A Lady Under Siege

14

Meghan came in the front door and called out, “Hi sweetie! I’m home.” She heard Betsy call from upstairs that she was getting changed, so she headed up to check on her, and also to check the art history books in her studio. She poked her head in Betsy’s bedroom and said, “Sorry I got late. Parking was a nightmare, there was some kind of street fair going on. I did phone. Why didn’t you pick up? You scared me half to death. You were supposed to look at the call display and pick up.”

“I was in the bathroom.”

“Well why didn’t you call back when you got out?”

Betsy didn’t answer.

“Why are you getting changed?”

“I just felt like it.” Meghan heard irritation in her daughter’s voice, a leave-me-alone tone. She put it down to resentment at being left alone again.

“I’ll make some dinner,” she said. “Lemon honey chicken, your favourite. With white rice, not brown. But first I need to check on something.”

She went to her studio office, the middle room of the three upstairs, and scanned the bookshelves for a particular title. Italian Renaissance Painting. She plopped the massive volume on her drafting table and flipped through it randomly. There it was: Caravaggio—Judith and Holofernes.

Her eyes roamed the image for a moment. From the first glance she agreed with Anne: Caravaggio’s Judith looked too diffident, too decidedly detached for someone in the midst of decapitating a general in his own bed, in his own tent, in the midst of his mighty army. Curious to see the other painting Anne had mentioned, she moved to the computer and googled Artemisia Gentileschi. As easy as that, she found the female painter’s version of the same event, and again, like Anne, found it more satisfying, more believable. This Judith looked to have righteousness on her side, giving her the strength and certitude to do what needed done. But to Meghan’s mind the most striking difference between the two paintings was in their portrayals of Judith’s accomplice, her maid Abra. In Caravaggio’s version Abra was an old crone waiting patiently like a granny in a buffet line up. Gentileschi’s Abra, on the other hand, is part of the team—she plants her full weight on the brute’s chest, pinning his arms down while he struggles against the blade Judith slices across his neck.

Before getting up from the computer she gave in to an urge to google Thomas of Gastoncoe, not for the first time. In fact she had done this every time she had used the computer lately, typing his name and Lady Sylvanne’s into every search engine she could think of, but she had never turned up anything meaningful. Browsing absently through the results, she heard Betsy heading downstairs. Time to get dinner started.

In the kitchen she rubbed some skinless chicken thighs with olive oil, slid them into a Pyrex dish, sprayed them with concentrated juice from a plastic lemon, slathered on some honey, and popped it in the oven. Betsy came in and stood watching her sheepishly, but Meghan didn’t pick up on it. “Can you get me some spinach out of the fridge, hon?” she asked.

It was only when Betsy brought the packet to her at the sink that Meghan noticed the clumsily fashioned mass of bandages that encased the girl’s index finger. In alarm she cried, “What did you do to your hand?”

“It got cut,” Betsy said timidly.

“How?”

“I was practicing golf with Derek.”

“Derek.”

“From next door.”

“I know who Derek is, thank you very much. And where exactly were you golfing?”

“In the back,” said Betsy, wincing in anticipation of what was surely to follow.

“In our back? Derek came over to our back lawn?”

Betsy nodded. “Kind of by accident.”

Meghan looked out the kitchen window and with a shock saw that her garden had been violated. A dozen or so heavy slats from the collapsed fence lay scattered in a random pile, crushing her flowerbed. The gaping hole in the fence felt like a breech in her defences. She rushed to the kitchen door, reached for the handle, and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw that a pane of glass had been reduced to a few shards clinging to the frame. She gingerly put a finger through the opening, to confirm what her eyes were telling her.

“I tried to get all the pieces out of it, and got a cut,” Betsy said defensively. “He said I don’t need stitches or anything.”

“You might, by the time I get through with you,” Meghan said. Glancing out onto the floor of the deck she saw splattered drops of dried blood. She looked down at her feet and saw that someone had done a very poor job of wiping up similar dots on the kitchen floor. There were faint smear marks from the door to the sink. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed them before.

“First thing is we’re going to take that bandage off and I’ll decide whether you need stitches or not. Hopefully not, but at least we’ll make sure it’s clean, and dress it properly. That mess looks ridiculous. Did you put any antiseptic on it?”

Betsy shook her head.

“No, he didn’t think of that, did he? Too busy wrecking my fence.” Her anger, slow to build, now made her shake with rage. “First thing is to give that man a piece of my mind,” she seethed. “Or I might just chop his frigging head off!”

She marched out of the kitchen, out of the house, and under a full head of righteousness marched straight toward Derek’s door. Betsy followed her as far as their own front step, then called after her, “He went to get a piece of glass! He measured it and everything!”

Meghan took no heed. She rang the doorbell and pounded on his door obsessively, and when it became abundantly clear he wasn’t home, it only increased the fury she felt toward him.