Sophie arched a golden brow. “It did not seem that way to me yesterday afternoon.”
Violet lowered her glass, momentarily diverted from her purpose. “I beg your pardon?”
Sophie shrugged elegantly and took another sip of her drink. “You two seemed rather… connected. I assumed that was why he was so friendly with me, when Lord Willingham and I appeared. To make you jealous,” she clarified, though Violet had taken her meaning.
“He and I are currently engaged in a bit of a… duel,” Violet said, failing to find a more appropriate word.
“Indeed?” Sophie leaned forward slightly, clearly interested. “Do go on.”
And so Violet did. She gave Sophie a somewhat condensed version of events, but thorough enough that by the time she had finished speaking, Sophie’s eyebrows were near her hairline, creating small wrinkles in her normally smooth brow.
“And so that is what you stumbled upon in Hyde Park yesterday,” Violet finished. “I apologize that my husband saw fit to drag you into this, and that he treated you so abominably in the process.”
Sophie waved a dismissive hand in a gesture eerily reminiscent of Diana, though twenty minutes ago Violet would not have thought the two ladies similar in the least. “I assumed it was something like that,” she said. “Well, not like what you have described, precisely, because I do not think my imagination rich enough to conjure that scenario.” She took another sip of brandy, and Violet followed suit. “As it happens, I received a profusely apologetic letter from your husband just an hour or so ago.”
Violet was impressed, though she supposed she shouldn’t have expected anything less. James was a man who, once set upon a course of action, tended to see it through immediately.
“It all seemed rather out of character for Audley, truth be told—his behavior yesterday, I mean,” Sophie amended. “Not the apology.” She paused. “Although nothing you’ve told me sounds terribly in character for him. Except for the stubbornness, of course. That sounds exactly right.”
It was interesting, Violet reflected, speaking to a woman who had known her husband longer than she had. Not as well as she had, of course, but still—before Violet had met James, before she had even had her first Season, West and Sophie had been courting. James would have been all of two-and-twenty at the time—a boy. A boy that Violet rather missed, much as it pained her to admit it.
“I thought, when I came here this afternoon, to ask you to play along with him,” Violet said a bit hesitantly.
“What, flirt with him in turn?” Sophie’s voice sounded amused, although it was with a straight face that she lifted her tumbler to her lips once again.
“Yes, rather. It would no doubt confuse and horrify him, and I’m irritated enough at the moment to relish the prospect.”
“Has it ever occurred to you to speak to him instead?” Sophie asked, posing a question that Violet had considered on more than one occasion over the course of the past week.
“I can’t,” Violet said simply. “When we quarreled… well, I’m certain I’m not blameless, but the issues we quarreled over really have to do with him. They’re all in his head.”
She could practically see the curiosity radiating from Sophie’s person, but of course she was entirely too well-bred to ask probing questions. And yet, Violet felt an almost painful desire to unburden herself. It had been four years, and she had never told anyone the story of that morning, which was really the story of the year that led to it. Diana, Emily, even her mother—they had all asked, of course. But she had never wished to speak of it—it felt like a betrayal of James, of her marriage and the secrets it held. And yet, here she was, with a woman she barely knew, and she found the words bubbling up within her so that she could barely contain them.
“We were very much in love when we married,” she said, having made up her mind in an instant. “I was only eighteen, you know—it was early in my very first Season that James and I met.”
“How did you meet?”
“At a ball—on a balcony, actually,” Violet said, smiling at the memory. “But it was instant—I fell in love with him so fast, it made my head spin.” She paused, thinking. “Of course, now I think it was merely infatuation at first—the real love came later, the more I grew to know him. But at the time, I thought that it was love at first sight, and he seemed to feel the same way. It was…” She paused, a lump rising in her throat at the memory. “It was wonderful.
“And we were happy at first, of course. James’s father made a gift of Audley House as a wedding present—it was far more than James was expecting to receive from him. James has never wished to be dependent on his father, but I think he wanted to prove something to the duke—show him that he was capable of this task that he’d been set. I think he enjoyed the challenge of it, too, in some ways. He studied mathematics at university, you know, and there are quite a lot of numbers involved in running successful stables. So in some ways, he enjoyed it. But he was always doing it for the wrong reason, I felt—always looking over his shoulder at his father, as if to make sure the duke saw that he was managing, that he could be more than some mere afterthought of a second son.
“James and I quarreled about it, sometimes,” Violet added, lost in memories. “I thought he spent far too much time on the stables—he would ride down to Kent once a week sometimes, despite employing a number of grooms. And when he was in London, he spent hours holed up going over the finances, despite having a man of business employed for that very purpose. But he would never listen to me. I think that he felt he had something to prove to me, too, which was ridiculous, but I could never convince him to see things that way. And other than that, things were so splendid—I kept myself busy, and James was always popping home at odd hours in the middle of the day to see me. It sounds frightfully silly now, but at the time, it was very romantic.”
“It sounds lovely,” Sophie said, and Violet looked up sharply, detecting a wistful note in her voice. She wondered what Sophie’s marriage had been like—and what a marriage between Sophie and West could have been like instead. “But what happened?”
