dangled at his side.
But the face, barely discernible through the gloom… The soft sensitive eyes…
A wave of horror chilled my skin. “Katya?” I breathed.
“She’s resting, I told you. I won’t have her disturbed.” She constricted her throat to force the note of her voice deeper. The effect was a ghastly rasp that made me shudder.
I had to think! I had to control my emotions. Be calm and think. “May I… may I look in on her… Paul? Just for a second?”
She stared at me for a long moment. “Very well. But don’t wake her. She needs her rest. She is weary… so weary….” The tone of plaintive compassion contrasted eerily with the macabre rasp of her voice.
My heart pounding, my mind awash with fear, I pushed the door open partway. This room, too, was heavy with shadow, deepened by the contrasting glare of sunlight through the gently billowing curtains. I closed the door softly behind me and crossed to the bed. Paul lay on his back, his arms at his sides, his legs straight and stiff. He was dead. She had covered him with one of her white dresses, its collar tucked under his chin, its arms carefully placed over his arms, giving the impression that he was wearing the garment. And his face, in repose so like hers, lent grotesque realism to the illusion.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed.
I folded the dress down and discovered a blot of dark blood over his shirtfront, in the center of which was a small black hole. He had been shot through the heart. But there was no blood on the counterpane upon which he lay. He had been shot somewhere else and carried—dragged, more likely—up to her bedroom. I shuddered to imagine the terrible effort it must have cost her to drag and tug his limp body up those broad stairs and into her room. And heaving it up onto the bed…
I carefully replaced the dress over him, and I stepped back into the hall, closing the door behind me.
She had not moved from the head of the stairs, where she was a silhouette of shadow against the glowing walls of the stairwell. “Is she sleeping?” she asked.
I drew a long breath. “Yes. She’s… resting.”
“Good,” she said in her forced gravelly voice. There was a moment of silence.
“I… Paul? May I have a few words with you?” I asked hesitantly.
She raised one eyebrow in Paul’s superior way. “If you must, old boy.” She turned and preceded me down the stairs. As I walked behind her I saw that she had crudely chopped her hair short and had tried to plaster it down with water.
A Drowned Virgin?
When, months later, I could review these events with a clearer mind, I realized that I had felt no sense of personal danger. I was afraid, to be sure, but not for myself. I recognized that Katya was quite mad. I assumed that she had killed her brother and perhaps her father with the target pistol she carried nonchalantly in her hand. There was no reason to believe she might not kill me. And yet, there was no place in the tangle of my emotions for fear. Perhaps the thought of being dead, of being out of it all, had a certain attraction.
My overwhelming emotion was pity… love and pity that tugged my heart towards her. Her body small and fragile within Paul’s ill-fitting clothes, her hair standing up in wet cowlicks, she looked so much the tragicomic clown, half grotesque, half pathetic, that I yearned to take her in my arms and comfort her. But I realized that if there were the slightest chance of guiding her back to reality, I must allow her to play out the role in which she found some kind of safety, some shelter from the storms raging in her mind.
We entered the salon and she turned to me with a supercilious expression and asked in Paul’s bored drawl, “I suppose you could do with a brandy? After all, it isn’t every day a fellow manages to get himself shot while wooing a young lady in a garden. It’s an event worthy of celebration.”
I accepted the brandy she offered without pouring one out for herself. “Shall we take it on the terrace?” she asked. “It’s another of those tediously exquisite days Katya is forever cooing about. We might as well subject ourselves to its ineffable beauty.”
I followed her out onto the terrace, and we sat overlooking the tangled garden. She sat with her ankles lightly crossed and her knees together, the graceful line of her body contrasting strangely with her costume.
How to start? What to say? I found myself slipping into the cautious, controlled, rather patronizing style of communication I had learned at the asylum at Passy. Hoping to discover how much she was aware of events around her, I began, “How’s your father?”
She glanced at me quickly, mistrust in her eyes. “You were coming from my father’s room when I found you in the hall. You know perfectly well that he’s dead.”
I nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry. How did he die?”
“My dear fellow, I would have imagined that a man of medical training, even one so inexperienced as you, could deduce that he shot himself… took the gentleman’s way out.”
“Out of what?”
“When he found you in the garden, he—” She stopped suddenly in midphrase and stared at me, confusion and doubt welling up in her eyes. When she spoke again, the guttural tone was gone. It was Katya’s voice. “I don’t understand… you were… weren’t you…?” She touched her brow with her fingertips.
“I was shot, yes, but only wounded. Nothing serious.”
“Only wounded? Yes, but…” She was adrift from reality, her expression vague. “Yes, but… I…”
“You say your father
“Papa? How could you believe that? Papa was so gentle. He could never harm anyone.”
“Listen—” I yearned to reach out and take her hand to reassure her, but I couldn’t tell where she was in the vague terrain between herself and her persona as Paul, and Paul would have recoiled from my touch. I soon learned to read the slight but dramatic indications of her shift from one personality to the other: the husky lowering of the voice, the shallowing of the eyes, the tensing of the mouth into Paul’s habitually disdainful expression. But at this moment I had to guess which one I was talking to. “Listen… Paul? Yesterday you told me about what happened in Paris. Tell me about that again please.”
She put the pistol in her lap and looked out across the garden, her eyes distant, her voice flat. “I probably didn’t tell you the truth yesterday… not the whole truth, anyway.”
That “probably” signaled to me that she had retreated back into Paul, but lacked his memory of events. There was a cunning quality to her negotiations between beings.
“Well, tell me the whole truth now. Begin in Paris, shortly before you moved here to Salies.”
Her eyes hardened, her nostrils dilated slightly, and when she spoke her voice had returned to that forced rasp that chilled my spine. “Oh, it began before that, old boy. Long before that. It began when poor Katya was a young girl just entering womanhood. When she was still the awkward and coltish Hortense.”
I had a flash of insight. “When she was fifteen and a half?”
“Yes. Just fifteen and a half.” She looked at me and smiled thinly. “I take it you’re thinking about her ghost?”
“Yes, I was. What happened to Katya when she was fifteen and a half?”
She frowned, seeming to recoil from the memory. “It’s not a pleasant thing to think about. It’s an ugly… shameful…”
My intuition told me that Katya would not be able to recount the event, whatever it was. I would have to learn it through Paul. “Please tell about it… Paul.”
She was silent for a time; then she began to speak, her eyes fixed on the middle distance, out across the ragged garden. “I had a friend visiting for a month that summer—a handsome rogue of a fellow several years older than I who was introducing me to the delights of gambling and other civilized dissipations. We were out on the town almost every night, if not playing cards, then putting the street walkers of St. Denis into… amusing situations. It was all typical of young men of my class. Wild oats and all that. Good dirty fun.
“It was this fellow’s practice to pay a kind of teasing court to Katya, as men in their twenties will do with teenaged girls, delighting in their shyness and awkwardness. They used to chat over dinner or take little strolls in the garden. As you might expect, she was both pleased and flattered by his attentions. He was a dashing rake, and she was poised—teetering, really—between adolescence and young womanhood. I never thought much of it. Indeed, I joined in the game, teasing her about her little infatuation, the way a brother will.
“There was a cruel streak in that man, one that came out in his treatment of the St. Denis girls. But it
