Haunting Violet
Page 5

I opened my mouth to scream.
A gloved hand closed over my chin, fingers digging into my lips. “None of that now.”
And then suddenly I was free, sailing backward without warning.
“Get off her!”
I hit the trunks, bruising my shoulder. A hat box fell to the ground. I pushed my hair out of my eyes just in time to see Colin rearing back to punch the ringleader.
“No!” I leaped forward, grabbing his arm. The momentum of his swing had me sliding forward but at least it stopped his fist from connecting. They glared at each other as the passengers began to trickle around us, returning to their cars. Colin frowned down at me.
“Violet,” he muttered, shaking me loose. “Are you daft?”
“Are you?” I shot back as the crowd pulled us away from them.
“I could’ve taken that tosser,” he said, clearly insulted.
“I know that, but they were rich, or rich enough, anyway. Do you think they would have shrugged it off if one of them had had their nose broken by a manservant from third class?” And no doubt he would have done just that. He was taller than each of them and had broader shoulders, for all that he was only eighteen years old. And he’d survived the alleys of London, whereas the others hadn’t likely ever made it east of Covent Garden.
“Did they hurt you?” His voice was gentle, his blue eyes searching.
“No,” I shook my head. “I’m fine. Thanks to you.”
“What the devil are you doing wandering about alone?” he snapped. “And dressed like a bloomin’ lady, the way you are. You have to be careful now, princess.”
And there was the Colin I knew.
“ ’Tisn’t proper,” he insisted as he led me along the platform like a petulant child. His Irish accent always thickened when he was upset. I jerked my arm out of his grasp.
“Proper?” I echoed, nodding to my mother, who was flirting with no fewer than two earls from our compartment and three gentlemen from the car behind us. As if any impropriety I might muster could even hope to compete with my mother’s expertise.
She still didn’t know I’d discovered her real name: Mary Morgan. Mary Morgan was just another poor girl, scratching out a living, trying to keep her belly full while she yearned for pretty dresses and carriage rides. Celeste Willoughby was a gifted widow, crushed by the tragic death of her husband, leaving her young, beautiful, and with child.
Never mind that Mother had never married.
Or that she sometimes claimed my father was a great lord who had dallied with her when she had been a lady’s maid in Wiltshire. I couldn’t even be sure she’d ever stepped foot out of London. More often than not, she just muttered that I ought to be grateful she’d kept me at all. I’d only gotten that much out of her because she’d had one too many glasses of sherry.
Mother thought drinking sherry was dignified and sophisticated.
And if one glass was what the Beau Monde drank, then surely three glasses must be three times more sophisticated.
She was right, I supposed. Not about the sherry, of course, but that I ought to be grateful. She could have left me at some drafty orphanage or sent me to the workhouses—something she pointed out to me on a weekly basis. I was pretty enough to be useful now; pretty girls, after all, can marry rich no matter what their station. And even better, I was not so beautiful as to draw any attention away from her. My place was comfortably in her shadow.
If there was one thing she craved even more than expensive liqueur, it was to be the toast of polite society, to be invited to lavish dinner parties and weekends in the country. And Mary, with her Cockney accent and her questionable past, could never accomplish such a feat, no matter her physical attributes.
Mrs. Celeste Willoughby, however, could.
Colin sighed. “You’d best go. And I should see how Marjorie’s getting on.”
Mother liked the idea of arriving with a manservant and our own lady’s maid, even though Marjorie was actually just a maid-of-all-work. Mother had rescued Marjorie from a brothel just after we’d moved into our new house.
In my less charitable moments, I wondered if she’d rescued Marjorie and Colin so they would serve her out of loyalty and never ask for proper payment.
Colin acted as butler when necessary, servant boy when heavy things needed lifting, and as a guard for my mother when it would add to her mystique. She liked to tell people that her spirit guides had cautioned her to have her own protector, as her gifts were such a weighty responsibility.
I didn’t believe in spirit guides. Or spirits.
Colin and I exchanged a commiserating roll of the eyes before I made my way to my mother’s side. Her dark hair was coiled under a small black hat edged with a lace veil, carefully pinned back so it wouldn’t obscure her face. To be fair, she was uncommonly beautiful; the trouble was, she knew it.
“Mo—,” I cut myself off. She hated it when I called her Mother in front of handsome men. It made her peevish and sour for hours afterward. I swallowed, trying not to notice the way she stood far too close to a man with prodigious whiskers and a neat mustache.
“Violet, come along,” she said, scolding me. “Where on earth have you been?” The scolding was for everyone else’s benefit. I knew full well she hadn’t yet realized I had gone. “Inside now, and not another word.” Which meant she was afraid I would give her away.
I hadn’t given her away in the last seven years, since that first visit to Mrs. Gordon, nor at any of the other sittings we provided. I didn’t know why she thought I’d choose to do so on some train platform without a Spiritualist for miles. I found my seat as her giggle tinkled, like champagne flutes touching. Even one of the disapproving matrons in our car lifted her head, momentarily enchanted. Her scowl returned, dark as a thundercloud, when she spotted my mother stepping nimbly up the stair, wasp-waisted and beautiful.