Chapter 10
Finn
Finn bit into an apple and watched Violet from across the manicured Victorian gardens as she listened to Ethan, nodding and scribbling down notes.
They were on location for the third day at Chelmswood Manor House, barely a thirty-minute drive from the studios.
The Manor House was the anchoring point of their shoot, which would roam over various parts of Chelmswood village in the next few days.
The walled kitchen gardens were standing in for the gardens at Beatrice’s friend’s house, where she asks Nathanial to meet her in secret.
Espalier fruit trees were trained along the old brick walls, some already coming into bud.
Rows of neatly dug-over beds were mostly fallow, except for some winter cabbage and oversized leeks.
A rather dusty-looking lean-to greenhouse ran half the length of the wall to his right.
Weak winter sunshine was taking the edge off the chill of the day, but where he sat, the shadow of the house cast him in shade.
They were waiting on a reset before going again on a scene where Nathanial is discovered by servants creeping about the gardens.
Ethan seemed to finish his instructions for Violet and took off in an ambling, long-legged jog. Violet was still scribbling, head bent over her little notebook.
Glancing up, she locked eyes with him. Finn stared at her and took another bite of his apple.
Violet’s eyes narrowed, and she started to walk towards him, navigating around an antique wheelbarrow positioned by the props team, filled with some very real horse manure.
‘Good morning,’ she said, stopping in front of him.
Ah, so they were doing formal. Okay.
‘Good morning, Vi. How do you do?’
She gave a light shake of her head like a dog with a flea and sighed.
‘It’s Violet. There’s a change of plan. We are going to move on to scene 3.7, where Nathanial comes back to the gardens on another day looking for Beatrice. It means a slight costume change, so I need to walk you to the costume quick-change area to meet Kathy.’
Violet turned towards the house, and with a tight flick of her notebook, gestured for Finn to walk with her.
Finn stood slowly and stretched, long and languorous, arms reaching over his head.
He leaned from side to side, rolled his head slowly, and shrugged his shoulders before letting out an extended sigh.
‘Aaahhhhh.’ He grinned at Violet. ‘Ready,’ he said.
A muscle twitched in her eyebrow, and her lips pressed into a hard line, as she turned to walk.
Finn took one final bite of his apple, then held the core out to Violet as they walked.
‘Can you take this, please?’
Violet glanced down at the apple core, already turning brown, then up at Finn. Her expression now was blank and unreadable. He almost felt bad for torturing her like this. But not quite bad enough to stop.
‘Sure,’ Violet said sweetly, and held out her hand.
‘Thanks ever so much,’ Finn cooed, returning the smile at full wattage. ‘Don’t want to get my costume sticky.’
Violet’s eyes flicked over his grubby, mud-spattered 18th-century farmer’s clothes but said nothing.
‘So, you’re still here then,’ Finn said in a conversational tone, as they walked across the lawns.
Her jaw clenched. ‘Yes. I was going to jack it all in and go… go….’ She glanced at the browning apple core. ‘Fruit picking around Australia, but then I thought to myself, No Violet, what would Finn do without me?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Finn said, as they approached the old orangery, russet and orange bricks, softened with age, topped with towering glass windows. ‘I could relax, only work with people who like and respect me, not question if my coffee is safe to drink.’
‘Well, I’m sticking it out,’ Violet said, picking up the pace. ‘So you’re stuck with me.’
‘Do you really need to walk me?’ Finn asked. ‘Can’t you just tell me where to go?’
‘I’d love to tell you exactly where to go but walking you around like a toddler is a key part of my job.’
‘Humph, walking people from place to place seems really hard. Sure your skills are up to that, Vi? Don’t you want to get some more help from Ethan or one of the other teenagers? You took sooo many notes.’
Violet looked up at him, eyes narrowed, cheeks flushed from the chill air, apple core pinched between her fingers. ‘Were you watching me all that time I was talking with Ethan?’
For a moment, as she glared at him with those green eyes, a furrow knotted between her brows, his mind went blank. He snapped his head round to face forward. Shrugging, he replied, ‘I was watching Ethan, not you.’
Violet made a humph noise and raised an eyebrow. ‘Look, the tasks might be basic and menial compared to what I used to do in theatre, but I know I need to learn the ropes. And these things help keep the shoot running to time.’
Finn opened his mouth to make a sharp retort and knock her down another peg or two, when Leanne came bouncing up to them.
‘Hey guys, everything okay for 3.7? You on your way to costume?’
