She touched the inky artifice of the wheel. A tattoo of a ship’s wheel, the circle with the spokes of the wheel dissecting it. On the cover was a fine ink drawing: it clearly was a tattoo.
To her surprise the butler let her in without question and again showed her up to the drawing room to wait. SHE RETURNED TO London and to Lavinia’s grand house in Eaton Square, with the black ornate balconies and the walls white as icing on a wedding cake. They had shone a light on them and seized them for themselves. They had taken all her secrets away from her in the asylum. Later, she hid the piece of jewellery in her jewellery box. The pendant was cold and hard, and real to the touch of her skin.
She pulled the pendant out from the weed. Caught up in the weed was a glittering piece of metal, a silver pendant in the shape of the letter B. She opened up her hand and there on her palm lay the weed, thin and delicate and frail. Her legs had grown purple, but she was holding the weed tightly in her hand, slimy and cold, like a small slithering fish. Unable to bear the cold any longer, she staggered out of the water and collapsed onto the bank. She carefully plucked the weed, tugging it out of the pebbles. She bent down into the cold water, her hand feeling as if it had been turned to stone. Something had been caught on one of them, a thread of silver light. Some delicate strands of green weeds, waving in the currents. There were just some golden pebbles and a few jagged black rocks. If she could look directly down, using her body to shield the water from the sun, she could see the bottom clearly. The reflection of the sunlight on the water still concealed some of the bottom of the stream. It was freezing, like a wild animal biting into her flesh. She took off her shoes and socks and entered the water.
There seemed to be no disturbance to the pebbles or indentation in the sandy bottom. As she approached the stream it looked exactly the same as it had when she had shown Archie the scene earlier. It had been a delusion, wasn’t that what the doctor had said? She walked through the wood, the trees gently brushing her cheeks. Without seeming to make a decision, she had turned and was walking back out towards the fields and forest. Violet suddenly felt, I’m not ready to see her, not up to pretending to be normal. She looked like a visitation, a hard angel, cut out from stained glass. She reached the house, where she saw Clara at the kitchen window, her hair glinting in the sun. ‘Best wishes to Archie.’ As if in some way this comment undermined the sanctity of her world, suggesting that she was actually in someone else’s world.Īs she walked back through the village, she wondered about returning to the field. Those were the words that rang in her head as she left the doctor’s.
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