Her plump face creased up in a wide smile. The cook smiled, a large woman who was still relatively young and had great enthusiasm for small pleasures. Is there not a dance tonight in the village?’ Violet asked. She saw the cook notice how dazed Archie and Clara were beginning to look. Violet realised she had to get the servants to leave the house. She turned to Clara whose head was nodding forward. ‘Delicious,’ he replied but she could see his eyelids beginning to droop. While Violet pretended to sip hers, she watched as her husband and his lover finished every last drop from their bowls. Violet wondered if Clara cared that she would never be able to replace Rose in Archie’s heart. She wore a blue velvet dress and her hair was pulled tightly back so that her features looked heavy and insolent rather than seductive. It was as if that now her affair with Violet’s husband was no longer secret, Clara had lost some of her magical power and vigour. Violet had imagined she would look triumphant. When Clara entered the dining room, to Violet’s surprise her youthful surface looked slightly dulled. She carefully poured all the liquid contents into the tureen of spinach soup.Īs husband and wife waited at the table for Clara to come down, Violet could see her husband looking at her admiringly in the candlelight. She went down to the kitchen where the cook was preparing dinner and, while her back was turned, took out the bottle from underneath her sash. Violet took the small bottle of laudanum from her bedroom table and hid it beneath the sash at her waist. It would be the first time Clara would formally dine with them. That evening, Violet dressed for dinner wearing her favourite red satin gown and tied her hair up. For fairy tales had their own morality, their own cruel sense of right and wrong that pierced any mundane surface. Lucid thought or logic would only serve to obfuscate her, confuse the moral rightness of what she had to do. She was acting in a purely intuitive way as if her imaginative reading of ‘The Constant Tin Soldier’ was the only source of truth and reality. She only knew that this story had to be completed. She was no longer sure if what she was about to do was for revenge or self-preservation or both and she hardly cared. No, the detective would not help her, there would be no prince coming to her rescue. It was her word against her husband’s and the doctors’ and even the capable Clara’s. But would he believe her? She had been put in an asylum – twice. She looked again at the bottle in her hand and her heart went cold. Archie was on a trajectory to complete the pattern on the book. She snatched the small brown medicine bottle from her bedside table – it was still at least two-thirds full. ![]() She put the book back on the shelf and ran upstairs to their bedroom.
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