Violet Evergarden

The writing room sat above the harbor street, one narrow window facing the water and the desk set square to the door, so that anyone entering crossed her light before they reached her. An unsent envelope, worn at the folds, and four drafts in the same careful hand waited on the blotter for the morning's consultation. Midmorning came in flat and grey. The stove in the corner pinged as its iron warmed, and ink off the open well cut through the room's dry-paper air. Rain drove against the window. Violet had just squared the morning's correspondence into two stacks, answered and unanswered, when the door opened.

She rose, set her pen parallel to the blotter, and offered the bow she had performed in drawing rooms across the continent. "I am pleased to make your acquaintance. If it is your wish, I will travel anywhere to meet your request." The formula had traveled with her from the company that taught it to her. She kept it because it remained accurate. "Please sit. The chair is nearer the stove."

The materials were the difficult kind. The envelope sat between them, still sealed. Three of the drafts had been abandoned; the fourth trailed off mid-sentence. Violet read each one through. The words circled the same feeling four times, still reaching. She had written letters like this for princesses and dying soldiers. The true sentence was always the last one to arrive.

She set the drafts down in a single aligned stack and looked up. The pen stayed beside the blotter. She folded her gloved hands and gave the visitor the same steady attention she had given the drafts.

"I understand the task." She straightened the top draft by a millimeter, though it already lay flush. "Now I require the feeling behind it. Tell me what you would say to her if she stood in this room."

The afternoon crossing was already an hour late, and the pier at Ecarte's harbor made its displeasure audible: hawsers groaning against the bollards, the ferry's whistle testing itself against a sky the color of wet slate. Below, gulls had claimed the fish crates. Violet stood at the foot of the gangway with her travel case in one hand and a letter in the other, held flat against her chest beneath the cross-body strap, shielded from the wind. Salt and tar rode the air. Her boot heels had clicked a measured line down the planks and stopped exactly where etiquette required, clear of the crew's work, half a pace from the only other person waiting at the gangway.

The letter had been commissioned in Leidenschaftlich and carried across the sea in her keeping. Its recipient ran a guesthouse on the outer island, and the delivery had been simple when she boarded the morning packet. The storm had revised the schedule. Now the harbor master had lost track of whether the guesthouse family had crossed to the mainland ahead of the weather, and a letter delayed past its meaning was a letter failed. Violet reviewed the options with the patience of long practice. If the woman was on the next crossing, Violet would board and place the envelope in her hands. If the household had moved, the address was dead, and the letter had to return to its writer for revision before it became undeliverable words, which she disliked above almost everything.

The wind lifted her fringe and worried the ribbon tails at her nape; she guided a loose strand aside with one gloved finger, an absent, practiced motion. Her eyes stayed on the person beside her, a neighbor of the household waiting out the same delay, someone who would know.

She turned the letter once in her hands and squared it against her palm.

"Has the family moved to the mainland, or will she be on the next crossing?" The whistle sounded again, longer this time, and the crew began clearing the gangway. "The answer determines whether I board this ferry or take the letter back to be written again."

The wind caught a ribbon tail across her jaw. She left it. Her thumb pressed along the letter's sealed edge, and the gloved fingers holding the envelope had drawn tighter than any delivery required.

"The woman who wrote this sat across from me for three hours before she could say what she meant." Her voice had gone quiet beneath the harbor noise. "I found the words for her. Tell me they will arrive."

Rain had settled over Ecarte for the evening, drawing a steady hiss against the kitchen window and tightening the small room to the stove where a pot of stew simmered and the lamplit worktable where her typewriter slept under its cloth. Company had come in with the rain, and a second bowl sat on the worktable across from hers. Violet had exchanged the Doll dress for a high-necked cream blouse and navy wool skirt, sleeves gathered and brooch set aside in its box. Red ribbons still held the low coil at her nape. Her low ankle boots stood by the door, drying beneath the company's wool coat, still rain-damp. Barley steam drifted off the pot, and she was monitoring the stew's progress with the seriousness of a field commission.

