She was surprised he’d never noticed. Or had he? She wasn’t sure.
She’d been so in love.
And then there was George…
…George, with whom she’d always thought she had been in love, until she’d truly fallen in love.
With his brother.
George, to whom she’d written immediately to call off the engagement as soon as she realised the true state of her emotions.
A letter he’d never received.
Tears dropped into the milky bathwater.
Confound it. Now she was crying.
And the bathwater was lukewarm.
She stepped out of the bath, pulled her nightgown over her head, rang the bell and told the maid to take it away.
“Pull yourself together, Lola.” She had to put them out of her mind. George. Sebastian. Nana. It all happened so long ago. She was no longer the awkward, gauche, lovelorn girl, and he was no longer the reserved, grave young man who had looked at her, just once, as though she were something precious in his eyes.
They had both matured, and that was good.
“Turn the page,” Viola growled to herself.
She’d come to London with a mission, and that was to finish writing her book.
Peregrine, curse the man, had forcibly reminded her of her duty.
She had no choice; shemustwrite.
But how?
She sat in the middle of the bed, her favourite place to write, and chewed on her pencil.
What was the problem?
The problem was her brain.
It kept wanting to go tohim. She could no longer think of anything else. Because of that, she could not write.
She’d read in a medical treatise somewhere that was all about galvanising corpses, that possibly one could galvanise a dead brain and stimulate it, get it to think again.
That would be one method to try out, she thought. But she lacked an electrical current that she could apply to her brain. A look out the window told her that an electric storm was unlikely to happen that night as well.
A second theory she’d read was that the brain ceased functioning when it lacked blood. Ergo, she could try doing a headstand to get it to fill with blood. This would reignite her creativity.
That sounded like a more reasonable thing to try out.
Since she lacked men’s trousers (she really ought to ask Peregrine to lend her a pair the next time she saw him), she tied her nightgown in makeshift pants around her legs. Then, with one, two, three attempts, she made the motion of doing a headstand on the mattress, with her legs propped up against the headboard of the bed.
It was the most interesting exercise.
It seemed to work. She felt the blood rush to her head as her cheeks heated. Her breath went faster, and the perspective of the room was decidedly different.
“Inspiration, inspiration come,” she muttered, like a magical incantation. She had to remain in this position and make it at least to ten beats. “One, two, three, four...”