It was a question Violet had asked herself, on nights when she lay sleepless in her own bed, conscious of James in his own room, not so very far away and yet seemingly separated by miles and miles of space between them.
“We quarreled,” she said simply, which was the truth and yet not even close to explaining what had happened. “We’d quarreled before, of course, but never quite like this—I don’t know if it all just came to a head, or…” She trailed off, thinking. “No, I think it was his father’s presence that made it so awful.”
“The duke was there when you quarreled?” Sophie asked incredulously, and with a note of alarm in her voice that made Violet curious about what had happened between Sophie and West all those years ago.
“No, he’d left by then,” Violet said. “But it was his presence that set everything off.” She took a deep breath, thinking back to that long-ago morning.
“A couple of days before we quarreled, I had been to tea with my mother. She and I—” She broke off, searching for a delicate way of describing her relationship with Lady Worthington. “Don’t always see eye to eye,” she finished.
“I have met Lady Worthington on several occasions, and I must confess that does not entirely surprise me,” Sophie said diplomatically.
“She was needling me about my marriage,” Violet continued. “I had made some offhand comment about James in jest and she took offense. She said it wasn’t my place to comment on my husband’s activities”—she could feel herself growing irate just recounting this conversation—“and I told her that when I wished for her opinion on my marriage, I’d ask for it.”
Sophie let out a laugh at that. “I take it that went over well?”
“As well as you’d imagine, I expect. She then informed me that my marriage wouldn’t have come about at all if it wasn’t for her—she was the one who found James and myself on a balcony at a ball and more or less forced hi
m to propose,” Violet explained. “So I naturally told her that we would have found ourselves in the same spot sooner or later regardless of whether she’d forced the issue.” She paused. “That was when she told me that she and the duke were the only reason James had gone looking for me on the balcony in the first place.”
Sophie’s jaw dropped. “They staged your meeting.”
Violet nodded. “Apparently my mother saw me leave with Lord Willingham, and rather than coming and fetching me herself, she informed the duke, who sent James out as a sort of knight in shining armor. I suppose as soon as my mother saw Jeremy come back indoors she made her way out there as quickly as possible to intercept us.” She paused. “I’ve never asked Jeremy about it, but she implied that she was the reason he’d escorted me out there in the first place. She can be quite intimidating when she wishes to be; even a rake like Jeremy would be cowed by her, and I wouldn’t put it past her to send me out there like a lamb to slaughter, just waiting for James’s rescue.”
“I have to give your mother credit,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “It doesn’t seem as though it should have worked, and yet it did. You must have been angry.”
“I was,” Violet admitted. “And confused—I didn’t know how to feel about it at all. I was so in love with James, and to now know that my happiness was owed to the machinations of my mother and his father—it made it all seem rather sordid.” She sighed. “I wanted to discuss it with James, of course, but I was so muddled about it all that I didn’t quite feel ready. I was concerned it would make him feel differently about our marriage—he has such a difficult relationship with his father, and I hesitated to confide something that would have made it worse…”
She leaned forward. “You must understand, I fully intended to tell him—and soon, at that. I just needed a bit more time.”
“Of course.” Sophie frowned. “I take it you didn’t receive it?”
Violet shook her head. “This is where the duke comes in. I was at home a couple of mornings later, and the duke came to call. This in and of itself was unusual—James liked to avoid him as much as possible. I’d never met him without James before. I thought it was odd, but of course I couldn’t refuse to see him. So I invited him in… and he started asking all sorts of…” Violet trailed off, searching for a delicate way to phrase it. “Personal questions,” she finished.
Sophie stared at her, uncomprehending, for a moment, and Violet touched a hand quickly to her own midriff. Sophie’s eyes widened, understanding. “He didn’t,” she said in rapt horror.
“He did,” Violet confirmed. “Oh, he wasn’t so brash as to come straight out and ask when I’d be providing his son with an heir, but he danced quite close to it.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that I didn’t think it a conversation appropriate for the drawing room,” Violet said, sniffing in remembered outrage. She recalled being quite pleased with her response at the time, thinking that for once she had managed a reply that even her mother would have approved of—for of course, Lady Worthington considered pregnancy and the marital activities that led to it to be unsuitable topics for any conversation. Ever. Suffice to say, given her mother’s disinclination to discuss the topic, Violet’s wedding night had been highly educational.
Violet had followed up this remark by asking a question of the duke.
“I don’t know why you should ask me that question,” she had said irritably. “My husband isn’t your heir. I believe you have an elder son who perhaps is more deserving of your interrogation.”
