin looks hurt and goes away. I really feel bad for Goblin, he seems to have the intellect of a toddler and really cares about Quinn, and Quinn just keeps being a dick to him.
Quinn says he has to find out what was done to Rebecca, and find justice for her. This is the first unselfish thing I think he's ever said. He might be just interested because she promised him more sex, sure, but at least he's finally got some kind of GOAL. About time. Again, I feel like this book should have started at a much later point than it did. Or maybe it's just all the excess filler.
He notices AQ is crying and he hugs her.
Then he gets down on the floor and kisses the instep of her foot, then her toes.
Oh.
k.
yeah I do that to my family members all the time, sure, perfectly normal behavior
She just laughs and calls him crazy (jokingly, unfortunately) and they have some champagne and talk some more about Rebecca and she doesn't want him going back to the Hermitage, certainly not alone, and btw Rebecca used sex so she's bad. She suggests he talk to a priest, Fr. Kevin first. Quinn scoffs at him because he's new and young and doesn't say Mass with "flair" like the old priests. Quinn, is there ANYTHING you're not absurdly snobby about? AQ gives him a rosary and Quinn says Kevin won't believe any of this anyway so why bother. AQ says she's going to talk to him anyway, and to get a gold crucifix on a chain made for Quinn and have Kevin bless it.
Quinn plans to take the cameo he found out there to get DNA tested. AQ brings up how Rebecca tried to bring down the house, Quinn says he won't let that happen again but he does want justice for her. He thinks about how he loves AQ, but he's going to deceive her, "protect her from protecting me", and he plans to go back into the swamp and invoke Rebecca's spirit again but he doesn't know how.
Notable bits include
- Jasmine waiting on the porch when Quinn returns to scold him for being out with no one knowing where he is, because Quinn is clearly a small child and not an 18 year old boy who just wasn't around this morning in a tiny section of a very vast property
- Jasmine tells him Patsy was worried too because she had a dream Quinn was in danger and that's why she drove up here. Quinn mentally scoffs and figures she's just here for money (oh shut up Quinn, it's not like you've ever needed any in your life) but when he asks Patsy about it, she says she dreamed the manor was on fire and some people had Quinn and were going to hurt him and that Virginia Lee appeared and told her to go help him. Quinn is amazed because, according to him, she hadn't been told about the fire. I would point out to Quinn that the others could have told her about it before he got home, but I think we're meant to take this as indeed true...which means Patsy actually does give a shit about Quinn.
- She does still make fun of him about Goblin though, and Quinn realizes from a look Aunt Queen gives her that Aunt Queen doesn't like Patsy "any more than Pops". So, she fucking hates her then? Look, making fun of a (from an outsider's POV) probably-crazy shut-in teenager from a weird family isn't cool, but said entire family loathing Patsy's existence while pampering Quinn at every turn makes her seem less like a bully and more like someone who is jealous and lashing out. Like Harry Potter making fun of Dudley Dursley. Not that it makes it ok, but it's understandable. Again, Patsy is actually the most interesting, and part of that is her very human FLAWS.
- Also how long does it take Quinn to notice shit like that in his own family? Aunt Queen and Patsy may not be around 24/7 like Pops and the staff, but it seems like something he should have picked up on before. I admittedly didn't learn some stuff about the relationships between adults in my own extended family until I was an adult myself, but I only saw these people on holidays.
- Quinn may have just come out of a house full of rotting bones on hooks and chains a mere PAGE ago yet has mind to note how Aunt Queen is wearing a green silk dress and how she always wears silk and he always thinks of silk when he thinks of hugging her.
- It's mentioned that one of the reasons people will think Quinn is talking crazy about this house is because they already might think he's crazy due to Goblin, which is interesting because that suggests anyone outside of the manor, where Quinn always is, knows about Goblin. When has he gone off and told anyone in town about Goblin? Not since he was getting expelled from kindergartens. Given how he detailed so many irrelevant bits about his trips as an older kid to New Orleans and NYC, I feel like he'd have told us if he'd at any point gone into town and had to deal with unwashed commoners who just didn't ~understand~ his special ghost friend.
