Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) Read Free Page A

balls during her coming-out season; the red glass buttons from the dress she had been wearing the night her husband had proposed; a dried and disintegrating carnation from his funeral wreath, and many other such treasures. Somewhere among them, Joletta knew, was what she sought.
    She found it in the third compartment, stuffed behind a baby’s christening robe. It was in a bundle tied up with a frayed black ribbon, along with a miniature in a frame so heavy and iridescent with tarnish that it had to be made of solid silver.
    What Mimi had called a diary was a boxlike book covered with worn maroon velvet and finished with discolored brass-bound edges that made square corners. Actually a Victorian traveling journal, it was thick with pages of heavy acid-free paper, each page covered with closely spaced lines of looping Spenserian script interspersed with sketches of dainty flowers, and a few small-scale figures and landscapes. Joletta had seen it once before, years ago. She stood now with the bundle in her hands, fingering the brass corners of the journal while she gazed down at the miniature that was uppermost.
    The small painting, done in oil colors that were soft and delicate yet as clear as the day they had come from the brush, showed the head and shoulders of a young woman. She appeared on the verge of a smile, the look in her wide, pansy-brown eyes diffident yet inquiring, guarded but vulnerable. Her brows were delicately arching, her lashes long and full. Her nose was slightly tip-tilted and her mouth formed with gentle curves tinted a natural coral. Her soft brown hair was drawn back in a low chignon from which short tendrils escaped to curl at her temples and cheekbones. There were garnet-and-seed-pearl eardrops in her ears and a matching brooch at the throat of her flat lace collar. She was not beautiful in a classic sense; still, there was something intriguing about her that made it difficult to look away from her. The artist had drawn his subject with care and precision, and also with a talent that made it seem she might complete her smile at any moment, might tilt her head and answer some question whose echo had long since ceased to sound.
    Violet Fossier.
    Joletta remembered the day she had first seen the miniature and the journal tied up with it. Mimi had been in bed with a chest cold. Joletta, thirteen or fourteen at the time, had been trying to take care of her. Mimi, who always scorned inactivity, had declined to nap or read. She had directed Joletta to the chest across the bedroom to get her tatting. As Joletta searched, taking out the treasures one by one in her quest for the tatting bobbin, Mimi had told her about each item.
    “Bring that to me, chère, ” her grandmother had commanded as Joletta pulled out the journal.
    The brass-bound book had been heavy, and its ornate hasp and small dangling lock and key attached with a piece of black ribbon had rattled as Joletta walked. Mimi took the book from her, handling it with care, smoothing the worn places on the velvet. In answer to Joletta’s plea to see inside, her grandmother had carefully opened the lock and lifted the frontpiece to expose the yellowed pages with their beautiful handwriting and delicate sketches marred with small ink blotches.
    “This belonged to your great-great-great-great-grandmother,” Mimi said. “She once held it in her own hands, wrote in it every day for the two years of her journey to Europe. She put her thoughts and feelings onto the pages, so that to read them is to know who and what she was. What a shame it is that we don’t do these things anymore.”
    Joletta, enthralled by the ornate script and faint mustiness that rose from the paper, had tilted her head to read the first line.
    “No, no, ma chère, ” her grandmother had said, snapping the journal closed. “This isn’t for you.”
    “But why, Mimi?”
    “You’re young yet, maybe someday when you’re older.”
    “I’m old enough now! I’m nearly grown, not