To Have and to Hoax

by Martha Waters

  In short, she was miserable. And by the time she became slightly less miserable, and began to just get on with it, she had no desire to discuss the events of that day. Every time she thought about it she felt hurt and betrayed all over again, the sting of James’s lack of trust in her, his inability to overcome the first instance of his faith in her being tested, as biting as it had been on that first morning, and the thought of sharing the story of their argument sounded as appealing as pouring lemon juice onto a paper cut. Meaning that no one—not her two closest friends, not her mother (perish the thought), no one—knew the reasons for her falling-out with James. Except, she supposed, for James’s father. He’d likely worked it out quite easily. But since she, like James, made it a practice to have as little contact with the duke as possible, it was never a subject that had been broached.

  “I don’t wish to discuss it,” Violet said, her voice sounding stiff even to her own ears.

  “But, Violet, it’s been four years now,” Diana protested. “If you’d just tell us what the bastard’s done, I should feel much better able to adjust my own behavior accordingly. I never know whether I should be moderately cold or if I should give him the cut direct. I shall feel wretched if he’s done something beyond the pale and I’ve been making polite conversation with him for years.”

  “Carry on with your conversations,” Violet said, cutting off Diana’s flow of chatter once the latter paused for breath. Avoiding Diana’s hawkish gaze, she instead looked at Emily, who was surveying her with a peculiar expression on her face, one that she hoped very much wasn’t pity.

  “You loved him once, Violet,” Emily said quietly. “Don’t you want to fight for it, rather than play foolish games?” She paused, then added in a small voice, “I would.”

  Violet looked at her friend, who had spent the past five Seasons catering to the whims of her foolish parents, who had watched both of her dearest friends marry while she remained, as ever, Lady Emily Turner, the prim, proper, and terribly virginal marquess’s daughter. And Violet realized in a sudden moment of clarity that in Emily’s eyes, it must seem extremely foolish of Violet to have allowed a great love match to wither and die. If only repairing the damage were so simple. If only it were as easy as walking up to her husband one morning and declaring a truce.

  But it wasn’t. It was not just the four years of silent meals and stiff conversations that divided them, but the knowledge Violet held, deep within herself, that her husband didn’t trust her—her love, her faith in him, her knowledge of her own heart.

  However, she said none of this. Instead, she said simply, “It’s too late, Emily. I can’t mend four years of damage. But I can show the man that I’m not something to be casually discarded.”

  “Ah,” Diana said, as though something had become immediately clear to her. “Are you going to become enceinte?”

  “Considering we don’t share a bedchamber anymore, I’m not sure how I’d go about doing so.”

  “Oh, Violet, you can be frightfully naive for a married woman,” Diana said impatiently. “I didn’t mean that Audley would be your partner in this endeavor. I was thinking more of planting a cuckoo in the nest.”

  “You want her to take a lover?” Emily hissed, looking about frantically as though the walls had ears—which, considering the number of servants in the house, it was entirely possible that they did.

  “She’d hardly be the first unhappily married woman of the ton to do so,” Diana said. She shrugged. “I’ve been thinking of taking one myself.”

  “Diana… you…” Words seemed to fail Emily entirely, and she subsided into a sort of distressed sputtering.

  “Diana, please do stop trying to shock Emily,” Violet said.

  “It’s not my fault that her virgin sensibilities make it so easy.” Diana leaned back against the settee. As ever, she managed to make bad posture look seductive in a way that Violet could never quite manage.

  “In any case, Diana, your husband is dead, so I daresay the circumstances are a bit different.” Seeing Diana open her mouth, no doubt with some new scheme to share, Violet waved her to silence. “I do appreciate your… er… helpful suggestions, but I have something else in mind already.”

  “Oh?” Diana sat back up again. “Do tell.”

  And, leaning forward conspiratorially, Violet did.

  Four

  James was having an extremely dissatisfying day.

  For the second morning in a row, he had left the house early, before Violet was awake, assuming she had little desire to see him at the breakfast table in light of their most recent conversation. Although, he reminded himself firmly, it was his bloody breakfast table, and he could damn well use it as he saw fit, whenever he very well pleased.

  In theory.

  In practice, he was more or less hiding from his own wife. It was thoroughly embarrassing. Discretion was the better part of valor and all that rot, though, and he found the idea of another argument in the same vein as their last one to be extremely trying.

  Yes, better to give her a few days to cool off before resuming the normal froideur of their dinners. Dinnertime in the Curzon Street house tended to be just shy of unbearable, in truth. Nothing terribly outrageous, of course—no blistering rows or other such unseemly displays of feeling. They were English, for God’s sake. But the reality was somehow worse—sitting across the table from Violet, always painfully beautiful in her evening gowns, her low-cut bodices a hellish temptation for a man who’d had nothing more than his hand for company in bed these past four years. And the silence—the silence was the worst. Violet, who could rarely cease her chatter long enough to take a breath, so full of life and ideas and curiosity about everything, everywhere—to sit across from her in silence was worse than any argument could have been.

