Page 38 of My Darling Mr. Darling

How strange it was to be back here, in this place that had once been her home. Daylight had changed the atmosphere, but her initial impression was the same as it had been when first she had sneaked inside with Serena—even after the passage of so many years, it was largely unchanged. What manner of man acquired a home like this and did not make it his own?

Everything was just as she remembered it, as if time had passed the house by and left nothing to show for its journey. She could almost expect to hear the thunder of her father’s footsteps on the stairs, as if he wasn’t trulygoneat all.

Her hand wrapped around the newel post at the base of the stairs, and there beneath her thumb was the same divot the heel of her shoe had carved into it when she had been a child sliding down the banister. Each step up the stairs felt as if she had shed a year along with it, casting off layer after layer of fear and doubt, pain and sorrow. Shades of her childhood swirled around her, but the grief she had expected to feel did not come.

The pressure she felt in her chest was not heartache; it was the weight of a lifetime of memories. And there were so many joyful ones. After her father had died, the oppressive burden of anguish had pulled her down into a dark and lonely place, and she had surmounted it only by casting it from her mind. In the years that had followed, she had so rarely had time to consider anything but her own survival. Dredging up the past had been an exercise in futility; one she had studiously avoided in an effort to save herself the hurt of it.

At some indefinable point, those wounds had…perhaps nothealed, but faded. At some point, she had acquired the ability to remember not the pain of her father’s passing, but the happiness she had shared with him.

She had worked in enough homes to know now that the relationship they had had was unusual, unique. Most children were relegated to the nursery, and time in the presence of their parents was rationed—but her papa had been her best friend. He had never once made her feel unwanted or unloved; he had always had time for her, even when his desk had been littered with papers to be read and signed.

She paused before the door to the office and considered it. There was no one about—and the door was just slightly ajar. It would be a simple enough matter to slip inside and resume her search.

But she didn’twantto. For just this moment, she wanted to remember what her life had been before it had descended into chaos, before her papa had given her away to a stranger. Because therehadbeen a time when he had loved her, and she—she didn’t want to sully those memories with the uncertainty that had plagued her for so many years.

So instead she drifted down the hall, turned left at the end, and pushed open the door to the room that had once been her own—and paused in the doorway.

It, too, was just how she had left it. She didn’t know why it surprised her, but it did. As if she had just stepped out, there was her own counterpane draped across the bed, heavy blue velvet embroidered with forget-me-nots; the flower that, according to Papa, had been her mother’s favorite. Perhaps it was a trifle faded now from when she had last seen it nearly a decade ago, but still it was her own. Those silk curtains that hung over the window—they were her own clumsy effort at stitchery, a joint effort between herself and Mrs. Morris.

Her dresser, her wardrobe, her rug spread across the floor. Everything precisely in its place. Like a shrine to a girl who no longer existed, no dust had been allowed to settle in, and the wood of the furniture gleamed in the fading sunlight as if it had recently been given a good polish.

Atop the dresser rested a cloth doll, perched upon the edge with her arms placed upon her lap as if sullenly awaiting the return of her owner. The doll had been a birthday present from Papa when Violet had been very young, and even though she had eventually outgrown the desire to play with dolls, she had always kept this one close by; a treasured friend.

Violet reached for the doll on impulse, settling at the edge of the bed to examine her once more. Still she wore the same sprigged white muslin gown, even if it had yellowed a bit with age, but the frayed hem had been repaired by someone skilled with a needle—and that had never been Violet. The dreadful curtains were testament enough to her lack of skill at that age.

The doll smiled up at her, her painted face cheerful, as if she were pleased once again to be held, to be loved—to be freed from the prison of her solitary vigil upon the dresser.

Violet’s breath lodged in her throat, and she swiped at her watering eyes.

Perhaps they were the same, the two of them. Perhaps she, too, had been waiting all this time for someone to free her from her own prison.

Perhaps she had left the greatest part of herself back in the cellar of Mrs. Selkirk’s school. Perhaps she had spent all these years in that deep, dark closet buried in the cellar, choking on loneliness and pain and grief, hoping,praying, that someone would remember her.

That one day, someone, somehow, would cast open that door, pull her from the fathomless dark, and bring her back into the light.

∞∞∞

It hadn’t surprised John that Violet had gone wandering—the only surprise had been that she had resisted the temptation to snoop through his office. She’d hesitated only a moment or two before proceeding down the hall, disappearing into her room.

Even if she hadn’t used it in years, it had always felt as though it belonged to her. A mishmash of eclectic collections from her childhood, things she had both grown into and out of—the gouges carved into the door frame marking her height at various ages, the bedraggled hair ribbons that had been plaited into a simple bracelet and shoved into a child-sized jewelry box. The books on deportment, whose spines were still stiff, which he had found stuffed behind her dresser, clearly unused. Dresses that had long gone out of fashion, still hanging in the wardrobe.

It had been a small slice of Violet’s world: the things that she had treasured enough to keep, and which he had preserved for her, because he had taken enough from her already.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, half-hidden beneath the shroud of the bed curtains—a vibrant blue, only a bit faded from the touch of the sun. Her shoulders were slumped, her hands cradling an aged cloth doll, its skirt tumbling over her lap in a spill of white muslin.

Though she did not look up, he knew she had heard him arrive in the doorway when she gave a sniffle and lifted the doll.

“Rosamund,” she said. “Papa gave her to me for my fourth birthday.”

“Named after your mother?” he asked, and she gave a short nod.

“I don’t remember her,” she said. “She took a fever just after I was born. I think he wanted to keep the memory of her alive for me, but I could never—” She paused to swipe at her eyes, blinking hard. “I could never hold on to her. Not like he could.” A shrug, and she dipped her head again, manipulating the doll’s arms so that they splayed out. “Once, I had a locket with her miniature painted inside of it,” she said.

His brows furrowed, because it was not an item that he had come across amongst the possessions that remained within her room. “I don’t think I’ve seen it, but I’ll have the staff—”

“It’s not here. They took it from me at the school. We weren’t allowed jewelry.Jewelry encourages vanity,” she said, in an odd little voice with a crisp, derisive lilt to it, as if imitating someone. A sigh followed, tremulous and regretful. “I don’t know what happened to it.”

Likely it had been sold long ago. Mrs. Selkirk had been a woman of expensive tastes; she had very likely subsidized her lifestyle with items stolen from her pupils and sold secondhand. He knew well enough that Violet had been sent off to school with no less than four massive trunks, but later he had discovered that all that remained of Violet’s possessions at the school amounted to a single nightdress and two gowns left over from her mourning attire. Mrs. Selkirk had protested that Violet had simply outgrown her other frocks, and there had been no way todisproveit, but all the other girls had told similar stories: they were allotted only three dresses each, and anything else they had arrived with had simply disappeared.