A Memory of Violets

by Hazel Gaynor

  Violette Ashton was not the type of woman to dismiss the notion of coincidence as mere folly, and as she opened the pages of Flora’s notebook and began to read the simple account of two little flower girls struggling to survive on the cruel streets of London, she felt an invisible hole being filled, felt that some indefinable thing she’d been missing all her life had finally been found.

  Chapter 42

  Violet House, London

  November 1912

  Heather Farm

  Grasmere

  Westmorland

  Dear Tilly,

  I hope you and your sister are both keeping well, and that Esther is settling into her new life in London. It is very strange to see the cottage so empty—no smoke rising from the chimney or washing hanging on the line. Dr. Jennings and I think about you both often, and say a prayer for you each time we walk by the cottage.

  Winter has taken hold of the mountains, and we struggle to keep ourselves warm. Dr. Jennings suggests the damson gin may help. Do you remember how you used to pick the berries for us? It seems so long ago now.

  As you asked, I returned to your mother’s cottage and emptied the contents of any cupboards and drawers that you didn’t have time to see to yourself. I have passed any clothing to the vicar’s wife for the church Christmas fete. It is strange how quickly the possessions of a person’s life can be removed, don’t you think?

  My reason for writing is to send on a small package that I discovered in the bottom of your mother’s wardrobe. It is marked “For Matilda and Esther Harper.” I don’t know whether it contains anything of interest or importance to you, but I didn’t wish to pry, so I have sent on the entire parcel.

  Please thank Esther for the wonderful buttonhole she sent for me to wear at Christmas Mass. It is beautifully made—from a distance, there would be no way of distinguishing it from a real Christmas rose.

  With all best wishes,

  Annie Jennings

  Tilly sat in the pale winter light of her bedroom. The air around her stilled. She wondered.

  Her hands shaking, she untied the string that bound the nut-brown package, carefully easing open the neatly folded edges.

  A standard-issue felt cap.

  The last thing she’d seen of him, just visible above the hedgerow, as he’d turned the corner at the end of the lane and disappeared from view.

  She lifted it from the parcel, its shape imprinted onto the paper it had sat within for so long. She turned it around in her hands, put it to her nose, breathing in deeply. It smelled of him, of the flaming furnace, pipe smoke, musty straw. She closed her eyes, shutting off all her other senses, inhaling the familiar smells, feeling the hat that had rested on her father’s head, just as his hand had rested, so often, upon hers.

  Opening her eyes, she noticed two envelopes, the paper yellowed and water-marked, the writing smudged. Tilly was written on one, Esther on the other. Her father’s looping, sprawling handwriting. Where had he been when he’d written this? Was it written in haste as he realized death was imminent, or had it been written long before he’d reached the battlefield—ready to be sent back to Grasmere when the inevitable time came?

  For a long while, she sat on the edge of her bed, holding the envelope in her hand. Everything was perfectly still, perfectly silent. She was suspended on an invisible thread, hanging between her past and her future.

  Carefully, she opened the envelope, lifting the paper from inside. It was neatly folded into quarters, so thin and worn that the creases almost tore as she gently unfolded it.

  Rustenburg, South Africa

  September 1901

  My darling Tilly,

  How can I possibly write this letter? How can I ever say good-bye?

  I know you didn’t want me to go to war. I know you don’t understand why I left you to come to this faraway land, to fight against other men. I can only hope that, in time, you will understand, will see things differently.

  I try to picture you reading this letter; I see your beautiful face, the tears in your almond eyes—and I am so sorry, Tilly. I am sorry that I did not come back to you, that I didn’t walk down the lane, didn’t watch you running to me, your hair streaming like flames behind you. That is what I have dreamed during the dark nights here, as the sound of musket fire fills the black sky. I picture you reading these words and I worry that I will never feel you in my arms again, my darling girl. Still, I want you to know that I would not have changed my mind. I would still have come here, to fight for the Queen.