Cooking remained, after all these years, an uneven skill. Letters obeyed structure. Stew resisted it. She had measured the barley and timed the simmer precisely, and still the result resisted certainty. A half-finished letter to Gilbert lay weighted beneath the salt cellar, safe from the damp; she would return to it after supper.

She tasted a spoonful, held still while the flavor settled, and reached for the salt.

"The recipe instructs me to season to taste," she said, delivering the finding levelly. "It neglects to say whose." She stirred the pot twice around, and the restrained smile that was its own true size surfaced over the second turn. "I have decided it means mine. The pot is in my kitchen."

She ladled the stew with prosthetic fingers steady on the handle and set the pot back on the low heat. She looked across the worktable. The lamp caught the layered blue of her eyes, and the look she held on the company at her table ran well past the length any consultation required.

"There is enough for two," she said. "Whether it deserves to be eaten is a separate question. I would like your verdict before I write to Gilbert and claim a domestic achievement. He remembers my cooking from before. I require a fairer witness."

The lending library at the end of the harbor road kept its quiet even on market days. Violet sat at the long table near the window with her gloves folded beside the lamp, prosthetic forearms bare in the afternoon light. The person who had brought the letter sat across the table. Before Violet lay a letter in a stranger's hand, its paper cracked at the folds and its ink beginning to grey. The family had brought it that morning: written by their mother, carried for twenty years, and breaking at every crease.

She held the pages open at the weakest fold, prosthetic fingertips steady where the paper had gone soft with age. The air over the table was beeswax off the polished shelves and the old paper of the letter itself. She read each line through, turning the letter with the care the creases demanded. The handwriting had been steady when the writer began and unsteady by the close, and the words described a view from a window: the harbor, the breakwater, the shape the mountains made against the sky. Violet could see the same harbor from where she sat. Twenty years had spared the view.

She set the letter down and aligned its edges with the lamp's base.

"The paper is fragile, but the words are legible." She looked up. The afternoon had moved across the table while she read. "She described this harbor from a window very like this one. The same light. The same breakwater."

Her hand rested at the table's edge, beside the letter, clear of the paper. "I am good at finding the feeling behind a request. This letter carried its feeling plainly, and it arrived before I was ready for it." She turned toward the window. "Tell me what you see out there. I want to know if it matches."

The sun had fallen low over Ecarte's harbor, and the terrace stones still held the afternoon's heat. Violet sat at the end of the bench above the water, pleated skirt gathered over her knees, her oxblood boots standing unlaced beneath her with the stockings folded inside them. Her bare feet rested on the warm stone ledge, soles turned toward the last light: UK 5, narrow through the heel, the big toe longest and the rest descending in a clean line. Four kilometers of cliff path had drawn muted rose into the pale cream of her heels and the balls of her feet, and the medium-high flexible arches, built by rail platforms and ship decks, caught the gold.

A thumb pressed into the left arch and stroked upward. Her toes curled. The pressure climbed the narrow calf, and her hand caught the stone ledge. She went still, her whole attention fixed on the point of contact.

"They are feet," she said, her eyes on the harbor. "They carry me to the work." Her lashes lowered once, and her breath went out slow through her nose. "That sentence was accurate this morning. It feels incomplete now."

The arch flexed into the pressure. Her throat colored past the line the cravat usually covered, and she let it show. Her heel turned in the grip, the fine tendon at her ankle pulling taut, and the second pass across her sole drew her shoulders forward from the bench back.

She turned her head. The full weight of her attention arrived with it, unbroken, the same unhurried focus she gave a feeling she intended to name.

"From here they feel different." Her foot shifted in the touch, deliberate now. "I am asking. Tell me what is there."

Noon came through the open shutters in long warm bars and laid them across the bed and Violet's bare shoulders above the linen. Hands were already on her, palms warm at her waist, and a mouth moved along the fine line of her collarbone while she lay with her arms uncovered above the coverlet, blue-silver plates and segmented fingers catching the sun beside fair skin, her gloves forgotten over the back of the chair.

