The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  He hauls Henry up the steps on his shoulder and pounds his back. No reaction, no vomiting of water, not even a spasm. Nothing more than a wet sack of flour, Henry Mortimer. He lays the young man out on the grass and checks his breathing, his pulse. Nothing. There is a deep cut on his forehead. How had the fellow managed to land himself in the canal? Swung the suitcase too hard, perhaps, and toppled over the railing?

  Lionel stares for long moments at the shadow of Henry’s body, and a little pinprick of an idea flares in his mind, like the lighting of a cigarette on a cold night.

  No. Surely not.

  But the idea persists, winding together with that seductive word last, that dazzling possibility of a future outside the scope of his present life, that determination to build a Lionel outside the scope of his present self. The knowledge of Violet, waiting for him in her unswerving innocence, behind one of those golden windows set inside the pale and perfect facade of the Hotel Baur au Lac.

  The two of them, primary suspects in the murder of Dr. Walter Grant.

  The opportunity is too perfect, as if dropped by heaven, by a God turned merciful after all. As a consolation for his failure. An act of compassion he can never deserve.

  Lionel lifts Henry’s jacket and finds the inner pocket, telling himself he must not hope, must not expect. His fingers encounter a packet of sodden papers, covered in leather. He pulls them out.

  His heart bounds and rebounds against the wall of his chest. He feels its pulse in his ears.

  He opens the packet, and inside, still damp but legible, protected by the leather binding of the notebook, is a United States passport for one Henry John Mortimer, birthplace Boston, Massachusetts, height six feet, weight a hundred and sixty pounds, hair dark brown, eyes gray.

  Lionel tucks the papers in his inside jacket pocket. He removes the gold college ring from Henry’s left pinkie finger and smashes it down the length of his own. He empties all the remaining pockets and fills the trousers with gravel. He peels away the jacket and shoes, the shirt with its embroidered monogram, anything at all that might identify the body. He drags him as far as he can to the end of the park, where the Schanzengraben canal empties out into the spreading Zurichsee, and with a whispered prayer he releases Henry Mortimer over the side.

  He stares for a moment or two at the shifting water, the flashing glimpse of skin and hair bobbing away in some unknown current.

  • • •

  VIOLET ANSWERS his soft knock at once. He looks at her astonished blue eyes, her round red O of a mouth, her pale and guiltless skin, and he cannot speak.

  “Lionel.”

  He steps inside, shuts the door, and takes her deep. As if he can somehow draw her into his chest and replace his soul with hers.

  “Lionel, what’s happened? You’re all wet! My God! Your face!”

  “Violet. There’s been an accident. We’ve been betrayed.”

  A gasp from the other side of the room. Jane.

  “Is it Henry?” she whispers.

  Lionel lifts his heavy arms from Violet.

  “Oh, God! You’re bleeding! Lionel!”

  He reaches inside his jacket pocket and withdraws Henry’s passport. He fans out the pages, one by one, and lays it on the desk to dry.

  “You’re mistaken,” he says. “I’m not Lionel. Lionel Richardson is dead.”

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, in the afternoon, the captain of a small tourist boat in the middle of the Zurichsee notices a small brown valise half hidden in a coil of rope in the stern. He holds it aloft. “Has anyone lost a piece of baggage?”

  The passengers look at one another and shake their heads.

  The captain shrugs. He will bring it to the town hall at the end of the day. They have a special department there for lost items.

  Violet, 1964

  Violet watches her husband in the mirror as she brushes her hair. He’s checking the windows before bedtime, as he always does: the force of habit and suspicion. It reminds her of the long-ago night in the long-ago German barn, the night they made Charlotte. (Well, she can’t be quite sure, but the memory of that night is so particularly poignant, that connection so especially passionate, and this is what she likes to think.) She smiles at the reflection.

  “I think she’s beautiful. And not just beautiful; she’s got such a spirit about her. I’ll bet you were enthralled.”

  He abandons his windows and joins her before the mirror. With his good left hand, he lifts her hair and kisses her shoulder and replies as every wise husband should. “I am enthralled by you.”

  She taps him with her hairbrush. “You can admit it. I’m not offended. She’s my great-niece, after all. And you’d have to be made of stone not to notice her, which you’re most certainly not.”

  “Only because she reminds me of you.”

  “Oh, she’s much braver than I was.”

  He takes the hairbrush from her hand and tugs her to bed. “Brasher, maybe, but not braver. You are, and have always been, the bravest person I’ve ever known, Violet Mortimer.”

  Violet follows him in and tucks herself into the familiar overhang of her husband’s body. She clasps her fingers along the abrupt end of his right arm, the rounded stump. “Richardson,” she whispers. How can she call him anything but Lionel when they’re lying together in their bed? In all these years, she never could.

  “Mortimer.” He kisses her hair. “Why didn’t you tell her the truth?”

  “Because she’s writing for her magazine. I didn’t want to ask her to hide anything. Anyway, I wasn’t ready.” She doesn’t need to say more; he knows what she means. This close and fragile secret between them, this intricate deception of which they, Lionel and Violet, form the living heart. Not even the children know the truth. This vivacious Vivian, this clever and radiant niece: Violet can’t quite bring herself to share the terror of that night in Zurich with her. Stitching Lionel’s skin together with her own shaking hands. Expecting the knock at the door, the shouts of police. Leaving the next morning, as if everything were quite normal, fearful of every glance at Lionel and his stiff gait, his glassy eyes. The fever that started the next day and lasted for a horrifying week, weakening him to a husk, not far from the hundred and sixty pounds his passport claimed. Jane’s untiring support, her massive strength holding them together. And everything, everything else. Everything, my God. A dozen lifetimes’ worth of everything.

