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Men and women are permitted to interact in three ways: marriage, ruination, and polite indifference.”
To be aware of one another but kept apart by station and society and… and all that goes with it.
She had left him only once, and only because the vicissitudes of war had torn her from him. She could not abandon him again.
I knew him better than my own soul. He may well have been my soul, for what little I am worth without him.”
He believed he was a coward. And what, then, did that make her?
See me, she wanted to tell him. Show me how to be brave. Let me help you.
“He was the joy of my life.”
“This was my world before I met him. And, heaven knows, I still hate this place—for all I should be grateful—but he taught me how to bear it.”
She looked at him now as a woman to a man, claiming all the freedom of it.
making her feel not fragile, precisely, but worthy of care. Even, perhaps, a little beautiful.
“Please don’t laugh, Miss Carroll. If you’re laughing, you must be smiling, and I don’t think I can climb back up to see it.”
That love—that her love for Gracewood and his love for his friend—had not died with her.
Oh God, this was a torment. Wanting so terribly to be seen, and terrified of what it might mean if she was.
He wanted to look at her like he wanted to breathe, like she was breath and he was drowning, and every moment of his not looking was a struggle towards the thing he most needed.
Every day I spend with Gracewood, I am trapped between who I am and who I was, always terrified that one will swallow the other.”
And then… Miranda’s letter. And the coach. And the gunshot. And the tower. And Gracewood, Gracewood, Gracewood.
It was as though seeing him again had rewritten her story, made it strange and wonderful and terrifying, spun meaning where there had been none. And it was poison, to both of them.
“Not only for this, for everything you’ve done. For finding me when I most needed to be found. I still don’t know how I came to merit the good fortune of… of you… but I swear by any God who gives a damn I will endeavour to deserve it.”
“I would rather your wrong than anyone else’s right, Miss Carroll.”
All because he looked at her the way she yearned to be looked at. Made her feel charming and clever and beautiful. As worth the attention of a handsome man as any other woman.
He liked her. He thought she was—what was it—quick and kind and bold. He thought she was beautiful. And… he wanted to kiss her.
“I would marry you tomorrow if I thought you would have me.”
“I know madness, and this is not it. A word from you, a glance, and I would lay all I have—all I am, or at the very least what’s left of me—at your feet. And someday, when you are ready to hear me, and to trust me, I shall, and then you can have me, or not, as it pleases you.”
fuck the world. I will change it for you if I have to.”
He… he really did think she was beautiful.
“I am not a joke,” she told him. “And I am not a mistake. I was born Lord Marleigh, but I am Viola Carroll. Do you understand? I am Viola Carroll.”
“You were my closest friend. The best part of my life. The best part of me. You were… my joy, my hope, my faith in better things. All this time, I thought I’d left you. And it was you, who left me.”
We all have the right to be recognised for who we are.” “But the cost—” “Is an infelicity of circumstance.”
He would have jumped from the cliffs of Morgencald for Viola Carroll. Of course he would. He already had.
he had not stopped to wonder how it felt to live in a world that rendered such a telling necessary. The burden she had borne, not just these past few weeks for his benefit, but all her life.
Viola Carroll lived. She had always lived. And it was he who had not recognised her.
Two years of grief suddenly seemed the most irrelevant price to pay for Viola’s return. For her chance to be who she was meant to be. And his, at last, to know her as she was meant to be known.
“That I did not know how to see you,” he told her, “is not your lie.”
“Oh, Viola, I never wanted to kiss my friend.”
if you think I came here for him, you are wrong. I am here for you. I am here for Viola Carroll.”
My soul calls to yours and yours to mine, and that will never change.”
But this one woman—his oldest, dearest friend in the world—left him tongue-tied.
“Damn the world. The world told you that you had to live the life it shaped for you, and you defied it. The world told me that I had to be as my father was, and I defied it, or am trying to. We can make our own world, Viola, with our own rules.”
“There is nothing I will not stoop to when it comes to your happiness.”
“Lovely Viola,” he said, “I possess neither the power nor the wish to deny you.”
“This body can fight. And ride. And sew. And play the pianoforte badly. It is mine. It deserves any carnal acts I want to indulge with it.
“I would say”—he shaped the words close to her mouth, as if each of them was its own kiss, a private prayer—“I love you as a man loves a woman, but we both know that love is not bound by such narrow terms.
“I die for your freckles,” he murmured.
There you were with your wild hair, and your beloved eyes, and I thought, here is a woman I could be obsessed with until the end of my days.
“Use me, Viola. Use me for your pleasure. Share it with me.”