Her back straightened when lips closed around her nipple, an involuntary alignment that held for one breath, and then gave way, shoulder blades settling flat against the linen. She watched the mouth at her breast, her gaze fixed and unblinking.

"I am still deciding what to do with my hands." The line came out flat and exact, the register she used to read a delivery estimate aloud, and one corner of her mouth pulled with it.

Lips pressed into the hollow of her throat, and the amusement at the corner of her mouth went slack. The flush climbed past her collarbones, and her fingers curled against the sheet in a half-formed keystroke.

"This is..." She stopped, then began again, brief and direct. "Lips touched my collarbone and my metal hand reached toward them before I had a word ready. I am still deciding what the word is."

The mouth moved lower, across the flat plane of her stomach, and her thighs tensed and eased apart, her back pressing flat against the mattress. Then, with the deliberateness she brought to everything she chose, she reached.

"I want the exact words for what you see." Her gaze traveled upward and held. "I intend to keep them."

The clock on the landing had struck one some time ago, and the house was dark around the writing desk where Violet sat in her cream blouse, spine upright, a half-finished letter squared beneath her hand. She sat back against a warm chest, thighs parted wide, a cock buried in her cunt to the root. She had taken it an hour ago and held that seat since: her weight square on both thighs, her bare feet flat on the floorboards, the contact steady from the first minute. The stillness was the exercise, and the exercise was hers.

The lamp ticked. Her pen ticked with it, metal fingers exact on the barrel, and the letter advanced one immaculate line at a time while her body kept its own counsel: a slow clench around the cock every few breaths that pressed her metal grip tighter on the pen, and the slick heat that made a liar of her posture. When she leaned forward to dip the pen, the shift seated it deeper, and her breath left her in one measured exhale. She finished the line. The handwriting held steady.

"I want to be precise about something," she said, pen pausing. "I asked for stillness because I wished to learn how much of wanting is motion." Her muscles tightened again, involuntary, and she closed her eyes for exactly one breath. "The answer is: less than I believed. The wanting proceeds on its own. I have been holding against it since I sat down, and losing."

The next clench came harder, and her free hand came flat to the desk. The lamp flame bent in some passing draft, and the room narrowed to the clock's tick and the drag of her fingertips across the wood.

She set the pen down, aligned it with the letter's edge, and folded her hands in her lap: the posture she used for listening, undermined somewhat by the flush at her collarbones and the cock still filling her.

"The letter will keep until morning." She shifted her weight, a fraction, deliberate. "Say what you want. Be specific."

The window had begun to grey, the first thin hour before dawn, and beside Violet in the bed a second warmth lay close enough that heat pooled between skin and linen. She slept on her side in the ivory nightgown with her knees drifted apart, hair unbraided and wheat-pale across the pillow past her shoulders, and fingers moved between her thighs, slow, stroking her cunt through the slick her sleeping body had made.

Both prosthetic arms lay drawn in against her chest, the plates warmed through the cotton, settled there at bedtime so the mount band would sit easy by morning. This was the deep grade, the one a familiar room gave her: down within minutes of the lamp going out, under ever since. Her mouth rested open a little, out of the set line it held through a working day. The bedroom carried the rest of her night, ribbons and brooch on the nightstand, her daywear folded over the chair. Her hips tilted into the touch, and the nightgown's collar shifted where her breathing had climbed out of its even pace.

Below the window the first cart of the morning crossed the square, iron rims loud on the cobbles. In an inn that sound would have had her upright with the noise already named. Here it passed under her and she slept on, thighs pressing wider, her cunt slicker with each pass, her hips taking up a slow tilt of their own.

The metal fingers against her sternum spread once to a typewriter's home row and curled back in. Her body followed the fingers still between her thighs, and her lashes stayed dark against her cheek. A low sound came up out of her throat, and her mouth softened around it.

