“It wasn’t them. I’ve just looked.”

  “Lawrence!” she exclaimed, realizing he was alone upstairs.

  “Shhhh. Please, go out through the garden and find a policeman. Quickly!”

  “No, I must go to him. You find the police.”

  “Matron. We’re wasting time. You have no idea what is up those stairs, and I do. I’ve a very good idea. You must go and bring us help.”

  She shook her head. “He’s my son.”

  “And while we argue, he may be dying. If you love him, go!”

  I turned and opened the door to the back stairs as quietly as I could. He must have been watching the house. He must know there are only two women and a wounded man here.

  I was already fishing my little revolver out of my pocket as I ran lightly up the stairs. The door at the top was closed, as it should be. I paused there only long enough to catch my breath, then opened the door.

  Raised voices were coming from Lawrence’s room. I recognized only one of them. I walked carefully down the passage to the partly opened door, and slowly looked around it.

  Lawrence was braced on his good arm, and on the floor by the bed I saw the vase of daffodils, glass shards and bruised flowers everywhere in little pools of water. But I couldn’t quite see who else was in there with him.

  A rich baritone voice, stage trained, spoke. “Never mind, I’ll find them. If that vase doesn’t bring them running, your falling down the stairs will. I counted. There are fourteen of them, narrow treads. It’s a very long way for you to bounce.”

  “Don’t try it,” Lawrence said angrily. “You don’t have a weapon now. I can still knock you down. I did by the river. That’s why you carried a rolling pin the next time.”

  “Of course I did,” the voice replied, taunting. “But I don’t need a weapon now.” He must have surged toward the bed, because suddenly he was there, in my line of sight now, and he raised both fists together, over his head, to bring them down on Lawrence’s half-healed broken leg.

  “No!” he cried, desperately trying to swing it off the bed and out of reach.

  The face between the raised arms was twisted by something that was more hate than anger, and I didn’t wait.

  I fired.

  The shot struck him in the right shoulder, and Jean-Paul cried out in pain and shock, turning toward me. Those pale gray eyes were darkened with fury.

  With a roar, he came toward me, arms outstretched, intent on what he would do when he caught me. Ignoring the pain, his mind was on nothing but me, in the doorway.

  I moved back, fired again, this time at his knee.

  He dropped like a stone, and then rising up on his elbows, he tried to crawl toward me.

  I didn’t want to kill him. Backing away, I quickly found my body up against the passage wall. There was nowhere else to go. If I fled down the stairs, I left Lawrence at his mercy. And he was still pulling himself across the floor toward me, still roaring, even with the weapon pointed directly at him.

  Lawrence was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear him. I watched in fascination as the wounded actor struggled toward me.

  “I will kill you,” I said as coldly as I could. “If you don’t stop.”

  But he was out of the room now, a matter of feet away, and I had to make a decision.

  One more foot agonizingly gained. And then another.

  I fired a last time, and this time he crumpled to the floor, his left arm broken. Screaming obscenities in such a fury that he still felt nothing.

  I heard the front door open. “Up here,” I shouted, thinking it was Dr. Moreau. I had the ridiculous thought that he was going to ruin his evening clothes, attending to Jean-Paul.

  But it wasn’t the doctor, it was the Colonel Sahib, taking the stairs two at a time, his long legs bringing him up them at great speed.

  “Bess? For the love of God—”

  I handed him the little revolver. “There’s one shot left. I tried not to kill him.”

  He put his arm around my shoulders as Lawrence shouted, “Bess! Are you all right? What’s happening? Damn it, someone tell me what’s happening.” He couldn’t see me from where he lay.

  “It’s all right,” I called. “It’s over.”

  “Er, who is the wounded man?” the Colonel Sahib asked me.

  “He’s a French actor. He tried to kill Lawrence Minton—he’s there in the bedroom—and he tried to kill me. He did kill a young girl.”

  Beyond the buttons of the Colonel Sahib’s coat, I saw Matron, her hand covering her mouth as she looked up the stairs in horror.

