Chapter Fourteen
Violet’s hours working as a page flew by.
With Hugo gone, and the joy he brought to her no longer part of her daily life, every other moment at college seemed to drag on.
She was always looking at her watch, trying to anticipate where she had to be next.
She was either running to her classes or squeezing in office hours.
Getting food before the dining room closed or putting in face-time with her suitemates so they didn’t feel she was ignoring them. Life felt like a series of commitments.
The only place that didn’t happen was when she was working.
When she was at the library, time completely evaporated.
With each book that was paged, she felt like she was on a mission to find it and deliver it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
While she felt sluggish in class and only wanted to sleep when she was in her dorm room, when she was at work, she felt invigorated.
Violet loved retrieving the books from the stacks and placing them carefully on a trolley; she enjoyed shuttling through the tunnels underground and gliding through areas of the intricate storage system that none of her friends knew even existed.
She felt like a messenger or a carrier pigeon, delivering something that was important to a student or scholar.
And when she wasn’t moving books between one of the libraries and the Houghton reading room, she was delighted to be ordering a bouquet of weekly flowers for Harry’s desk.
That task in particular made her feel as Lottie mentioned, like she was contributing a small part in tending to Harry’s study.
But now, she’d realized that she only had two minutes to get to her first class.
Her seminar on Anglo-Saxon Epics was in Emerson Hall, luckily close by in the Yard, but she knew she’d still have to sprint to get there on time.
She quickly threw on her backpack and ran down the marble stairs and out the tall bronze doors.
The class was on the third floor of Emerson and by the time she got to the classroom, she was completely out of breath and the lavender scarf was no longer tied around her neck, but had fallen unevenly to one side.
She slinked through the doorway and found a seat.
With only twenty students in the class, her tardiness hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“Happy you could join us today.” Professor Jenkins smirked as Violet pulled out her notebook. Around the table, her fellow students were already studying the remarks the professor had written over their first term paper, which he had just returned to them.
Jenkins reached over at his desk, pulled out Violet’s from his folder, and handed it to her.
Atop the very first page, he’d scratched a large “C” in black marker, underlining the grade with two angry strokes.
Violet’s stomach sank. She read over the comments in the margins.
Jenkins seemed to have been irritated by nearly everything she’d written in her paper.
It was clear he thought she’d completely missed the point in her analysis of Beowulf.
By the time she got to the end of his remarks, she felt he thought he’d been generous giving her a C.
On a less forgiving afternoon, he might have given her an F.
“Okay everyone.” Jenkins cleared his throat. “Now that you’ve all had a chance to look over your papers… let’s start today’s class with something we can all do with a certain amount of proficiency… a little reading aloud, shall we?”
“Violet. Why don’t you begin for us?” Jenkins singled her out. “How about the top of here of your Exeter Anthologies. ‘The Seafarer’ is a rather perfect example of an Anglo-Saxon elegy, if I must say so…”
The sound of rustling pages filled the room.
Violet’s eyes fell on the long verse. She hated reading aloud. She’d never been good at any type of public speaking. She messed up easily as she would often lose her place or trip over her words. But her dread was further emphasized by now having to read in front of the whole class.
So if the poor grade on her first paper wasn’t bad enough, her professor would now think she couldn’t even string two words together properly.
“Is there a problem, Violet?” Jenkins’s voice sliced through the air. “Time isn’t standing still… we’re all waiting.”
“Um, yes,” she stammered. “Sorry.” Her eyes dropped to the page and she tried to focus, taking a deep breath before she began.
“‘May of my own truth reckon,’” Violet began.
“A little louder please so we can hear you,” Jenkins’s voice boomed over hers.
Violet’s face flamed with embarrassment. The poem was 124 lines: Was Jenkins going to make her read the whole thing? With every word she uttered, she felt she was butchering the poem.
She struggled to find her confidence and a natural rhythm to the verse.
“‘That I suffered,’”
“‘Known at my keel…’”
The words felt as though they were getting twisted in her mouth.
Violet’s face flamed red with each mangled verse.
She was seconds away from clapping the book shut and running out of the classroom in embarrassment when suddenly a memory of Hugo flashed before her.
They had been doing their homework together in the Yard.
Hugo had been trying to find a connection between two of Shakespeare’s plays for a paper he needed to write.
In a moment of frustration, he threw down his book, leapt to his feet, and began playfully acting out all of the voices in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
He had such happiness on his face as he bellowed out the words passionately and playfully gripped his chest. What had begun as comical relief became a conduit for his joy.
Violet suddenly felt a claw inside her, a yearning to seize that same emotion. The thought of Hugo being so utterly liberated helped relax her nerves and steadied her. She eased into the language, surrendering to the words on her tongue as though they were music.
“There at the ship’s stem
Wave-tossed, by cliff wall.
Cold fettered
My feet
Frost-bound
In cold-clasp,
Where cares seethed then
Hot at the heart;
Hunger within tore”
The elegy continued to pour out of her in a distinct, mournful cadence.
And while the words she spoke did not exude the same joyfulness that Hugo had channeled only a year ago in the Yard, they had transformed from just verses on the page.
Now, they were a means in which she could release her emotions.
The class had grown motionless, every student sat in their seat completely transfixed. Even Professor Jenkins appeared moved by the time she reached the end.
Violet wiped her eyes. At Hugo’s funeral, she had wanted to give a eulogy fitting for him.
She had stayed up all night staring at her computer screen trying to compose a fitting tribute for someone she loved deeply.
She refused to memorialize him as the golden boy athlete, his fellow crewmates could speak to that.
She wanted to pay tribute to another side of him.
The sensitive, romantic, and poetic boyfriend who could create an ode to a chocolate croissant or a haiku to a snowflake on a cold winter’s day.
But that morning, when she arrived at the church, the sight of his grief-stricken parents and the throngs of mourners sitting shoulder to shoulder in the pews, she froze.
She knew she couldn’t gaze out and see the face of Hugo’s mother, her eyes red-raw from crying, his father shell-shocked and motionless as stone.
When the pastor announced her name to speak, Violet had been unable to rise from the pew.
She handed over the sheet of typed words to Theo.
And it was he who found the courage to step up to the pulpit and read them to the crowd.