Page 49 of Calling All Angels
The journal went on:
16 July 1802
What madness is this? How could this happen? Rowena ruined? I do not believe a word of it. Father is furious and forbidding me to see her or you. He will not listen to reason. He will not say why. Is it the scandal he’s afeared will ruin me, too? But I am ruined without you. Ruined. Do not go tomorrow. I beg you—if God hears me—do not meet him in that field.
Arthur, protect him. There is something wrong with all this.
Connor scowled. Might as well have spit in the wind, for all the good that prayer did.
17 July 1802
I cannot breathe! The sun is breaking. What horror might come at first light? I am locked in my room to prevent me from coming to you. I’d climb out the window, but my father has perched himself below to keep me here. A prisoner! I hate him today, God forgive me. But if anything befalls you, my love, I swear, my father will never know my forgiveness.
And we all know what happened next,he thought.
Connor skimmed down the page and a handful of paragraphs Bean had written pragmatically about Connor’s death and how Arthur had surprisingly refused to honor his late brother’s promise to marry Violet. To take her as a bride in his stead. It would have been the honorable thing to do, but then, Arthur hadn’t owned an honorable bone in his body.
It was, instead, Landon Sykes she would marry, an unexpected windfall for the family in dire need of one. There was a copy of the banns, read in the parish kirk three Sundays in a row, to announce their engagement.
Oh, that he could have been there in the parish to object to that unholy union.
28 July 1802
I cannot see ahead. I cannot. If Father forces me to do this thing, I’ll surely die of fury. For I ken now what Landon Sykes and your brother did. What they both did to you. May they rot in hell.
Connor went hot then cold by turns. Guilt washed over him.
He’d been wrong. Dead wrong that she’d been a part of it. Now, remembering that treachery, how he’d blamed her for marrying Sykes, he could see that he’d been blinded to it before. Somehow, she’d put the pieces together about their plot. Reading her words felt as if she’d reached across the centuries to speak to him. All this time, he’d been wrong. Horribly, unjustifiably wrong. It wouldn’t have taken Arthur long to take his place as heir after Connor’s death. Or to revel in his newfound rank. Had he even feigned grief for his brother?
Ezra Bean called Violet’s comments “hysteria” and a typical example of a willful daughter resisting her duty. A man of his times, Bean gave no credit to a woman’s choice. But who was Connor to cast aspersions? He had been no better.
12 August 1802
’Tis done. Against my will. Better that piece of lead should have found my breast instead of yours that day, my love. But my life is over all the same. My father has sold me to your murderer for the price of a dowry and a promise of a generous yearly stipend. I bit the bastard and drew blood when he tried to kiss me. I will kill him if he touches me. I swear it.
Connor read several more entries of her misery, her threats on Sykes’s life. But then all entries stopped for almost two years, when Bean noted the next two entries were from a new journal altogether.
16 May 1804
It infuriates him that I never say his name. But it makes me oddly happy to see him so. No use in explaining why he lives grand and my soul dies, slowly, day by day. Ye must know why. I long hoped he would end me. But he got me with child instead. Now when he comes to me at night, I close my eyes tight and think of ye. If I didn’t, I would spend the rest of my days in cell away from my wee bairns. Or hanged, more like, for his death. If it wasn’t for my son, Joseph, and my daughter, Eliza, I’d welcome my own death. I promise you that.
23 November 1805
Where are you, my love? I look up at the night sky and imagine you seeing those same stars from above. I miss your hands on mine. Your mouth on mine. I miss the kindness in your eyes. I must hide this diary, for I am with child again. He will hurt me if he finds this book, but I canna risk this child. His child. I should hate it, but I will not. I am not a real woman except for them. Only a smudge of ash on the wall of my room. A shadow. But the children make me remember you and what we could’ve been. And every day, I pretend they are yours.
He put the book down, staring into the water at the minnows swimming there amongst the clouds dancing across the water. He could not bear to read more. Couldn’t bear all the bitterness he’d held onto for so many years, when she’d suffered so at the hands of the man who’d killed him. How could he have imagined she’d gone willingly to Sykes? Or borne him children with an open heart? Connor’s own heart twisted. The fault wasn’t in her but in him. He’d been but a shell of the man he’d once been. Half here and half there.
The fragrance of the crisp water, the sky, sharply blue against the green trees, it all reminded him of things he’d forgot, the simple pleasures of the mortal world, suddenly free from the shadow of his bitterness.
In all the time he’d been a Celestial, he’d stuffed his past into a pocket and kept it in the dark where it had safely festered for far too long. Why hadn’t he pushed for answers? Why hadn’t he sought her out sooner? Or imagined he’d gotten it all wrong about Violet? His brother he’d written off long ago, but Violet… He’d blamed her all these years for something he’d made up in his head. If he could talk to her now, to Violet, what would his excuse be? That his love for her had not been enough to guess the truth? That he’d assumed the worst of her? But why?
It was his lack, not hers. His mistrust.
And Emma had not deserved his bitterness any more than Violet had. He was, in fact, unworthy of her love or her devotion.
Swiveling a look at Emma, who was deep in conversation with Elle about something he couldn’t make out from here, it was as if he was looking at Violet. Even though he’d told himself that Emma and Violet were not alike at all, he’d been wrong about that, too. Wrong about Violet’s faithfulness, her strength to survive when others would have crumpled. Emma, too, had steel beneath the velvet of her soul. She never backed down, despite what had happened to her. That was who she was. Yet she was a modern woman who had options that Violet never had.
If Violet had lived till Emma’s age now, Violet’s children would have been nearly grown. It gave him small comfort that she’d had her bairns to love amidst the conflict with her husband.