  The only thing that made these dinners tolerable was the strength of his cellars, in truth—if he one day squandered his entire fortune on rare vintages, he would lay the blame entirely at Violet’s feet. One could not sit across from her in silence without fortification.

  With that less-than-pleasing thought in mind, James had spent yesterday and much of today meeting with his man of business and his solicitors. This was the aspect of owning the stables he had once enjoyed the most—the horse chatter at Tattersalls, less so. He loved to ride—loved the feel of being on horseback, loved the clarity of mind his morning rides afforded him—but he wasn’t the sort to willingly spend an hour debating the merits of a particular filly. However, of late, even the cool logic of the Audley House finances had lost its appeal. What had once been satisfying—taking a task assigned to him by his father and performing it better than the duke could possibly have expected—had lost some of its allure as time wore on. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone—not when he had fought with Violet so often over this very issue—but he was beginning to wish the stables occupied rather less of his time.

  The stables at Audley House had been a wedding present. “Getting too old for it myself,” his father had said on James’s wedding day. And James—who had prided himself on the distance he had created between himself and his father, who hated the mere thought of being reliant on the duke in any way—had found himself powerless to resist. Because of Violet. He was about to marry Violet Grey—Violet Grey! A rather hasty wedding, it was true, but this was all to James’s liking. Those ten minutes on that balcony had been the most fortuitous of his life. While he’d planned for them to live in the house on Curzon Street on which he’d spent a chunk of his inheritance from his mother, he loved the idea of being able to offer her a country house as well.

  The fact was, he’d been twenty-three and foolish, and he’d have agreed to just about anything if it offered him the chance to make Violet happier.

  James had surprised himself with his own competence at managing the stables—and this fact was deeply satisfying to him. He was good at mathematics—not a genius, but very good. He excelled at working out the finances of the stables, maximizing their profits. He didn’t find the bu
ying and selling of horseflesh to be particularly fascinating—he found, in truth, poring over the books related to the home farm at Audley House to be far more interesting—but it was certainly not beyond his abilities. The time spent in the stables—an issue that had caused no small amount of friction between himself and his wife in their happier days—also quickly grew old. But he was determined to make a success of it—to prove to his father that he could, to show Violet that he could lay the world at her feet.

  He immersed himself in every aspect of the running of the stables, and it was, if he were to be honest, not entirely satisfying—except for each time he was able to reply to an inquiry from his father with an informed report of his success. That made it all worth it. Or so he had always told himself.

  Now, five years older and no longer blinded by an absurd schoolboy lust for Violet, he saw matters differently than he had at the time of his marriage. He knew now—had realized it soon after the wedding, really—that his father was just hedging his bets. The Duke of Dovington left nothing to chance. If there was the slightest possibility that West, his elder brother and the heir, wouldn’t be able to carry on the family line, then it only made sense to ensure that the younger son—who was about to marry a nubile young lady—was well provided for, since his son might very well be duke someday. Of course, James reflected wryly, his father had never been much worried about hedging his bets before—it was West’s curricle accident, an event that had taken place not long before James had met Violet, that had suddenly made the duke worry for the future of the dukedom. This accident had seriously wounded West and killed Jeremy’s elder brother—against whom West had been racing—and had apparently given the duke rather a fright about the future of the Audley line.

  The fact that James and Violet now seemed extremely unlikely to produce an heir was perhaps the only thing James found at all positive about his current arrangement with his wife. He had always had a sense of vicious satisfaction in thwarting his father’s plans.

  In any case, James now found himself the owner of a successful set of stables, which mercifully kept him occupied enough to ensure that he didn’t spend his days merely reading newspapers at his club, manufacturing excuses not to return home. It was hardly a substitute for a loving, happy, fulfilling marriage—or even for a project he felt more passion for—but it was better than nothing, he supposed. And yet, today he didn’t find his work as distracting as he usually did. Everything seemed to frustrate him; he felt as though he were crawling out of his skin, and he didn’t know why.

  No. That was a lie. He knew perfectly well why. He couldn’t get his damned encounter with Violet out of his head.

  It was galling that a woman whose bed he hadn’t visited in four years, with whom he routinely carried on conversations of five or fewer sentences, could destroy his calm like this. It had always been this way, though, from the first night he had met her. James had always prided himself on his cool head, his ability to distance himself from any situation, to not let others get under his skin. It was a skill he had perfected out of necessity, during the long, lonely years of his childhood at Brook Vale Park. Prior to meeting Violet, he had kept himself at a distance from others, even his closest friends. It was lonely, at times, but it was certainly less frustrating, less likely to end in hurt.

  Violet, however, had waltzed into his life and upended it. And he had let her—hadn’t even minded, because he had been so besotted. Looking back, with the benefit of five years’ distance and experience, he could see how unutterably foolish he had been. This was why he had never let himself get close to a woman, prior to Violet—and look what it had led to. A wife who had at the first opportunity lied to him, plotted against him; a wife whom he’d fought with—bloody shouted at, for Christ’s sake—and with whom he now shared long, unpleasantly silent dinners. It had been satisfying, somehow, to see her own icy demeanor shattered for once. Some men would have dreaded an angry wife; James found he vastly preferred it to an indifferent one.

