“I didn’t mean it as an insult.”
She looked up. “No? Then maybe you should listen to your words. ‘Oh, that Violet—never showing any feelings! It’s like she keeps her true self hidden from the entire world.’ Why would that be, do you think?” One hand gravitated to her hip, right where he’d wanted to slide his hand. “You, of all people, should understand. I keep everything hidden because there’s nothing about my true self that anyone likes. I’m not difficult, Sebastian. I’m the easiest person around. I don’t belong, and I spend all my time pretending I do. Sometimes I get weary of it, and that makes me angry.”
Violet sighed, set aside her pen, and turned back to her flower bed. She reached for another gauze-wrapped needle, and then shook her head and turned to him.
“It’s not fair to the people around me when I lose my temper.” Her jaw squared. “I say awful things when I’m angry. But it’s not fair to me, either, that I was made this way. You think it’s hard spending time with me? Imagine being a blacksmith puzzle made by a madman. You’re unable to perform the basic functions of your existence. You never bring anyone joy. You learn not to hope when someone picks you up. Because no matter how high their anticipation runs upon starting, you know what will happen in the end: They’ll throw you away in disgust.”
Disgust. Was that what she thought he’d expressed? “Violet,” he said softly. “I wasn’t—I’m not disgusted by you. That’s the last thing I am.”
She stared straight ahead. “It comes out to the same thing, whatever name you give it.” Her voice was as stiff as her arms at her side. “Don’t worry about your conscience, Sebastian. Everyone tires of me eventually. Lay me aside and walk away.”
He let out a frustrated sigh. “You’re being ridiculous. You’re acting as if there’s nothing to you but your work—as if once I walk away from that, I stop caring for you at all. It doesn’t work like that.”
Her lip twitched in dismay at his words—right on caring for you—and Sebastian sighed and pressed his fingers to his forehead. “There is more to you than your work.”
She turned away. “Do you remember when you first submitted my paper?”
It had been before her husband passed away. She’d written up her work and asked Sebastian for advice—which he’d been unable to deliver at first, as he’d never read a scientific paper, either. They’d studied a number of them together, Violet writing and rewriting until they were both satisfied.
The first time she submitted it to a journal, it had been sent back to her with a note that perhaps a ladies’ journal on home gardening might prefer her modest contribution. The next publication hadn’t bothered to explain its rejection, nor the one after that nor the one after that.
“That’s bollocks,” Sebastian had told her when that last slip had come in the mail. “They aren’t even reading it.”
Violet had been sick at the time. She had never told him what ailed her. He’d only known that she’d become weaker and weaker. Her skin had been like wax, and she’d been given to fainting spells.
She’d refused to talk about that, too.
She’d simply sat in her chair, unable to even stand, and refused to look in his direction. “It must not be very good. Likely they have all sorts of excellent submissions, and this didn’t make the cut.”
“If I were the one submitting—a man with a university education—they’d give it a second look,” Sebastian had said in a fury. “And a third one too, I’d wager.”
So she’d put his name on the paper. “Go ahead and try,” she’d told him.
Sebastian had ridden into Cambridge the next day and handed it to a former professor for advice. The man had read it in stunned silence and then looked at Sebastian. “Malheur,” he’d said in a strangled voice, “this is brilliant.”
Several months later, it had been accepted for publication and Sebastian’s first lecture had been scheduled.
At that lecture, Violet had smiled raptly for the first time in nine months. That smile of hers—the color that had come temporarily to her cheeks—was the only reason he’d agreed to keep doing it.
But she wasn’t smiling any more. She was glaring at the dirt in front of her, and Sebastian wished he could make this right again.
“Just as well that Violet Waterfield never got her start publishing scientific works,” Violet said. “I’d be a pariah. A nothing. My sister would hate me.” She picked up another needle, but didn’t use it. She brandished it instead as if it were a sword. “My mother already does. Nobody would have paid the least attention to my work. So it’s just as well. This way, at least I’m someone, even if nobody knows who I am.”