“I knew you’d understand. My own daughter has been sneaking about with that sort of subversive literature! She won’t tell me which of her friends gave it to her. I don’t know who is attempting to lead her astray. It’s not enough that she’s harboring such vile thoughts; it has made her tell me falsehoods.”
“Falsehoods?” Violet said. “Surely she did not tell actual lies.”
“As good as,” Lily said scornfully. “Truths designed to mislead are just as bad as lies.”
Violet licked her lips. “She loves you, you know. She’s not sly by nature. Maybe she felt you’d not be open to having such a discussion.”
“Well, of course she thought that! I’m not open to such conversation. Who would be? Nobody of good family. This talk of higher education may be an unfortunate necessity for women who cannot obtain a respectable offer, but Amanda is not in that situation.”
Violet didn’t say anything.
“You and I,” Lily said, “we understand. The female sphere is not lesser, merely because it is relegated to the weaker sex. We may not be as strong as men, as clever as men, but we have our purpose. To have Amanda shirk that…”
“Purpose,” Violet said ruefully. And then, after a pause, “Remind me what that is again?”
Lily looked at her sister. For a moment, she simply looked, as if only now remembering that Violet had neither children nor husband. As if wondering how she would be able to look her sister in the eye after telling her flat-out that she served no purpose.
“This is why I love you,” Lily said awkwardly. “Because no matter what our outward differences may be, you still understand me. You know what is in my heart, just as I know what’s in yours.”
Violet sat in frozen silence, scarcely able to nod in reply. She’d always known she had to mislead Lily in order for her sister to love her. Not just about her activities or her thoughts; she had to lie about everything.
It had never occurred to her that Lily—warm, sweet, open Lily—was lying to her, too. That Violet wanted her to do it, because even the illusion of love was preferable to the utter lack of it.
“When I find the fiend who gave my daughter that dreadful material,” Lily was saying, “I’ll ruin him. Or her. That sneaking, lying, selfish, false-faced coward.”
She was lying to Lily. She was lying to Sebastian. She was lying to everyone who mattered to her.
She had no idea what she said to end the interview, how she took leave of her sister. It began to drizzle on the way home; she heard the drops against the roof of her carriage. She was met with an umbrella at her home and ushered into the warm interior, but she didn’t belong there either.
She wandered from room to room, her eyes moving from the false versions of La Mode Illustrée that she used to hide her inclinations from prying eyes to the knitting she used to make herself look innocuous.
She’d only begun to knit because her father had banished her from his gardens. Even her knitting was a lie, an illusion of calm industriousness that she used to hide all her internal turmoil.
Everything about her was a lie. And with good reason—the truth was so very ugly.
So ugly that even Violet shrank from it in cowardice.
She changed to a simple gown and slipped out to her greenhouse. The rain had begun to pour down, but she didn’t take an umbrella. The cold, fat drops that pelted her skin seemed a just punishment.
Even her work was a lie. It wasn’t hers; nobody recognized it as such. And doing it was pointless, since nobody would present it any longer. She’d been lying to herself these last weeks.
She looked down.
Soaking seeds, trying to coax them to germinate? That illusion of fertility was the biggest lie of them all.
She was a blacksmith’s puzzle without a solution. Her faults never lay in the beginning of her acquaintances, but at the end—when she drove everyone who cared for her away. It was only a question of how long it took them to ferret out the truth.
Nothing was what she was; nothing was what she gave to those foolish enough to care for her. Nothing was what she deserved, and so nothing had been what she got. It didn’t matter how hard she tried or what she did.
At the end of the day she was a selfish, pointless, lying coward.
She put her hands over her ears, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t make that whisper go away. It wasn’t a voice, after all. It was just her own memory, and Violet’s memory was a harsh, terrible thing.
She couldn’t make it go away. She couldn’t prove herself wrong. Maybe, it was time to demonstrate how right she was. Deep down, she had always known that if anyone knew the truth…
Well. Even Sebastian would know how impossible it was to care for her. Violet took all the feelings that she’d packed away, all the hurts and lost desires, the things she dared not let herself feel.
And she wanted. She wanted to be held so badly that it hurt. She wanted someone to say that she was wrong, that she mattered. She wanted to stop lying.
Outside, thunder rumbled. Violet knocked a row of empty pots to the ground. They broke into useless shards, stinging her skin. Rain was falling in such quantity that she could scarcely see her back-garden wall. She doubted Sebastian would be in his garden, not in this downpour.