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.