A Lady Under Siege - By B.G. Preston Page 0,10

room for herself, she looked down at her mother, all puffy-eyed and distracted.

“Are you going crazy?” she asked.

“What? No—why? Don’t think that.”

“Daddy said he left because you were driving him crazy. But maybe it was ’cause I drove him crazy. And now I’m driving you crazy.”

“No, no, no,” Meghan protested. She pulled herself together, stood up, rinsed yogurt and tears from her hands at the sink, then came to Betsy. She straightened a loose strand of her daughter’s hair.

“Your father is full of it, which is one of many reasons he doesn’t live with us anymore. I’ll have to talk to him about how he’s explaining things to you. And you’d better eat up quick or it’ll end up being the usual sprint to school.”

“Pro D day,” she said.

“Shit.”

“I told you.”

“I forgot. I’ll have to juggle.” She thought for a moment. “I can get away with working here most of the day,” she said. These days she actually preferred it. Working from home gave her a break from the toxicity of office gossip. She was an illustrator and graphic designer with a well-known book imprint, part of a publishing conglomerate that was by all accounts teetering on the verge of financial ruin. “I’ve got one meeting this morning first thing I can’t cancel,” she remembered. “Hopefully I’ll be gone a couple of hours, max. That’s the one positive thing I can say about this house—I’m so much closer to work here. But we’ll still have to get someone to come be with you. Your dad, maybe.”

Betsy made a face. “No fun.”

“How about a play date at Brittany’s?”

“Her mom is psycho.”

“Good. You can help her cope.”

“I’d rather stay here—I’ll keep the doors locked and won’t answer any phone numbers I don’t know.”

Meghan hesitated. “You’re giving me one more thing to stress about.”

“I can handle it.”

“I don’t know if I can. You’re ten. Have you ever been alone in your life?”

“No. But I feel like I’m alone, lots of times.”

Looking at her daughter’s troubled face, Meghan felt herself dissolve into guilt and sympathy. “Give me a hug,” she demanded. She didn’t want Betsy to see it, but she was crying again.

6

Sylvanne invited the priest into a small anteroom off her husband’s bedroom. She didn’t close the door. She could hear and see her loyal servants, maids and men, paying their tearful respects to her dead husband laying upon his bed. She stood by a narrow gothic window, little more than a slit, through which she could also hear sounds of the besiegers below. The news had reached them, it was clear. They were shouting and whooping, in high spirits, calling on those inside the castle to surrender. “On our Lord’s good word, no harm will be done you. No judgment. No reprisals. You are free to come out in peace.” She had asked her servants to wait while she composed herself. She didn’t want that rabble pouring in and seizing her like some living bauble. The gates would be opened soon enough, she’d told them, but on her own terms. First, there would need to be a simple, immediate funeral for her husband, done with regrettable haste but as much dignity as possible. Before that, she wanted answers from the priest.

“You heard my husband’s dying words,” she addressed him. “You heard me tell him that my knowledge of the Good Book is limited. He spoke of Judith. What is her story, and how might it affect me?”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t make too much of such words as issue from a dying man’s mouth, m’Lady,” the priest answered. “In that feverish moment he may not have been in his right mind. Judith’s tale barely merits inclusion in our Bible. A most inappropriate fable, really. Quite unworthy of the Prince of Peace.”

“Still, I wish to hear it,” said Sylvanne.

“So be it. It’s like this, Madame. An Assyrian army, under the great and fearsome general Holofernes, laid a strangulating siege to the Israelites at the walled city of Bethulia. Now within those walls, the widow Judith, a Jewess of great beauty, hatching a plan, shed her widow’s sackcloth, washed her body, anointed her skin with perfume, attended to her lovely hair, put on bracelets and rings, and altogether clothed herself in her finest attire. Thus adorned, she could surely captivate any man who might look upon her. She and her maid, a loyal woman named Abra, snuck out of the city, and presented themselves to Holofernes’s camp.

“Now Holofernes, charmed by her, invited her