  There are so many things I want to say to you, Tilly—too many. It is easy to tell you that I love you with all my heart, to tell you that you are the most wonderful daughter any father could hope for. Your thirst for adventure, your love of books, your gift as an artist—there are so many things I admire in you—and you have so much still to learn and discover. I know you will have a very bright future.

  But there is something I need to tell you, Tilly, and this is where it becomes so difficult to find the words. I’d hoped that we might sit together, on the breezy top of Catbells, so that I could explain everything while I looked into those eyes of yours. I am sorry that I cannot hold your hand as I tell you this.

  Before I met your mother—Hannah—I was married to another woman. She’d come from London to live with her aunt in Windermere. We met at a village fair, and I loved her instantly. We were married after a long courtship, and she fell pregnant within a year of our wedding day. I could not have been happier. But fate was not kind. The birth was complicated. While the child survived, my beautiful wife was lost. I was heartbroken. Without the child, I do not know how I would have found a reason to keep living. That child—my daughter—was you, Tilly.

  I raised you with the help of my parents—your grandparents—who loved you as much as it is possible to love anyone. You grew into a wonderful, happy child. You were two years old when I meet Hannah Blake. You needed a mother, Tilly, and I needed a wife. Hannah was a wonderful woman, and we were soon married. We made a happy family, but Hannah longed to have a child of her own. For years we struggled. Many babies were lost. And then Esther arrived.

  I know you sensed a distance growing between you, that you felt your mother didn’t love you as she loved Esther. She tried, Tilly, she really did try to love you, and in her own way, she did. She had loved you for many years, but when Esther was born, something changed for her. She’d felt Esther grow within her, she’d felt her kicks and tumbles. There was a connection between them, a thread that bound them together. It broke her heart to know that she couldn’t feel that way about you. I watched the cracks appear, and the storm clouds gather around the three of you, and it saddened me beyond words.

  I know it will be hard for you to hear this, but I only ask that you try to find it in your heart to forgive your mother. She meant no malice. She struggled to understand her emotions, to understand the space which she and you inhabited. Please try to understand, Tilly. Please try to forgive her. I know that if you could, it would allow her to live the rest of her life with some peace. Perhaps we all deserve a second chance? Perhaps we are allowed to make one mistake which can be forgiven?

  I also want you to know what a wonderful woman your real mother was. She was raised as an orphan at a home for blind and crippled children on the south coast. She worked, for a short while, at a place in London where she made flowers in a chapel workroom. She is in the back row of the enclosed photograph, in the center. I have marked her for you, so that you can see her. It is the only photograph I have of her—and I wish for you to have it. The note on the back was written by her.

  Before she became Lily Harper, your mother’s name was Lily Brennan. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen and you look just like her, Tilly. You are your mother’s daughter. The enclosed silver locket also belonged to her. The picture inside is of me as a younger man. She wore it every day, to keep me close to her heart, she said. I hope that you will wear it now to keep me—and her—close to your heart.

&nbs
p; Lily loved all flowers, but violets were her favorite. She loved their sweet scent and had chosen Violet for a middle name, if her baby was a girl. I kept her wish in naming you Matilda Violet.

  Be happy, Tilly. Wherever life leads you, be happy. Be the strong, independent girl I remember and know that you are much loved, if even from afar.

  I will be waiting for you—somewhere in the future.

  Daddy

  x

  Tilly carefully folded the pages of her father’s letter and picked up the picture postcard. An arrow pointed to one of the girls. Her mother, Lily Brennan, Flora’s closest friend. She was pretty. It struck Tilly how much she looked like her.

  Turning the card over, she read the words on the back: Me and Florrie after we were making the violets. Florrie is on my left.

  Her mother’s writing. Her mother. She looked at the picture again—Lily and Florrie, side by side, their distant gaze reaching out through the years, whispering to her.