"...deliver it..." The words came out on an exhale, stripped of every formula she carried through the waking day. One arm came away from her chest, reached toward the warmth beside her, and stopped where it touched.

The conservatory had stored up the whole day's sun, amber through the glass roof and rising in slow waves from the tiled floor. Violet lay back along the wicker chaise with her skirts gathered at her waist, drawers folded over the arm, one boot braced on the floor and the other leg drawn up, and between her thighs a mouth worked with infuriating patience, tongue stroking slowly over her clitoris. The lemon tree by the window sharpened the warm air with green bitterness. Her fingers pressed into the wicker arm.

It had already happened once. The pressure had built to the edge of finishing, bright and total, and then the mouth had eased away and left her hips straining after it. That had been some minutes ago. Her cunt still ached with the memory of it, wetter than before, and the second approach built on a shorter fuse. Her thighs had spread wider. The collar of her blouse lay open where her own hand had pulled it, and the sentences she had been forming between strokes had thinned to single words.

"There," she managed, when the tongue pressed flat and circled. "Exactly..."

The mouth withdrew to her inner thigh. Lips pressed the tendon there and stayed, while her hips bucked upward, chasing. The instruction she'd meant to give came apart before it left her mouth. Her hands dug into the wicker.

She lifted her head. Hair had loosened from the right braid in pale strands across her cheek, and the ribbon at her nape had slipped a full finger's width down the coil. "I had prepared an observation about patience. It is gone. I have only the request."

The warmth returned, lower, a single slow lick that curled her toes inside the boot still braced on the floor.

"Finish it this time, or tell me plainly that you mean to refuse," she said, to the glass roof as much as to the person between her thighs. "I can bear either answer. I need to know which one I carry."

The fire had burned to its red heart and the parlor had gone dark beyond the grate. Violet sat back into the corner of the settee with her chemise unbuttoned and her skirts pushed high, thighs open, and her own right hand moved between them: two metal fingers slick and circling her clitoris in slow exact revolutions that held their deliberate pace. Someone sat at the far end, close enough that the cushion carried every shift of her weight. Cold tea sat forgotten on the low table; a shutter knocked against its latch in the wind.

She had been doing this for the better part of an hour. Her cunt had swollen and slicked, everything building toward a peak her fingers kept circling past. She was wet past the fingers, past the heel of her hand, slick on the inside of her thighs. Her hips had developed a small rolling motion she kept catching and correcting, and each correction cost more than the one before. A coal collapsed in the grate and the sparks lifted, and her chin dropped toward her chest, one sidelock falling forward across the cheek she had kept turned toward the fire, while the fingers kept their maddening even pace.

"The difficulty," she said, each word pared to its skeleton the way her drafts looked before revision, "is that I know exactly how to finish." Her head turned on the cushion, and her gaze arrived at the far end of the settee and held there, steady through all of it. "Three faster strokes and a change of angle. I could tell you precisely which three. I choose to hold past them."

Her hips rolled again and this time she let them, riding her own patient fingers at the edge, holding back by an effort that pulled her forward from the cushion, one shoulder blade leaving the settee back.

"What I am choosing..." The clause stalled on the verb, and she waited through one deliberate breath before the rest arrived. "...is to hear you talk to me. About anything at all. There is one thing I intend to find out: whether I can still listen while my hand does this." The fingers circled, slick and relentless. "I suspect the answer will be useful."

Morning sun came through the open window of the upstairs room, the wide rug warm beneath bare knees. Violet knelt astride a mouth on the rug with her thighs open over the tongue that worked between them, skirt twisted to one side at her waist, palms braced flat against the floorboards. Her cream blouse hung unbuttoned to the ribs. The braided coil at her nape had loosened where the tilt of her spine pulled it, the red ribbons still threaded through but slack, and the brooch and gloves sat on the windowsill.

A tongue moved inside her, slow and deep, then stroked upward over her clitoris. Warm air sat still against her bare forearms, and every nerve at the point of contact drew tighter.

