Chapter 5
O, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd.
She was a vixen when she went to school,
And though she be but little, she is fierce.
The affliction that prevented Violet Arden from ever starting a thing was the exact same condition that kept her from finishing: perfectionism.
“You’re too hard on yourself,” Maggie had warned her a thousand times, but Violet never listened.
For most of her two and twenty years, she had failed to devote herself to any cause or passion for fear that her drawing or dancing or stitching would fail to live up to her own standards.
Or, even ghastlier, that the lofty standard would be met, and then it would change, and the whole mortifying ordeal would begin again.
She had started and abandoned several sketches that morning.
The proof of her failure was mounting in accusatory piles at her feet.
Perfectionism. It was poison. Yet there was a face lodged in her mind, or the idea of one, and her want of perfection was in direct conflict with this surge of inspiration.
She outright refused to paint the whole face, for it would break the new laws she had established for herself. No, she would not paint the horrible man who had screamed at her in the ruins, but she might draw an eye, an ear, a certain corner of the mouth…
Violet grumbled and stepped back from the easel, appalled yet again at her inability to get it right or even to honor her own vows.
She shouldn’t be drawing him at all, not even bits.
Her gaze wandered to the balcony and the wan hand of morning light stretching its fingers across the plummet to the pond.
Beadle Cottage, a half mile down the hill from Pressmore, waited somewhere in the chilly embrace where the light had yet to spread.
She thought of her sister Maggie, who was no doubt awake at that early hour and scribbling away, hard at work on her next novel.
“I’m not like you, Maggie,” Violet said softly to that view out the balcony doors. “There is no inspiration in an insult for me, only doubt and shame.”
Derivative and silly. And for no one.
Now Violet could put a face to the discourtesy, and that made the sting of it doubly powerful.
She thought of young Violet in the Pressmore fields playing pirates with her friends on an endless summer’s day, of Alasdair Kerr, who had seemed a friend then, laughing at her jokes and racing her along the water’s edge to the bridge.
Bigger, faster, he always won those races but never boasted of it to the others.
“Who are you speaking to? My easel? I should hope so! I hope you are the best of friends, for that might justify your thieving of it!” Cristabel Bilbury stood at the door, hair wild and tangled, fists perched on her waist. There was a vastness of carpet between them, for Ann always let Violet take one of the grander bedrooms in the estate when she spent the night, and with Maggie deep in her second novel, those stays were becoming more and more frequent.
“You went to bed so early last night,” said Violet, putting down her pencil. “I didn’t think you would need it until this afternoon.”
“But where is yours?” Cristabel demanded, marching over to her. At once, she scrutinized the light marks, the bare beginnings of a face, not quite anyone, as if Violet had been sketching around the subject, afraid of the direct approach.
“I left it in the ruins. The rain caught me out.” Cristabel had left her easel in the drawing room, and she was nowhere to be found when Violet returned from the ruins.
At dinner, she learned from her aunt, Mrs. Mildred Richmond, that Cristabel had complained of a headache and had gone up to bed early.
These abrupt comings and goings were referred to as “her little episodes.”
Cristabel’s eyes flared. “And your paintings?”
“Gone, I’m afraid,” Violet replied quietly, her shoulders collapsing inward.
They were both looking at the sketch now.
There was no use lying. “A man startled me, chased me off. It’s his land, and he had every right to do it, I suppose, but there was no need to be so…
so…” She huffed and waved her hand at nothing.
“Anyway, I will have to ask Lane to send someone to Sampson Park for my things.”
“You cannot retrieve them?”
“Certainly not! I hope never to see that wretched man again.”
Her tutor poked the paper so hard it creased. “Yet here something of a man emerges.”
Violet plucked the sketch from the easel and tore it down the middle, staring back at Cristabel defiantly. “There. Gone. He plagued my mind because of the things he said about my paintings in London, but no more.”
“Ah. Derivative and silly? For no one? That man?”
Even repeated in Cristabel’s voice, the insult made Violet feel sick.
“Don’t worry,” Violet said, forcing a cheerful tone. “I know the paper is costly, I’ll use the scraps. And I’ll ask Bloom to have the easel brought back to the north drawing room.”
