HE CLASPS her afterward for ages, far longer than the frantic conjoining itself. Violet’s forehead presses his cheek; her legs straddle his lap. She feels his imprint everywhere on her body, stamping out everything else, Walter and Wittenberg, Oxford and Gstaad, the young woman in emerald silk.
Neither speaks. The shared culmination came too rushed and hard, too premature on both sides; they are still dressed, still strangers to each other’s secrets. Violet’s drawers and stockings lie next to them on the battered cloth seat; Lionel’s hands are fisted around the blue gossamer that bunches about her waist and hips. His head lolls back on the seat top, eyes wide to the sky.
Violet touches the damp hair at his temple. “If you ask me if I’m all right, I’ll throttle you.”
He laughs. “And here I was simply assuming you felt the same as I did.”
“Which is?”
“Which is better than I’ve ever felt in my life.”
Violet rests against his chest, brimming with Lionel, too heavy to move, while he strokes her legs with his thumbs. Something rustles in the trees nearby; an owl hoots softly. The fragrant evening air lies still in her lungs. At last she disengages to collapse into the seat. Lionel helps her straighten her dress. He opens the door and goes around to the back and returns with a blanket, which he spreads under the small stand of trees near the pasture fence.
“Come with me,” he says, and lifts her from the seat.
Beneath the trees, Lionel removes her dress and underthings and opens her to the moonlight. “My God,” he whispers, and he kisses her sleek newborn skin in awe, he makes love to her again with a slow reverence that settles into her marrow.
Later, he wraps them both in the blanket and they watch the stars, too alive to sleep. Violet’s hand curls around Lionel’s bare shoulder, so much larger than Walter’s, thick with inelegant muscle. She thinks of Walter’s crumpled body on the floor of the bedroom, defeated at a stroke.
“Tell me about your stepfather,” she says.
He doesn’t answer. Violet detaches herself from his arms and walks naked to the automobile. Lionel’s gaze casts across her skin like a ray of moonlight, following her. His cigarette case sits in the pocket of his discarded jacket; she takes it out and returns to the blanket in the trees, where she feeds him a smoke and lights it herself.
“All right,” he says, when she has tucked herself back in the blanket. “I suppose you’ve a right to know. You should know.”
“Not if you can’t speak of it.”
“Well, I haven’t, have I? Not since I gave evidence.” He breathes out a slow cloud of smoke. “How much do you know?”
“That he was a brute. That he was brutal to your mother, and you shot him.”
“Brutal. Yes. He beat her regularly, when he wasn’t out with some mistress or another. A chap of the old school. I don’t know why she took it; I suppose she figured that having divorced an earl to marry him, she couldn’t go back. She had too much pride. So she stayed. My sister was born a year or two later . . .”
“Your sister?”
“Charlotte. You’ll love her; she’s like me, only eleven years old and far nicer.”
For this casual glimpse of a shared future, Violet pinches him. He pinches her back.
“Anyway, Charlotte was born, and a few weeks later a woman turned up at the door, pregnant, by my stepfather she claimed. Mother went hysterical. The old man was out; I picked the lock on his desk and gave the woman a hundred pounds and sent her off.”
“Good Lord.”
“He came home at one o’clock in the morning. I heard them fighting in their room. I heard him hitting her. I tried putting my face in the pillow, but it didn’t help. The servants had locked themselves in their rooms by then; they always did when the fighting started. I expect they were just as scared of him as we were.”
Lionel pauses to smoke, tipping the ash into the grass beside them. “Then Charlotte started crying—Mother was nursing her herself, you see, so she had a little bassinet in their room. I don’t know if you’ve heard a baby cry, a newborn, but you can’t ignore it. You hear it in your gut.”
Violet burrows herself closer into him, not wanting to hear the rest, desperate to hear the rest. “No, I haven’t. Not in many years.”
“Well, I had to do something, didn’t I? I went to his study and picked the lock on the desk again, the drawer where he kept his revolver. I went back upstairs and opened the door. He was . . . well, he had her over the bed, just like you were this afternoon when I walked in, and she was crying and bloody, and the baby was crying. I told him if he touched her again, I’d kill him.”
“What did he say?”
“He laughed and said he’d like to see me try. And he grabbed my mother’s hair and jerked it back and told her to look at her little boy with his gun—he was very drunk, I could see that, and I didn’t care—and I shot him. I shot him twice.” Lionel grinds out his cigarette and rests his arm in the grass, palm upward. “I didn’t mean to kill him, actually. I was aiming for his shoulders.”
“You did the right thing. The only thing.”