Chapter Nine
Pages Written to Romance
Veda
“Are you not excited by the prospect of a ball?” Aunt Hazel asked, a pincer-like gaze closing in on her niece.
The niece realized the aunt expected an answer. “Uh,” she stuttered, struggling to find one. She looked above her as if the answer would be hanging in the air over her head. Everything around her was like the set of a period film, but she didn’t watch films like that. She only recognized a few things from movies her cousin liked to watch. The diction used by the aunt and the other young women perusing the dress shop were unfamiliar and she didn’t want to speak until she was certain she would not sound foolish.
She would have preferred to stay silent, but the aunt’s focus was still boring down on her.
“I take as much pleasure in a ball as any of us,” she said, repeating something one of the other girls said across the room.
The aunt appeared satisfied and presented the young woman with a roll of yellow silk. “Does this fabric please you, Veda?” she asked. “I’m supposed to get you out of those mourning rags.”
The young woman stared down at her black dress. “Veda?” she repeated before she’d had time to realize that she should not have repeated the name like it was unfamiliar. It wasn’t unfamiliar, but it was not her name.
“My apologies. I’ll address you properly. Miss Fastille, I always forget how properly my brother raised his daughters,” Aunt Hazel said before turning to another roll of fabric.
Browsing among the samples, the young lady muttered to herself. “I think I’m getting this. It’s a Jane Austin novel, but not exactly. Salinger planned to let Veda go dress shopping, and then she’s supposed to meet him at a ball. Pretty pedestrian date if you ask me. I mean, I know Veda watches these movies and reads these books. He’s probably noticed too. If he’s been to her house once, he’s seen Northanger Abbey on the shelf. I guess his book is a pretty good attempt.”
Thief that the young lady was, she chose a dark red fabric, which Aunt Hazel immediately dismissed and replaced with a turquoise fabric. Red was not a color for a young unmarried lady who wanted to move in sophisticated circles.
The young lady would not have chosen the color for herself, but when she saw the effect of it next to her skin and hair in the mirror, she relented.
After the dress had been chosen and instructions given to the seamstress, she was taken with a flurry of faceless young women to a jewelry store to choose accessories.
Maybe everything the young woman was seeing was less like a period novel and more like those ridiculous YouTube videos where a man sends a woman out for a day of shopping in a limousine, lunch with her friends, and showering her with a different present every hour until she’s finally brought to him at sunset when he presents her with an engagement ring.
Feeling nauseous, the young lady began to rethink her desire to read the book intended for Veda. She wasn’t sure what she had wanted from Salinger, but this level of spoiling, even though it was only within the pages of a spell book was unappealing. Bored, she refused to choose a necklace for herself. She told the aunt she would wear whatever was chosen for her.
When the aunt turned her back on her, the young lady left the shop and looked for a way to leave the book. She had made a mistake. She didn’t want fake dresses or fake jewels. She bet Salinger’s love for Veda was just as fake as the book she was reading.
She walked down the street only three buildings further than the jewelry shop and found that the world Salinger made simply ceased to exist. She took a deep breath in and realized there was nowhere to go, nothing to do, except to finish the story Salinger had prepared.
“Yuck,” she said aloud as she turned on her heel and returned to the shop.
The aunt took her and the faceless cousins for high tea. She had never had high tea before and Salinger had done more research on that subject. The teashop was charming, the food was delightful, and the prattle the aunt presented was not terrible to listen to. It was like listening to June present a lesson.
Then Aunt Hazel took them all to a narrow house with many rising floors in what appeared to be the heart of London. The young lady was hurried into a bath, then presented with a ladies’ maid who did her makeup and hair while they waited for her dress to arrive.
Dresses weren’t made in a day in the 1800s, but the young lady thanked Salinger in her heart for not insisting on historical accuracy. The sooner the ball came, the sooner she could get out of the boring book made to impress a girl who didn’t think about anything but dresses and sparkly rocks, that were no longer impressive because they could be made artificially inside microwaves! The young lady almost spat. Surely, not even Veda was that empty inside.
Soon, the young lady was dressed and inspecting her appearance in front of a mirror. If she was honest with herself, she had not looked that normal since her childhood. She ran her fingers down her smooth ears and unspotted nose. She felt a little sick. She could never look like that in real life.
The aunt called to her, and she carefully navigated the staircase down.
She was loaded into a carriage with the other girls.
Everything was quite grand as they pulled up to a stately manor house with torches burning along the drive to light the way. A footman helped her down from the carriage and her aunt led the way into the house greeting faceless people at every turn.
She had to find Salinger. That was the only way to end the story.
Racing through the ballroom, through the dining room, and any other part of the house that was available for guests, she searched for him.
He was nowhere.
Finally, she stood at the entryway, waiting, hoping that he would be the next man to alight from a carriage.
Then unexpectedly from behind her, she heard his voice in her ear. He said, “You have a loose thread.”
She turned to him, surprised. “Holy shit!” she blurted.
She hadn’t meant to say something like that. That was how she usually talked, but she had planned to be extra careful with her language when she was in the book. She didn’t know if bad language would disrupt the way the story was supposed to go.
