To Have and to Hoax

by Martha Waters

  Yours, etc.

  Penvale

  Unconscious. The word echoed in Violet’s mind as she stared down at Penvale’s missive. She flipped the paper over, desperately hoping for more information than the scant few sentences that had been provided to her, but there was nothing.

  “Violet?” Emily asked, and Violet looked up, startled; for a moment, she had forgotten that she was not alone. “Is everything quite all right?”

  “No,” Violet said, her voice sounding strange to her own ears. “That is, I don’t quite know. James was thrown from his horse yesterday and knocked unconscious.”

  “Good lord!” Diana said, springing up suddenly. With a few quick strides, she crossed to where Violet was standing and snatched the letter from her. Scanning it quickly, she gave an unladylike snort. “Typical of my brother. Just enough information to thoroughly worry you, but nothing that might actually be of use.”

  Violet barely heard her. “I must go,” she said, scarcely aware of the words leaving her mouth. “I must go to Brook Vale.”

  Brook Vale was a picturesque village in Kent and the seat of the Duke of Dovington, the title that was currently held by James’s father. Although Brook Vale Park was the family seat, James had been bequeathed Audley House, on the opposite side of the village, upon his marriage to Violet. The house itself was of modest size when compared with the country estate of the duke, but Audley House’s true value was in the attached stables, which were spectacular, stocked with a host of steeds of impressive bloodlines, contenders in all the major races each year. James’s not-insubstantial annual income, an inheritance from his mother, was heavily augmented by the sale of those horses, the fees paid by other owners for the right to breed with his stallions, and race winnings.

  It was all, on the surface, an entirely advantageous arrangement.

  Violet hated those stables’ very existence.

  “Now wait, Violet—”

  Violet ignored Diana. “I must depart at once. What if James is still unconscious? Or—or—” She couldn’t bear to give voice to her thoughts in that instant—it was utterly impossible to think of her maddening, energetic husband as being anything other than in the best of health. She glanced up at Emily, who was studying her with a compassionate gaze.

  “Of course you must go,” Emily said briskly, standing up. She rang for Wooton, who reappeared a moment later.

  “Wooton, Lady James must depart at once for Audley House,” Emily announced.

  “Indeed, my lady?” Wooton inquired, casting a look in Violet’s direction that in a less well-trained butler would have been characterized as inquisitive.

  “Yes,” Violet managed. “It would seem that Lord James has had some sort of riding accident, and I would like to go see him immediately.”

  Wooton’s impassive expression was betrayed by a slight furrowing of the brow—tricky to notice in such a heavily wrinkled face—that seemed to indicate concern. “I will have Price prepare a trunk for you immediately, my lady.”

  “Thank you, Wooton,” Violet said distractedly, and turned back to Emily and Diana. “If you’ll excuse me, I should like to speak to Price myself, inform her that I only need the barest necessities—”

  “Of course,” Emily said calmly, taking two steps forward to seize Violet’s hand. “Dear Violet, do send word as soon as you know more about Lord James’s condition.”

  “I’m certain he’s fine,” Diana said, then added with an attempt at her usual humor, “After all, I know I’ve heard you lament his hard head in the past.”

  “Thank you,” Violet said, attempting a smile and managing no more than a wobble of the mouth. “I’m certain it’s—well—” For once, words failed her, and she could do no more than bid her friends farewell and make her way to her bedchamber.

  Once she arrived there, she found Price, her lady’s maid, in a frenzy of activity, flitting about with various articles of clothing in her hands.

  “Only pack for a couple of days, Price,” Violet said upon entering the room. “If Lord James is well, I shall return to London immediately, and if not…” She trailed off, then shook her head vehemently, trying not to dwell on the prospect. “If his condition is serious, I will send word for more of my things to be sent along posthaste.”

