A Veil of Violet

[contains a topic of death]

A story by Lily M Hull

“Can I help you?” Her voice was low and as smooth as velvet. I hovered over the chair next to her, nearly gaping in awe.

“May I?” I put my hand on the back of the seat, and she gestured to it lazily.

I sat, feeling the red silk of its arm, and gathered my courage before explaining, “I know you. And, of course, you know me.”

“Intriguing.” she hummed, crossing her legs. I tried my best to avert my gaze. “So, the famous question. Who are you?”

I swallowed. “I want you to guess. I know you can probably hardly recognize me, as I’ve changed so much. And, of course, so have you, grown beautiful. Of course, you had beauty before, as you know. But I know you, so if you’d kindly..guess who I am.”

She hummed again, candlelight gleaming in her eyes as if playing out a fiery story. Smoke rose in long twining wisps from the cigar she held interlaced in her two gloved fingers. Draped in the chair in front of me, her long hair pulled up in some elaborate style, she was a regal and enigmatic presence, hardly the girl—the woman—I had known before. She gently blew smoke from her painted red lips, and turned her gaze to me then, intense and bold, with eyeliner slithered over her catlike eyes. She rested her head in one hand, running her eyes over me, as if studying me; contemplating something I had suspicions to be more than just my name.

Then, ever elegantly, she took her purse and rose to her feet. After a fleeting moment of fear that she might leave and I’d never speak to her again, she turned over a gilded timepiece in her hands and pressed it into mine. It only took a moment to realize what it was, the feat of what she’d done. “He would have wanted you to have it.” She tapped her cigar in the ashtray and held out her arm for me to take, as I gaped up at her in awe. “Shall we?”

The streets of Paris were hardly alive at such an hour, a line of streetlights bleeding yellow into the canal beside which we walked. Someone was playing the saxophone softly in the distance accompanied by a woman drawling on in French song, and a lone motorcar whizzed through a puddle, in the otherwise desolate cobblestone street. If she were to push me in the water right now, I thought, I would not stop her, and no one would find me. I looked down at her as she adjusted her fur boa, and the way her long, black evening gown fell over her curves. All of those old feelings I had locked deep within started trickling back, little by little, until the flood of it burst from the seams of the desperate dam I fortified. I was helpless against its power.

“So,” she started, her silky voice torturing my ears. “What brings you to France?”

You.

“Oh, I was lingering in England and then Spain, and then I took a little detour,” I grinned. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

“I couldn’t agree more.” She grimaced, as if the memories were flooding back to her, too. For a moment, as the light struck half of her face, something changed and I was suddenly gazing at the same youthful girl from my past.

“Clara,”

“I no longer go by that name,” she said sternly, though almost as if suddenly drunken with pain. “I am Belladonna Sinclair, Miss Sinclair to you. You will address me as such.”

The evening sky was a waning violet, a stark contrast to the yellow of the streetlights and flood of gold from windows and balconies. Said yellow infiltrated the side of my face farthest from my Belladonna, encompassing the blurry silhouette of my figure. She, though, next to me, was full of violet, as were the shadows of walls and scenery around us. If she were a liquid, flowing and blending in with the evening, soaking through its every crack, then I was a solid, something whole and bright and jagged, suddenly uneven in the presence of our differences.

Of course, I thought to myself. The cold, unforgiving winter air sliced through my lungs and chilled the fingers inside my glove. “Well, Miss Sinclair,” I tipped my top hat to her, “enchante.”

“Enchante,” she breathed.

A more youthful version of myself would have said it was as if nothing had ever come between us, as though everything were back to normalcy, augmented by the smell of her perfume having nearly undone me.

“Let us attempt not to beat around the bush,” she said lazily, maintaining composure, “why have you sought after me, and…how have you done so?”

“I was following the clues you left me,” I replied, “I knew you’d wish for me to catch up eventually. It was in our old plan, remember, all those years ago?” She grimaced. I waved my hand in front of us, showcasing the city, as if it were the city of New York at our fore in its stead. “Remember it? Ourselves, together, full of youthful hope.”

“Naivety,” she corrected. “Youthful naivety.”

“We were full of love. Do not pretend to deceive me, Miss Sinclair, I love you. And I know you loved me.”

She had the gall to laugh. “I'm sorry,” she gasped, “but that is entirely irrelevant now!”

“It is not. That is why I came here, you must see it!” I stopped in my tracks and turned to face her, entwining my fingers with hers, a link between us I never intended to break again. “My love,” I whispered, “we should never have let anyone come between us. What we have is beyond Edmund, beyond anything in this lifetime. My love for you is surviving and undying, I’ll love you in this lifetime and the next. I have come to you in a manifestation of our love long before this, you must have felt it.”