  In any case, after a day filled with thoughts like these running through his head, he returned home in the afternoon, drawn by some vague unformed hope that perhaps Violet would be sitting down to a late midday meal and he could join her. No doubt it would result in another bloody argument, but he found the prospect oddly enticing. He’d fought with her often enough, after all, even if he was a bit out of practice.

  He snorted in derision when he caught himself thinking this—had he really sunk to the point that arguing with his wife seemed like a pleasant way to pass a meal?

  Apparently, he had.

  This was what marriage did to a man.

  However, when he arrived home, he was informed by Wooton that Lady James had not come down from her bedroom all day.

  “Is she ill?” James asked, frowning. Violet was never one to laze about like a lady of leisure, despite the fact that that was, strictly speaking, exactly what she was. She was one of the most energetic people he knew, male or female.

  “Price said that her ladyship has not been feeling well since her return from the country,” Wooton said, and though there was no hint of reproach in his voice, James stiffened slightly all the same. Damn Wooton. He had been his father’s butler throughout James’s childhood, and had done the unthinkable—left the employ of a duke to serve a lowly second son—upon James’s marriage. James himself had barely been able to fathom it, though he knew Wooton had always had a fondness for him. Indeed, he had displayed far more concern for James’s well-being during his boyhood than his own father had, though Wooton’s concern was usually expressed in a stern, unyielding, butlerish sort of way. Sometimes, he thought Wooton forgot that he was a fully grown man, and not the lonely boy he had once been.

  In any case, when James had returned home late the night before last, Wooton had been waiting by the door, as always, causing James a slight pang of guilt for keeping him up. A ridiculous emotion to feel for one’s butler, to be sure, but Wooton was not as young as he once was—though had James been asked to pinpoint precisely how old Wooton was, he was not at all certain he would have been able to give an answer with any measure of accuracy.

  Wooton hadn’t said much upon his arrival beyond a curt, “I am glad to see your lordship in one piece,” and yet James had felt three different sorts of censure from that one remark—for his recklessness, for the unnecessary worry he had caused Violet, and for allowing her to travel halfway to Kent and back without his escort.

  Not, James felt like informing Wooton, that Violet would have welcomed his escort on her return to London. In fact, he was relatively certain that had he entered that carriage with her, he would not have emerged in one piece. However, he had not said this—it had been a long day, but he had not yet sunk to the level of having to explain himself to his servants. Even Wooton.

  Now, however, James could sense all the unspoken words Wooton was holding back—little wonder that the lady of the house should fall ill after hours of worry and uncomfortable carriage travel. Again, James was tempted to tell his butler that Violet was a sturdy sort, and that he’d never known her to be unduly troubled by carriage travel before, but he knew that all he would receive from the man would be a bland, “Of course, my lord,” so he refrained.

  “I shall pay her a visit,” he said to Wooton, handing him his coat, hat, and gloves, and walking decisively toward the stairs. Glancing over his shoulder quickly as he began to ascend the steps, he was satisfied to see a fleeting expression of surprise flick across Wooton’s face. If nothing else, today he had managed to cause his butler to express an emotion, however briefly—any self-respecting Englishman could feel proud of such an accomplishment.

  His steps slowed, however, as he approached Violet’s door, and he hesitated. Should he knock, or go right in? He didn’t wish to disturb her if she was asleep, but the idea of walking uninvited into her bedchamber, as though the past four years hadn’t happened… No. He rapped softly on the door.

  After a moment, Violet’s voice: “Enter.” />
  Upon opening the door, the first thing that hit him was the smell. The entire damn room smelled like Violet. It made sense, of course—she slept here, for Christ’s sake—but it still caught him off guard, the strength of the scent. Violet smelled wonderful. It was hard to say what exactly her scent was—something floral and warm and uniquely Violet, though not actual violets—but he had spent the past four long years catching mere whiffs of it across the dinner table, and it was overwhelming to be surrounded by it once more. He felt like a starving man who’d been led out of the desert and sat before the most sumptuous feast he’d ever had in his life.

  He gave himself a stern, internal shake. Was he going senile? Surely he was young for that.

  He was distracted from these less-than-comforting thoughts, however, by the sight of Violet herself. She was sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, a book lying open on her lap. She was watching him with a wary gaze.

  “Violet,” he said, his voice more formal by far than it had been on the night they met. “How are you feeling?”

  She gave a faint cough, then hastily stifled it before responding. “Passable, thank you.” Her voice was equally formal, and he guessed that she was still angry about their ordeal earlier in the week.

  “Wooton said you’re not feeling well,” he said, taking a couple of steps forward. The curtains were pulled, dimming the light in the room, but he could see by the flickering light of the fire that she was dressed in a blue morning gown, though she had not gone to the trouble of dressing her hair, which lay in a thick braid over one shoulder. It made her look very young—very like the eighteen-year-old girl he had fallen in love with, in fact.