Page 56 of My Darling Mr. Darling

This had happened to her, he realized. He had known of it, had read pages and pages of testimony attesting to the vile treatment the girls at Mrs. Selkirk’s had been subjected to, and still he had hoped that it wasn’t as bad as it had sounded.

And it wasn’t—it was worse. So much worse than he could have imagined. So much worse than simple words scrawled across a page could ever have conveyed. There was a horror in it that could only be expressed in the hitch of her breath, the careful monotone she employed, as if to speak of it even now, years later, required she distance herself from it even within her own mind.

She dragged the mass of her unbound hair over her shoulder, running her fingers through the tangles of it as if she desperately required something to do with her hands. Only a sliver of her face was visible to him, just enough to see her lashes flutter, the left corner of her lips tighten. “You don’t get those things back when it’s over,” she said, “because the truth of it is, it’sneverover. All it takes is a room a little too dark, a little too close—and you’re right back there again. A part of you will always live there, in that dark, dark space. Buried. Forgotten.” Her shoulders lifted and fell in a half-hearted shrug. “You’ll always be a bit strange. A bit mad.”

His hands tightened on her shoulders. “You’re notmad, Vi. You’ve never been mad.”

A strange, guttural laugh warbled from her throat. “You’d be surprised. Did you know I was dismissed from my first position as a maid because I screamed when the housekeeper locked us in our room? I screamed and screamed, and I couldn’t stop—not even when one of the other maids slapped me.”

“Vi, you survived something dreadful. Anyone would be affected by it.” He didn’t know how to comfort her—didn’t know how she would receive it, even if he did. How welcome could it possibly be, given that he had been responsible for sending her to that hellish place?

And even though his throat clogged with all of the apologies he wanted to make, he knew they could not reduce the magnitude of her suffering. They could not atone for sleepless nights and lost positions, for the instinctual fear that tightened its icy claws around her in the darkness, for the dread that stole her breath from her very lungs in rooms too small and dark for comfort.

Those words had always been about alleviating his own guilt, relieving himself of the burden. How selfish that seemed now, how callous—there was no perfect combination of them to erase the trauma she had experienced, the distress that haunted her still.

“I don’t blame you anymore,” she said, her voice tinged with something like astonishment, as if even she could not quite believe what she was saying. His head jerked up, but her face was turned just a bit to the left of the window, and he met her eyes in the mirror that hung upon the wall.

She had been watching him. Watching his face, his unguarded expressions as he had spoken—asshehad spoken. Likely she had seen more than he ever could have told her. Perhaps more even than he would have wished her to see.

“You don’t owe me forgiveness,” he said, dragging his eyes away from hers. “You don’t owe me anything, Vi.”

Incredibly, she laughed. A little raw; a little tired—but still there was amusement lingering in the soft, understated sound. “No,” she said. “I don’t. But do you know how exhausting it is to carry so much anger in your heart?” Her hand fell over his where it remained perched upon her shoulder. “I was so afraid,” she said. “For so many years, I was so afraid you would find me. I had terrible nightmares of being dragged back to that school—or worse. I had built you up into this terrible, Gothic villain in my mind.”

He could not suppress his flinch, but neither could he argue with her assessment.

“But you weren’t to know what occurred at that awful school—nobody did. And when youdidknow, you stopped it. You saved them, all those girls I left behind.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, something excruciatingly painful flitting across her face. “I hated the thought that you would find me. But now, when I look back, all I feel is…relief that I was never as alone as I felt. That I hadn’t been forgotten. Thatsomeonewas still looking for me.” Her small, white teeth tugged on her lower lip. “Sometimes, I felt so invisible that I might as well have just…faded away. Like I had never existed at all. And I had no one; no friends, no family—no one who could possibly understand.”

“Iunderstand,” he said, and it was almost true. He understood, in an abstract sort of way. In a way that had come from interviews and hours upon hours of poring over testimony. He understood as well as one could without living it. She could speak to him of it purelybecausehe understood; because he would not think her mad for her attack of anxiety, for her discomfort with darkness and with small spaces. She could speak to him because he had opened the window for her, knowing she had needed the feel of the air upon her cheeks, the reassurance that her lungs would not be starved of air. Because he had lit the candles—a dozen of them or more, far more than any other person would find reasonable.

“I know,” she said. Her lashes drifted down, shading her eyes. “But it wasn’t truly your fault any more than it was mine. I can accept that. I can stop blaming you for the things beyond your control.”

