Page 11 of These Violet Delights
Violet returned to the painting, memory’s hold on her releasing. To Emilia, she must have looked very serious, consumed by her work, but inside it was all racing thoughts and tumult. Whatever happened to those boys? How did Freddie become so wild? There were nasty rumors about him, not just that he had caused the fire that destroyed Clafton, but that he had broken hearts across the county, gaining a reputation that disappointed his pious mother. And the other one, the older brother, Alasdair, had seemingly vanished. One day he was covered in grass and mud, playing pirates with her in the endless days of summer, the next he was gone. Violet herself had never worked with oil paints, but she had spent hours watching Cristabel do so, struck by how a swipe of solvent across the picture could remove the color, leaving behind just an impression, a faded ghost of once-bright shapes.
Hours slipped by. Morning gave way to afternoon, and thelight changed into something warmer while the air shimmered with a chill. “I don’t know,” began Violet, standing back to judge her work. “You were right, Emilia. There is something romantic about this place, feud and all. Yet I know something is missing. Never mind, stay back—it isn’t any good at all.”
Emilia ignored her, smelling lightly of lilacs as she rushed to Violet’s side. Emilia stretched her stiff limbs, then her eyes widened. She hugged herself, glancing down at her shoes, then back, shyly, at the painting. “How can you disparage it so? It’s lovely, Violet. Truly.” She turned toward Violet’s tutor with a searching look.
“Better than what came before” was all Cristabel would grant. Derivative and silly it was not. She touched Violet’s shoulder lightly, and there was approval in it. Violet didn’t move, seeing only the flaws. “Better and better, that is all a teacher can ask.” Turning back the way they had come, Cristabel sighed. “But now, as I knew I would be, I am very hungry. We should return to the house before the weather turns.”
Emilia twirled, delighted still by her portrait. Then her stomach gurgled with hunger, and she laughed. “Miss Bilbury has the right idea—we’ve earned a nice, long tea in the gardens, or in the temple! It sounds lovely in there when the rain comes.”
“You two go ahead,” said Violet. She nodded toward the easel. “Just once, I want to paint something and feel like I’ve triumphed.”
“I cannot even tempt you with Martha’s scones?” Emilia pouted. “I could smell her baking them fresh this morning before we ventured out.”
“No, we will go,” said Cristabel. She stared into Violet’s eyes, recognizing the impulse that told Violet to go again. While Emilia embraced Violet and hurried toward thearchway leading out from the ruins, Cristabel patted her shoulder again with quiet, flinty approval. Violet’s heart swelled; it felt more validating than all of the Frenchman’s effusive, flowery praise, which he heaped on Violet whenever she made so much as a slightly thoughtful brushstroke. And it felt good, hopeful, to discover she could want this, want to keep going, without him.
“Anything but the lady in green, mm?” Cristabel asked, squinting.
Violet gestured to the small hand mirror she had tucked into the supply case. “A self-portrait, I think. Finally. I like the clouds today, the shadows…it suits my mood.”
“Just be mindful of the rain,” said Cristabel as she left. “It will ruin today’s work.”
Then, alone, Violet picked up the mirror and started sketching what she saw. The hours passed, the clouds clumped while the shadows stretched and thickened, but she saw her own image, resilient even in that encroaching darkness. By and by, she appeared on the canvas. The sketch must be perfect, a skeleton for the paint to be draped across. A delicate figure peered out at her, and as she mixed her pigments and painted her own eyes—large, prying, periwinkle—the power and awe of the ruins appeared in the reflection.
She hadn’t quite finished, but, standing back, she was overcome with what she had managed, and happiness, so fleeting in those days of first heartbreak, fluttered in her breast. Maybe it wasn’t hopelessly terrible.
But that was short-lived. It was getting dark, and those clouds, once simply moody and inspiring, had become genuinely threatening. Violet hurried to put away her things, realizing with a start that thunder was rolling across the hillside toward her. No, she thought, stopping, hands frozen into claws,thunder was felt first in the chest, not in the ground. A horse was approaching, storming into the ruins, hooves drumming hard.
Violet shoved her wooden case of supplies closed, latching it, though she knew she had left many things behind. She felt suddenly guilty and knew she shouldn’t be caught there. This was a serious place, draped in sad memories, not to be made light of or defiled. Yet there she was, caught out as the rider burst through the break between two crumbling walls. It was not yet evening, but the iron sky melted one ghoulish shadow into another, and the man and his horse seemed a punishment, a haunting. The man was as immense as the horse, with a hat and dark coat, the whites of his eyes as vivid as two dashes of vigorously struck paint.
She was at once familiar with the stranger, drawn to him, and repelled by the shrieking cry of his horse as it reared and then crashed back down, upsetting her easel. Violet’s heart raced; her self-portrait was nearly trampled beneath the beast’s hooves. With a gasp, she stumbled away, clutching her packed paints and brushes.
“Do you know where you stand?” the rider demanded, shouting at her.
“I’m…” There was a small archway through which the comforting promise of Pressmore Estate could be seen. Violet threw herself that way, realizing the horse and rider couldn’t possibly follow through the narrow opening. “I didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t mean…I wasn’t…I merely wished to paint—”
“Leave,” he commanded. “Leave this place!”
Violet swallowed a scream of fright. The rider calmed his horse, backing away, and the last gracious splendor of sunlight withdrew from the ruins, falling across the man’s face for oneinstant. The light flickered strangely over his eyes, reflecting off spectacles. Familiarity turned to recognition, and recognition turned to disgust. It was the man from her aunt’s exhibition in London, the one who had sneeringly insulted her work even while she wallowed inches away, shattered and at her lowest.
Derivative and silly. And for no one.
“You!You.” She paused in the archway, her eyes widening. An image of him resolved, like a portrait painted in a heartbeat. The sandy brown hair and honey-gold eyes, the size, the posture. It appeared the village gossips had been right about Clafton Hall rising again. So, the oafish little boy had matured into a monster; that made perfect sense. He was, after all, a Kerr. He drew up his shoulders, expanding impossibly, as if he were no man at all but an apparition.
Violet wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of running; she raised her chin and strode toward the lip of the hill, hoping he saw the challenge in her eyes.
4
What Fates impose, that men must needs abide;
It boots not to resist both wind and tide.
Henry VI, Part 3—Act 4, Scene 3
The ruins were meant to be empty.
It was meant to be a graveyard, not occupied by the living.
Tomorrow, the first wagons would clatter up the hill to bring timber and stone, and the builders would fill the place to assess what of the remaining hall could be repurposed or folded into the restoration. Alasdair had wanted one moment alone with Clafton before it became overrun with strangers. He had not expected the woman to be there, or for her arresting eyes to fill with anger at the sight of him.
