The Secret Life of Violet Grant by Beatriz Williams Read Free Book Online

important.”
    I took his hand and let him pull me upward. “If you must. Where do we go?”
    He stood close as a whisker, solid as a deep-blue tree. “How about the library?”
    â€œThe library.”
    â€œYes, the library.” Doctor Paul reached around my back, untied my frilly apron, and lifted it over my head. “We’re going to find out all about this aunt of yours.”

Violet
    Y
our husband told me you wouldn’t mind,
Lionel Richardson said. For the life of her, Violet can’t imagine why. In the course of their two and a half years together, Walter has only allowed one other man inside the darkened laboratory with her: namely, himself.
    But then, like most illicit affairs, theirs was unequal from the beginning. Violet’s youth, her loneliness, her awe-swollen gratitude were no match for Dr. Grant’s experience. At nineteen—at any age—innocence doesn’t know its own power. To know that power, after all, is to lose it.
    In Violet’s downcast moments—now, for example, as she locks the laboratory door and trudges in the direction of Lionel Richardson’s laughter down the hall—she forces herself to recall the instant of their meeting, the instant in which everything changed. When the chains of her attachment were first forged.
    She climbs the stairs to her husband’s office, from which Richardson’s laughter originates, but she sees instead the familiar Oxford room of 1911, richly appointed, and the angular man standing in the doorway before it: the legendary Dr. Walter Grant made manifestly physical. She remembers how every aspect exuded masculine eminence, from his thin-lipped mouth surrounded by its salty trim beard to his graying hair gleaming with pomade under the masterful glow of a multitude of electric lamps.He wasn’t a large man, but neither was he small. He was built like a whip, slender and hard, and the expert tailoring of his clothes to his body gave him an additional substance that, in Violet’s eyes, he didn’t require.
    At the moment of that first meeting, Violet was somewhat out of breath. She had grown agitated, speaking to his private secretary, whose job it was to protect the great man from unforeseen attacks like hers; she was also hot beneath her drab brown clothes, because it was the end of August and the heat lounged about the yellowed university stones, an old beast exhausted by the long summer and refusing to be moved. Damp with perspiration, her chest moving rapidly, Violet pushed back her loosened hair with firm fingers and announced herself.
    Clearly, Dr. Grant was annoyed at the disturbance. He turned his grimace to the secretary.
    â€œI’m dreadfully sorry, sir. The young lady will simply not be moved. Shall I call someone?” The secretary’s clipped gray voice betrayed not the slightest sense of Violet as a fellow female, as a fellow human being, as anything other than an obstacle to be removed from Dr. Grant’s eminent path.
    Violet was used to this. She was used to the look of aggravation on Dr. Grant’s face. She was used to rooms like this, the smell of wooden furniture and ancient air, the acrid hint of chemicals in some distant laboratory, the
clickety-click
of someone’s typewriter interrupting the scholarly quiet. She tilted up her chin and held out her leather portfolio of papers. “With all respect, Dr. Grant, I will not leave until I learn why my application to your institute has once more been sent back, without any sign of its having been read and considered.”
    â€œApplication to this institute,
”
said the secretary scathingly. “The cheek of these American girls. I shall ring for help at once, Dr. Grant.” She lifted the receiver of a dusty black telephone box.
    But Dr. Grant held up his hand. He looked at Violet, really
looked
, and his eyes were so genuinely and intensely blue that Violet felt a leap of childlike hope inside