The Countess Conspiracy

“You look at me,” Violet said, “and your eye shows you a pink snapdragon. It’s a lie. There are no pink snapdragons. There is no softness in me to give. Not to you, not to anyone. No matter what you do, you’ll never find any warmth in me. It simply isn’t there. On occasion, I tell the truth, and on occasion, the truth is comforting. But don’t break your heart searching for something that isn’t there.”

Sebastian felt the tug of painful want. It was a bittersweet sensation, as if he were a soldier come home on temporary leave. He might stay by her side for a week or two and love every moment. He might envy the embroidered cushions of the sofa because they caressed her form.

He harbored a stray thought or three thousand about pulling her to him, of kissing her until the bitter taste of truth fled before them. And, in truth, he’d thought—over and over—that she needed time. That if he waited, it would some day work out.

All soldiers dreamed of armistice, after all.

But Violet never let him hold her, and peace was never coming. It was a bitter thought, almost too bitter to bear. It didn’t matter how much he yearned for her.

“I realized years ago,” Sebastian said, “that having you as a friend wasn’t second prize. It wasn’t something to chafe against. It was an honor.”

She looked up warily.

“My heart isn’t breaking because I can’t have you.”

“Don’t say that. I saw the way you were looking at me just now. We can quibble over the precise words to use. But don’t tell me I haven’t hurt you.”

“My heart’s not breaking because I can’t have you,” he insisted. “It’s breaking because you think you’re a hard thing, because you imagine that what I see in you is an illusion. It isn’t.”

She looked over at him. Her eyes widened and she planted her feet firmly on the floor, straightening as if preparing to flee.

But he didn’t let himself move toward her.

She crossed her arms in front of her. “I’m not the sort of woman that men fall in love with,” Violet said flatly. “I’m not warm or welcoming. I’m harsh and cold.” Her eyes flashed. “I have no interest in sexual intercourse. It’s true, perhaps, that some man might take leave of his senses and imagine that he feels something like love for me, but I have every reason to believe that it would be a temporary departure from reality. Even the most imaginative, most sincere of men would eventually realize the truth. I’m scarcely a woman, Sebastian. Make a list of female qualities and I have none of them.”

It was like coming home to a place that he held dear and finding that the woods had burnt to the ground and the house was in ruins. He stared at her aghast.

She looked into his eyes. Her expression didn’t change, didn’t flicker one bit.

“I have it on the best of authority,” she pronounced, “that I’m worthless as a woman.” She came to her feet then, turned, and wrestled the door open.

Night had fallen; it was dark beyond.

“Wait.” He followed after her. He reached for her hand and then checked himself, realizing that would only make things worse. “Wait,” he said. “Violet, listen to me. Your husband was an ass.”

She stopped in her tracks. She didn’t turn back to him.

“I mean it,” Sebastian said. “I have no idea what he was doing to you, but I watched you while it happened. When you wrote your paper—that first paper on snapdragons, the one that I sent in for you—I was afraid you’d not live out the year.”

Her chin rose. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. You were ill for weeks that year. Did he hit you? Were you hiding bruises? Did he tell you that you were worthless? That you were nothing?”

Her chest rose. “I don’t want to talk about my husband.”

“Even after you grew well enough to leave your bed, you scarcely had the capacity to walk in the garden with me. We had to stop and sit every ten yards. I hoped you could recover from whatever it was. But two months later, you were too ill to see me again. I thought you were dying, Violet.”

She shook her head. “Obviously, you were wrong. I’m still here.”

“You’re still here. Six months after we wrote that first paper, your husband fell down the stairs in a drunken fit and snapped his neck. And suddenly, after years of watching you struggle with ill health, I watched you get better—no relapses, no sudden illnesses. So don’t repeat your husband’s words to me, Violet. I can guess at the truth.”

“You can’t.” Her voice choked. “You have no idea, Sebastian.”

“Whatever it was that your husband told you, whatever it was that he did to you—he was wrong. He was horribly wrong.”

Violet looked at him. “You’re telling yourself lies. You’re imagining that my husband was at fault, that he stripped me of warmth. You’re wrong. It was the other way around. My husband told me I was worthless because he discovered I didn’t have any warmth to give. He said I was selfish, and I’m not sure he was wrong. Because when he died, I couldn’t even make myself feel sorry for it.”

“Violet,” Sebastian said, “you took in a baby owl with a broken wing for three months, ignored the fact that it shredded the antique furniture in the room where you kept it, and when your maids were too squeamish to capture mice, you did it yourself.”

Her eyes flashed. “That was curiosity.”

“I heard you cooing to it,” Sebastian said. “And shall we talk about Herman, the cat you found caught in a steel trap?”

Violet pretended not to hear this. “My husband never hit me,” she said. “Not once. And if you think he was the only one who told me how little I mattered…” She drew a breath. “I was my father’s good luck talisman. Lily always used to tell everyone that Father loved us too much to kill himself. But I have always known better. I have never been enough.”

God, more than anything, he wished it would help to take her in his arms. To squeeze her so tightly that all her fears fled. But this was Violet. She wouldn’t welcome his embrace. She wouldn’t want to admit that she had anything so messy as emotions, let alone that she was besieged by them. She stared out into the darkness, her eyes clear, her face unshadowed.

“So forget about me,” Violet said. “Stop wanting to know. Everyone who understands me eventually becomes disgusted by who I am.”