They immediately spent a moment in bemused silence in honor of the perilous little paradox that was the English female.
When and if Violet ever fell in love, lightning would split the heavens, tectonic plates would shift, continents would reorder themselves.
Because she might be willful and spoiled and impetuous, but no one loved with the force of his sister. Her love story would be epic.
How, she had no idea. She seldom considered the how of things.
"Furthermore"
"There's a 'furthermore'?" His voice was utterly inflectionless.
"I'm not a child. I'm a lady born of one of England's finest and oldest families, and I daresay even you know how to behave in the presence of a lady. Regardless of the inconvenience I've caused you, I'll thank you to remember whatever manners you've managed to feign to date, because the ones you're exhibiting do you no credit and merely reinforce the prevailing opinion, Captain Flint, that you are a savage." She delighted in giving the S a serpent-like sibilance.
"The measure of a gentleman is how he behaves when he hasn't an audience to witness the beauty of his manners. And I wouldn't expect you to understand this, my lord, but centuries of fine breeding have ensured that I need not, as you say, exert myself if I choose not to. Only the likes of you equate the actual need to work with virtue. It is in fact due to the work of my ancestors that I no longer need to, and my family considers this a mark of honor."
"I should not, if I were you, wish to be, because 'sterner stuff' is usually forged by hardship.
"Don't be tedious, Lavay. If it's so necessary for you to know," he said ungraciously. "She won a contest."
There was a short stunned silence.
"You played a game?" Lavay said this slow, flat incredulity, hilarity suppressed, clearly trying to picture it. "And you lost to a girl. What manner of contest was this? Ribbon-tying?"
Flint felt ridiculous now, in retrospect, which was doing nothing to settle his temper. "I challenged her to aim a dart. Let's just say it landed rather serendipitously in the right spot," he finished curtly. "She was lucky."
"You speak metaphorically, Captain? She aimed a dart as in the vein of Cupid?
"It's-" She couldn't finish.
"Don't try, Miss Redmond," he agreed, shading his eyes. "There are honestly no suitable words, so we shall not fault you for failing to find them. Nothing makes a man feel more like God than sailing a ship over the sea with no land in sight. And nothing makes a man feel less like a God than clinging to a shred of ship exploded by lightning in a storm."
Well, it's not as though he cannot help it, you see. The saving of things. I suspect it's Captain Flint's way of telling the world, "This is how it's done."
She wondered if it was also Flint's way of showing the world,
This is how you could have saved me when I was a boy.
"But is not one a result of the other? she asked. "Love and loyalty? I cannot see how could you prefer one to the other."
"Very well," she said after a moment. "Here is how I see that loyalty and love are the same: You would lay down your life for someone for reasons of both love and loyalty. But loyalty implies dependence, doesn't it? For instance, dogs are loyal. It also implies indebtedness. For instance, servants are loyal."
"It also implies integrity. And honor. And"
"Steadfastness," she completed, with only a hint of irony.
"So you see them as absolutes then, Miss Redmond? Love means to be willing to die for someone, and loyalty perhaps the same?"
"How can they be otherwise?"
Lyon Redmond was either a man on a pilgrimage in search of salvation, or a man out to burn on the pyre of his own love for a woman.
Regardless, he still suffered.
"Tell me what wouldn't you do for Violet, Captain Flint?"
Flint didn't yet know the answer to this. Though he was perhaps closer to knowing.
"I haven't yet been tested."
Lyon smiled slowly at this, and shook his head. "Ah. Clearly you haven't a soul of a poet, then, sir. You cannot be lured into hyperbole: 'There's nothing I wouldn't do! Nothing!' And etcetera. I can. I like hyperbole. Don't fear it, Flint! Believe me, there's some truth to all the purple words that surround love, you know. When you love someone more than life and it is indeed possible to love someone more than life, or otherwise poets wouldn't have gone on and on about it over the centuries and you know, you know, you were born for only one person - imagine you cannot have them without tearing everything else you know asunder. Without hurting and disappointing all the other people you love. What then would you do?
"Let's say then you've made the decision to tear the life you know asunder in order to be with this person you love. A difficult decision to be sure. Putting it lightly. Because you cannot imagine a life without her, and the alternative left to you is a lifetime of desolation, as you don't intend to don a hair shirt or join a monastery or fling yourself into the ocean and drown. And so you go ahead and do the unthinkable and tear your life asunder, only to discover the person you love won't have you after all, and she actually has a reason."
"For you see, Captain Flint, I, too, never settle for less than what I want. Or never thought I possibly could. I'm a Redmond. If only you truly understood what this means. So I set out to reorder the world in a way I thought would make me worthy of her love. But my quest has changed me in ways I never anticipated, and I'm not the man who once loved that girl. There's much more to my journey yet. And here's a bitter irony: I've found in becoming heroic, in becoming worthy of her, I've painted myself into an untenable corner. I've more work to do to prove someone's innocence or guilt."
He began to stand, and saw Lyon stiffen, poised to do whatever he needed to do. He, like Lyon, could throw himself on a pyre, too. Because fire cleansed. She'd won, and he'd lost.
It had stopped mattering. Her happiness was indistinguishable from his own. No matter what became of him, he wanted her to know he loved her.
"You'd best get out of here, Redmond. Your secret is safe with me."
Lyon's eyes flared in wary surprise. He froze. And his smile, when it came, was slow, and crooked, and he looked very like Lavay when Lavay was being insufferably knowing.
"Ah. You do love her more than life. Splendid. And that, my dear Lord Flint, is what I came here today to discover."
Whatever he felt was between him and Violet. "Go before I change my mind, Redmond."
She needed to know more. "But that means-"
"It means I love you, Violet. I have never said that aloud to another human being."
He said it quickly and tonelessly. As if he was afraid of the words. Violet stood basking in those words the way she might a sunbeam after a long, gray day. She closed her eyes. And she knew she was lit from within.
"Do not let me just stand here having said those words," he said stiffly. "It's undignified."
"I love you, too," she said softly, hurriedly. Feeling abashed. Eyes still closed. Egads. So this was what it was like to be in love. Awkward and foolish, indeed.
