She looked around the room. Father’s mahogany desk hulked beneath his portrait. Strange objects littered the surface. Some of them were interesting – like the faded globe that showed the countries of the British Empire in delicate pink – but others gave her the willies. Especially the yellowed ivory tusk mounted in brass, which spanned almost the entire length of the desk. It conjured images of Babar and Celeste, heroes of her favourite childhood books （which, like all the other nursery volumes, had originally been given to Graham） tuskless and bleeding.
It made her feel sad for another reason. As a child, Violet had assumed that Father’s ‘curios’ （as he called them） were signs that he shared her love of the natural world. But it was when Father was telling her and Graham the story of how he came to possess the tusk – on the same hunting trip to Southern Rhodesia that he’d acquired Cecil, skinny and cowering as a puppy – that she realised how wrong she was. Father didn’t care that elephants formed close-knit, matriarchal groups; that they mourned their dead like humans. Nor did he consider that the elephant he had killed – for the mere sake of an ornament on his desk – would have been bewildered by fear and pain at the moment of its death.
For Father, the tusk – and everything else in the Hall like it – was just a trophy. These noble creatures weren’t to be studied or venerated, but conquered.
They would never understand each other.
But there wasn’t time to dwell on such things now, she told herself. After all, she had a mission to accomplish.
She was sure that the desk drawer would be locked but – to her delight – it slid open easily.
Violet rifled through the contents quickly. Father’s leather writing-case, with the Ayres insignia （an osprey, picked out in gold）; an old pocket watch with a broken face; letters from the bank, his pipe … she was just beginning to think that Father hadn’t bothered locking his desk because it held nothing important when she saw the feather.
It was large enough to have come from a crow, Violet thought. Or perhaps a jackdaw?
Carefully, she took it from the drawer. It was black as obsidian, shimmering blue where it caught the light. She saw that it was streaked with white – or rather with queer absences of colour, like an unfinished painting. The feather appeared to have come loose from a soft wad of material. On closer inspection, Violet saw that it was a handkerchief, fashioned from a delicate linen that had been eaten away by moths. There was a monogram in the corner of the handkerchief, the letters E.W. picked out in bottle-green silk.
Violet’s heart fluttered in her chest. E.W.
W for Weyward?
Underneath the layer of dust, Violet detected the faintest whiff of something light and floral coming from the handkerchief. Lavender. It was barely there, the ghost of a scent, but it was enough. The memories instantly flooded her brain, as if she had tapped into a hidden spring. The feeling of warm arms around her, a thick, fragrant curtain of hair tickling her face. The low melody of a lullaby, the sound of a heart beating next to her ear.
The feather, the handkerchief.
They were her mother’s.
And Father had been keeping them in his desk drawer, as if they were something important. Special.
The old fantasy of her parents’ wedding day hovered before her. Father looking almost handsome, in a morning suit of soft grey. Her mother – Violet imagined a woman with a heart-shaped face and a dark river of hair – smiling as she took his hand. Their faces golden with sunshine; petals swirling overhead.
Violet sometimes wondered if Father was capable of loving anything – apart from hunting, and the Empire – but she also knew that he had defied tradition and his dead parents’ wishes to marry her mother. And he had held on to these keepsakes, things that reminded him of her, for all these years. She imagined him sitting at his desk, pressing the handkerchief to his nose the way Violet was doing now.
Could she have misunderstood, that night in the study? Perhaps they can stop you from turning out like her. The very words had seemed to drip with hatred.
But perhaps she’d been wrong, confused somehow? Her heart leaped at the thought. Perhaps he had loved her mother, very much. And then she had died.
Violet began to feel almost sorry for him.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood there with the little bundle in her hand, but after a while she became aware of something strange.
She could hear. Properly, this time. It was as if the heavy curtains, the thick glass of the window and the ancient stone walls had fallen away. She could hear the beat of a sparrow’s wings as it took flight from a sycamore. The throaty yell of a buzzard, calling to its mate as it circled in the sky. A field mouse, chittering as it foraged in the bushes beneath the window.
Violet stared at the items in her hand in wonder. Then, there were three knocks: Graham’s signal. How could Father be back already? Violet looked at her watch: it had just gone ten o’clock. He must have set off earlier than she’d realised.
She wanted to take the feather and the handkerchief with her, but what if Father noticed they were missing? Then he would know she had been inside his study. Perhaps – her heart thudded with the thought, with what she was about to do – he wouldn’t miss the feather. She could just keep it, for a little while, and put it back later. After all, Father had had it all to himself for years and years …
‘Violet?’ Graham hissed through the door. ‘Are you in there? He’s back! Hurry!’
Her blood humming with excitement, Violet put the handkerchief back in the drawer, then shoved the feather into the pocket of her dress. She shut the door of Father’s study quietly and crept back up the stairs.
As a test, Violet crouched on the floor and pulled the hatbox out from underneath her bed.
The inside of the box was filmy with spider silk. Goldie was alive and well, and judging from the dead flies and ants that speckled his lair, possessed of his usual appetite. He reared up on his legs and blinked his eight beady eyes at her, before leaping into the air in a tawny flash. He came to rest on Violet’s shoulder, and she smiled as he nestled against her. Warmth unfurled in her chest, fizzing through her veins.
It was like taking off a blindfold. She hadn’t realised how deadened to the world she had become – now, her nerves seemed to bristle with electricity. Colours looked brighter than they had before – through her window, the outside world flared with sunshine – and the click of Goldie’s pincers was miraculous to her ears.
She was herself again.
Violet smoothed her hair and clothes, checking in the looking glass that she was presentable before going downstairs. She remembered what Father had said after supper the other night. He expected her to be a cheerful, gracious presence around her cousin Frederick. Eugh.
As she walked down the stairs, she heard Father talking loudly in the entrance hall. A boorish laugh echoed through the house. It was so loud that Violet heard the family of blue tits that lived in the roof chirrup in fright. She disliked cousin Frederick already.
When she reached the hall, she saw that the owner of the boorish laugh was a straight-backed young man in a sand-coloured uniform. He smiled when she drew near, revealing white, even teeth. Below his officer’s cap, his eyes were green. Her favourite colour. Father, who had just finished telling some dull story, clapped him on the back. Graham stood awkwardly off to one side, looking as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands.