Page 39 of My Darling Mr. Darling

“I’m sorry,” he said, although it sounded trite and weak. “If I had known—”

She held up a hand. “It was just bronze, not gold. No stones; only enamel forget-me-nots on the front. You don’t give expensive jewelry to a child, after all, so it wasn’tprecious, but—” Again her voice trembled, and in profile he could see her blink rapidly, as if to stave away tears. “But it was all I had of her.” Her hand smoothed at the doll’s tumbled skirt, as if the motion comforted her.

Slowly, John crossed the floor, his footsteps muffled by the thick rug blanketing the glossy wood. She didn’t flinch when he sat beside her, didn’t shy away or even cast him a scowl. Her eyes flicked toward him, but the fleeting glance was less suspicious and more resigned.

“You look a great deal like her, you know,” he said, resting his hands on his thighs.

A scoff of a laugh; her shoulders rolled with it. “I don’t,” she said. “I was such an awkward, gangly thing. And even in the miniature, I could tell she was beautiful.”

“Vi,you’rebeautiful.” It hadn’t been what he hadmeantto say, but when her head whipped toward him, expressive brows arched high, he could not call the words back, or clarify them, qualify them. Instead he said, “Your father kept a portrait of her in his office on Piccadilly. You’re practically her image. Didn’t you know?”

Her fingers fiddled with the doll’s cloth arms. “I’ve never been to Papa’s office,” she said. “I didn’t—I didn’t know he kept a portrait there. He didn’t keep any in the house. I think they made him sad.”

Townsend had implied something of the sort; that it was too hard to see the both of them—his late wife, and his daughter, who would never know her. That he could look upon one or the other, but never both, because the grief that assailed him with it threatened to drown him.

“You should have it,” he said, and as if of its own accord, his right hand covered her left, fingers curling around hers. “I’ll send someone round with it this evening.”

She stared down at their hands as if they contained a meaning she could not decipher, but she did not extract her hand from his. Her chest expanded with a huge inhale, and it escaped her on a shuddering sigh. In a toneless voice, she said, “It belongs to you. Along with everything else.” The fingers of her free hand snarled in the doll’s skirt, crushing wrinkles into the fabric.

John felt himself wince, and reflexively his hand squeezed hers. The worst of it was that it wastrue; everythingdidbelong to him, and had since he had married her. Everything—from the house she had been raised within, to the aged cloth doll she held in her hands—every bit of it was his by law. There was simply nothing that could be said to ease the sting of it. There were no words to erase the pain of having lost everything she had held dear.

So he said instead, “I was so envious of you, you know.”

Her fingers stiffened in his, as if he’d startled her. Her eyes darted, briefly settling on his face before flitting off again, as if she could not bring herself to look too long upon him. She said, “What?”

“I held such a deep respect for your father—as if he were my own. But he was always yours. His every thought was for you.” John had expected to feel embarrassed by this, but instead he felt only relief. As if by confessing those old, terrible feelings, he could let them go at last, along with the weight they bore upon him. “He was so proud of you,” he said. “And back then, when I was so eager for the slightest bit of kindness, when I felt I vied with you for his attention, I could not understand why. He’d speak fondly of some bit of mischief you’d gotten into, and I’d think, ‘He deserves a better daughter.’”

Violet took a swift breath, her shoulders snapping back in righteous indignation, but he squeezed her fingers again to quell her instinctive retort.

“I was a fool,” he said. “It wasn’t even about you, Vi. It was just that I was so bloodyenvious, because you had everything I wanted. And every time he had a new story to share—how you’d run off yet another governess by putting a garden snake in her bed, or how you’d lobbed apples at the neighbor boy’s head for pinching one of the kitchen maids—I felt that envy rear its ugly head anew, because I felt I had no one to speak so fondly of even my best actions, let alone my worst. What I had to work for every day, you received in abundance simply for existing.”

And finally Violet looked at him. For a long moment, she simplylooked, incredulously, as if she could not believe what she had heard. “How can you say that?” she asked. “All he ever spoke of was you. For the last years of his life, there was hardly an hour that passed that he did not spend in praise of you.” An awkward little laugh emerged from her throat, and it sounded as if it had been dragged through something bitter and foul. “I hated you,” she whispered, raggedly. “Before I had ever met you, I hated you for taking him from me.”

“I didn’t know,” John said, digesting that slowly. “I had no idea.”

“Didn’t you? He spoke of you like a son. You shared a part of his life that I never could. You had your own world between you, and perhaps if he had left you at his office, I could have been content. But he never did; he always brought you home with him.”

“He never brought me home. Notonce. I was never even invited—”

“You didn’t have to bepresentto be here,” she said viciously, yanking at her hand, though he refused to surrender it. “He brought you home with him every night; you were in his every word. I lived in your shadow!” Something that might have been a sob tore at her throat. “Helovedyou,” she snarled, like a feral thing, chewing the words as brutally as a wolf, “Helovedyou, and I—I was only a daughter. You were the son hechose. You were the one hewanted.”

The words, saturated with years of bitterness, scored him. Somehow, it had never occurred to him that she might have cause to be envious ofhim, that she might have resented him for the same reasons—only she had had cause for them. Of course she would have perceived him as a threat. She had been accustomed to her father’s undivided attention, more or less, and he had usurped that position—or at very least, had forced her to share it.

“Vi,” he said, clasping her wrist in an effort to keep her, for fear that she might flee the house—perhaps even the city. “Please. I’m sorry.” The words tasted sour in his mouth, and he realized that Serena had been right yet again. Each apology cheapened the one that had come before, and they were all of them useless. “Don’t run, just—just talk to me. Even if it is only to excoriate me, I would prefer it to your silence.”

She stood stock-still beside the bed, but she had ceased her frantic tugging. The fading sunlight gilded her hair as it poured through the window, turning her dark curls a glossy mahogany. The shock that etched itself upon her delicate features surprised him; her guarded, indifferent expression had cracked straight down the middle, exposing what lay beneath at last. Uncertainty, anxiety…dread.

“I don’t—I don’t know what you expect me to say,” she said at last.

“Anything at all.”Everything. “I only want to know, Vi.” He eased his grip on her wrist, stroking his thumb across the soft inner flesh there. “It seems I’ve committed sins I wasn’t even aware of. How am I to make amends without knowing how I have wronged you?” There was a scar, there, beneath his thumb, hidden just below the hem of her glove. He could feel the changed texture of her skin, the unnatural smoothness to it. A burn, likely. Carefully, he turned her wrist up, edged back the hem with his thumb, exposing it to the light.

Her fingers clenched; her voice emerged, high and taut. “What are you doing?”

It was a long, thin mark, the skin sheened silvery—a very old scar. But not, he thought, old enough to have been acquired in childhood. “Tell me how this came about,” he said.

Her lashes lowered, her lips pinching as she considered. At last she said, “A baking incident, when I was a kitchen maid. I was careless with a pan—I dropped a whole tray of biscuits when I burned myself, and Cook cuffed me for it.”

“A kitchen maid,” he said. “This would have been…Mr. Wright’s household?” She had not yet been nineteen, and it had been the first position she had held longer than a month—right up until Mr. Wright had pinched her bottom and she’d blacked his eye for it.