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“My dear, an accomplishment is inventing the hydraulic press or investigating the properties of nitrous oxide. It is not making a picture of a willow tree on cloth.” “Don’t you think that’s rather a matter of perspective?” Viola gazed upon her only mildly blood-spattered willow. “If putting pictures on cloth was the province of men, you may be quite sure it would be hailed as the miracle of the age.”
There was the past and the present and the bright, sharp line she had drawn between them.
After all, what is love but understanding?”
“I cannot meet him as a stranger. But he has never known me as myself.”
She already knew how it felt to stand here, to be insignificant among the centuries.
Morgencald had been built to withstand everything, including change.
Their whole lives they had been there for one another, from the playing fields of Eton and Cambridge to the killing fields of Salamanca and Waterloo. She had left him only once, and only because the vicissitudes of war had torn her from him. She could not abandon him again.
“Too many ghosts,” he told the figure that stood in the doorway. Her mouth quirked upwards, eerily familiar as only phantoms could be, promising recognition and offering only heartbreak.
“Not all are meant for the life they are given. Perhaps there could have been some mercy in what happened—beyond your understanding.” “My understanding? I knew him better than my own soul. He may well have been my soul, for what little I am worth without him.”
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“Perhaps then,” she suggested, “if you cannot disperse the ghosts, you must find a way to live with them.”
“I don’t know how to live. I never did.”
A rogue dimple, untwinned, glimmered at the edge of her mouth.
“As far as I can see, the only person you’ve abandoned is you.”
See me, she wanted to tell him. Show me how to be brave. Let me help you.
It was, she reflected, slightly horrible to be so noticed. And also … wonderful.
Her heart tightened strangely, suspended somewhere between pleasure and grief.
And so she was forced to choose: Be a stranger in whom Gracewood could confide, who might bring him some measure of comfort in his loneliness. Or be the friend he thought dead, who had abandoned him and betrayed him and left him searching through corpses on the fields of Waterloo.
His eyes met hers. Memory had not done their blue justice, nor the warmth that lay beneath their beauty, like some undersea garden. “He was the joy of my life.”
...
Her world was a piece of warmth in the shape of his mouth.
Weakness is hard enough to bear when it isn’t the first thing everyone sees when they look at you.
“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.”
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But it was different to know something and understand it.
Because now she was trapped. Trapped between the lie her past had forced her to live and the lie that had made her future possible. Except it wasn’t a lie. Gracewood was right to mourn her. She had died two years ago on a battlefield in France. She was Viola Carroll. She had always been Viola Carroll. And some part of her had always known it.
Oh God, this was a torment. Wanting so terribly to be seen, and terrified of what it might mean if she was.
Breakfast is the best meal of the day—as it should be, to console one for having to get out of bed.
There was something inestimably cruel about the connectedness of lives. The way one’s own suffering, and the things one did to relieve it, became so entwined with the suffering of others.
“Don’t try to tell me time is a healer. Because time also kills people.”
Bold had been her intent from the beginning. Sensuous had somehow crept in later. A memory of a hand touching hers. The warmth of a mouth against her glove.
She had thought she could live with the guilt. It had been something she had accepted along with the loss of her title and fortune, and a life that would have, in so many ways, been not just easier but about as blessed as a life could be. Except it would also have been a life of permanent imposture, closing around her like an iron maiden as the years passed.
By the time she had fully recovered from her injuries, everyone who had known her already thought her dead.
Pain without honour, loss without pride, regret without end.
Until he understood how a stranger could seem so familiar to him. How something in her could call to a part of him he had long thought dead. How it was possible she could feel like homecoming to a man who had never before had any sense of home.
det kommer göra så ont pls
Was she beautiful? He was sure she must be, but it had been a long time since he had given consideration to such things.
His mind kept catching on odd details: the embroidery on her gloves, the vividness of coral against the pale skin of her throat, the freckles that trailed down her neck.
It made him want to take her apart with the same exquisite carefulness she used to put herself together,
Better, he thought, to be haunted by the living than the dead.
In the right light, to a kind eye, he might even pass for the Duke of Gracewood instead of this cracked vase of a man that everyone could see through.
Because he was lonely. Because she was pretty. Because she could laugh when he had close to forgotten how.
What faculty did she possess, what gift, what magic that could conjure laughter from nothing. From dust and air. From places so full of tears.
kan någon säga detta om mig 🥺
Now he had made her laugh.
Again, he had to think. But, then, Marleigh had made him think too,
“It is clear to me,” she offered finally, “that you are a good man. Even if it is no longer clear to you.”
He was the joy of my life, Gracewood had told her upon the north tower. Which was nothing he could have said when they had not been strangers.
...
He was her truest friend, and she had never seen him until now. She almost pitied the people they had once been, that they could be so dear and know so little of each other.
Despair was like stagnant water.
Whatever Lady Marleigh might have thought, it could never be her place to lead Gracewood back into the world. How could she when in the eyes of the world women like her did not, could not, exist?
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.
She was doing the right thing. She wasn’t doing the right thing. She was. She wasn’t.
Whatever you did, or did not do, whether it was just or the reverse, no matter how necessary it felt, life moved mercilessly forward.
she could not be both cause and cure, a stranger and a friend, his past and his future.
