The tapestries that had graced the walls of the Château de Saint-Loy — unicorns, vainly coursed by hounds and hunters, captured and gentled by comely virgins; Helen, not yet of Troy, and her retinue departing for Cytherea; King Louis confuting the heathen — looked down upon a scene that was certainly not the least strange they had viewed in their long centuries.
There was Lutetia McKell presiding over her tea service as if nothing had happened. “Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea, Judy? You look chilled. I’ve some of your favorite keemun. Ashton? Dane?”
They exchanged despairing glances. “I don’t think any of us wants tea at the moment, Mother,” Dane said. “Dad was saying something.”
“Forgive me, dear. I’m afraid I wasn’t listening closely.”
Her husband inhaled. “Lutetia. Did you substitute the live cartridges for the blanks?”
“Yes, dear,” said Lutetia.
Dane cried, “Why?”
“Well, darling, you see, when your father lent Miss Grey the revolver, because she was nervous about being alone in the penthouse, he told me about it.” Of course. Didn’t his father tell her everything? Well, Dane thought grimly, not everything. “He’d said he was afraid, however, Miss Grey not being accustomed to firearms and so on, that there might be an accident. So, he told me, he’d put blank bullets in the revolver instead of real ones, although he’d bought live shells at the time he purchased the revolver. That’s how I knew, Ashton, that the live cartridges were on the top shelf of your wardrobe.”
Ashton groaned.
Lutetia continued in the same bright tone. One day, she said, she had telephoned the penthouse. Sheila Grey’s maid, who came in daily, answered. Miss Grey, she had told Lutetia, was out. Lutetia had hung up without giving her name.
She had then dressed properly for a neighborly visit and gone up to the penthouse and rung the bell. The maid answered the door.
“Is Miss Grey in?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t expect her for sure till six.”
“You mean she may return before then? In that case, I believe I’ll wait. I’m Mrs. McKell, who lives downstairs.”
The maid had hesitated only for a moment. “I guess it’ll be all right, ma’am. I recognized you. Come in.”
Lutetia had sat down in a chair in Sheila’s living room (not a very comfortable one, she said: “I don’t care for Swedish Modern, do you, Judy?”) and the maid had excused herself. “If you don’t mind, ma’am, I’ve got my work to do.”
Although Lutetia had never been in the penthouse apartment during Sheila Grey’s occupancy, she was familiar with the apartment’s layout. There were only two bedrooms, one a guest room; any woman could tell at a glance which was which, and both lay at the side of the apartment away from the kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a hall. Lutetia waited a few moments, then quietly got up and walked through the door on the other side.
She was wrong about the guest room; there was none. Sheila had converted her second bedroom into a workroom; here was where she plotted her fashions, the GHQ of her organization. With all deliberate speed Lutetia proceeded to the master bedroom.
Logic demanded that the revolver be kept in the night-table drawer. And there it was. She took the weapon, removed its blanks, inserted the live ammunition, returned the revolver to the drawer, and left the bedroom with the blanks clutched in her handkerchief.
She had summoned the maid, said she would not wait after all, and returned to her apartment.
“Then I put the box of bullets in my dressing-table drawer,” Lutetia concluded conversationally, “along with the blank ones in the handkerchief. That’s all there was to it, darling.”
Ashton pounded his palm in frustration. “But why, Lutetia, why?”
“I couldn’t think what else to do with them.”
“I don’t mean that.” Her husband passed his hand over his face. “I mean the whole thing. Why did you switch cartridges at all? What on earth did you have in mind? Didn’t you realize the danger?”
“You don’t understand, Ashton. The danger, as you call it, was the whole point. Some night when that woman — girl — would be all alone, I intended to visit her and tell her that I knew all about you and her. I was going to threaten her, don’t you see?”
“Threaten her?” repeated Ashton, blankly.
“And taunt her, too.”
“Mother,” rasped Dane, “what are you talking about?”
“And make her so angry that she’d shoot me.”
Had Lutetia broken out in Swahili, or Urdu, they could not have regarded her with more bafflement.
“Shoot you,” her husband repeated. The words evidently meant nothing to him. “Shoot you,” he said again.
“Shoot you, Mother?”
“Don’t you see? It was all my fault, your father’s consorting with that woman, turning his back on his wife. If I had been a better, more understanding wife to your father, he would never have taken up with another woman. It was my doing, really. I was the guilty one.”
“You’re lying!” cried Ashton McKell. “What kind of story is that? Do you expect any grown person to believe such a yarn? Lutetia.” He glared at her. “Did you shoot Sheila?”
She was staring at him in horror, like a child who, having told the exact truth, is still accused of fibbing. Her lower lip trembled.
“Ashton, no. How can you think such a thing? I changed those bullets for the reason I told you. Don’t you believe me?”
“No,” he flung at her. Then he muttered, “I don’t know.”
She’s insane, Dane thought, with the creeping kind of insanity that just touches the edge of another world, and he doesn’t see it. He’s still trying to judge her rationally.
The thought was so acute that Dane almost groaned aloud. He had never realized it; now, in the flash of the revelation, it was as if he had known it all his life. Everything was illuminated by it — his mother’s unnatural selflessness, her timidities resting on a bedrock of Victorian stubbornness, her self-isolation, her clinging to a past that for her must always be the present. How long has this been coming on? he wondered; and, looking back, it was impossible for him to judge just when she had crossed the line.
Whenever it had been, there was no spark to convert it into action until she became aware of her husband’s “spiritual infidelity.” Then, in her system of twisted values, she moved; she took the blame on herself by seeking punishment, at the same time that she “protected” her beloved husband and master and laid the onus of punishment on the other woman’s shoulders.
What his father must be thinking, Dane could not imagine. The whole concept was so extraordinary — the guilty man shriven of guilt, but feeling guilt still — that probably his thoughts were one boiling confusion. The elder McKell’s trapdoor mouth was half open, his commanding eyes glossy, his breathing labored. He looked like a man in shock.
It was Judy Walsh who said gently, “But didn’t you realize, Mrs. McKell, that what you did might lead to the accidental death of someone else?” Judy knew.
Lutetia shook the head that now rested on the lacy jabot of her bosom. “I’m so sorry. I never thought of that. How stupid of me. I was so sure it could only happen to me. But it didn’t... The nights came and went, and they were lonely nights... I could never bring myself to carry out my plan.”
Judy turned away; her eyes were filled with tears.