  Overwhelmed with emotion, she clutched the silver locket in her hand and lay down on the bed, curling into a tight ball, hugging her knees to her chest, her heart bursting with grief for her father, for her real mother, for Hannah, for Esther—for everything. “Daddy. Daddy,” she whispered, clutching his letter as the tears fell—tears of relief, of regret, of hope—tumbling down her cheeks.

  HOURS PASSED. Her tears eventually subsided. Drained of energy, she fell into a deep sleep. It was dark when she awoke to the sound of the girls returning from the factory.

  She sat up, rubbing her eyes, gritty and swollen from her tears. She looked at the picture postcard again; studied the face of her young mother.

  “I look like you,” she said, smiling as she traced her fingers over the edge of her mother’s face. “I look exactly like you.”

  Almond eyes, narrow chin, the arch in her eyebrows—there was no mistaking the resemblance.

  She read the label beneath the photograph: SHAW’S HOMES FOR WATERCRESS AND FLOWER GIRLS, 1883.

  Turning it over, she read her mother’s words again. “Me and Florrie after we were making the violets. Florrie is on my left.”

  She remembered Queenie’s words: “Florrie came up from the orphanage at Clacton with Lily Brennan . . . Inseparable those two were—Irish, you see, always stick together, don’t they. They slept in beds next to each other, in that little room at the top of the house . . . Became great friends.”

  Tilly looked around the room. She was sleeping in the same room her own mother had slept in as a young woman.

  Her skin prickled as a light breeze sent a shiver through her. The familiar perfume of violets filled the room—powdery, sweet, and aqueous—and from some distant place, she heard a gasp, a sigh, as if someone was weeping far, far away.

  Chapter 43

  Nightingale House, London

  December 1912

  It was the roses Violette noticed first. Long before the muffled voices in the hallway, the soft footsteps ascending the stairs, or the gentle knock on her bedroom door, it was the familiar scent of damask rose that announced her mother’s arrival.

  Her heart raced. This wasn’t her mother’s usual flamboyant Christmas visit, arriving with a trunk load of presents for the girls, producing squeals of delight as they felt the shapes of the packages, guessing what might be inside. This wasn’t about singing favorite carols around the piano.

  This visit was different.

  Everything was different.

  Violette had read Flora Flynn’s notebook, and like a winter morning mist clearing from the windowpanes, it had all become so clear to her. Like those first days after her eye surgery, when blurred colors and shapes had gradually become more distinguishable, the truth of her life had emerged from the pages of Flora’s book. She’d chased her memories back over the years: the birth of her children, the move to London, her home in Harrogate, her marriage, meeting Richard, her schooling, her emerging eyesight, distant memories of the wind in the eaves and a nightingale singing outside her window, her imaginary friend, the cries of the street sellers, her hand in someone else’s, her bare feet numbed by the cold, a song she remembered, “I meet a maid in the greenwood shade, At the dawning of the day.”

  SETTING DOWN THE NOTEBOOK, which she’d clutched in her hands all morning, she turned to face the door. Her mother’s footsteps were assured, purposeful, yet gentle. She carried herself with such elegance. “You can take the lady out of Paris,” she’d once said, “but you can never take Paris out of the lady.”

  Who was this woman she called Mother?

  It all made sense to Violette now—the air of anxiety she’d sensed about her mother when they’d spent time together in London earlier that year. She’d arrived on the pretext of visiting her eldest granddaughter for her birthday, but often, when the two women had sat together, the conversation felt forced. “Is there something you want to tell me, Mother?” Violette had asked on more than one occasion. “You seem distracted. Is everything all right?” But despite the awkward pauses, her mother had dismissed the notion, busying herself with trips to the zoo and the theater. But Violette had sensed something lingering in the air between them. She’d heard secrets whispered on the wind, heard stories from the nightingale that sang at her window.

  She jumped at the sound of three brisk knocks on the door.