Except, she couldn’t help it. She was so surprised because even though she knew what Salinger looked like, and she should not have been surprised by his appearance in the story. He was the whole reason she was there. It was just that she’d never seen a man look that mouth-watering in her life. He was half Inuit, so his features were so intensely masculine that the knot of lace at his throat only accentuated his attractiveness and brought it all home that there wasn’t another man like him anywhere. She realized he had chosen the era for himself because he knew his looks made him better than any woman’s fantasy of Heathcliff.
His expression didn’t change with her exclamation.
Looking into his eyes, she saw immediately that he didn’t know she wasn’t Veda. He was a version of himself that had been programmed to expect Veda.
She felt weak, her gloved hand took hold of the banister next to her. No, she didn’t read Jane Austin, but she did read Emily Brontë.
“You have a loose thread,” he repeated, showing her that the stitching holding her lace to her sleeve was tearing loose. Part of the lace had already detached.
She looked at it. She guessed he hadn’t overlooked that there was no such thing as nineteenth-century fast fashion. “What can I do?”
“I’ll help you,” he offered with a grin.
“How are you going to help me?”
“I’ll stitch it for you,” he said, showing her a needle and a spool of matching thread.
She gasped. “Where did you get those? You weren’t carrying them around with you?”
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“No. I borrowed them from a maid,” he said, wetting his bottom lip with his tongue, “I didn’t have them with me. We’ll find an empty room.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be introduced?” she stuttered.
“I’m Salinger,” he said like he didn’t need a last name like Heathcliff. “Come with me.”
She slipped her hand into the crook of his offered elbow and followed him into a darkened hall. He didn’t even try a door until they were quite far from the ball. It was a library.
Even in the midst of how magnetic she found her host, she still had room in her consciousness to recognize that the other doors probably had nothing behind them. He was a rotten writer, even if he was beautiful enough to utter Heathcliff’s lines: “Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you.”
The young lady stepped into the empty room with him.
The book titles flashed in the candlelight. He was very near to her as he stretched out a length of thread, broke it with his teeth, and threaded the needle.
“Are you good with needles?” she asked playfully.
“I’m good with sharp things.”
Slowly, he stitched the lace back into place. She used the time to think about what boys usually did when they were so close to her. She thought of the boys who tried to dance with her at the school dances. It wasn’t much of a dance, it was more like holding a boy up so the school chaperones wouldn’t notice how drunk he was. She realized now that she had settled for that kind of attention because no other kind seemed available.
Salinger concentrated on his work, except when he pulled the long thread taut. At that moment, he admired the curls around her ear and let his eyes travel down the curve of her neck until they arrived back at the place he was mending.
“What are you looking at?” the young lady asked, feeling shy.
“You,” he replied.
“Well, you can stop it. I’m not supposed to be here. You’re not supposed to be fixing my dress. You’re supposed to be fixing Veda’s.”
He didn’t hear her. It wasn’t in his script that the wrong girl had slipped into the place of the right one.
“Do you want me to help you with the hem?” he asked.
“Is that coming apart too?”
“Indeed, it is.”
She looked down and saw that half the lace on her hem had fallen off. “Are you going to fix that?”
“If you want me to,” he said, tying a knot in his thread. Then he flipped her sleeve inside out and cut the thread with his teeth, inadvertently kissing the side of her arm.
She jumped.
“What of it? Do you want me to continue?” he asked, maintaining his gaze and smiling.
She swallowed and nodded.
He dropped to his knees and started talking as he began mending her hem. “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” he drawled.
“Have you?” the young woman asked, knowing full well that he was not talking about her.
“Always. I thought you were puzzling because you were less eager to meet me than your cousins, but I did not expect to find you so interesting. Whenever I see you, I wonder where you’re going, what you’re going to do there, if there’s someone you’re meeting that you look at differently. What would you look like if you were attracted to someone? What would it feel like if you looked at me that way? You look through me. Do you know that?”
“I don’t mean to,” the lady answered.
“You do. Like there’s more on your mind than what man might like you. Like you’ve taught yourself to look disinterested. I want to see the expression on your face when you feel the way I do.”
“You want to see what?” she asked, getting angry.
“What you look like when all your layers of reserve are gone.” He chuckled. “Not for free. I’ll show you what I’m like too. What I'm like when I have nothing left to hide. If you came with me, up into the north, I could show you a life you never saw before.”
“Are you asking me to marry you?”
He laughed. The glint of his very white teeth was adorable. “No. I’m asking you to meet me in the place where I feel most alive.”
She turned to him scornfully. “Because you love me?”
She felt his hand on her calf. “No. Because I adore you.”
Her eyes went wide and her heart nearly stopped. The real boys in her life didn’t speak like that, not to anyone, not ever. Did Salinger need to come to a place like this in order to say something like that to Veda? Red-faced, she asked him.
