Chapter 14
It had been too many days since Violet had played.
While Cyril was moving into Pimms Mill, Violet had moved into what was to be the headmistress’s cottage, where she had picked out the paint color, brought her chosen furnishings from Kinthwaite Park, and had envisioned herself retiring to her own comforts after a long day of expanding young ladies’ understanding of the world around them.
What should have been a wondrous occasion was filled with uncertainty and the interfering thoughts of how Cyril might look in what were supposed to be her rooms. So, after she’d seen Liza settled, Violet had gone to the school’s music room.
She picked up her instrument and played Sibelius, Schumann, and Bartok, and finished with her lady violinist, Ellen Wright. She breathed heavily but with satisfaction, simply holding her instrument and bow after pouring so much feeling through strings and wood.
Her dream was slipping away from her. She could sense it.
Of course, the action of being set aside for a male was nothing new.
Fighting to prove herself worthy to the male populous in general was not new.
Heavens, she attended weekly meetings where the fight for equality with the opposite sex was measured, strategized, and put to action.
A shudder broke through her core, and she stepped to the nearest chair and sat. She wouldn’t give up, of course. If only Cyril wasn’t so … worthy.
She bit her lip. At one time, she’d believed him to be her best friend—or, at least, one who knew her better than most anyone else—as irritating as that could be at times. He’d had a way of driving her on without allowing her to get in her own way. Which happened often enough.
She hugged her violin to her chest, her bow resting across her knees.
How she’d missed him.
Ten years of nothing. Nothing since he’d left for university.
And now she saw so much of him—would see so much of him.
He’d hardly changed—except for the beard, of course.
Still quiet. Still observant. Still able to match her impetuous tongue with his infuriatingly calm one.
Ten years of his absence in her life after being such an integral part of it, and now this abrupt reentry—it was like drinking water because it was necessary, then discovering oneself thirsting in a desert, then being dropped into the middle of a lake.
At least she’d learned to swim. And she would. She would still be a part of this school. She would not be affected by so much … Cyril. She would not surrender.
“You will never guess what I came across at home.”
Violet stood quickly in response to Ruby’s sudden appearance in the music room, Lydia on her heels.
“It is too good,” Lydia said, brown eyes alight.
Ruby’s eyes widened. “Did we startle you?”
Violet lowered her violin to the table next to her. She set the bow likewise. “Only caught me in my deep and brilliant thoughts,” she quipped.
“I’m sure you have a great deal on your mind,” Ruby said, compassion in her eyes. “How is the orientation going?”
“All moved in. The décor would not suit your brother at all.” She smiled, knowing it did not reach her eyes.
“I’m sure it wouldn’t,” Ruby said. Violet knew her friend was torn in her loyalties.
“Perhaps living in the headmistress’s cottage will paint you as the victor,” Lydia offered, taking a bench across from Violet.
“As opposed to him taking up residence just down the road?”
Lydia’s shoulders dropped. “Oh. I see your point. We could call it a draw.”
“We could call it a lot of things,” Violet grumbled, “but I’m a lady.”
Lydia snorted.
Violet straightened. “I feel that I cannot relinquish any footing I have in this endeavor, and that means matching Mr. Burke step for step. More, if I can manage it.”
“That is a sound move, I think,” Lydia said with a nod. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Then she patted the space next to her. “Speaking of close enemies …” She waggled her eyebrows. “Ruby, come sit and show Violet what we found.”
Ruby followed and, from her floral-embossed leather handbag, produced in her fingers … a marble.
A rose quartz marble.
Violet’s breath hitched. “Where did you find that?”
“You recognize it, do you?” Lydia asked.
She reached for it, and Ruby placed it in her open palm. A flood of sentiment washed over her as she rolled the orb in her hand, recognizing the varying patterns of soft-white marbling in the pink stone.
“How astonishing it is to see something so seemingly insignificant and realize its utmost power over your memories.” She glanced at her friends and laughed. “My goodness. I hadn’t thought to ever see this again. But where did you find it?”
“I’ve been helping Patrick move into Cyril’s old room—the one with the secret passage to the cupola—”
Violet and Lydia exchanged a curious glance.
“—and I found the marble in a lower drawer of the desk. Patrick said Cyril had given him his old bag of marbles and assumed he missed this one. But then I remembered our conversation that day at the park.”
