Page 24 of These Violet Delights
“I’ll manage,” said Violet.
“We can reconvene in the front hall, Violet, and you can tell me all about our quarry.”
Mr. Kerr lowered Violet to the ground, yet there was no way to do so without also sliding her somewhat down the sticking front of his shirt and breeches. It would have been bad enough alone, but with Emilia standing there gawking, it was enough to make her feverish with embarrassment.
Backing away slowly, his gaze searching along the grass ather feet, Mr. Kerr struggled through his goodbye. “I would ask that you extend my good wishes and condolences to Mrs. Richmond, but given…well…”
“Yes,” Violet whispered. “Yes, given it all…”
“Precisely.” Mr. Kerr made it three strides away from her before spinning back around. He looked between the women, though Emilia was stupefied, by either his implausible presence, his wetness, or both. Mr. Kerr lowered his voice, speaking exclusively to Violet. “Freddie didn’t do this. I know…my brother is many things—unserious, selfish, lacking in both discipline and tact—but he is not the sort of man to retaliate in this manner. For all his faults, he did love Miss Graddock and would not put her life at risk.”
Violet felt the cool air settle around her. She wanted to believe him, but Clafton had burned and now this, and it was hard to ignore the miasma of misfortune swirling around the Kerrs. His eyes were no longer burning along her cheek and jaw but imploring, gently seeking. A dozen versions of his sketched face hid behind scraps she had repurposed for plein air studies and paintings of fruit. She hadn’t managed to capture him to her satisfaction, and now, seeing this new softness in his eyes, she wondered if she would ever be able to render such contradictions in paint.
“I have heard you,” she said, plain. “Good morning, Mr. Kerr.”
He went away, back down the hill toward the water, and Violet accepted Emilia’s offered hand to go back into the house. They waited in the front hall for Lane only briefly, for he was soon dressed and with them, a look of hard determination etched across his normally boyish face. Lane was copper-haired and prone to wide grins, and Violet had a difficult time seeing her cousin as anything but an immovably jolly fellow.Now, however, with Pressmore set aflame, he brooded and paced.
Violet offered a description of the horse and rider, Lane called for his own conveyance to Cray Arches, and the women idled in the front hall wearing twin expressions of exhausted confusion. It was still quite early. Violet’s ankle seethed and throbbed with pain.
“I want to go home,” she said, at last. “I want to be with my sisters.”
Arrangements were made for a carriage to take her to Beadle Cottage. Miss Bilbury made it clear that such an absence from Pressmore would not keep her from Violet and promised, or maybe threatened, to visit frequently to watch her progress. And so, Violet’s easel and paints were packed along with her garments, and a tearful Emilia saw her off. They would not be parted long, but Emilia still took it to heart.
Almost as soon as the carriage stopped at the end of the cottage path, Winny was there to greet her, and at once, Violet felt better about her life. In Winny’s warm glow, it was nearly impossible to stay glum; even the burden of her ankle lightened. And how much more welcome was Violet when she brought with her a veritable feast of news to be shared with Winny, Maggie, and their mother!
Beadle Cottage was nothing extraordinary, small and compact, but was charmingly drowning in honeysuckles. A winsome little black fence and gate did not guard but rather outlined the property, sitting before the sloped, cobbled path that wandered to the green front door. Moss grew between every crack. The shutters were also painted green, and Mrs. Arden had taken great pains to bolster the garden with all the flowers that made her daughters sigh and smile. Violet liked to call it a “homey home,” or, on the days it rained and the tiledroof sprung a leak, a “homely home.” It was not situated very well among the hills that rose around it, and there were other quirks—a crooked chimney, an awkward layout, the aforementioned naughty roof—that Violet considered endearing but that those with grand tastes would find irritating and shabby.
It had two sitting rooms, one office, and three bedrooms, which was not enough for them all, but do was made because it must be.
“The house is terribly dirty,” Winny warned her, watching as the carriage driver helped Violet down and across the path, then to the sitting room on the left side of the house. “Why did nobody send word you were coming?”
“It was all extremely sudden,” Violet told her, and then additionally Maggie and Mamma as they appeared, roused by the noise. “There was a fire at Pressmore this morning,” she added to a chorus of gasps. She told the whole long story but carefully excised the part where Mr. Kerr appeared like a soggy Adonis cloaked in mist on the water’s edge.
That, she decided silently, was just for her.
Her older sister, Maggie, stood apart, absorbing everything from near the hearth, watching her with strangely bright eyes. Maggie, who had been unceremoniously bludgeoned by Love, and who was the wisest and most worldly of the sisters, seemed to have recognized something in Violet, and the thought of it made her quake.
8
I have shot my arrow o’er the house
And hurt my brother.
Hamlet—Act 5, Scene 2
Some hours later, Alasdair sat hunched over a pile of roasted pheasant at the Gull and Knave. The time had come to collect his brother, if for no other reason than to verify he had been nowhere near Pressmore when the fire occurred. He was mortified to discover that the builders at the Clafton ruins knew precisely where Freddie had been; his younger brother was racking up quite the bill and twice the reputation at the postal inn on the edge of Cray Arches.
From the front counter, the knotted old tree trunk of a proprietor and a boy with sandy blond hair peered at him. That happened a lot when he ate in public, which was why he rarely did it. After a swim and a long walk, he could eat two braces of game birds if he wanted to, for his was a furnace that required copious fuel. Alasdair ignored their peeping looks and stabbed his knife down into the meat; he didn’t relish what came next,but hauling Freddie out of the perverse little nest he had made was hungry work, so Alasdair ate his fill, even if he found no pleasure in it.
The Gull and Knave was comfortable enough, as far as he could tell, a clean and relatively upstanding place for travelers to rest, exchange their carriage, and enjoy a hot meal. A staircase ran up the right side of the main room, and Alasdair had taken a table with a good view of it; if Freddie tried to scuttle away, Alasdair would see it. And he knew Freddie was upstairs. The black-haired, bristling bear of a proprietor had reluctantly admitted it after Alasdair offered to pay Freddie’s alarmingly mounting bill.
It was an underhanded tactic, perhaps, but everyone got what they needed.
And soon, once he finished eating, Alasdair would have his brother back.
He glowered down at his plate, annoyed at himself for stalling. There was a storm brewing in his head, and if he wasn’t careful, the force of it would be unleashed upon Freddie.Maybe he deserves it, I don’t know.But it was more than Freddie’s absence bothering him; something Miss Arden had mentioned earlier was encouraging that gale in his mind to swirl all the harder.
Painting, to her, was a confirmation that the world truly existed as she saw it. In all his many years of curating and purchasing art, he had never considered such a concept, and it bothered him. She was an amateur, hardly an apprentice of Bilbury’s, yet her observations were sound. Insightful. The meat on his plate was vanishing, and he was becoming almost uncomfortably full. Alasdair shifted, circling around another discomfiting realization—that he knew exactly what she meant. Art pulled Violet Arden out of herself, but Alasdair had neverfound what could do the same for him. Some of his contemporaries at Cambridge who liked to swim with him and go to the club started calling him the Mute Brute. They didn’t understand that he had gone inside himself to escape the noise, the shrieking banshees of grief that descended after his father’s death. Robert Daly had taken his side, but weakly, and Alasdair had always gotten the impression that Robert chuckled about the name behind his back. The Mute Brute. It lasted until he soundly beat Frank Miles during a river race; Frank trotted out the nickname in retaliation, and Alasdair broke his arm in three places, finally having enough.