He let his free hand settle on the curve of her hip, splaying across her warm, smooth skin. “Can you stop blaming yourself for the things beyond yours?” He was thinking of the wretched brokenness scrawled across her face when, not so very long ago, he had called up an accounting of her sins for her; the shame he had witnessed take hold of her, the guilt over her perceived misdeeds. Each desperate act that she had seen as a sign of her weak character and that he had seen as one of her incredible strength. “Can you stop blaming yourself for surviving however you had to do it?”

In the mirror, her reflection offered up a wry smile. “It’s so much easier,” she said, laying her hand over his, and peeling his fingers free of where they held her hip, “to forgive someone else than it is to forgive yourself.” And as she pulled his hand up, up, up the gentle slope of her belly to the rise of her breast, the realization that she hadn’ttrulyanswered his question faded into insignificance.

Her hair cascaded in a riot of curls over her right breast, but the left fit into the mold of his hand perfectly, warm and soft, and her nipple peaked in his palm. Her head dropped back against his shoulder, and the sweet, floral scent of her hair washed up around him.

“You’re not shy,” he said, and it wasn’t accusation—only curiosity.

“Sharing a room with three other girls will cure one of the predilection for modesty,” she said simply, and rolled her shoulders as her eyes drifted closed. “There comes a point where scruples—of any sort—are merely a hindrance.”

She was something of a novelty; a woman who was not shocked easily, nor one who shied away from the baser aspects of life. A woman of strong convictions and an iron will to rival his own. No shrinking violet, she—though he did not imagine she would appreciate the comparison. He had admired her before he had ever known her, in the snippets of the myriad lives she had left behind, the tiny threads and fragments of herself that had remained when she had gone.

And he admired her now in the mirror—the delicate beauty that belied a strength writ into her very bones. The gentle curve of her chin, alluring and determined at once. The graceful slope of shoulders that could bear the weight of worlds. The length of her legs tapering down to small feet, well-suited to the dodging and weaving she’d done through the world, neatly evading his pursuit.

Until now. Now, she settled into the circle of his arms, her head lolling against his shoulder and made a satisfied little hum as his hand slid down her belly toward that sparse triangle of soft, dark curls at the juncture of her thighs. Her warm breath brushed his throat in a series of abbreviated puffs as his fingers reached their destination, and her hips gave a small, awkward jerk into the light touch. Her teeth seized her lower lip, her lashes fluttered—her hands, which had been curling reflexively at her sides instead splayed wide, searching for something to hold onto. They settled onto his hips, lightly at first, as if uncertain whether she would be rebuffed, and then, when he murmured something vaguely approving, they slid down his thighs, nails scraping across the fabric of his trousers.

Time unspooled like thread from a bobbin rolling across the floor—John could have watched each new expression chase across her face in the mirror until dawn drove back the night. He learned what she liked by the flush that spread across her cheeks and down her throat, the pitch and rise of her breath, the curl of her toes into the plush carpet beneath her feet. The slow, soft plunges of his fingers. The stroke of his thumb across the peak of her nipple. Even the brush of his lips near her temple. She soaked in every bit of it, so deprived of affection, of simple physical touch, that she nestled against his chest like a kitten, content to be held and petted and cherished.

Her arousal bloomed like a flower beneath the sun, but even as her hips arched to his hand she murmured in a petulant tone, “This isn’t quite what I had in mind.”

“I believe I said, ‘However I want you,’” John said into the soft hair at the temple. “Look at yourself, Vi. How could I not want exactly this?”

Violet’s eyes fluttered open for a brief moment, and she gave a tiny squeak of dismay. “Oh, Lord. I look like a…a scarlet woman,” she said, panting the words through breaths broken with the threat of approaching climax.

She did, actually, though not in the way she meant it—that flush that painted her skin had deepened to a glowing rose. “No,” he said. “You look beautiful—uninhibited; passionate.” Society as a whole prized ladies who would never dream of allowing this sort of liberty. Passion—if indeed it existed at all—was to be strictly controlled, permissible only in the dark of the night, beneath a swath of bedclothes. But Violet had always been a rebel. It had taken him years to learn to appreciate it, but now he could not imagine her meek and retiring—she was always meant to be a different mold of woman.

A plaintive sound rose in her throat. Her hands lifted, one going around his neck to steady herself and the other sliding over his between her thighs. “Please,” she whispered, pushing herself up on her toes, turning her face to his, half an inch from his lips.