Let Me In

[doomsday_disco]

“The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in – let me in!’ ‘Who are you?’ I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. ‘Catherine Linton,’ it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of LINTON? I had read EARNSHAW twenty times for Linton) – ‘I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!’ As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window.”

 

A ghostly feminine perfume rising from the stiff binding of old diaries. Violet leaf and antique rose curl through the air, smeared with ink.

[Poenari]

Ghostly, indeed! This smells like an old worn, faded, threadbare linen handkerchief that had been soaked in violet water 100 years ago and pressed into an old diary. Faintly floral in that antique way, with a dusty dried up blot of ink that had spilled on it while making an entry. As it wears, the rose comes out, but softly, gently, delicately. It ends up as a very lovely delicate vintage floral, something I would wear to tea.

[Assimbya]

I would call this a sister scent to The Woman Behind It from this Halloween's Yellow Wallpaper collection; though they share few notes in common, their sensibilities are very much akin, which feels appropriate to their respective source materials (my review of Woman Behind It is here). While Woman Behind It reminded me of dried flowers on a vanity, this reminds me more of dried flowers within the pages of a diary, smeared with ink from being enfolded there while the writing was still wet.

 

Violet is the most prominent note here to me (and I'd say for me it seems like the flower rather than the leaves); violet is pretty low on my list of florals, and in this blend it does indeed have the prim, candied sweetness which often turns me off it as a note; this is complicated and made more interesting by the dark sharpness of the ink note, which is distinct without being overpowering. (This is a combination which also occurs effectively in the recent Black Butterfly Moon, but there are many other notes which distract from the violet-ink pairing.) This has more substance than The Woman Behind It; still a ghost, but one who might have the capacity to rattle at the windowpanes. Like that other scent, it's not for me, but I appreciate it as an effective evocation of this moment in the novel, and will for now keep my decant.