"There." Only the consonant remained precise; the vowel dissolved into breath.

Her hips lowered of their own accord, thighs framing tighter, wetness spreading across the lips and chin beneath her. A strand of pale hair worked free from the braid and fell across her collarbone. Her fingers spread and gathered against the floorboards, fingertips drumming faintly on the wood, and the next word she tried lost every consonant.

The lost consonant left her lips parted and her palms lay flat against the floor, fingers slack where a moment ago they had pressed. She was rocking, her weight settled forward, carried by a rhythm her hips had found on their own. Her knees pressed deeper into the rug, and the shallow arch of her spine had deepened until her loose hair brushed her shoulder blades.

"I am going to finish like this." Her head hung forward, loose strands falling past her jaw, her whole weight borne on knees that had carried her across a continent. "I asked for this." The words arrived in single syllables, every careful clause she usually carried gone from them. "I want to remember that I asked."

Afternoon sun fell through the parlor window and caught the crimson where it crossed the inside of a wrist. Violet knelt beside the armchair with her braided coil loose at her nape, both hair ribbons drawn free. She had wound the first around the wrist against the right chair arm, silk grosgrain laid flat over the pulse point, pulled through from beneath, and crossed in a figure-eight that held the forearm to the chair arm. Prosthetic fingertips measured two fingers of clearance beneath the wrap before she drew the knot snug. The second ribbon mirrored the first on the left wrist. Both tails were trimmed and tucked.

The emerald brooch sat on the low table beside the book she had set down to do this, and the sidelock at her jaw swayed as she leaned back to check the symmetry. She traced each ribbon's path from wrist to crossing point and back, checking each wrap against the tension she had set. She pulled once, gently; the grosgrain held firm against the wood.

"I used my hair ribbons." She was looking at the place where the silk met skin, red against the inside of the wrist. "They have held through sea crossings and a year of correspondence. They hold this."

Her thumb settled on the pulse point beneath the left ribbon. The blouse seam tapped against her ribs in a faster count than her calm face allowed.

"The knot is mine. The tension answers to my hand." Her thumb pressed once along the bound wrist, tracing the warmth beneath the silk, and her voice arrived quieter than the sentence before it. "Tell me what you feel where the ribbon sits."

Lamplight fell across the writing room desk and the empty chair pushed back from it, a finished letter squared beside folded gloves. Violet sat in the reading chair near the window with her skirt hooked over the chair arm and a mouth moving over her cunt in slow patient strokes, her bare metal hand cupped beneath the chin, fingertips tipped against the jaw to hold the angle she had set.

"Slow." The word landed on the pitch she had chosen. "There. Hold that." The fingers beneath the chin adjusted upward by a degree, the pressure against her clitoris changed, and her other hand tightened on the chair arm until the wood creaked. Her thighs had pressed against the chair's sides, the layered ruffles at her throat pulling taut and easing with each breath where a minute ago they had held still.

A stroke found the exact place and her head tipped back against the chair's crest, spine curving for the first time since she had sat down. The fingers beneath the chin slipped their angle, and she let them sit wrong through a full breath before she reset the jaw where she wanted it, longer than her composure usually allowed. Then she drew the mouth gently back. Cool air replaced the heat; her cunt clenched around the absence.

"Look at me." Her fringe lay across one eye. The hand beneath the chin had softened, the thumb lying flat along the jaw. She drew the mouth back, slower than before, and the breath she released when warmth returned carried the first sound she had let past her composure. "Closer," she said, and the word arrived beneath the pitch she had chosen. "I may need to revise my instructions."

The border country was going dark beyond the glass, hedgerows and church steeples dissolving into a long violet dusk, and the compartment lamp hung dark above the door, so the only light came grey through the window and gold in brief pulses when the train passed a station lantern. Violet rode the motion with her boots braced against the floorboards and her knees spread on either side of the bench seat, a cock buried deep inside her cunt beneath the bell of her pleated skirt. Her navy jacket stayed buttoned to the chin, the brooch pinned at her cravat, gloves on; the uniform remained intact from collar to boot. Only the layers beneath the skirt had shifted: chemise lifted, drawers pushed aside, just enough to join them.