But her teacher wasn’t moving, was simply watching her with the strangest half smile. “Why should you feel doubt and shame for what someone else perceives in your work?”
Violet flushed to the tips of her ears, her face growing hot. “You heard me…”
“I was told many of the same things, and by my father, no less. It was my brother who saw the potential in me. We all helped with the family engraving, but Nicholas urged me to paint.” She looked at the scraps of paper dangling from Violet’s hands.
“My father promised nobody would want my rubbish. But do you know how much my watercolor of hollyhocks fetched last winter? Seven hundred and thirty pounds. Perhaps you will not need a Frenchman, or a Mr. Derivative. Perhaps you will need no one at all.”
Violet softly gasped. It was a bewildering sum.
“That was my aim,” she whispered. “Could it really be possible?”
“Freedom, my pupil. Freedom. Use the easel until yours is returned,” said Cristabel. “But for now, come down to breakfast. One can hardly be expected to create on an empty stomach.”
They found Ann and Emilia in the very drawing room from which Violet had poached the easel.
The two ladies (Ann in a dotted white muslin and Emilia in green) sat in conversation beside an airy wall of windows, the curtains ruffled from the ornate doors that were opened onto the back terrace.
Ann and Lane had hosted their wedding breakfast in this room years earlier; Violet couldn’t help but marvel at how much had changed since then.
Ann, taking a brioche from a tiered platter, had good color in her cheeks, and she had lost the gaunt air of sickness that had followed her in the wake of her hard pregnancy.
Letters had been brought in, and Emilia was perusing some correspondence, the fine handwriting upon it causing Violet to wonder if it was from her cousin Ruby, who had been returned to Lakhnau.
“Ladies!” Ann cried, waving them over. “Come! Come! You must forgive Lane’s absence, for he is with Mrs. Kelly and the baby. He spends every moment he can with the boy, and I confess to only loving him more after finding him such a devoted father.”
They all agreed it was a favorable quality in a man, though Miss Bilbury swore she would never have children, feeling they were too inclined to bring disease and chaos into the house.
How was one to paint with all the sticky, prying fingers and crying?
That was sensible for an artist, Ann allowed, but insisted the sticky fingers and crying were all forgotten once her little boy smiled at her.
She did lament that caring for the infant chewed into the time she usually allotted for her many charitable pursuits.
Indeed, Ann had only just established her next venture, the Ladies’ Society for the Lonely, Abandoned, and Infirm, when her challenging pregnancy forced her to set it aside.
Everyone present assured Ann that now, with her healthy once more, the Society would flourish.
Thoroughly distracted, Emilia summarized Ruby’s letter for them but paused often to gaze longingly out the window.
“Are you expecting a caller?” Violet finally asked over her hot chocolate.
“Oh!” Emilia blushed. “Probably not. Puck is making mischief in the wisteria again; it is hard not to watch.”
“Hmph,” muttered Cristabel.
“Emilia has had her head in the sky for weeks,” Ann teased, placing a plum cake on her sister’s plate. Emilia had hardly eaten a crumb all morning.
“Winter will be here soon,” said Emilia, unconvincingly, and still stealing glances beyond the billowing curtain. “It fills me with melancholy.” Her gaze narrowed, then she sat up straighter, nearly upsetting her plate and plum cake. “Do you see? Someone is coming down the hill…”
All four ladies hurried to the window and, standing in a row, shoulder to shoulder, surveyed the distance.
“But that is the gentleman who lives at Sampson Park,” cried Ann. “Mr. Kerr. But who is with him? Upon my word, have you ever seen a larger fellow?”
“That is the other Mr. Kerr, didi,” added Emilia, her voice breathy and strained. She clasped her hands together, holding them over her heart.
“There are two?” asked Ann.
“Not good,” muttered Cristabel.
“Oh, yes,” Emilia said with a laugh. “The eldest son has returned to the country to oversee the rebuilding of Clafton.”
The men veered toward the woods and the bridge that crossed the narrow stream. The smaller one appeared to be carrying a painting under one arm. Violet blanched and spun away from the window, crossing her arms over herself.
“Who cares why they have come? If they are coming here, then we should turn them away!”
“Violet,” Ann chided, going to her. “That would be terribly discourteous—”