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Violet sprawled on the soft eiderdown, her needlepoint carelessly discarded on the floor beside her bed. She sighed, puffing her cheeks out in an exaggerated fashion before taking her book from the bedside table and opening it with a resigned shrug. William had missed their afternoon tryst, and she had grown bored with her luxurious prison cell. He had been most explicit about her never leaving the room for fear of her coming face-to-face with Mrs. Grafton, an instruction she was more than happy to acquiesce to. Provided, of course, William made regular visits to relieve her tedious existence.
The book failed to hold her attention, and she soon tossed it back on the table. Violet lay on her back staring at the ceiling, her thoughts once again turning to William. It was he who had taught her to read; not that she had been completely illiterate, but he helped her develop, helped her understand the meaning of the words and in so doing, taught her to enjoy reading. She would often lay naked next to him, reading passages from the books he bought for her while he helped her with pronunciation, or explained the meaning of a word she had not encountered before. Violet often thought, back then, he would ask her to marry him. To make a lady of her, why else would he bother to teach her to read, if not to make her pass for a young lady of repute? He never spent his time, or money, with any of the other girls, only her.
Then he met that bitch Bridget, the fucking pretty American whore with all the right connections. It was really obvious he didn’t love Bridget. It was his idea for Violet to leave the security of Madame Beauchamp’s Belgravia house and become his wife’s servant. It would allow them to be close, allow him to continue his peccadillo, his penchant for the abnormal. William had told her the marriage was just business; Bridget was useful to him.
But she heard them ... fornicating! And what about the baby, surely that would change things if she wasn’t careful? What if, faced with the prospect of fatherhood, William mellowed, embracing the respectability that came with having a family?
Violet jumped from the bed and began to pace. Her dress rustled with each forceful stride. Her blood thumped loudly in her ears as a hot flush rose through her body and tiny beads of perspiration formed on her furrowed brow. She curled her fingers into fists. The skin, stretched tight across her knuckles, shone pale as the blood drained from her hands.
Was that why he hadn’t come to visit that afternoon? Was he busy playing the happy father-to-be, the newlywed husband who couldn’t keep his hands of his beautiful young bride? Society was so fickle.
As a single man of means, he could do as he pleased. It was no secret gentlemen longed to be him and the ladies, many of them already married, desired him, and all would turn a blind eye to his philandering. But now he had taken a wife, and she was at risk of becoming a scandalous dalliance, a cheap indiscretion at the heart of the Grafton household. An indiscretion, she knew, he could easily dispense with, especially if the young Mrs. Grafton were to be receptive to the more unusual aspects of his advances in the boudoir.
Violet’s rage consumed her from within. It burned from her heart and radiated throughout her body. She loved William, not for his money or his power, but because they were kindred spirits born into absurdly different worlds. She saw a side to him few others even knew he possessed and in return, he respected her, not just for her body and youthful exuberance, but for her mind. She was clever, astute and deviously cunning and he’d nurtured that. When he ran into difficulty over rights to expand a mine under a neighbouring estate, it was her idea that she should meet the landowner, a local member of Parliament. William still had the letter of entitlement, allowing him to expand his companies’ mining operations, secured in his safe, with the two photographic plates showing the esteemed politician asleep in Violet’s arms.
Violet was a fighter, and she wasn’t ready to give up on her future just yet. She may be only a lowly chambermaid now, but one day she would be Mrs. Grafton, even Lady Grafton. She would find a way of removing the threat posed by that Yankee bitch, and she would start tonight by giving William an evening he wouldn’t forget, even if that meant leaving the cabin and going in search of him. She would start by taking some time to free her mind, then she would find something suitable to wear, and with it, something to disguise her features, should she encounter his loathsome bride. Then, if he still had not visited her, or at least sent word giving details of their next rendezvous, she would dine in the first class saloon as her ticket entitled her to, ensuring she sat close to the Grafton’s table. The thrill of the event, expecting discovery at any moment, and the expression on William’s face, when she revealed herself to him, would all make for an intoxicating, if not arousing, evening.
Drawing a warm bath, Violet took an ornately carved bamboo pipe and a small china pot, brightly decorated with a hand-painted Chinese dragon, from the top drawer of the dresser. She carefully lifted the lid and took out a small tablet of opium, which she burned on a metal plate balanced above the electric lamp. After a few minutes, she reclined on the bed and began inhaling the relaxing, psychotropic vapours through the pipe.
Once she had slipped into a comfortable groove, where the walls rippled and twisted, contorting into strange shapes and spinning spirals, and the portraits spoke to her in strange tongues, she stumbled through to the suite’s compact bathroom. She quickly shed the silk stockings and nightgown she had worn all day in expectation of William’s visit, leaving them forgotten on the floor. Slipping into the water’s welcoming warmth she sank into a tranquil, if bizarre, daydream as the opium eased her troubled mind, while the effects of the bathwater soothed the tension in her muscles.
