A Curious Beginning

“Many times I had caught [Aunt Nell] watching me, her lips parted as if to speak, but as soon as I lifted my brow in inquiry, she snapped her mouth closed and waved me off. It was not until the last fit had come upon her, suddenly and without warning, that she had tried to speak and found she could not. Robbed of speech, she tried to write, but her hand was weak, stiff with the apoplexy that had stilled her tongue, and she died with something unsaid.”

Aunt Nell’s stubborn silence and subsequent inability to speak suggest the novel’s caution against guarding secrets too closely, an idea echoed when Max is killed before he can explain any of Veronica’s past to her. Additionally, this scene foreshadows Aunt Nell’s part in raising Veronica in secret, out of sight of her royal relatives.

“I took a handkerchief from my pocket, not one of those ridiculous flimsy scraps carried by fashionable females, but a proper square of good cambric.”

Veronica here shows a derision for fashion over pragmatism, something she will continually blend throughout the novel. This disdain emerges as not a disdain for women themselves, but for the fashions—and society—that urge delicacy over practicality and capability.

“‘You are not what I expected,’ [the baron] ventured at last, but his tone was not unkind and his eyes shone warmly.

I nodded. ‘I seldom am. I have tried, I assure you. I have been brought up to do good works and to conduct myself with propriety and decorum, and yet I am forever doing the unexpected.’”

Veronica’s assurance that she has attempted propriety suggests a sheepishness about her adventurous spirit that diminishes the further she gets from her life with her adoptive aunts. This highlights an early iteration of the novel’s exploration of how setting and community can affect one’s understanding of oneself.