  “Yes, my lady,” Price said, bobbing a curtsey and resuming her frenetic pace. Violet retreated to her neatly made bed, upon which she lay down in the precise center, staring up at the canopy above. She was conscious as she never had been before of the rhythm of her heart in her chest, its pace still accelerated even as she lay entirely still. She couldn’t remove the image from her mind of James lying in the mud, a horse’s hooves dancing precariously near his head.

  That head of his—one she had held in her hands, and kissed, and, more recently, wanted to scream at until her throat was raw—contained everything that made him James. Those green eyes, capable of conveying or masking great feeling, as he wished. The mouth she had kissed so many countless times in their first year of marriage, and not at all since then. And that mind—that clever, infuriating mind. She was angry with him—she had been angry with him for years. But she was not prepared for how devastating she would find the prospect of any harm befalling him.

  In the first year of their marriage, before their awful falling-out, she’d pleaded with him to be careful at the stables—he enjoyed riding, but the attention he devoted to Audley House’s stables verged on obsessive, a product of his desire to prove himself to his father, and the idea of him injuring himself for such an absurd reason had worried her as much as it had irritated her. He had largely ignored her concerns, refusing to delegate tasks at the stables that could easily be performed by a groom, and spending long hours poring over the books despite having a perfectly competent steward in his employ. She’d tried to bite her tongue at times, not wishing to nag, but there had been occasions when she could not resist raising the issue—after a week that involved two separate trips to Kent to check on the stables, for instance, or a morning when he appeared wearily at the breakfast table after working late into the night.

  She asked him to step back a bit from the stables; she told him he had nothing to prove to his father. He, however, insisted that he wished to make a success of the stables for her sake, for the sake of their future children—which inevitably led to a quarrel. A quarrel followed shortly by a reconciliation, but still, a quarrel. Even now, Violet’s hackles rose at the memory of this—of his inability to trust her to know her own mind. His inability to trust that she would love him even without the income of the (wildly lucrative, it must be said) stables.

  And, of course, at the time, James had spent far less time at the stables than he did now.

  Furthermore, given the current state of noncommunication between them, it had been a long time since Violet had reminded him to be careful.

  Four years, if one wanted to be precise.

  Violet could, in truth, offer the exact date of her last conversation with James before the event that had come to be known, in her head, as The Argument. She gave it the honor of capital letters because although it was not by any stretch the first argument they’d had in their marriage, none of their previous spats had rivaled it for passion—or for lasting damage.

  She could still remember lying in bed with him that last morning, her head resting on his bare shoulder as his arm curved around her back, keeping her tucked firmly against his side. She had revisited the memory of that morning so many times that it was growing frayed at the edges, some of the details becoming confused in her mind—had it really been raining, or was the sound of raindrops a detail that she had fabricated?

  In any case, she had learned from nearly four years of experience that to dwell too long upon this was to sink into melancholy. Which brought her back to her present circumstances: lying on her bed, contemplating a man who could, at this exact moment, very well be—

  No. Violet quite simply refused to even consider it. James was fine—he had to be fine—because
if he wasn’t, that would mean that the past four years would be the end of their story, not a mere rough stretch in the middle. And somewhere, deep down, without even admitting it to herself, Violet had always assumed it would be the latter.

  So, instead of allowing herself to grow maudlin, she allowed herself to grow angry. Here she was, about to tear off after a man who would barely speak to her, who had injured himself by taking a foolish, unnecessary risk—something she had asked him repeatedly to refrain from doing. Something he did to prove himself to a man whose good opinion, in Violet’s mind, was scarcely worth having.

  Who was she, after all, to demand such a sacrifice? Merely his wife, of course. And now she was the one about to be inconvenienced by a day of travel, all because her tiresome husband wouldn’t listen to her. If he was not dead of some horrid head injury, she had half a mind to give him one herself once she arrived.

  And with that comforting thought, she rose from the bed and made ready to depart.

  Two

  Lord James Audley had a devil of a headache.