Violet felt warmth rising up her neck.
“How you and Cyril argued about who took whose favorite marble. You did mention a pink marble, did you not?”
She nodded.
“And you mentioned still having Cyril’s porcelain marble …” Ruby paused.
Violet looked up to find both her friends watching her expectantly. “What? It does not signify. How many children in generations upon generations have a bag of marbles in a drawer?”
“Yes, darling,” Lydia said. “But Mr. Burke seems to have removed this particular specimen before giving the others to his younger brother. So, perhaps, it does signify.”
“Not to mention that he has not occupied that room in the house above five years, as the boys shifted rooms when Henry left the nursery. So it’s not as though the marbles were languishing in a forgotten corner somewhere. He moved them with him. Quite deliberately.”
“And removed a certain pink one, quite deliberately.” Lydia’s eyes flashed.
Violet attempted to settle the nerves that had sprung to life in her stomach.
“Come now,” she said, sounding far too breathless.
“Finding a lone marble in the bottom of an empty desk after the occupant has left is not grounds for speculating what I think your overactive minds are speculating. Perhaps that’s where he kept the bag and it was not closed properly, and therefore, it is all a careless mistake. ”
“I thought of that possibility,” Ruby said. She leaned forward. “I asked Patrick if that was the drawer in which Cyril had kept the bag of marbles.”
Violet waited. By the upturn of Ruby’s lips and Lydia’s smug expression, she could guess what was coming, and she was sure her face was fully aflame. “And?” she asked.
“Patrick pointed to the lower drawer of the wardrobe and said the bag had been retrieved from there.” She sat back, wearing a look Sherlock Holmes himself might’ve worn.
“So,” Violet said, maintaining as calm a veneer as she was capable of, “you hurried over here to tell me that a marble I once owned and, admittedly, was a favorite was found abandoned in a lower desk drawer in a room your older brother no longer occupies? A marble you are implying—and correct me if I’m wrong—has some meaning to said brother, who did not find it necessary to take with him now that he has quit the room, likely for good? ”
Ruby’s brow lowered, and Lydia slowly deflated.
“And who’s to say that the bag of marbles was not once in that desk drawer? Are boys known for putting everything in its designated place?”
“Well, Cyril is,” Ruby said.
She did have a point, though it was not a strong one. Still, those nerves had not settled and were flitting around like midges over a pond. The cool marble rolled smooth and hard between her palms. This was ludicrous.
She paused, an unsettling sensation settling upon her anyway. “Am I to understand … that is … do you want the marble to be significant? To your brother, I mean?” She gulped, remembering her and Cyril’s exchange earlier on the balcony. Heated, but not in the angry way.
Her gaze darted between Ruby and Lydia, both now very interested in opposite corners of the room.
Ruby fidgeted with the clasp of her handbag.
Violet must put this idea to rest immediately, or there would be no end to their scheming.
She knew this because she’d been part of their scheming too many times.
“You do realize that Mr. Burke and I are currently at odds? And that I have had as much a place in his life in the past decade as he has had in mine? That is to say, none? You are placing a lot of weight on a very small, albeit lovely, little rock.”
There. That should do it.
“But the way you look at each other,” Lydia said.
Violet’s gaze shot to her friend’s.
“And the history you share—all of those years,” Ruby said.
Violet looked at Ruby, her mouth half open.
Lydia leaned forward. “And at the dinner table, he was farthest from you but the first at your side to offer help.”
Violet scowled at the reminder of the incident, and Lydia shut her mouth in a small grimace that in another situation might’ve been adorable.
Ruby leaned toward her. “I remember, Violet, when you would come to Oakleigh, and I would get to watch some of your lessons. I looked forward to the chance. Do you know why?”
Violet sighed. “Why?”
“Because I delighted in watching my brother be more himself, more of who he was going to be, when he was with the beautiful and spirited Violet Whittemore, than when he was with any other person I ever observed him with.”
Violet’s heart pounded at the disconcerting, lovely confession. “You were a baby!” she said, perhaps too defensively.
Ruby straightened her shoulders. “I was ten years old when he left for university. And quite observant. You weren’t the only precocious child in the universe, you know.”
Violet sighed and placed a hand over each eye. “I cannot believe this day,” she muttered. She’d so admired the intelligence and pluck of her Wendy-birds. What had happened? “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”