The Secret Life of Violet Grant by Beatriz Williams

Author:Beatriz Williams [Williams, Beatriz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Violet

The party in the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré’s splendid flat in Französischestrasse reaches its riotous zenith just after one o’clock in the morning. By then, the butler has long since given up answering the door, and any unfortunate latecomer is forced to wedge his own path from the packed entry hall to the dining room, where the table and chairs have been pushed back and the enormous tiger-striped rug rolled up for dancing, to the cavernous drawing room, where champagne circulates by the bottle and people lean out the windows, trailing smoke.

Through the walls, the music jingles and jingles, a bouncy ragtime tune Violet recognizes by sound but not by name. She stands by a wall in the library, cradling a glass of champagne between her palms and staring up at a wall of books. The flat has been rented at an exorbitant price from a newly rich family of Prussian industrialists, away in Monte Carlo for the duration of the summer, and if the titles of their books are any indication, they would be delighted by the use to which their rooms have been put. Violet has already opened one door to reveal a half-dressed woman straddling a man atop a precarious French chair; when she stole into the library a few moments ago, she surprised another couple on the sofa in the final throes of concourse. (Not her own husband, thank God.) The comtesse’s friends have followed her here to Berlin, and are making the most of her champagne and her ragtime and her plentiful rooms.

Violet waited calmly while the couple straightened their clothes and left the room in fits of giggles, and now she is blessedly alone with the German translations of de Sade and Casanova.

Violet has read de Sade, in the original French. Walter gave her the book soon after they began their affair; she was too reserved, he said, too inhibited, and needed shocking. As if carrying on a clandestine sexual relationship with her decades-older professor, with the renowned Dr. Grant, hadn’t been shocking enough already for a Fifth Avenue debutante from a sedate Knickerbocker family.

Violet reaches out her hand and runs her finger along the spine. Walter is somewhere in that merry cloud of noise, smoking his pungent pipe. The comtesse drew him away at the moment of their arrival, there was someone she must introduce him to, Oh, my dear Mrs. Grant, you don’t mind my borrowing your husband for just a short, short minute?

No, Violet had not minded.

A faint squeak of hinges announces a newcomer, and an instant later Violet hears the heaviness of Lionel Richardson’s voice from the doorway: “I thought I’d find you here.”

He was looking for her. She extinguishes the thought at once and keeps her gaze trained to the shelves before her, her head canted at the same two o’clock angle to read the titles. She presses her fingers into her champagne glass and says, “It wasn’t much of a stretch, was it? Did you expect to find me dancing ragtime?”

He doesn’t reply.

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