  “Lawrence is safe,” I said to her. “He isn’t hurt.” Glancing up at my father, I said, “I expect I ought to do something to stop the bleeding.”

  And my calm, collected father, looking at the dark red smear from Lawrence’s bedside to a foot from where I’d been standing, said harshly, “Let him bleed.”

  In the event we did no such thing.

  Once she had assured herself that Lawrence was upset but truly unharmed, Matron knelt by me in the passage and worked with quiet efficiency on Jean-Paul’s knee as I dealt with his shoulder and arm wounds. His single-minded determination had kept the pain at bay as he came after me, but it had finally overwhelmed him, and he lay there now, his eyes tightly shut and his jaw clenched against it.

  I thought in other circumstances, he’d rather die than allow us to attend to him, but his suffering was mounting with every passing minute and even his stoicism was wearing thin. The Colonel Sahib stood guard until the ambulance and the police arrived, but there was no possibility of escape. Jean-Paul could hardly move.

  I found it difficult to be sympathetic, all the same. He would have killed me if he could, and then Lawrence. Matron as well, if she’d rushed back inside. I’d seen that in his pale eyes as he crawled toward me, his will stronger than his body, and for seconds that seemed to go on forever as I stood there watching him, I’d feared I’d have to kill him to stop him.

  Still, it was easy to understand how grief might turn a man’s mind, even how it might turn him into a killer. His daughter, as I learned much later from the magistrate who took our statements, was with the nuns in Rouen. She had never fully recovered from the nightmare she had endured. Her father had found her wandering the road out of the village, bloody and wounded, having been left in that house for dead. A constant reminder of all he had lost.

  By the time Dr. Moreau arrived ten minutes later, he had only to supervise the rest of our work. The knee was shattered, but the arm was a clean break, and the shoulder wound was in the muscle. He brought more dressings from his surgery, and something for the patient’s pain. I don’t think Jean-Paul was grateful for the relief, but he didn’t refuse to swallow the medication. By the time the police and the ambulance finally arrived, he was groggy, unable to answer questions. The police turned first to Dr. Moreau, who deferred to my father to clarify the situation.

  Later, I asked, “How was Marina? And the dinner?” as we watched the attendants slide the stretcher into the ambulance. A policeman climbed in beside it and was ordered not to let the prisoner out of his sight.

  “It was odd,” Dr. Moreau said, shrugging. “She hadn’t sent the invitation.”

  “She hadn’t? But it appeared—it appeared to be real. And she was preparing for the dinner when I was there only yesterday.”

  “Apparently it’s tomorrow night. No invitations had been sent out, anyway. There was no need. The students were to ask their parents to attend. But after she’d finished her duties, we took her out to dine. We could do no less. And it was a very pleasant evening. What has happened here? And who was this man lying in the upstairs passage? I’ve never seen him before.”

  “He’s the man who nearly killed Lawrence.”

  “But what is he doing here?”

  “He came to finish his handiwork.”

  “Mon Dieu! Who shot him? Your father?”

  “No. I had to. He was going to kill us.”

  He turned to look at me. After a moment, he said quietly, “That was very brave of you.”

  For the first time, some of the tightness in my chest went away.

  Madame and Matron were in the sitting room. My father was still speaking to a senior policeman.

  Matron had almost literally run into the Colonel Sahib arriving to speak to me—he was just stepping out of a taxi as she was frantically searching for help. He didn’t wait to listen to what she was trying to tell him. He could hear the gunshots and came through the door that Jean-Paul had left unlocked for his own escape, and up the stairs, leaving Matron to follow. She had had the good sense to send the astonished driver to find the nearest policeman.

  When the ambulance had taken Jean-Paul away, under guard, we sat in the parlor as I gave a policeman the simplest account of the evening, knowing I’d have to repeat it again when we were interviewed in the morning by the magistrate in charge. The policeman hadn’t recognized Jean-Paul, but someone at the hospital or police station would do so during the night, I was sure. I was glad I had witnesses. The police had ignored me until they learned who had done the shooting. It was assumed that Matron and I had been summoned by Dr. Moreau to help him deal with the wounds.

