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 privacy 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.