The Secret Life of Violet Grant (3 page)

“You mean a century or so ago?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

I set the telephone down on the table and fingered the tarnished brass clasp of my acquisition. As ancient as my mother's virtue, that valise, and just as lost to history: cracked and dusty, bent in all the wrong places. A faint scent of musty leather crept up from its creases. There was no label of any kind.

I don't mean to shock you, but I've never considered myself an especially shy person, now or then. And yet I couldn't quite bring myself to undo that clasp and open the suitcase in the middle of my ramshackle Greenwich Village fifth-floor apartment. There was something odd and sacred about it, something inviolable in all that mustiness. (Quite unlike my mother's virtue, in that respect.)

My hand fell away. I looked back at the telephone. “I think it's time to call Great-aunt Julie.”

•   •   •

“VIOLET
SCHUYLER
, DID YOU SAY?”

“Yes, Aunt Julie. Violet Schuyler. Does she exist? Do you know her?”

“Well, well.” The line went quiet. I imagined her pacing to the limit
of the telephone cord, like a horse on a gilded Park Avenue picket line. I imagined her pristine sixty-two-year-old face, her well-preserved brow making the ultimate sacrifice to this unexpected Saturday-morning conundrum.

“Aunt Julie? Are you there?”

“You're certain the name was Violet? Foreign handwriting can be so atrocious.”

“It's definitely Violet. Doctor Paul concurs.”

“Who's Doctor Paul?”

“We'll get to him later. Let's talk about Violet. Obviously you know the name.”

She exhaled with drama, as if collapsing on the sofa. I heard the scratching of her cigarette lighter. Must be serious, then.

“Yes, I know the name.”

“And?”

A long breath against the mouth of the receiver. “Darling, she was my sister. My older sister, Violet. A scientist. She murdered her husband in Berlin in 1914 and ran off with her lover, and nobody's heard from her since.”

BERLIN

T
he Englishman walks through the door of Violet's life in the middle of an ordinary May afternoon, smelling of leather and outdoors.

She's not expecting him. In that hour, Berlin is crowded with light, incandescent with sunshine and possibility, but Violet has banished brightness within the thick redbrick walls of her basement laboratory. She closes the door and lowers herself into a wooden chair in the center of the room, where she stares without moving at the heavy blackness surrounding her.

In her blindness, Violet's other senses rise up with primeval sharpness. She counts the careful beats of her heart, sixty-two to the minute; she hears the click of footsteps down the linoleum hallway outside her room. The sterile scents of the laboratory fill her nostrils: cleaning solutions and chemicals, paper and pencil lead. Deeper still, she feels the weight of the furniture around her, interrupting the empty space. The chairs, the table, the radioactive apparatus she is about to employ. The door in the corner, from which she can just begin to detect a few thin lines of light stealing past the cracks.

As she sits and waits, as her pupils dilate by tiny fractions of degrees, the stolen light from the doorway finds the walls and the furniture, and
the intricate charcoal shadow of the apparatus atop the table. Violet removes a watch from her pocket and consults the luminous dial. She has been sitting in her shapeless void for ten minutes.

Ten more minutes left.

Violet replaces her watch and resists the urge to rise and check the apparatus. She set it up with her own hands; she has already inspected each detail; she has already performed this experiment countless times. What possible surprise could it hold?

But a trace of unease seems to have stolen into the room with the light from outside the door. It pierces Violet's calm preparation and winds around her chest like the thread behind a needle. She counts her pulse again: sixty-nine beats to the minute.

What an extraordinary anomaly.

She has never experienced this sensation before an experiment. Her nerves are cool and precise; her nerves are the very reason she was first delegated to perform this particular duty. She might go further and say that her nerves had brought her to this point in her life: her work, her unconventional marriage, her existence here in Berlin in this incandescent May of 1914, in a basement laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, waiting for her pupils to dilate to the necessary degree before she can begin an experiment at the frontier of atomic physics.

But she can't deny the existence of this sensation that tightens about her heart. It is real, and it is quantifiable: seven additional beats of her heart in every minute.

A double knock strikes the door.

“Come in,” Violet says.

