Page 10 of These Violet Delights
Violet’s head snapped up. “I love you like a sister, Emilia, and you have not lived here long, so I will not tell Lane of this.” Emilia’s sister, Ann, had married Violet’s cousin Lane just two years earlier at Pressmore. Thus, she could not expect Ann and Emilia to feel the kind of loathing decades of enmity engendered. “You will notice none of the Kerrs attended Ann and Lane’s wedding, and there is good reason for it—”
“Well, yes, they were not invited,” Emilia interrupted. It was her turn to sniff.
Shaking her head impatiently, Violet slashed her brush across the canvas, applying the lightest piece of the sky visibleabove the ruins. It was gray there, and getting grayer, thicker clouds gathering. She did not appreciate Emilia’s skeptical eyebrows. This was family lore, and family lore was sacred. “You mustn’t make light of it, especially in front of my aunt. You see, it began long ago when Lady Edith Kerr, then unmarried, thought she had well and truly won Mr. Richmond. Of course, she was wrong, and he was besotted with Aunt Mildred. Drinking vinegar would have made Lady Edith less sour, and she spread vile rumors about Mildred and the family. Then, there was the hedge maze disaster—”
“What could possibly be serious about a hedge maze?” asked Emilia.
“It does sound frivolous,” Cristabel added, which won her a scathing glare from Violet, aimed over her shoulder.
As her words became more heated, her brush swished faster. “Aunt Mildred now has the finest hedges in the county, which did not sit right with the Kerrs, who had boasted to anyone with ears to listen that their gardens would never be outdone and Clafton never outshone. I think we both know how that turned out.” She paused to gesture vaguely around herself with the brush, then dunked it in water. “I heard Lady Edith nearly fainted when your sister, Ann, had the Grecian temple built…” Here, Violet paused, and Emilia raised an eyebrow. “And Sir Kerr, who was always excessively proud of his well-stocked pond, never extended an invitation to fish to our uncle or to Cousin Lane.”
This list did not seem to move Emilia even a little. “These hardly seem like meaningful trespasses.”
Violet painted faster and faster. Now came the very tops of the broken walls, glazed with buttery light; now the faintest cool red of the leaves that tried to infringe upon what had once been a soaring room fit for dinners and balls; now the halo ofblue signifying the top of Emilia’s head…“And the fire that ruined them. Everyone knows it was done by the youngest boy, Francis—”
“Freddie,” Emilia corrected, breathless. After all their talk, she had finally gone still.
“Yes, thank you, Freddie. He’s feral, that one. You mustn’t think him eligible, not for me, not for you, not for anyone. He isn’t fit for the Vauxhall cages, let alone polite society. He’s lamed two horses racing through Anselm and Cray Arches, and we all know his antics will kill Lady Edith any day now.”
“Violet,” Emilia whispered, this time more urgently. At last, Violet careened to a stop, looking up from her work. She peered between Emilia and the portrait—there was a frantic life to the painting so far, an instinctual, loose movement to this first layer of watercolors that she had never achieved before.
As if reading her thoughts, Cristabel Bilbury gave a mild “Hm” that sounded terrifyingly like approval. “Perhaps I should let you chat away after all,” she said.
“Ha! Maybe you should. I haven’t even mentioned the eldest son,” said Violet, more deliberate, more managed. She mixed another set of paints, impatient to continue.
“You shouldn’t. It seems wrong to speak ill of the family in the ruins of their home.”
“It was your idea to come here.” Violet set down her brush, letting the first layer of thin paint dry. It occurred to her that she had been painting Emilia but notseeingher. She studied the young woman, the slight purse of her full lips, the downward slump to her shoulders, her strained grip on the book in her lap…What was she missing? “Why did you insist on this place?”
Another sound from Cristabel, this one musical with curiosity.
“I…thought it would be exciting, but now I see my error,” said Emilia after a moment’s pause to think. Her eyelashes fluttered, and the faintest roses bloomed dark across her brown cheeks. “I didn’t know your family hated the Kerrs so much.”
“It’s your family, too,” Violet pointed out. “Your sister is a Richmond now, and Pressmore is your home. I may not be all that fond of Aunt Mildred, but I can at least take her side in this.”
Aunt Mildred, a Richmond by marriage, had most recently taken up the crusade for Violet’s older sister, Maggie, who defied Mildred’s wishes and married a man who had scarcely a penny to his name. It had caused something of a rift in the family until things turned around for Maggie and Bridger Darrow, who together, by and by, earned money from his publishing of her book. Aunt Mildred was quiet on the subject now, but only because her doomsaying had come to nothing.
“I always knew clever Margaret would find her way,” Aunt Mildred had said to Emilia and Violet just the previous afternoon while discussing the family during a stroll through the gardens. Emilia and Violet had suppressed their skeptical laughter; Aunt Mildred loved to be right, and the girls knew better than to argue with a widow who had nothing better to do than take constant accounting of the family’s fortunes, past, present, and future.
A harsh, rattling wind rustled the trees encroaching on the ruins. Violet looked up, her attention taken, that gale tugging at her hair and her gown, demanding something she couldn’t interpret. She often felt herself drawn to similar vague portents and tried never to resist them.The world around us is constantly trying to teach us things,Miss Bilbury had told her when they first began their relationship, and Violet agreed. The silvery music of a sudden rain shower, the kitchen door creakingearly on a late summer morning, the protective scream of a crow guarding its nest, they all felt like messages from an unseen world.
Maybe that was why she had devoted herself to painting when she had never devoted herself to anything but her sisters—it was a chance to capture the secrets hidden in what others considered the mundane.
She let the wind tug her. Violet turned away from her easel, looking out the gap where a window had once been. Clafton sat on a hill twin to the one that lay across the water. There, whole and happy and teeming with life, sat the wonderfully lush bouquet that was Pressmore Estate. Beadle Cottage, where Violet lived with Maggie and Winny, their mother, and Bridger, was not a mile from it, yet Pressmore seemed a nation of its own. The extensive gardens and woods made Pressmore feel like a fairy land, or perhaps that was simply the imposition of memory and nostalgia; Violet and her family had passed so many pleasant summers there, having picnics, playing pirates and highwaymen, every milestone of girlhood to womanhood marked by the plain magic of the place.
“The Kerr boys would play with us when we were children,” Violet heard herself say. The memories emerged as if from a dream, blurred, simplified to shockingly bright colors. “The younger one, Freddie, and Alasdair. They used to take a little rowboat across the water from here to there. Freddie always had frogs in his pockets, and it frightened Winny. We didn’t know anything about the feud then, and if we had, we probably would have laughed at it. What fun! I’ve always enjoyed doing what I shouldn’t…” She trailed off, softly wistful.
“What were they like?” Emilia asked, and it sounded like she was smiling.
“Loud. Wild. Lane is shy now and he was shy as a boy, sowe would have to stand up for him,” Violet replied with a laugh. “Alasdair was big for his age. I remember he always wanted to be in charge. That did not sit well with me.”
“Shocking,” said Emilia, wry.
“Indeed. The last day they ran off to play with us, he pulled my hair so hard that I chased him down the hill to thump him, and we ended up rolling and rolling…We were both covered in filth and grass, but it was so silly we forgot to be angry at each other once we landed by the water.” Violet hadn’t thought of little big Alasdair Kerr for ages. Unbidden, the memory took on a hard edge of bitterness. She sighed. “They came back the next day only to tell us we were disgusting creatures, unladylike, unfit for their company. And that was that.”
“Surely their parents filled their heads with that nonsense.”
“Surely. But I was only little, and all I knew was that I had lost a friend.”
