Chapter 3 #3
“Violet,” Emilia whispered, this time more urgently.
At last, Violet careened to a stop, looking up from her work.
She peered between Emilia and the portrait—there was a frantic life to the painting so far, an instinctual, loose movement to this first layer of watercolors that she had never achieved before.
As if reading her thoughts, Cristabel Bilbury gave a mild “Hm” that sounded terrifyingly like approval. “Perhaps I should let you chat away after all,” she said.
“Ha! Maybe you should. I haven’t even mentioned the eldest son,” said Violet, more deliberate, more managed. She mixed another set of paints, impatient to continue.
“You shouldn’t. It seems wrong to speak ill of the family in the ruins of their home.”
“It was your idea to come here.” Violet set down her brush, letting the first layer of thin paint dry.
It occurred to her that she had been painting Emilia but not seeing her.
She studied the young woman, the slight purse of her full lips, the downward slump to her shoulders, her strained grip on the book in her lap…
What was she missing? “Why did you insist on this place?”
Another sound from Cristabel, this one musical with curiosity.
“I…thought it would be exciting, but now I see my error,” said Emilia after a moment’s pause to think. Her eyelashes fluttered, and the faintest roses bloomed dark across her brown cheeks. “I didn’t know your family hated the Kerrs so much.”
“It’s your family, too,” Violet pointed out. “Your sister is a Richmond now, and Pressmore is your home. I may not be all that fond of Aunt Mildred, but I can at least take her side in this.”
Aunt Mildred, a Richmond by marriage, had most recently taken up the crusade for Violet’s older sister, Maggie, who defied Mildred’s wishes and married a man who had scarcely a penny to his name.
It had caused something of a rift in the family until things turned around for Maggie and Bridger Darrow, who together, by and by, earned money from his publishing of her book.
Aunt Mildred was quiet on the subject now, but only because her doomsaying had come to nothing.
“I always knew clever Margaret would find her way,” Aunt Mildred had said to Emilia and Violet just the previous afternoon while discussing the family during a stroll through the gardens.
Emilia and Violet had suppressed their skeptical laughter; Aunt Mildred loved to be right, and the girls knew better than to argue with a widow who had nothing better to do than take constant accounting of the family’s fortunes, past, present, and future.
A harsh, rattling wind rustled the trees encroaching on the ruins.
Violet looked up, her attention taken, that gale tugging at her hair and her gown, demanding something she couldn’t interpret.
She often felt herself drawn to similar vague portents and tried never to resist them.
The world around us is constantly trying to teach us things, Miss Bilbury had told her when they first began their relationship, and Violet agreed.
The silvery music of a sudden rain shower, the kitchen door creaking early on a late summer morning, the protective scream of a crow guarding its nest, they all felt like messages from an unseen world.
Maybe that was why she had devoted herself to painting when she had never devoted herself to anything but her sisters—it was a chance to capture the secrets hidden in what others considered the mundane.
She let the wind tug her. Violet turned away from her easel, looking out the gap where a window had once been.
Clafton sat on a hill twin to the one that lay across the water.
There, whole and happy and teeming with life, sat the wonderfully lush bouquet that was Pressmore Estate.
Beadle Cottage, where Violet lived with Maggie and Winny, their mother, and Bridger, was not a mile from it, yet Pressmore seemed a nation of its own.
The extensive gardens and woods made Pressmore feel like a fairy land, or perhaps that was simply the imposition of memory and nostalgia; Violet and her family had passed so many pleasant summers there, having picnics, playing pirates and highwaymen, every milestone of girlhood to womanhood marked by the plain magic of the place.
“The Kerr boys would play with us when we were children,” Violet heard herself say.
The memories emerged as if from a dream, blurred, simplified to shockingly bright colors.
“The younger one, Freddie, and Alasdair. They used to take a little rowboat across the water from here to there. Freddie always had frogs in his pockets, and it frightened Winny. We didn’t know anything about the feud then, and if we had, we probably would have laughed at it.
What fun! I’ve always enjoyed doing what I shouldn’t… ” She trailed off, softly wistful.
“What were they like?” Emilia asked, and it sounded like she was smiling.
“Loud. Wild. Lane is shy now and he was shy as a boy, so we would have to stand up for him,” Violet replied with a laugh. “Alasdair was big for his age. I remember he always wanted to be in charge. That did not sit well with me.”
“Shocking,” said Emilia, wry.
“Indeed. The last day they ran off to play with us, he pulled my hair so hard that I chased him down the hill to thump him, and we ended up rolling and rolling…We were both covered in filth and grass, but it was so silly we forgot to be angry at each other once we landed by the water.” Violet hadn’t thought of little big Alasdair Kerr for ages.
Unbidden, the memory took on a hard edge of bitterness.
She sighed. “They came back the next day only to tell us we were disgusting creatures, unladylike, unfit for their company. And that was that.”
“Surely their parents filled their heads with that nonsense.”
“Surely. But I was only little, and all I knew was that I had lost a friend.”
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 the light 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 the archway 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 one instant.
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.