Page 9 of These Violet Delights
“We aren’t supposed to say his name,” Emilia whispered. Cristabel ignored her.
“Then stop sketching like him! Light strokes.Light.Decisive only when you have begun to understand the face!” She picked up Violet’s empty palette and whacked her lightly on the back of the head. Violet persevered, determined, her brow drawn low over her eyes in concentration. She had finished blocking out the column and Emilia’s skirts when Cristabel piped up again. “Is that what youthinkher skirts look like, or is it the truth before your eyes?”
Violet rubbed out her error, quietly fuming, annoyed that the eminent Miss Bilbury, who had joined and withdrawn from the Royal Watercolour Society several times, whose rendition of hydrangeas and grapes had been widely lauded until it was discovered to have been painted by a woman, was right.
“Observe more,” said Cristabel, stern. “Think slower.”
“I only think one speed,” Violet replied miserably. “At a gallop.”
That made her tutor laugh in earnest. “Too clever, Violet, that is what you are, imprisoned by that cleverness. A painter is not smart, they are patient and receptive.”
After a while, they were both satisfied with her sketch, and Violet began to mix her pigments.
“So,” Cristabel drawled, standing behind her with a hand tucked under her chin. “You can paint something besides the woman in green.”
Violet blanched. In truth, she had become fixated on the woman who had burst into her aunt’s exhibition and accused Violet of stealing the Frenchman. Lately, she had done nothing but try to capture the lady’s exact expression of outrage and sadness. With every iteration, Violet noticed a troubling slippage, a transference between their faces; after a while, she was painting herself in that green dress, horrified and imploring, her broken heart on display for all the world.
“I couldn’t get her quite right,” Violet replied softly.
“Ah. Yes. That’s because this fool Frenchman has made you a mimic, not an artist in your own right. No matter. We will tear him out by the root until we find the violets hidden among these weeds.”
On the tumbled stone, Emilia whimpered. “That’s quite harsh.”
Cristabel glared until Emilia went silent. “The sitter will say nothing and squirm even less, thank you.”
With nothing but the waxwings at the edge of the wood to fill the cold, quiet air, Violet began to paint, and Emilia, for those hours, became her sole concern and obsession. The young women had much in common—they were both two and twenty, both younger sisters to boldly energetic ladies who had married and settled, and they shared a love of art, literature, and theater. Emilia, however, hailed from a wealthy family; she was the daughter of a colonel who had made his fortune in the West Indies, found love there, and sent his two lovely daughters back to England. Violet, therefore, did not protest the chance to paint the lady, luminous in the autumn light, but rather, she found the ruins of Clafton unsettling and could not understand why Emilia insisted upon it.
“Can we not speak at all?” Emilia asked, jutting out her lip.
Cristabel leaned over Violet’s shoulder. “You have captured her mouth, I suppose, and that is where the likeness of a person lives. What could possibly be more urgent than art?”
Emilia visibly relaxed. “Why, finding Violet a husband, of course.” And before Violet could protest or point out that she had written off love, Emilia clobbered her way through a list of bachelors. “What about Mr. Delridge? He is tall, although I find his very small eyes disconcerting. Or Mr. Prandle? Did you meet him over the summer?” Emilia asked.
Violet’s brush moved swiftly but gently over the paper as she began to carve out the slender shadows beneath Emilia’s chin. “How can you think of romance in a place like this?”
The black curls framing Emilia’s face bounced as she shrugged, then returned to her careful pose. “Are lovers not often trotting off to ruins in the novels you like?”
“Certainly,” said Violet, glancing up at the broken walls hemming them in on three sides. Though Emilia sat in an advantageous wedge of sunlight, Violet herself was enfolded in the unforgiving shadows cast by what remained of the estate. Only her hand, creating more and more of Emilia, felt a touch of warmth from the sun. “It all seems far more romantic when it’s in a book. A terrible fire destroyed this place, but that was well before you and Ann came to Pressmore. We were visiting Lane the summer it happened; I can still remember the great clouds of black smoke. There was a haze in the air for a whole week…”
“How awful,” Emilia murmured. She looked forlorn; perhaps she felt the same chill that crept across Violet’s back and up her neck.
“The Kerrs have given up on it, I think,” said Violet, turning to the little folding table they had carried along. Upon it, she mixed her pigments, eager to capture that slight melancholy in Emilia’s expression.
“More color,” she heard Cristabel mutter. “In her eyes, do you see the hint of carmine? Do not paint vacancy where there is life.”
And Emilia was full of life. Young. Vibrant. So, it wasn’t surprising that her sadness converted seamlessly into joy. “Oh, no, there you are wrong, Violet. Have you not heard the news? It is all over Cray Arches. The gossips at Gray and Simon are beside themselves!” Gray and Simon, a shop for hats andaccoutrements, was where Violet and the other young ladies of the village spent an inordinate amount of time agonizing over ribbons and buttons; Winny practically lived there. “Mr. Kerr has returned from abroad, and it’s said he has been seen spending money from here to Lighthorne Heath on the best stone and timber.”
Another tickle of frost raced up Violet’s spine at the wordsMr. Kerr,for the only Mr. Kerr she knew about had died in this doomed and dilapidated place. Although now that she thought on it, he had beenSirKerr, which meant…
A dreadful image flashed before her: the back of a head, sandy brown, the silhouette of a towering man with a devastating manner about him.Derivative and silly,he had sneered directly at her art.And for no one.
She was thinking too much again. Cristabel drew close.
Put it—him—and his scornful opinions from your mind.
“I never pay attention to what the Kerrs do,” Violet sniffed.
“But why should that be so?” Emilia pressed. “There are two eligible men in the family, are there not? Yet nobody will tell me the first thing about them, all because of some ridiculous feud…”