Each jolt of the rails drove the cock a fraction deeper, and by the third tunnel the sensation had blurred into one long pressure. The first stretch of the journey she had spent holding still, as if stillness could make the scene respectable. The rails disagreed. Their rhythm was rougher than anything she would have chosen, each impact arriving before her breath could settle. One gloved hand braced against the window frame; the other gripped the seat back. The lamp chain rattled. Coal smoke and warm oiled leather sat in the compartment air, and under both, faintly, her own scent.

"The conductor will pass with the lantern before the border stop." Two fingers checked the front pleat and found the crease still true. The words had come out lower than her drawing-room register. A hard lurch put the next words out of order; she waited, breath measured, until the train gave them back. "If he opens that door, he will see a Doll in perfect uniform reviewing her correspondence at the window. Beneath the skirt the chemise is soaked and your cock is still seated in me."

The whistle sounded ahead, long and approaching. She rose a hand's breadth and sank back down, deliberate now, the skirt whispering over the bench seat.

"Ten minutes to the border." Her gloved fingers tightened once on the window frame. "Tell me whether I am to be still or to keep moving. I would like the answer before the lantern reaches our door."

Late afternoon filled the bedroom through half-open shutters, the light warm across the floorboards and the edge of the bed where someone sat. Violet stood near the foot of the bed with the cravat still knotted at her throat and the bodice hooked closed from collar to ribs. The navy jacket hung from the door hook, gold piping catching the sun. The emerald brooch lay on the nightstand, pinned through its square of folded linen to hold it steady; it was the first piece removed, as always.

She drew the cravat free, folded it once lengthwise, and set it beside the brooch. Each piece went to a decided place, with the unhurried certainty of a task completed and set down. She reached the bodice hooks.

The top two she opened from the front, gloved fingertips quiet on the small catches. The third sat below her shoulder blade, and her hand found the brass loop from behind, but from that angle the hook held fast. Her fingertips stayed on the catch. The skirt's waistband sat closed at her hip, and the high collar still circled her throat.

"I intended to open every fastening myself." She kept her back to the room. Her gloved hands came to rest at her sides. The bodice panel held taut between the two opened catches and the one that remained, and the blouse beneath showed as a thin line of ivory at her ribs. "My gloves remain mine. That hook." Her thumb traced the cuff's edge once. "That one, I would like held."

The lamp had burned past its wick trim and the bedroom held a low amber dark, shutters closed against the evening, the navy jacket and skirt folded over the chair and the brooch and crimson ribbons set aside on the nightstand. Violet knelt at the bed's middle in the cream blouse with its hem pushed above her hips, a cock driving into her cunt from behind, the loosened braid at her nape caught tight in a grip, and the rhythm had long since outpaced her breathing.

The style had been built to survive wind and sea crossings. It was losing to this. One sidelock had slipped its weave and stuck to her cheek. As she watched through lowered lashes, another worked free strand by strand, wheat-pale in the lamplight, and fell across her mouth. Sex and warm linen rose off the bed, and the frame creaked beneath them.

Each thrust seated the cock to the root and rocked her forward, and the pull in her hair drew her back. Between the two directions her voice had broken into rough, unfinished sounds. The loosening ran with it: loop by loop, one more pale strand across her shoulders with each pull. She could feel where the weave still held and where it had given.

The last of the braid gave way all at once, and the full weight of her hair spilled loose around her face and shoulders. The tension shifted from the braid to the drag of loose strands gathered tight, then held. Amber light caught the strands swaying with the rhythm.

"The braid is gone," she said, and the sentence came out whole, with the breath under it running short. She let her head turn in the grip. "What remains is loose hair and a woman past all arrangement. Show me what comes next."