Chapter 25 Ormdale
Chapter twenty-five
Ormdale
Violet walked as if possessed, clambering over rock walls, sending sheep scattering and angry lapwings protesting at her approach.
I wandered lonely as a cloud.
Were clouds lonely? she wondered. Aunt Emily had made them memorise that one; it ended with a bit about thrills and daffodils. She hadn’t cared for the poem at the time, but she’d often found that it hummed in her head when she was at her wit’s end about something or waiting for something.
She had never been good at waiting.
Perhaps that was why her aunt had insisted on the poems. To give Violet’s mind something to run away with, when the rest of her was stuck. She would ask her, when she saw her again.
If she saw her again. How long would she last here, under Una’s gimlet eye?
Violet shook her head and kicked at a clod. What was she doing with herself?
Her eyes followed the rail tracks that led to the village, and the way Out.
It called to her, as it always had, but it was far less glamorous now. She had spent two years out there, so she knew that people were people everywhere—herself included. She needed to eat, and sleep, and be safe from the particularly bad ones. As they all did.
Violet groaned. It had been stupid indeed to bring back that newspaper, but in the days when the menagerie first opened, she and Una had eagerly kept all the clippings and pasted them in an album.
There was a historic photograph of Her Highness Princess Louise (a friend of Edith’s Belmonte relations) snipping the ribbon on the gate, and another of her petting a wyvern.
On the day, Una had been terrified that the wyvern would bite the princess, and Violet had told her if that happened they would be imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried for treason.
Aunt Emily had rebuked her seriously for this.
“She ought to toughen up, she’s too soft,” Violet had protested, echoing her father’s sentiment.
“And who are you to tell another person what they ought to be, Violet?” her aunt had said sternly. “Will you accept the same in return?”
Violet stopped dead. She hadn’t, in fact, liked it at all when Una had tried to tell her just now what she ought to be.
And it was far easier to think that Una was too soft than that she herself was too clumsy and harsh.
Violet was aware of a brown body the size of a badger pushing itself laboriously out of the ground nearby.
It was the most common kind of dragon, native to the dale.
Her cousin George had named it something in Latin or Greek, of course, but Violet couldn’t remember what it was.
It would always be a ‘groundling’ to her.
Nobody paid much attention to them, unless they got into your garden or the woolshed and made a mess. They were retiring, with poor eyesight and strong jaws. This one had got itself trapped under a rock that had fallen from the nearby wall.
Violet’s father had disliked them for making the holes that occasionally caused his horse to stumble. She had even seem him squash one once, when he thought no one was looking. She had never told anyone of it. To harm any dragon was against their oath, most especially his as the Worm Warden.
She had never forgotten how easily it had been dispatched—how very soft the creature had turned out to be, in the end.
Violet stretched out her foot. The mud-brown dragon went completely still, using its colour to vanish. She suddenly knew why her father had squashed the grounding, and it had nothing to do with the holes it made.
It was because the groundling was soft, and he was angry. Perhaps something inside her father did not like softness because he had never been allowed to be soft.
Perhaps that same thing was inside her, too, and that was why she had pricked her sister like that.
Violet carefully pushed the rock aside with the toe of her boot, freeing the groundling. It scrambled away.
Violet’s fingers ran over the volumes in the new Ormby Lending Library, housed in a lime-washed one room cottage near the little school. The literary selection bore the unmistakable imprint of her aunt. But here and there, a more modern title surprised her.
“Here to borrow a book?” a familiar, accented voice inquired from the open doorway.
Violet jumped and spun round.
“Janushek!” she shouted into his shoulder.
She had flung her arms round him without thinking.
As he patted her back pleasantly, two things occurred to her in rapid succession.
One: she had learned it wasn’t advisable to go round embracing men who weren’t related to you; and two: Janushek was a wonderful exception to that rule. To every rule, really.
She fell back with tears in her eyes.
“Ah,” Janushek said. “It hasn’t been easy, then, this homecoming.”
“No,” she said, “it hasn’t.”
He squinted at the book she had in her hand. “Nietzsche? Your taste in reading has undergone a revolution!”
“Yours hasn’t,” she returned. “You donated this one, didn’t you?”
He laughed. “Am I so predictable?”
“Gloriously,” said Violet. She looked doubtfully at the book. “It looks dense. Is it worth the effort?”
Janushek considered this. “Is it worth the effort for the chicken to inquire why the cook is scouring the pot?”
Violet raised her eyebrows. “That’s grim. I think I’ll choose something else. What do you suggest?”
Janushek leaned down and selected a book for her.
“The Wind in the Willows,“ Violet read. “Sounds like the sort of poetry Aunt Emily goes for.”
“It is a novel for children, but also poetry of a kind,” he agreed. “The best character is the bargewoman.”
“I’ll look for her,” said Violet, tucking the book under her arm and making a movement towards the open door, expecting him to move aside for her.
He didn’t.
“Violet,” he said. “You have not signed the book.”
He pointed at a table equipped with an open notebook and jar of pencils.
Violet laughed. “Have you become a rule-follower at last, Janushek?”
“Oh, I have always tried to follow the rules that matter,” he said with a smile. “But never because they were rules.”
Violet sobered. “I always thought of you as a restless soul, like me. What was it they said of Abraham? That he looked for a better country? You’re not looking anymore, are you?”
He followed her gaze around the room, and then met her eyes again. “Perhaps I just realised that the better country is the one you make, not the one you find.”
Violet lowered her eyes. “What if you make it worse, just by being there?”
Janushek’s voice lowered. “Most of us have days, I think, of believing that.”
“And what do you do, on those days?”
“I cry,” Janushek said simply.
Violet looked at him in alarm.
“If possible, in the company of someone I care for,” he added. “It is preferable.”
“I don’t think Una would thank me for that,” Violet said morosely.
Janushek leaned on the doorframe with a sigh. “I’m sorry if I made it sound too easy, Violet. It is not easy. But it is good.”
“What is? Crying on people?”
“Not running away,” he said. He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Now, stop trying to distract me, and write your name in that book.”
Violet wrote her name in the book.