  It was well after two in the morning when we crawled into our beds. My father had insisted on staying the night, and a cot from the surgery was made up for him in the sitting room.

  I had a few minutes to speak to him after the others had gone up the stairs.

  “If you’d taken Major Webb into your confidence, he might have been able to help you a little,” my father chided me. “We’ll have to keep this from your mother, you know.”

  “Even if I had trusted him, he wouldn’t have been here tonight. But yes, for Mother’s sake.” Still, she would find out in time. She always did. Sparing her never worked for very long.

  “What’s this about that man trying to drown you?”

  He had been present when I spoke to the police tonight.

  And so I told him everything I knew. He listened without comment, but I watched the line of his mouth tighten as I talked. “And there you have it,” I said, when it was finished.

  “Good God, Bess. I had no idea you were in this much danger.”

  I said thoughtfully, “I don’t know what Jean-Paul believed at the time. What his daughter, if he ever found her, knew or understood about the murders. I expect he has been looking for a scapegoat for a very long time.”

  As I finished, I caught a fleeting expression on my father’s face. There and gone so quickly I wasn’t sure I’d read it correctly: he was seeing himself in Jean-Paul’s shoes, if anything had happened to us, my mother and me. He wouldn’t have stopped until he had found whoever was responsible.

  A little silence followed, uncomfortable on my part.

  Then he said in his normal tone of voice, “The Sergeant’s body was still there at the house, you said?”

  “Yes, Lawrence hadn’t been able to carry it back to his own lines.” I realized where he was going. “You’re right. Jean-Paul would have seen the man’s insignia. What regiment had been there. And he could most certainly see that the Sergeant had been dead well before that family had been shot. There were no German bodies in the house. He’d assumed that the English were to blame. A starting point.”

  What’s more, he’d befriended Lieutenant Bedford—who was also in that regiment. How many others, until he’d found Lawrence Minton?

  “If Minton hadn’t been seconded to these talks, the man might never have found him.”

  Happenstance . . . But theater companies traveled, didn’t they? He might have found his way to England eventually. He’d waited this long, after all.

  Changing the subject, the Colonel Sahib said, “Go to bed. Before you fall asleep on your feet.” He rose from his chair, and as I stood up, he bent forward and kissed me on the cheek. “Good night, love.”

  I went upstairs, uncertain whether I would sleep or not. Someone—Matron perhaps—had taken a mop and water to the bloodstains where I’d shot Jean-Paul, and the wood was still damp in places. I was grateful to her.

  I had had to give my little revolver to the police for the time being. It would be returned, I was told. But I didn’t think it would be.

  The house was quiet. I undressed, got into bed, and then sat bolt upright again.

  When the ambulance and the police had arrived, neighbors had come out into the street to see what was happening. They’d heard the shots, of course. They were worried.

  I had had other things on my mind just then, but now I remembered something.

  Standing back on the far side of the street, in the shadows, was Captain Jackson. As soon as he saw me, the worried expression on his face changed to relief. There hadn’t been time to think about him, and I didn’t see him after that. Whether he’d gone or stayed.

  The police were back in the morning, and afterward we went to the station to give our written statements. It was unnecessary to mention Lawrence’s dependency on laudanum or his suicidal feelings. I simply wrote down the facts in the case, from Jean-Paul’s belief that a British officer had killed his family, to his search for that man, and his obsession with revenge. Whatever anyone else chose to write was his or her affair. I told the absolute truth. Just not all of the truth. Jean-Paul had been found in Lawrence Minton’s sickroom, he himself could attest to that, and while the police were not happy that I’d shot him, they decided that my lack of skill with a revolver and my terror had resulted in three wounds, none of which was fatal.

  I didn’t tell them that my aim was true.