Violet straightened and nodded, dropping the hand holding the apple core into the folds of her coat. ‘Yes, heading there now, we’ll—’
Finn cut her off. ‘Actually, Leanne, good to bump into you. Vi here was just saying something interesting about how she’s doing basic tasks.’ He turned to Violet. ‘Weren’t you, Vi?’
Leanne’s brows knitted together. ‘Oh, really? Is something wrong, Violet?’
The blood had drained from Violet’s face, and she was as white as paper.
‘Uh, no, what I was saying was…’ She swallowed, her throat working, and Finn could see the cogs cranking as she tried to decide what to say.
Moments passed as Leanne peered at her. ‘Violet?’
Finn grinned at her and raised an eyebrow over Leanne’s head.
‘I…’ Violet managed, before stalling like a stuck record.
‘She was saying,’ Finn took over smoothly. ‘How important it is to learn the basics and all the seemingly small tasks that actually keep things running. Isn’t that right, Vi?’
Violet started breathing again and nodded, dumbly.
‘Oh,’ Leanne laughed, cutting the awkwardness. ‘Yes, that’s very true. No one can really appreciate how key these tasks are until you’re doing them.’
Leanne’s eyes suddenly focused somewhere in the distance, and she had the faraway look of someone listening to her radio.
‘On my way,’ she barked into the mouthpiece. She flashed a smile at them both. ‘I’ll leave you to it then. But Violet,’ Leanne cocked her head to one side, ‘don’t be scared to ask for help. We were all new once.’
She bounced off, hair swinging behind her.
Finn grinned and set off towards the house. ‘So Vi, I hope—’
‘Don’t speak to me,’ she spat, marching beside him.
Her face had recovered from its previous pallor and was now flaming, the flush spreading down her neck in blotchy patches.
‘Don’t speak to me, don’t speak about me, don’t even look at me, if you can help it! This is my life, Finn, it’s not a joke. Be professional.’
‘To be fair, I didn’t actually do anything,’ Finn said, as a couple of extras dressed in Victorian housemaid dresses and mob caps, and giggling over something on a mobile phone, passed within a few feet of them.
A brief, tense quiet fell between them until the housemaids were out of earshot.
Violet glowered up at him, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
‘The deal was that I would be civil and nice,’ she hissed. ‘Please don’t make it any fucking harder than it already is.’
They reached the door of the house. Violet turned, and with a smile so forcedly sweet it looked demonic, she said, ‘This way, please, Finn,’ and gestured for him to walk through.
Finn walked through the door with some trepidation, slightly worried he had gone too far and was about to get a dagger in the back. Or a stapler.
They climbed the ancient oak staircase from the cellars to the ground floor and continued through the house in a stony silence, the only noise the creaking of ancient floorboards. Turning a corner, they reached a small parlour that had been designated as a costume change space.
Violet announced, ‘Hi, I have Finn here,’ in a cheerful and upbeat tone.
Kathy waved him over, and Finn was ushered over to a small cubicle charging area, where she was ready with his change.
He didn’t hear her leave, but when he glanced over his shoulder, Violet had gone.
Twenty minutes later, Finn was ready, but Jennifer was still in costume.
Leanne appeared and walked him to a makeshift green room further down the corridor, a little closer to the exit to the gardens.
The room appeared to be another sitting room, but a little less formal and a bit more worn than the parlour the costume team was set up in.
Heavy blue and gold drapes hung at the mullioned windows, bleached at the edges by the sun, dusty and fraying at the bottom.
A huge stone fireplace dominated the room, a very small grate with a few sticks and pinecones perched in the middle of the stone hearth, and threadbare-looking rugs overlapped one another across the floor.
Finn ignored the folding chairs and little plastic table and sat down heavily in one of the sagging sofas, which faced each other across a huge, low coffee table. As he sat, dust motes puffed up from the sofa and filled the air around him, glinting in the shards of light from the windows.
The door opened, and Violet appeared, then stood back to let Jennifer in. Squeezing her huge, hooped skirts through the doorway, Jennifer glanced around, murmured, ‘Oh, shabby chic,’ then stopped abruptly.
‘Uh, who put these in here? I can’t sit on one of those,’ she said to Violet, pointing at the folding chairs.
‘I need a stool, please,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, this dress will be crushed. And I am not sitting on that,’ she wrinkled her nose at the sofa, where Finn was still surrounded by a cloud of dust motes.
‘Of course,’ Violet said, not missing a beat. ‘I’ll see what I can find, and I’ll be right back.’
She disappeared without looking at him once.