  “Of course you do,” Viscount Penvale said from his spot across from him at the breakfast table at Audley House. “You were knocked unconscious by a fall from a horse yesterday. Even your thick head can’t bounce back from that so quickly.”

  “True, true,” added the Marquess of Willingham, himself seated a few chairs down from Penvale, busily applying liberal amounts of jam to a piece of toast. “Especially when you’re not as young as you once were, old boy.” Apparently satisfied with his jam-to-bread ratio, he shoved half the piece of toast into his mouth with considerable enthusiasm.

  James divided a glare between the two of them, stirring milk into his tea with more vigor than was strictly necessary. “I’m twenty-eight,” he informed them icily, setting aside his spoon. “And last I checked, Jeremy, you had two months on me—do I detect the sound of your own ancient bones creaking?”

  “Can’t say I hear it myself,” Willingham—Jeremy—said cheerfully around his mouthful of toast.

  “In a bit of a temper this morning, are we?” Penvale asked, applying himself to an egg with great interest. “Not greeting the world with our usual sunny disposition?”

  “We,” James pronounced through gritted teeth, “were knocked unconscious yesterday, and awoke in a sickbed, where we had weak tea forced down our throat. And we still feel as though a blacksmith is hammering away at our skull. So we”—he speared a sausage with great force—“are not, perhaps, in the mood for your chatter this morning.”

  A rather gratifying silence fell at this announcement, during which time James chewed his sausage. Although he wished for few of his father’s personality traits, the Duke of Dovington’s ability to silence a room was one he was grateful for. Even his very closest friends knew better than to poke at him when he addressed them in that tone. Long experience had taught Penvale and Jeremy that doing so would yield no information, and could even, on rare occasions, end in fisticuffs.

  “So, back to London today, Penvale?” Jeremy asked, carefully ignoring James as he spoke.

  “Quite. You as well?”

  “I thought so.”

  “I’m coming, too,” James said, setting down his fork with a clatter. He managed to avoid wincing at the sound, but only just.

  “I thought you planned to stay for another few days,” Penvale said cautiously.

  “I did,” James replied, reaching for his teacup. “But I want to tell Worthington in person that his damned horse is probably going to murder the next person who attempts to ride it.”

  “Wilson did attempt to tell you that before you got on the horse’s back,” Penvale pointed out. Wilson was James’s stablemaster at Audley House.

  “I know,” James said ruefully. “I really don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Do you think it odd,” Jeremy said with an air of casual unconcern that instantly set James on his guard, “that you are far more willing to speak to Worthington than you are to speak to his daughter?”

  “No,” James said shortly, using the tone he reserved for whenever Violet was mentioned—one that clearly indicated that further inquiries would not be welcomed. Generally this worked well for him; after fifteen years of friendship, Penvale and Jeremy did not expect much—or anything at all, really—in the way of heartfelt confessions from James. This morning, however, was clearly destined to be the most irritating of recent memory, because Jeremy, for once, took no notice of his tone.

  “Does he find it strange that when he asks you how his daughter is, you cannot give him any sort of reply with certainty?”

  “He might,” James said shortly, “if it ever occurred to him to ask such a question, which it of course does not.” Because Worthington was an ass. A benign ass, it was true—he had given his daughter a generous dowry and left the rest of her needs to his wife—but still an ass. James knew enough about neglectful fathers to know that Violet had minded her father’s lack of attention, even if she’d never said as much.

  “But don’t you think—” Jeremy began, clearly with a death wish.

  “Jeremy,” Penvale said warningly as James opened his mouth to snap back at Jeremy. “Didn’t the physician instruct us not to upset him?”

  This merely had the effect of worsening James’s temper. “I am not a child, nor am I in my dotage,” he said. “So I would appreciate it if you were to refrain from discussing me as though I weren’t here, as you sit at my breakfast table, eating my food.”