She closes her eyes as the door opens, because she doesn't want the additional light to interrupt the adjustment of her pupils. Footsteps beat against the linoleum; the door clicks shut. Her husband, probably, come to check on her progress. To stand over her and ensure that she gets nothing wrong. That she misses nothing.

But in the split second before he speaks, Violet knows this intruder
isn't her husband. These footsteps are too heavy, the leathery air that whirls through the door with him too brash. Her senses recognize his strangeness just before his voice confirms it.

“I hope I'm not disturbing you, Mrs. Grant.”

Violet opens her eyes.

“My name is Richardson, Lionel Richardson. Your husband told me you wouldn't mind my observing the experiment.”

Your husband told me.
Walter sent this stranger to her?

Again, that unsettling sensation in her chest. If only she could see him. His black shape outlines the blacker void around him, obstructing the light from the door without a trace. His voice rumbles from the center of a capacious chest, low and respectful, the syllables clipped by precise British scissors.

I hope I'm not disturbing you.

“Not at all,” Violet says crisply. “Are you a colleague of his?”

“No, no. A former student.” He makes some movement in the darkness, indicating the apparatus. “Used to do these sorts of things myself.”

“Then I need not apologize for the darkness. Would you like to sit?” Her heart is beating even faster now, perhaps seventy-five hard strikes a minute. It must be surprise, that's all. She's rarely interrupted in those experiments, which are long and repetitious and generally unworthy of spectators. Her animal brain is simply reacting to the sudden presence of an unknown organism, a possible threat. An unexpected foreign invader who might be anyone or anything, but whose vital and leathery bulk doesn't belong in the quiet darkness of her laboratory.

“Thank you.” A chair scrapes against the linoleum, as if Lionel Richardson can see in the dark. Or perhaps he simply memorized the location of the furniture in the brief flash of light at his entrance. “Are you nearly ready to begin, Mrs. Grant?”

“Almost.” Violet consults her watch again. “Another three minutes.”

Richardson laughs softly. “I remember it well. No twenty minutes ever passed so strangely. Time seems to stretch out, doesn't it? A sort of
black infinity, disconnected from everything else. All sorts of profound thoughts would pass through one's brain. Not that I could ever recall them afterward.”

Yes,
Violet thinks.
That's it exactly.
“You're here for old times' sake, then?”

Another laugh. “Something like that. Dr. Grant told me someone else was performing my old duties this very minute, and I couldn't resist a peek. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

Of course she minds. Lionel Richardson seems to take up half the room, as if he's swallowed up the blackness to leave only his own solid limbs, his broad and rumbling chest. Violet is seized with a burst of annoyance at her husband, who surely should have known better than to send this stranger to swallow up her laboratory while she sits waiting in the darkness, alone and unsuspecting.

Richardson says, “I'd be happy to help you with the counting. I know it's something of an eyestrain.”

“That's not necessary. It takes some practice, as you know.”

“Oh, I remember how. I was the first one, you know, back in ought-nine, when your husband began his experiments. I still see those bloody little exploding lights, sometimes, when I close my eyes.”

Violet laughs. “I know what you mean.”

“Maddening, isn't it? But I see the crafty doctor has found a permanent replacement for me. A far more agreeable one, at any rate.”

This time Violet feels the actual course of acceleration in her chest, the physical sense of quickening. How did one bring one's heart back under proper regulation after a shock? You couldn't simply order it to slow down. You couldn't simply say, in a firm voice, as one spoke to a misbehaving child:
Sixty-two beats is more than sufficient, thank you.
The heart, an organ of instinct rather than reason, had to perceive that there was nothing to fear. The chemical signals of danger, of distress, had to disperse from the blood.

Violet flicks open her watch. “It's time. Are you able to see?”

“Just barely.”

“We can wait a few more minutes, if you like.”

“No, no. I'm not here to interrupt your progress. Carry on.”

Violet rises from her chair and moves to the table in the center of the room, guided more by feel than by sight. She flicks the switch on the lamp, though she doesn't look directly at the feeble low-wattage bulb. It illuminates her notepad and pencil just enough that she can write down her notes.

