"You seem to have been unlucky in your eavesdropping."
Laura grimaced. "It was more that my parents were profligate with their emotions. Growing up in that house, it was impossible not to know how matters stood between them. If I'd been upstairs in my room, I'd probably still have heard every word of what they said, None of the servants were home that afternoon, so they saw no reason to be moderate.
"The fight was about the fact that my mother had just learned that Papa had been unfaithful to her. Not a real affair, just a quick tumble with a married woman in their circle. I think the woman must have wanted to make trouble, because she immediately came to my mother and tearfully confessed her sin.
"My mother became insanely jealous and confronted my father when she found out. She threatened to carve him up with a knife so he could never betray her again. Instead of denying her accusation or admitting it and asking her forgiveness, he stupidly tried to brazen it out, saying that the act had been meaningless and Tatyana was a fool to carry on so. After all, it was she whom he loved, so she should stop acting like a shrew.
"I couldn't see what was happening, but judging by the sounds, she threw the poker at him," Laura continued. "Then she said that if sex was so meaningless, she'd go and spread her legs for Count Vyotov, who'd been trying to seduce her for years. My father exploded, shouting that a man had the right to bed other women, but no decent woman could do the same. My mother laughed and said why should she be decent when her husband wasn't?"
Laura's voice cracked as the scene replayed in her mind, as vivid as the day it happened. "Papa called her a whore and hit her—I heard her scream and crash into a piece of furniture, then fall to the floor. Her voice dropped into a hiss, the most terrifying sound I've ever heard. She said she was going to leave the house that minute and go straight to Count Vyotov. Papa threatened to kill her if she tried to leave. She told him he'd better get a gun, because nothing but death would stop her."
Once again Laura choked to a halt. His voice deep with compassion, Ian said, "Did they get into a struggle where she accidentally shot him, and you've been concealing the truth all these years?"
"No, that would have been horrible but would have made a certain ghastly kind of sense," Laura whispered. "Instead, Papa said that he couldn't kill the woman he loved, but he would kill himself if she betrayed him. Cold as ice, my mother said it was a pity that he had valued love so little, for his infidelity had destroyed her love and he had no one to blame but himself. Then she stormed out of the house.
"I thought of going to my father, but he was in such a rage that I didn't dare. Instead, I slipped out the other door of the library and hid in my room, trembling."
Forcing herself to continue, she said, "The rest is as I told you. I had almost convinced myself that this was only another fight, like the others, and the next day everything would be fine again. Then... then I heard the shot and went downstairs to the library. When I found my father's body, my first thought was that if I had gone to him, he would not have done such a thing."
"You mustn't think that!" Ian said sharply. "No child has that kind of responsibility for a parent!"
"How could I not think it?" she cried in anguish. Wrapping her arms around the pain in her midriff, she tried to speak evenly. "But I didn't waste time on guilt then. When Papa fell across the desk, he had knocked his suicide note on the floor. It was in front of me when I walked in. I picked the note up and read it, and it was almost the worst part of all. He said that he couldn't bear Tatyana's unfaithfulness, and that he had killed himself to prove how much he loved her."
Laura's voice took on the brittle edge of hysteria. "Can you believe that is what he said? He destroyed all of our lives and said it was for love!"
"Your father was suffering from a spell of madness," Ian said, his calm voice pitched to bring her back to earth. "He was a melancholic, prone to despondency, and what happened that day pushed him over the edge into suicidal despair."
"I don't doubt that he was mad that day," Laura said bitterly. "But my mother was sane except when she was in the grip of passion. Then she became as wildly unbalanced as my father. Though she didn't shoot him, it wouldn't have surprised me if she had. She was capable of it."
"But she didn't, and you are more like her than like him.''
Ignoring his interjection, Laura said, "When I saw the note, I knew instinctively that it mustn't become public, so I hid it in my room. The official verdict was that my father had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his pistol, so that he could be buried in holy ground.