Page 73 of Hearts of Locke Hill

“Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, it was.”

“Violet?”

“Yes?”

“You still cheat.” Then he pushed off into a languid sidestroke, a smile on his lips.

The urge to argue her case rose to her lips and died there as well. Those strong arms gliding through the pool water now had just been wrapped around her.

Her. Violet Grace Whittemore.

Theoddone.

She hurried out into the lush afternoon, biting back her own smile.

Y

15 and 19

“I am entirely jealous, Cyril Burke. I am green from head to toe. Whatever Shakespearian reference you can make to describe jealousy, I will own that it fits my person. Call me Cain. Call me Heathcliff. Call me Hera. Call me—”

“I think I understand the depth of your feeling.” Cyril shifted his feet in the meadow grass.

Violet threw her hands up in the air. “How could you? You are aboy.”

Cyril cleared his throat. “Um, man. I’m a man.”

“Boy, man, what is the difference?”

“Er—”

“Either way, it means you get to go to university, and I get to stay here, stifled and … and …tethered! Like the espaliered trees against Kinthwaite’s walls. Have you seen them?” She gestured toward the southern wall of the vast estate behind them, where young pear trees had been pruned and shaped and pinned flat against the stone in elegant symmetry.

Cyril had to admit, the comparison was fitting. He would not mention how the practice made the trees more productive and easier to care for. He did not want his head to come off.

He turned to her earnestly. “Believe me when I say, I wish you could go to university. I do.”

He watched her cross her arms and turn away fromKinthwaite, glaring across the meadow and beyond the trees, likely across the ocean.

“Your father could not countenance sending you to America.” It was more a guess than a statement.

She shook her head. “I shall go anyway. You’ll see. I’ll go and get a degree at Vassar or Wellesley or Radcliffe College. I don’t care in what.”

“I’m sure you’d excel in numerous courses of study.”

“May I confess something horrid to you?”

Cyril winced. “Must you?”

“Sometimes I wish I’d been born poor. Or middling poor.”

“Thatishorrid.”

“I know it. It makes me sound so ungrateful and shallow. As though I don’t have compassion or a single clue of the depth of suffering that is allowed in this world. But had I not been born to this status, I would’ve been sent to school. I could attend a girls’ college. I could study maths and science and engineering and—

“We’ve been able to study those things together.”

Her hands dropped to her sides, fists clenched. “To a point. But now you’re leaving—” Violet’s voice hitched, and she became very still. “I am not finished yet,” she whispered, emotion muting her usual vim. “Father says I’m to learn to be a wife. And wives have no need to learn how to build bridges or run a railroad company or cure a disease …”