“Richard,” she said, her voice almost like a song. “What came between us… Edmund’s death…put it to rest. We had the funeral of our love, that was what made it and became its completion.” The words she spoke would have caused a bigger reaction from me if they weren’t like a lullaby, if seeing her again so closely did not taste like the sweetest dream I’d had in ten years. “It could’ve never been,” she explained, “and it wasn’t. That has not changed.”

“But Edmund was the reason it couldn’t be! If not for his love, his money coming in a wedge between us, we would have still been together, we would have married!”

“But you have no money!”

“And yet you have run away to Paris, penniless at the time! And look at you now. The things Edmund said about me were borne of spite, I tell you! He was positively green that I had you and he did not. He turned your heart against me, my love.”

“I’m sorry!” She cried. “But I have built a life here! Do not think that I haven’t suffered, in your name or in his, but this is my destiny.”

“You only say that because of the pain from losing him. When will you put yourself first?”

“There is something else, Richard, I swear.”

“Tell me, Belladonna my dear, that you do not love me.” I waited, holding her. Her face held the utmost despair for a moment, as her mask slipped.

With tears in her eyes, she cried, “of course I love you!”

“Then it's settled!” I exclaimed.

“No it is not! There is something I have not yet told you, Richard! If you knew who I truly am, you would not so easily say these things. You would run away in horror; I am not one bit the girl who ran away ten years ago.”

“I know everything about you. You have not changed a bit since I saw you last!”

“You do not know everything about me.” She tore herself from my grip and sat heavily on a nearby park bench, sobbing.

Our breath succeeded in short, white puffs, in the frigid nighttime. I stood before her, under the magnificent ceiling of stars, and it was like anything I’d ever dreamed of. How could I convince her that I knew exactly her favorite ribbon color and material, exactly how many freckles there were on her face, even as she covered them with so much makeup, how many eyelashes she had to flutter at me? How would I convince her that nothing she did, in any lifetime, could displease me? There was one mere path that I could take, in the back of my mind, one solution. The truth.

“I know you killed him,” I whispered.

She shot up from her seat like a bullet, and breathlessly asked, “What?”

“If that is indeed your secret. I know you killed him.”

She tore me away by the arm into a secluded alleyway, putting a hand over my mouth. “Do not say that so loudly.”

Shadows swallowed us almost entirely; the faintest of amber light, a whisper, gleamed in her eyes and upon her jet black hair.

“You ran away to France before anyone found out. You changed everything about yourself to please the mere law, yet you are only hurting inside. As were you ten years ago, as Edmund planted such lies and doubt about me in your mind. I knew for the sake of your own happiness, he had to be out of your life. He betrayed you, my love! And he betrayed me too! I would not have it. That is why I helped you that night.”

“How did you help me?” She cried, still holding on to me. Her eyes were so wide they nearly bulged out.

“I was the one who put the gun on that table. I did it for you. I did it for us.”

“You don’t feel guilty over it?” She asked incredulously. “I’ve spent the last ten years riddled with guilt.”

“I don’t. I did it for you, Clara! So that we could be together.”

She stared at me in disbelief. “How did you find me? How did you know I’d be in that restaurant?”

“Your clues!”

“I didn’t leave any clues!” She hollered. “What clues?”

“You!” I yelled, but she had looked resigned in disbelief, as if she already knew. “You spend every Sunday evening there, with your Sunday pearls still on, and you order a martini and some food after more drinks, but you never let yourself get drunk. Never.” I chuckled. “When you were drunk back at home, you’d talk for hours. Spilled every secret you had.”

“I can’t believe this.” She backed away from me, her eyes full of tears shining as bright as the stars. “You are not the man I knew—thought I knew—whatever the case is!”

“Grown more handsome, I presume. I did it for us, Clara, I did it for us. That is why I went to him that night, and if I didn’t know better, I’d remember I hoped he would turn up at your door to ‘warn you’ one way or another.”

“What night? What have you done?” She cried.

“I only confessed to him my undying love for you. That I'd follow wherever you went, I'd watch over you wherever you were, that there was nowhere you could go to escape me. That really, it was your choice, to be happy with me. Because you’ve told me so many times how you would endure anything, to live another day. Why, to live on is your choice! And that comes with me. And his timepiece!” I took out the golden circle and tossed it in the air, catching it again with the smile of an angel. “And to think I doubted you for a second, my love! A token of your submission,” I walked closer to her, “your obedience.”

She turned to run away, but I grabbed her. “I know anyone would kill a man for a chance at being with me.”