With Total Impunity

An architect returning home from a business trip is stranded when his car breaks down. It is midnight. In the distance he sees a wrought-iron gate, and behind it, a beautiful, crumbling mansion that seems to belong to a different time. For a steep fee, he is given room and board by its strange inhabitants: a coterie of women, penniless and aristocratic, the last holdouts of a long line.

The formidable and fascinating women of La Diguière—three generations of mothers, daughters, and sisters unattached to anyone but themselves—have day jobs and study for exams. They have sold their Louis XVI furniture and sleep on IKEA beds, in pursuit of their single imperative: to maintain their closely guarded estate, now on the brink of final dissolution. But they do not despair; when the architect arrives, they have just set in motion a Jamesian marriage plot. Circumstances collude to keep the architect at La Diguière for longer than anticipated, and our Lockwoodian narrator readily gives in—their concerns are now his.

This is a story told with the psychotherapist’s appetite for discord and the novelist’s for motive. There is a way out; it will not be difficult. They have only to think of it, and, with total impunity, to act.