“My elder son is unlikely to ever provide me with an heir,” the duke ground out, and Violet had looked at him blankly. Surely he wasn’t saying that West preferred men? She’d read of such things, of course, in her study of the Greeks, and in some of the more illicit poetry she had stumbled across—she had even once asked James a series of questions about the mechanics involved, which had been possibly the only time she’d ever seen him blush—but West’s reputation had always been that of a rake about town, and she had heard the whisperings of the near-engagement with Miss Wexham a couple of years before…
“I don’t understand why you should think that,” she said, when the duke seemed disinclined to elaborate. “The marquess is only six-and-twenty, I believe? Rather young to be considering marriage, so I wouldn’t despair that he hasn’t yet taken a wife—”
“He will never take a wife,” the duke cut in, enunciating each word so clearly that it sounded as though he were hacking them each off of a block of ice. “After that foolish accident, he seems to have been left with an injury that will prevent him from ever fathering children.”
“He—oh!” Violet said, understanding dawning. Pity followed closely on its heels—how awful for West. She had grown quite fond of him over the past year—though she did wonder at James never mentioning something of this great a magnitude about his brother. Perhaps he felt it too delicate to discuss with his wife.
None of this, however, could she share with Sophie. Aside from the fact that it was highly inappropriate drawing room conversation, she had no idea what the depth of Sophie’s feelings for West might still be—or any notion of what had passed between them in the past.
“He didn’t take too kindly to my comment about the appropriateness of the conversation,” she added, “and expressed some rather rude doubts about my suitability as James’s wife. I hadn’t intended to confront him before speaking to James of course, but at that point I rather lost my temper and told him I’d had quite enough of his interference in my marriage.”
“I do wish I could have witnessed this,” Sophie said somewhat dreamily. “I should so dearly love to see that man delivered a set-down…”
“Yes, well,” Violet said, preening a bit before subsiding, “it didn’t last long, I’m afraid. He wasted no time at all in informing me that he and my mother had interfered because neither of them had any confidence in their children’s ability to make appropriate matches on our own.”
“I needed an heir for the dukedom, and my elder son was unable to comply,” the duke said. “And you—your mother was worried that you wouldn’t take, I understand. How much easier to throw you two together than to leave it all to chance. You should be thanking me,” the duke said smugly. “It seems to me as though your happiness is entirely thanks to your mother and myself.”
“My mother said something similar just the other day as we were discussing this very matter,” Violet said coldly. “You may think yourselves some sort of strategic geniuses for working out how to take advantage of James’s gentlemanly instincts, but—”
The duke interrupted her with a laugh. “It hardly was the work of a genius. It was really all too easy. My son is entirely too predictable—if he sees a maiden in distress, of course he will come to her rescue. I merely had to mention to him that I’d seen his friend with someone who might cause a bit of a headache for him to send him tearing out in pursuit. And of course, it was nothing at all to have your mother stumble across the two of you on the balcony. I really must congratulate you, my dear, for putting on such a thoroughly convincing performance. Your mother questioned how well it would work, but I—”
“You knew precisely how to manipulate me.”
Violet and the duke both turned, startled, to the doorway, where James had appeared silently. Violet had been so caught up in the duke’s tale that she hadn’t noticed any noise from the mews heralding his return. She had never seen James look like this before—he was very still, his broad-shouldered form filling the doorway. His eyes were flicking back and forth between herself and his father, as though he couldn’t quite decide whom to focus on. After a moment, however, his gaze settled on the duke.
“Well, congratulations, Father,” James said, strolling into the room with a sort of studied casualness that Violet could see instantly was an act. “You win. You found me a bride with impeccable lineage, and you managed to keep your little secret until after all the papers were signed.” He continued to advanc
e toward the duke, not stopping until he was only a couple of feet from his father. “You haven’t quite succeeded in your aim, though, since we’ve yet to provide you with an heir. Which I surmise is the reason you came to sniff around my wife today.” There was the slightest tremble in his voice, which Violet recognized as a sign of just how angry he was.
The duke’s expression grew hard as he surveyed his younger son. “Don’t make a scene, James. If you can’t keep your emotions in check, I don’t think there’s any point in my lingering.” He rose, making as if to step past James, but James blocked his progress.
“I will never provide you with an heir,” he said quietly, and while Violet knew—she knew—that it was just his anger speaking, the words were still like a dagger to her heart. Those were her future children he was disavowing. She knew he didn’t mean it, but that didn’t mean she wanted to hear it. “So your bloody scheme was all for naught.” He took a step closer to his father. “Now get out of my house.”
“You don’t mean he thought you were involved somehow?” Sophie’s brows knit together, and her tone of offended outrage on Violet’s behalf was obliquely comforting.
“I mean precisely that,” Violet said. “I made things worse because I panicked a bit, initially.”
The door had scarcely closed behind the duke when James turned to her. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to see in his eyes—understanding, perhaps? A sense of shared anger? Love? Whatever she was looking for, she didn’t find it, seeing instead a look of profound betrayal in those familiar green eyes.
“James,” she said quickly, before he could speak, “I knew nothing about this.” This wasn’t, of course, entirely true—she had known for close to two days, without telling him. But she was so eager to distance herself from their parents’ actions that she spoke without thinking.
“Yes, you did,” he said quietly. “I heard you. You just told him you’d been discussing it with your mother.” His voice was relatively calm, but she could hear the accusatory note to it.
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