- It is mentioned that they share Aunt Queen's favorite supper, which is scrambled eggs with caviar, along with some champagne. I get it, they're disgustingly rich and they revel in it.
- By the way, Aunt Queen is wearing silver spike heels. In case you forgot HEELS ARE HER THING OMFG!
- Rebecca was very nice to William and Camille for the first two weeks but they "didn't fall for it" and were "just waiting for her to disappear like all the rest" (I expect they didn't have a high opinion of their dad's mistresses). I have a hunch the translation is that they were brats to her even though she tried with them. Especially since Ora Lee says she didn't start out as a mean person when she first arrived, so how did they not "fall for it" if it wasn't a trick?
- Rebecca was surely a jerk to them, make no mistake, but the degree that they HATE her...I feel like snooping and teasing isn't enough to explain it, unless they were selfish brats like Quinn. I wonder if either she had some secrets of her own about what she was doing to them that even Ora Lee didn't know...or maybe if Manfred was abusing them himself, and they transferred the blame on to her because it was easier for them to hate their father's mistress than it was to hate their father, or because they blamed it on her since maybe he got worse over time and that just happened to line up with when he brought her home, etc. Maybe because he started spending more time in the swamp after he brought her home, and it upset them just as much as he did her. It could be a lot of things. I just really, really want it to be more than "she made fun of my poetry once" because that's ridiculous. Especially if Camille really was as "done in by those days" as Aunt Queen claims.
- AQ is sure to note that when Jerome, the black servant, stops Rebecca from burning down the house, that Rebecca called him "the n-word." Now of course that's shitty but like...are we supposed to think she's exceptionally bad for this? Because I don't think that was exceptional at all during her time period. But oh, apparently it's not due to her time, but her class: "The Irish poor were never great lovers of the black man, I can tell you Quinn." Yeah, not like the Blackwoods, who don't pay their black staff to this very day, or let them sleep in the manor unless it's with their grownass creepy son. This is very typical classism, framing other prejudices (racism, homophobia, etc.) as problems unique to "poor white trash" and often used by wealthy people/liberals/etc. so that they can shit on poor people while also exempting themselves from ever having to examine their own prejudices cuz gosh THEY'RE not like that! It's those gross poor people who are, not them!
- AQ is also sure to note that the repairs to the house from Rebecca's arson attempt "cost a mint." Excuse me for sneering, but after having it rubbed in my face over and over how much money these people have and have always had, I hardly care much. I don't like to judge people for how little *or* how much they have, and I actually dislike it when the rich are automatically classed as villains in other works, but Rice's overt classism and wealth-fixation has succeeded in making me hate people with money in this book.
- AQ's mother became the official lady of Blackwood Manor because "Aunt Camille was a wounded being who could never take such a place" YEAH, SOMETHING BAD BETTER HAVE HAPPENED TO HER THAT WE JUST DON'T KNOW YET, THIS IS GETTING STUPID
Oh, and I was flipping ahead...there's a bit where he's pressuring Jasmine, HIS EMPLOYEE, to have sex with him and he calls her "Milk Chocolate" and says he's being "kind" to her because he doesn't "take up" with just anybody you know, and while he's looking at her tits he tells us how she "lived like a nun" since her husband died and is sure to note that her sister Lolly has had three husbands.
...yeah, he's not gay, he's the grossest kind of man who just also happens to like men as well as women, I think. Difference is, he also RESPECTS men. You don't see him talking to Lestat or Stirling or whoever else he seems attracted to like this, nor making such remarks in his head. Disgusting. I mean, it makes sense for his upbringing, definitely, I just wish I could be sure this is going to be at all painted as being as sexist and classist and racist as it is on his part (white men sexually exploiting their black female servants and slaves is something with a long, nasty history, and it's especially hard to ignore when Quinn literally lives in an antebellum mansion, ffs)