She casts her eyes over the apparatus: the small box at one end, containing a minute speck of radium; the aperture on the box's side, through which the particles of radiation shoot unseen toward the sheet of gold foil; the glass screen, coated with zinc sulfide; and the eyepiece with its magnifying lenses.

She takes out her watch, settles her right eye on the eyepiece, and squints her left lid shut.

A tiny green-white flash explodes in her vision, a delicate firework of breath-stopping beauty. But Violet's breath is already stopped, already shocked by the unexpected invasion of Lionel Richardson into her laboratory, and the tiny flashes make no impression, other than the scratches of her pencil as she counts them.

Why this oversized reaction? Why this perception of imminent danger?

Has Walter perhaps mentioned Lionel Richardson's name before? Is there some association buried in her subconscious that causes the synapses of her brain to crackle with electricity, to issue these messages of alarm down her neural pathways to the muscles of her heart and lungs? Or maybe it's just that she can't see him, can't inspect his face and clothes and person and confirm that he's speaking the truth, that he's only a man, a visiting former student of her husband's, benignly curious.

Violet takes her eyes from the screen for an instant to check her
watch. Nearly five minutes have passed. At five minutes she will draw a line under her counting marks and start again.

“Can I help you? Keep time for you?” asks the invader.

“It's not necessary.” She looks at her watch. Five minutes. She draws a line.

“Aren't you missing your count, looking back and forth like that?”

“A few, of course.”

“Dr. Grant always had me take a partner to keep time. We switched off to rest our eyes.” He offers this information respectfully, without a trace of the usual scientific arrogance.

“We don't have the staff for that here in Berlin.”

“You have it now.”

Without taking her eye from the eyepiece, Violet grasps the watch in her left hand and holds it out. “Very well. If you insist.”

He gathers the watch in a light brush of his fingers against her palm. “Five-minute intervals?”

“Yes.” Violet shuts her eyes.

“All right. Ready . . .”

A tranquil leather-scented silence warms the air. Violet breathes it deeply inside her, once, twice.

“Go.”

Violet opens her eyes to the glorious flashing blackness, the stars exploding in her own minute universe. Her pencil moves on the paper, counting, counting. Lionel Richardson sits just behind her, unmoving, close enough that she can feel the heat radiating from his body. He holds her watch in his steady palm. Her gold pocket watch, unadorned, almost masculine; the watch her sister Christina gave her four years ago on a smoke-drenched pier on the Hudson River, as the massive transatlantic liner
Olympic
strained against her moorings a few feet away. Her watch: Violet's only parting gift from the disapproving Schuylers.

“Time,” says Lionel Richardson.

Violet draws a line to begin a new count.

“And . . . go.”

He issues the direction with low-pitched assurance, from his invisible post at her left shoulder. He hasn't simply swallowed the blackness, he's become the dark space itself. Even his scent has absorbed into the air. Violet makes her tireless marks on the notepad. She sinks into the world of electric green-white scintillations, the regular strikes of radioactive particles against atomic nuclei, and somewhere in the rhythmic beauty, her heart returns at last to its usual serene pace, her nerves smooth down their ragged edges. Only the pencil, hard and sharp between her thumb and forefinger, links her to the ordinary world.

“Time,” says Richardson, and then: “Would you like me to count this round? Your eyes must be aching.”

Her eyes are aching. Her shoulders ache, too, and the small of her back. She straightens herself. “Yes, thank you.”

Lionel's chair scrapes lightly. His body slides upward in the darkness behind her. A pressure cups her right elbow: his hand, guiding her around her own chair and into his. He places the watch in her palm and settles into the seat before the eyepiece, hunching himself around the apparatus without complaint, for he's much larger than she is.

She lifts the watch and stares at the face. “Ready?”

“A moment.” He adjusts himself, settles his eye back against the lint lining. His profile, lit by the dim bulb next to the notepad, reveals itself at last: firm and regular, the nose a trifle large, the hair short and dark as ink above his white collar. His forehead is high, overhanging the eyepiece, and in the soft yellow light Violet cannot detect a single line. “Ready.”

She drops her gaze back to Christina's watch.

“And . . . go.”