  Most men would have subsided at this—James’s demeanor of icy calm had, on numerous occasions, proved quite effective at ending an argument—but, unfortunately, Penvale and Jeremy had known him for far too long to be intimidated.

  “Are you certain you wish to journey back to London with us?” Penvale asked. “Perhaps you had better rest for another day—that fall yesterday was nothing to take lightly.”

  “I’m going back to London today, whether you want me to or not,” James said precisely, taking a sip of his tea. A shaft of morning sunlight streamed through the windows, burnishing Jeremy’s golden hair. Jeremy stared across the table at James with an eyebrow raised, toast in hand, and in the silence that followed, James became fully aware of the extent to which he sounded like a petulant child. He heaved a sigh, then set down his teacup with a clatter.

  “My damned head aches, and I just want to sleep in my own bed,” he said, leaning forward to meet Penvale’s and Jeremy’s eyes in turn.

  “You have a bed here that, last I checked, belongs to you as well,” Jeremy pointed out.

  “It’s not the same,” James said shortly, and shoved his chair back from the table as he rose. Logically, he knew that Jeremy was correct; Audley House was his, along with everything within it, including the beds. He had some frightfully official-looking paperwork buried somewhere in a drawer in his study back in London to prove it. But he could never quite manage to shake the feeling he had when he was here—the feeling that his father was nearby. And, of course, there was the other damned fact: that here in the country, Violet wasn’t.

  “I’m going to pack,” he said. “We’ll depart in an hour.”

  Without another word, he strode from the room.

  It was absurd, he reflected as he climbed the stairs. Ludicrous, really. It had been four years since he and Violet had shared a bed. In London, he slept in his bedchamber and she in hers, separated by a wall, a dressing room, a connecting door, another dressing room, another wall, and four years’ worth of cold silences. And yet he still slept easier knowing that she was under the same roof. It was just the sort of sentimental nonsense that, prior to his marriage, he would have had no time for.

  Of course, before his marriage, he wouldn’t have thought himself the sort of man to let one argument with one woman ruin four long years of his life.

  And yet he had.

  Violet had refused to accompany him on any of his trips to Brook Vale since the day of their argument—a day he had taken to referring to, in the privac
y of his own head, as the Die Horribilis. Each time he departed, he asked her, with his usual politeness—with the voice that he knew made him sound like an ass, even as he was using it—whether she would like to accompany him. Take a bit of the clean country air. Et cetera. Her answer was always no.

  And James was always disappointed and relieved in almost equal measure.

  He shouldn’t have minded. She hated those stables—he’d lost count of the number of times she had told him that she wished he’d spend less time at them, leave the day-to-day running of them to his—entirely competent—staff. They were hardly in dire financial straits, not with her dowry and his inheritance—it wasn’t as though they needed to worry about his inattention to the minutiae of the stables’ operation sending them into ruin.

  It had always irritated him that she couldn’t see that all those hours spent at the stables were, in large part, for her. That he had to prove to her, to his father, to himself that he was the sort of man who could make something. Manage something. He’d had no title to offer her other than a courtesy title; he wasn’t responsible for the running of the dukedom, like his brother would one day be. But he somehow felt that these stables gave him a purpose, and in so doing made him worthy of her. He wanted to be better than whatever feckless, idle, perhaps better titled aristocrat she would have married if she hadn’t met him on that balcony, and that she never understood this had therefore been a constant source of friction.

  So why he was disappointed not to have her there, to be spared her disapproving looks and cutting remarks, was a mystery to him.

  But the fact remained that he never slept as well at Audley House as he did at their residence in town.

  * * *

  By early evening, they were nearly back to town. The weather was fine, all sunshine and blue skies and puffy white clouds, making the confinement of the carriage all the more intolerable. Outside, James could see the rolling green hills and woods of southern England and, patriotic man that he was, could not help but feel a surge of love for his homeland. One’s marital troubles were undoubtedly distracting, but still: God save the king, et cetera.