  They didn’t search my room, and so they never discovered Captain Jackson’s revolver. I was glad I hadn’t had to explain having two weapons in my possession.

  It helped that the respected Dr. Moreau could tell them that he and his wife had been lured away from the house. And Jean-Paul hadn’t come to the house until he was certain that the doctor had taken the two women to a restaurant and had ordered their meal. Witnesses later placed him on the street outside the windows.

  I returned from the police station to find Captain Jackson waiting for me across the street from the house.

  “Are you all right?” he asked at once, when I stopped to speak to him. “What happened?”

  I gave him a brief account.

  He swore under his breath. “I followed the doctor and his wife. I thought they were the intended target. And nothing happened. I came back here, to find police and an ambulance at the door.”

  “Why should they be a target?”

  “I wasn’t the only one following them.”

  “Do you still have that rolling pin?”

  “Yes. Shall I take it to the police?”

  “Would you mind, terribly? They will not be pleased that you didn’t turn it in straightaway.”

  His drawl came back. “Well, as to that, I just knew it had blood on it. I couldn’t say whose blood it was.”

  “Come in and meet my father. He’ll be returning to the house as soon as he’s finished his own statement and his interview. And I must return your revolver.”

  Surprised, he said, “Didn’t the police take it as evidence?”

  “No,” I said, smiling. “I couldn’t get to yours. I had to use my own.”

  He stared at me. “I didn’t know you had one.” Then, considering the matter, “Did you miss, trying to kill him?”

  “I didn’t want to kill him. Just to stop him. And I succeeded.”

  Captain Jackson howled with laughter then, bent over with it.

  More than a little put out, I said, “I don’t see anything funny about that.”

  “No, ma’am, I expect you don’t,” he answered when he’d caught his breath. “My mother would like you. I have never seen her miss anything she aims to shoot. With revolver or rifle. New Mexico wasn’t always civilized, you know. My father taught her well.”

  In India, I’d been taught by my own father, and Simon had seen to it that I practiced regularly. He would take me out riding and find a quiet place to put up targets, a place that wouldn’t bring the regiment or anyone else charging down on us if they heard the shots.

  I realized that I hadn’t had time to ask my father if he’d seen Simon in London, or if he’d even returned from Scotland.

  Madame Moreau was in her sitting room with Matron, and so I took the Captain into the parlor. But when I started upstairs to fetch the revolver, he asked if he might meet Lawrence Minton. And so I took him with me.

  Lawrence was tired from his own session with the police, and I thought for a moment he wasn’t happy to have to deal with another stranger. But I shouldn’t have worried. The Captain was affable and soon had Lawrence smiling. I left them together and went to take off my coat. When I came back, they were exchanging war stories, and I left them to that as well. It was, I thought, an antidote to his own boredom and his mother’s constant presence.

  Captain Jackson, I told myself, starting down the stairs to wait for my father, could cajole a post into talking to him.

  Later he met my father and Dr. Moreau, but I found a moment to return his revolver. And before the Colonel Sahib left, I asked him for news of Simon.

  He shook his head. “Your mother told me that he hadn’t returned to the cottage.”

  I had to leave it at that. Matron had come up behind me to tell him good-bye.

  When the police had everything they needed, I was allowed to return to England. They kept my little revolver, evidence for the trial. But I could always ask Simon to find another one.

  Matron was staying a little longer, until Lawrence could travel.

  I went to see the magistrate before I traveled to Calais. I asked him what would become of Jean-Paul.

  He studied me for a moment. “It’s a very sad case. But there are other circumstances to be considered. Still. The court will decide his fate. He pleaded guilty, you know.”

  I hadn’t known that. But somehow I wasn’t surprised. He was clever enough to save himself from the death penalty. I was glad that Lawrence would be leaving for England in another few weeks. I didn’t think that Jean-Paul felt either remorse or guilt. He couldn’t let go of the past. And if he ever got the chance, he would still take his revenge if he could. He would find someone to blame.