Page 34 of My Darling Mr. Darling

“Do you know, being accused so often of ill intent toward the ladies of this house is growing truly tiresome,” John said conversationally, as he reached for the teapot and began to prepare both cups. “You might consider expanding your repertoire of my imagined sins. If you’re open to suggestions, treason might be a refreshing change.”

An awkward little laugh trickled from Violet’s throat. “I promise I’ll give a shout if I require you,” she said to Davis. And then she added, in a curiously soft voice, “Some things I must do for myself.”

With a guttural growl that was neither assent nor refusal, Davis at last gave a stiff bow and took himself off to parts unknown—though John did not doubt that he would remain close enough to hear a cry, should Violet tire of his company.

A heavy silence descended for a tense space of seconds as Violet eased herself to her seat, her hands gripping the arms of the chair until her knuckles went white. She pressed her lips together, her teeth periodically worrying her lower lip with such ferocity that John feared she might draw blood.

In an effort to distract her from her obvious discomfort, he slid her cup of tea across the table to her—an action that would have earned him a chiding in class, but now provoked only an absent murmur of thanks.

“Davis disapproves of me,” he said, watching her shoulders draw up as she sipped her tea, as if she were physically shrinking away from him, making herself smaller and less noticeable.

“Davis disapproves of everyone,” she said, in a muted voice that barely breached the scant space between them. “He is suspicious by nature, but not malicious.” Her gaze had landed upon the polished surface of the table between them, stuck there as if weighted. “I asked him to smile once. It was dreadful. Had I been a small child, I might have run screaming in terror.”

John chuckled—though he was certain Violet hadn’t intended the anecdote humorously—but even that failed to cut the mounting tension, falling flat in the silence. Violet clenched her fingers around her teacup, holding it before her like a shield. Given her obvious discomfort, John might have expected some manner of fidgeting, some nervous motion—but it seemed she had retreated instead, growing smaller, quieter.

Far from the hellion he had once thought her, now she was only a shadow of the girl she had been, as if she sought only to be invisible. Though he knew that Serena had insisted upon supplying her with a new wardrobe, she invariably appeared in gowns that, while clearly well-made, lacked any fashionable embellishments. The colors were bland and subdued, and they were neither particularly flattering nor terribly uncomplimentary. Her hair—a rich, lustrous brown—was habitually wound atop her head and pinned in place with a severity that was decades too old for her. Worlds away from the joyful, laughing sprite rendered in oils upon the canvas that hung upon the wall in his bedroom. He wondered if that girl might be hiding somewhere inside her, buried deep down, beneath the pins and the starch and the tart words and bristling attitude.

Or if she had, in fact, died that cold day in April so many years ago, smothered in a musty closet at the back of the cellar in Mrs. Selkirk’s school in Sussex.

The thought made him sad for her, and furious with himself. It was a familiar feeling, that anger, that helplessness, but he swallowed them down back into his gut—Violet was anxious enough simply to be alone in the drawing room with him. She neither liked nor trusted him, and she certainly did not know him well enough to understand that that anger was not directed at her.

She didn’t know him at all.

He took a deep breath, set his teacup down upon the table, and clasped his hands before him. “Vi?” he prompted, because he suspected she might sit in abject, tortured silence unless prodded into speech.

Her eyes jerked to his, her dark brows snapping together. “No one calls me Vi,” she said tartly, but her tight grip on her teacup had eased, and the tension slid from her shoulders until her arms came down, her hands no longer shielding her face.

“Until quite recently, no one called you Violet, either,” he said. “It was Sarah, wasn’t it? And before that, Kate—and then Lucy, Grace, Mary, Susan—”

“How did you know?” she asked, her voice trembling over the words. “How did you know—how did you knowallof it?” A queer little shudder ran through her, shoulders to toes, and John suspected she was only now realizing just how close he had always been. Just a few steps behind her for years, dogging her footsteps.

For a moment he hesitated. If she ran again, he would only be giving her the tools to better evade him. But she had done that well enough for years already—and if she wished to go, certainly Grey and Serena would spirit her away to somewhere he would never find her anyway. There was nothing to lose, really, but perhaps there was something to gain. A crumb of trust; a shred of understanding extended between them.

“Your letters,” he said. “The first one arrived shortly after I placed the advertisement inTheTimes, so I assumed you had read it. The postmark led me to the post office that had received your letter. From there, it was simply a matter of passing around that sketch of you until someone recognized you. A woman in your position could not have traveled far to post a letter, after all.”

“I hadn’t realized,” she said slowly.

No, of course she hadn’t. “You covered your tracks well,” he said. “Took precautions. You were always gone by the time I received your letters. You left no forwarding address, no information on where you were headed. You never stayed in one place for very long.”

She nodded absently, her brows dipping in thoughtful contemplation.

“You should be proud,” he said. “You evaded not just me, but half a dozen Runners over the years. It wasn’t difficult to find where you’d been, but determining where you were going proved impossible.” His thumb itched to smooth away the frown that had settled between her brows. “I conducted hundreds of interviews,” he said. “To recreate your life as it had been, to see if I could glean where you might go next. Most of your associates spoke of you fondly, especially in those early years. They described you as polite, hard-working.” He hesitated. “Quiet. Distant.”

Another nod; she ducked her head, and he heard her breath whistle out through her teeth.

“They told me what they knew of you, things they said you had told them. Things I knew to be false—a childhood in Ipswich, or Coventry, or Exeter. The eldest of nine children, or the youngest of three. A mother who had been a seamstress; a father who had been a greengrocer. Eventually, there were no stories at all. Only a quiet woman who performed her duties without complaint and spoke only when spoken to.”

There was a tightness at the corners of her eyes, a glitter to her stormy irises, like it hurt her to hear his assessment of her life. To witness what someone else had made of her experiences, the manner in which she had supported herself, how she had lived.

“I suppose it must have been difficult, after a while, to keep it all straight,” he said. “To remember what you’d said, and to whom. I imagine that at a certain point, it was simply easier to say nothing at all. To become a woman with no past. To maintain a distance from everyone.”

“Safer,” she corrected, in a choked little voice. “Not easier.Safer.”

Because always she had been running— from him. “And lonely, I think,” he said.

As if he had pressed too close to an unpleasant truth, she jerked out of her seat to pace the drawing room floor fractiously, shoving her teacup onto the table with so violent a motion that tea splashed out onto the surface of it. She wrung her hands before her and swallowed convulsively, the lines of her neck tight and tense.

Briefly her gaze landed on the door, and she paused mid-circuit, the instinct to flee bare in her eyes. She wanted to escape so badly—it was scrawled across her face as if in ink.