“Do you like me?” she asked, still sketching.
“I love you, you little imp, even when I fantasize about buttoning your lips together so you stop asking so many questions.”
Lily giggled. “Would you say we’re almost like a real family?”
Violet nearly choked. “Almost.”
“Me, too. I wish you were my mother. Not my dead mama—she’ll always be my first mother, plus now she’s an angel in heaven. But wouldn’t it be nice if you were my new mama?” Lily shot a concerned look over one shoulder. “Can people have second mamas?”
“I... ” Violet shook her head, speechless. What was she to do with these questions? “I never even had one mama, so I’m no expert on the topic of motherhood.”
Lily’s eyes rounded. “You didn’t? Did she die, like mine? Did you have a papa instead?”
“I never had either one.” Violet’s chest tightened at the reminder of her childhood. “I was a very lonely little girl.”
Lily nodded. “Then you’re just like me. A girl in want of a nice family. That’s why we’d be perfect together.”
Violet hesitated. “You had a mama and youhavea papa. It’s not ideal, but—”
“But we’re not a family,” Lily interrupted. “Not yet, anyway.”
“I don’t think...” Violet took a deep breath. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to switch the topic to the Italian Renaissance after all. “Did you know Michelangelo was an Italian painter in the sixteenth century? Three hundred years ago, Pope Julius II contracted him to paint frescoes—murals done on plaster instead of boards, like we’re doing—in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City.”
Lily’s eyes narrowed at the abrupt change in topic, but she returned her focus to sketching without pressing further. “Where’s Vatican City?”
“Rome.” Violet counted her lucky stars for having successfully transitioned to an alternate topic. One in which there was actually something to say. Lily couldn’t imagine how badly Violet wished the three of them were a family. A wish unlikely to come true. “In Italy.”
“Was Julius the prince of Rome? Was that why he lived in a palace?”
“Not precisely. Have you heard of the Church of England?”
Lily sent a withering glance over her shoulder. “Ilivein anabbey.”
“Fair enough. Well, the Pope is the head of the Catholics, who have their own church. And the capitol, so to speak, is in Rome. The palace is sometimes called the Palace of Sixtus V, who was one of the popes. And in fact, the Sistine Chapel is called ‘sistine’ in honor of Pope Sixtus VI, who came right after him.”
Lily put down her pencil. “There was no sister?”
“I’m afraid not. Just popes.”
“If you married my papa, could I have a sister?”
Violet dropped her face in her hands with a groan.
She had hopedso hardthat she’d been wrong about where this conversation had been going. She’d also foolishly believed talk of a distant city might distract a little girl from the far more real dramas unfolding betwixt the abbey walls. Most of all, she had no idea how to answer Lily honestly without simultaneously crushing the child’s dreams. Her own dreams were more than a little shaken. It had never occurred to her that Alistair might care about her romantic past. Where Violet was from, people only cared about right now. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow.
Come to think of it, she was surprised she hadn’t been evicted from the house at once, out of paternal fear for the governess’s negative influence upon his daughter. He’d been more than disappointed. He looked disgusted. Ather. Well, she couldn’t help her past, but she wasn’t delusional enough to imagine wedding bells in the future. If she even had a future. She’d be fortunate just to avoid bells tolling at her hanging.
“What are you drawing?” she asked, hoping to distract herself from the direction of her thoughts. “May I see?”
To her surprise, Lily started guiltily and lowered her gaze. “You promise you won’t be cross?”
Violet’s eyes narrowed. “Why would I be cross?”
Lily’s careless one-shoulder shrug was more alarming than any words might have been.
Lips pursed, Violet lifted a candle from the table. She cupped the flame with one hand and made her way to Lily’s side, half afraid she’d discover the boards covered in imagery of a flamboyant father-governess matrimony.
Instead, what she saw were flowers. Beautiful flowers. Impossible flowers. Simultaneously picture-perfect and without the slightest attention to perspective. Verisimilitude crossed with the fantastical in bold, sure lines. Daisies towered over roses. An enormous ladybird settled among blades of grass, partially blocking a rectangular stone that reminded Violet of—