“Not at all,” he said. “I say whatever I want whenever. This is the only way to make you stand still. You love dancing. You love the dresses that accompany that kind of occasion and I’m showing you that for the most mundane part of the whole thing, I will be here for you, sewing the lace back on your dress, sewing you into your dress, or cutting you out of it... I’ll be here.” He paused, his eyes full of feeling.
The young lady was having a hard time listening to his confession. It wasn’t for her! Why wasn’t it for her?
Then he commented casually, “Having the lace fall off must make you crazy. You’re dealing with it remarkably well.”
He knew Veda well enough to know what would make her crazy?
Angry, she deliberately stepped on his foot. With her next step, she stepped on his hand that held the needle. He grunted slightly as the unseen needle punctured his finger.
“I think you’ve read me wrong. I don’t want to dance. I don’t want fine gowns. I don’t care about any of those stupid things.”
“What do you want?” he asked, wrenching his hand free from under her foot.
“I want a man who is wild.”
Without blinking an eye, he rubbed a sample of his own blood between his fingers and painted it in a straight line across his cheek. “If that’s what you want.” He grabbed her roughly, and...
⚘⚘⚘
I put down the book and found myself greeted by Salinger's expectant eyes. We were seated in the hidden library. The white trees stretched their limbs over us as cover from the sunlight peeping through the skylight.
“What did you think?” he blurted.
I didn't know how to answer him. The truth seemed too horrible to explain. “This book was written to be read only once, wasn't it?” I feigned.
“Yes.”
I frowned at him, unable to feign more than once. “I'm sorry, but someone has already read this book. It didn't pull me in. It's already been written like any other novel, describing a different girl's reaction to your story.”
“What?” he gasped, snatching the book from my fingers. He opened to the first page and started reading out loud. Scanning furiously, he read her thoughts and her speech. Then he snapped the book shut. “Who did this?”
I averted my eyes.
“You know!” he accused.
“You can figure it out yourself if you read further into the story. She might even tell you her real name, but if it's okay with you, I'd rather not read anymore. It's insulting and grotesque from her perspective.”
“Well, it was going to be monumental,” he sputtered angrily.
“I'm sure it was,” I said, thinking of how his imagination had not filled in the blanks of the story. According to the reader, there were too many gaps. I did not think about what he said about me and how deeply it struck. It had been a narrow escape. If I had read that book, I might have been romanced—lost.
“Who do you think it was?” he asked, getting more impatient.
“I think it was Fair Isle.”
“Why?”
“She talks about her piercings and the color red. Pearl and Intarsia don’t talk that way and Clementine is out. She has no reason to steal a spell book.”
“You sound so sure.”
“I am so sure.”
He crossed his arms across his chest. “How?”
I got up and led him to the other side of the room. Few people knew about the secret room inside the hidden library, but there had to be a room designated for the purpose of reading and it needed to be clandestine. It was little more than a closet hidden behind a painting, but inside was a reading nook that ensured complete privacy while reading. I pulled a picture frame from the wall and showed him the space behind it. I liked being the keeper of secrets. I didn't even look inside. I merely opened it and leaned against the wall. Without looking, I knew Clementine was there, lying on her back with a book in her hands. She was completely oblivious to the world.
Salinger looked in and returned it to its place before he commented. “Is she old enough to be reading that?”
“According to the family, Clementine's nineteen.”
“That can't possibly be right.”
“It's not.”
Salinger shook his head. “How old do you think she is?”
I rolled my eyes. “I've been studying her for a long time. I don't think she's ancient, and I don't think the witch who Clementine claims to be her mother is related to her. Clementine wasn't raised with the rest of us from infancy. She came when I was eleven. I think she belongs to someone else, a witch who had an obsession with youth. Maybe a witch who couldn't stand being grown up enough to have a child.”
“Still, do you have a guess as to how old she might be?”
“I think she's in her late twenties, but she looked so off eight years ago that she couldn't pass for an adult, so they shoved her in one grade ahead of us. I'm not trying to be rude, but I think it's not just her body that looks so young. She's young in her head too. The magic that keeps her young is potent. She's going to look like a goddess her entire life.”
“What? You want to change places with her?”
My mouth fell into a disgruntled frown. “Do I wish my mother was obsessed with youth and beauty to the extent that I would age half the rate of everybody else? The price is too high. Clementine makes horrible decisions regularly and she doesn't even have the decency to be sorry about it. She's almost thirty and she's content to hang out with a bunch of high schoolers. No. I don't want to switch places with her. But part of the reason I feel so close to Clementine is that she and I have something in common—errant mothers. Maybe it's that my mother has me feeling down lately.”
“You never talk about her,” Salinger remarked, sounding particularly kindhearted.
I almost wanted to tell him what was going on and why I was so wretched, but I didn't. Instead, I turned the conversation back to Fair Isle. “I think Fair Isle stole your book, and if there was any kind of love spell woven into the pages of this book, she might be quite unhappy for the next little while. Lock your door at night,” I advised.
He shook his head. “There was no love spell. I’m not trying to control you.”
“I appreciate that. All the same,” I said. “You should read every last bit of what happened inside the book and see what damage has been done. These books are dangerous.”
He clenched his teeth and nodded.