  How could she describe all this to Vivian?

  Violet turns in her husband’s arms. She wants to see him with her own eyes.

  “But you must tell her one day,” says Lionel.

  “One day, I will.”

  • • •

  AND THE FOLLOWING APRIL, when Vivian and Paul return to Paris, this time to marry in a small ceremony in the front salon of the Mortimer Institute, where a dozen or so Mortimer grandchildren dash about unchecked and nobody except the bride’s mother minds that the bride’s belly appears a little rounder than is seemly beneath the empire waist of her knee-length ivory satin dress, Violet pulls her great-niece aside and tells her the truth in hushed and reverent tones.

  Vivian. Sweeping of eyelash, velvet-pink of lip, birdcage of veil. She rolls her joyous eyes beneath the netting. “For God’s sake, Aunt Violet. As if we hadn’t figured that out by Christmas.”

  A gentle trumpet sounds from downstairs. Vivian Senior calls out from the doorway, “Time to go, darling, before that impatient groom of yours gets a better offer.”

  Vivian notices Violet’s astonished expression and laughs. She leans close and encloses Violet’s shoulders with her ivory-gloved hands and whispers, “Darling Violet. Lovely, lucky Violet. I am so very glad you told me today.”

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Readers and interviewers often ask me where I get the ideas for my books, and the answer is simple: everywhere! I’m a literary magpie, grabbing histori
cal nuggets here and characters there. The Secret Life of Violet Grant began with a family story, to which I added various bits and pieces: from a minor link in the chain of events leading up to the First World War, from the spectacular story of the men and women who explored the frontier of atomic physics a hundred years ago, and from a little-known Victorian sex memoir.

  The family story described on the opening page of this book belongs to my husband’s grandfather, the Mr. Henry Elliott caught in Europe with his extraordinary mother when the First World War broke out. The German government really did send him an unsolicited check for their lost luggage forty years later, though naturally my sense of drama required the actual suitcase to be delivered to Manhattan for the purposes of this narrative. Needless to say, neither Henry nor his mother were spies—at least as far as we know—and had nothing whatever to do with either murder or atomic physics.

  I took even further liberties with the historical record in my description of the coterie of individuals who forged our understanding of the interior of the atom, and let me hurry to assure you that Dr. Walter Grant never existed, nor did any such scandal ever touch the legendary Cavendish Institute at Cambridge University, on which I based my fictional Devonshire Institute at Oxford. Credit for Dr. Grant’s breakthrough in determining the existence of a solid atomic nucleus properly belongs to the great Dr. Ernest Rutherford and his team at the Cavendish. Since my own years of studying physics are far behind me, I relied on Brian Cathcart’s The Fly in the Cathedral, a gripping (yes, gripping!) layman’s account of the race to split the atom, both for its insight into the scientific process and for its memorable opening scene in the darkness of the experimental laboratory. As for the unprecedented gathering of scientific genius at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in the years before the war, I can only say that I wish I might have been a fly on the wall of Max Planck’s drawing room during those musical evenings.

  While Lionel Richardson and his race to Zurich are figments of my own imagination, that last-minute Alsatian solution to the July Crisis was, in fact, reported to have been proposed by an unnamed colleague of German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, as Barbara Tuchman discusses in her monumental account of the war’s outbreak, The Guns of August. “But,” as she explains, “to seize it required boldness, and Bethmann . . . was a man, as Theodore Roosevelt said of Taft, ‘who means well feebly.’” Nothing ever came of it, and war was declared on August 1.

  I’m sorry to say that Dr. Walter Grant and his appalling journal were likewise inspired by a real-life counterpart. While researching Victorian bedroom habits, I came across the most staggering of sex memoirs: My Secret Life, by the pseudonymous “Walter,” which spans over forty years of explicit antics by a garrulous and remorseless nineteeth-century sex addict. The read is not for the faint of heart, but as a window into the mind and methods of the compulsive seducer, into the fatal tendency of even the most intelligent and independent women to fall under the spell of his psychological control, and into the everyday details of life in Victorian London, it has few equals.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With every book, my appreciation deepens for the extraordinary group of people who take my raw manuscripts and land them on readers’ shelves, both actual and virtual. My heartfelt thanks are always and forever due to my matchless literary agent, Alexandra Machinist, and her crack team of professionals at Janklow & Nesbit, who open doors and smooth paths and allow me to concentrate on what I do best. I’m also deeply grateful for the support and talent of my editor, Chris Pepe, and all the marvelous people at Putnam Books: Ivan Held, Meaghan Wagner, Katie McKee, Mary Stone, Lydia Hirt, and Kate Stark, to name a few, and to say nothing of the copyeditors, proofreaders, and others who work all the magic behind the scenes. I owe special thanks to the Putnam art department, who gave me such a blindingly gorgeous cover for A Hundred Summers, and who possess an uncanny skill for capturing the heart of a story in a single image.

  I’m fortunate to have the support of so many wonderful people in my writing career. Sydney and Caroline Williams, Christopher Chantrill, Vonnie Chantrill, Renée Chantrill Reffreger, Bill and Caroline Featherston, Edward and Melissa Williams, Chris and Elizabeth Fuller, Deborah Royce, David and Anne Juge, and the entire mom team at Julian Curtiss School: you’re the best. Karen White, Lauren Willig, Mary Bly, Sarah MacLean, Linda Francis Lee, Bee Ridgway, Susanna Kearsley, and my other dear friends from the writing world (you know who you are!): there are no words to describe how much you’ve enriched my life.

  Finally, and most importantly, I thank my husband, Sydney, and our four precious children, for the love and commitment that make everything possible.