The broad was beautiful.
She beheld the camera as if it were her dearest friend, and I mean dearest in the bedroom sense. You could not mistake that look. It ricocheted down the generations. It belonged to a different half-lidded category of allurement altogether from the huge gaze of Violet Grant, weightless with innocence, void of corruption. Whoever she was, whatever she was, this Mrs. Jane Johnson de Saint-Honoré was eminently corruptible. She knew the heat of a luxurious bed or two, if you’ll pardon my bard.
And judging by Henry Mortimer’s date of birth, she knew it early.
I spread the papers out before me. One, two, three. Violet, Jane, Henry.
But Henry was only nineteen years old in July 1914. Surely this couldn’t be Violet’s lover, the one she’d murdered her husband for. Not this grave dark-haired boy traveling with his come-hither mumsy. Youth aside, he didn’t look like the kind of kid who inspired a grand passion. Or even a petit passion. He looked like the kind of kid who inspired a grand yawn of ennui. Trust me, I knew the type. They flocked to me in their heat-seeking dozens.
Where had Violet picked them up, and why?
And where was the lover in all this?
I flipped through the leather-bound books that remained on the bed, searching for something else. Anything. A name, a postcard.
The books must have been Violet’s scientific journals. They were filled with drawings and equations, inscrutable alphas and deltas that were decidedly Greek to me. Still. I liked her handwriting, quick and masculine. Rather like mine.
But the last book wasn’t the same. Here the scrawl took a different slant, a thicker brush, smaller letters. The ink was still rich and black. The cover was stamped in gold: 1912. I turned to the back, and a folded piece of paper fell out, scattering dried rose petals over the bedspread. I collected them gently in my hand and unfolded the paper.
proclaimed the engraved monogram at the top, marking it Violet’s, but this was a different handwriting altogether:
Ah! So Violet is a romantic after all
I have kissed each one to last you until I return
Lionel
The pulse in my neck took a flying leap off a vertical gulp.
Lionel. Oh, my bright twinkling stars. Lionel.
Violet’s lover.
He was real. He had held a pen in his hand and written these words. This story handed down through discreet channels, this secret shame of the secretly shameless Schuylers, this tragic Berlin affair: it had happened. I’d found Violet’s husband, and now I knew her lover.
His name was Lionel.
I opened my hands and looked again at the petals. I picked one and held it to my lips.
After half a century, it had lost its scent and its velvet texture, but a little color still held on, a half-remembered dream of scarlet. I have kissed each one to last you until I return. Elvis Aaron Presley, give me strength. Kissed each one. Kissed each petal for you, Violet, and when I say petal, you know whereof I metaphor.
Who could blame Violet? If this Lionel appeared in the room right now before me, I’d have him kissing my roses before you could say voulez-vous.
I returned the petal to my palm and looked adoringly at the pile nestled there. The faded little dears. I imagined them sitting there in Violet’s ecru stationery all these years, beneath her gossamer dress and her underclothes, inside the journal labeled 1912: so many layers to shield them from the brutal half century that followed their secret Lionel-lipped benediction, the modern world of muddy trenches and nuclear bombs, of rock and roll and Norman Mailer and the Duchess of Argyll.
I poured them back into the note and folded it with care. Like eggs in a nest, like my own private little secret with Aunt Violet. I opened the book to slip them safely back inside, and as I did so, a single and rather surprising word jumped out from one of the pages.
Jumped at me not because it was unfamiliar, necessarily, but because it clashed with such contemporary force against the chivalry of Lionel’s rose-petal kisses.
fuck
? ? ?
I PAUSED, notebook in one hand and petals in the other. I set the note on the bed, and then I flipped back through the pages of the book, intensely curious, trying to find the word again. Because. What was it doing there?
Neither word nor book belonged to Violet or Lionel; even to my untrained eyes, the handwriting here was distinct from both the love note and the scientific notebooks. It was a journal of some kind—the dates were printed in a tiny typeface at the top of each page—and when I stopped to read an entry, my breath caught. I slid to the floor, braced my back against the bedpost, and clutched the leather in my hand.