  “It’s open. Come in.” There was an edge to her voice.

  The door creaked as her mother pushed it open, the scent of roses filling the room as she entered.

  “Violette, darling! How wonderful it is to be back.”

  They embraced. Violette absorbed the sensation of her mother’s arms around her, the feel of her hair as it brushed against her cheek—just as it had when she was a child. How she’d loved her mother’s warm embrace. How safe it had made her feel. She savored the familiar scent of her perfume, the scent of her childhood.

  And yet, a hesitancy passed between them, its presence in the room as real as a living thing.

  Violette pulled away, turning her head to the window, wondering how she could ever ask the questions that burned within her, how she would find the courage to demand the truth.

  “New coat, Mother?” she asked, trying to distract herself from the thoughts that troubled her mind.

  Marguerite laughed. “Yes! Wonderful, isn’t it?” She twirled once, catching her reflection in the mirror. “Do you like the color? Peacock blue.”

  “Yes. It suits you. Very much.”

  Pleasantries, niceties, insignificant chatter.

  “I know I shouldn’t have, but I saw it in Whiteleys window. Well, you know me, I couldn’t resist. Not that I have much need for it in here,” she added, undoing the buttons and removing her gloves before commencing an exaggerated fanning of her face with them. “My goodness, it’s so stuffy in here, Violette. Get some fresh air into the room. You’ll faint in this heat.”

  Violette settled herself at the window seat, waiting patiently for her mother to fiddle with the awkward lock on the window. Eventually, it relented, allowing a welcome breath of cold air to enter the room. Perhaps the maid had banked the fire a little too high that morning.

  “Much better.” Marguerite stood at the window, allowing the chill air to wash over her. “I think it’s being cooped up on that dreadful train for so long. I suppose I should be thankful that we made good time—the most annoying woman sat next to me. She spent the entire journey telling me about her ailments. I’m sure I would have been in danger of contracting something myself if I’d listened to her a moment longer.”

  Violette observed her mother as she spoke, watched her as she walked around the bedroom, picking things up and replacing them—perfume bottles, pots of face cream, brushes and combs—adjusting the curtains, rearranging the pillows on the eiderdown. Her mother. Marguerite Ingram, the beautiful girl from Paris, the wife of a wealthy factory owner: sugar, cotton—everything he turned his hand to, a success. Her mother—and yet, not her mother.

  Violette watched her as she walked
around the room without a care in the world, and she felt herself drowning, as if years of pretense and fabrication were washing over her, smothering her beneath a wave of confusion and anger.

  “Oh, do be quiet, Mother!”

  Marguerite jumped, startled by the sharpness of her daughter’s words. “Violette! Whatever is the—”

  “Please. Just stop chattering on about nonsense. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”

  The words caught in her throat, emotion overwhelming her. She gripped the edge of the window seat, her fingernails digging into the plush fabric to steady herself against the rocking and reeling of these strange, uncharted waters she was sailing.

  “But, Violette. Darling, I don’t—”

  Violette walked to the drawer of her dressing table, removing the lace handkerchief and the pressed violets.

  “These,” she said, holding her hands out. “These belonged to me.”

  She glared at her mother, watching her for any sign, a flicker of remorse, a look of regret as she took them from her daughter. She saw none.

  “Yes, darling.” Marguerite crossed the room, perching on the edge of the bed. Her face paled. “Yes. Of course they are yours. Remember, I gave them to you when I visited in the spring—little trinkets from your childhood.”

  “My childhood! My childhood?” Violette walked back to the window seat, resting her cheek against the cool glass.

  “Darling, is everything all right? Is anything the matter?”

  “And at what part of my childhood did I have these trinkets, Mother? As a baby?” She could almost feel the words as they tumbled from her lips, they were so important, so laden with emotion.

  Marguerite sat perfectly still, staring at the violets and the handkerchief. They were such delicate, fragile things, and yet so appallingly substantial.