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.
It had been dry weather of late, meaning the roads were in good condition and the group was making excellent time. Opposite him in the carriage, Jeremy was slumped in a corner, attempting to nap—no doubt hampered in his efforts by the frequent jostling of the conveyance. Penvale was seated next to James, his nose buried in a dense tome about water management on country estates.
“You haven’t got a country estate,” James pointed out pleasantly. His head was starting to throb again, damn it.
Penvale glanced up and cast him a narrow look. “I will someday.”
“Even if you raise the blunt,” James said frankly, knowing he was pushing Penvale but unable to help himself, “do you think your uncle will really sell?”
“If I make him a good enough offer,” Penvale said shortly, and returned his attention to his reading. James did not needle him further; given his own disinclination to discuss matters of a personal nature with his friends, he could not fault Penvale for turning closemouthed on this particular subject.
Penvale had been merely ten years old when his parents had died and he had inherited his title. The family estate had been in so much debt that there had been no choice but to sell it to cover the death duties, as it was unentailed—and the most eager prospective buyer had been his father’s younger brother, from whom the late Lord Penvale had been estranged his entire adult life, and who had made his fortune with the East India Company. Penvale and his sister had been sent to Hampshire to live with their mother’s sister and her husband—on an estate a mere handful of miles from Violet’s father’s. Diana and Violet had been friends ever since.
Penvale had spent his entire adult life obsessed with reuniting his title with its ancestral land. He had always been eerily lucky at the gaming tables, but instead of spending his winnings on wine and women, he’d hoarded his blunt like a miser, even going so far as to speculate on stocks—thus engaging in an activity abhorrent to all but the most desperate gentlemen—to increase his fortune. He didn’t take kindly to questions about the likelihood of his uncle selling the estate back to him.
James felt the carriage slow and, leaning forward to peer out the window, saw that they were entering the yard of a coaching inn, where they could switch out their team of horses for a fresh set and, more importantly, get out of this blasted carriage for a moment.
The wheels had barely stopped turning when he opened the door and leaped to the ground, startling the footman reaching for the door handle. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched Penvale drop his book onto his recently vacated seat and give Jeremy a none-too-gentle pat on the shoulder to awaken him before he, too, alighted. James took a few steps toward the door of the inn, then stopped in his tracks as he saw a familiar carriage waiting for its passenger to return.
A very familiar carriage.
Unless he was very much mistaken—and James prided himself on rarely being mistaken—the well-sprung carriage that stood so serenely outside the inn was his very own. He and his friends had taken Jeremy’s carriage to Brook Vale so that he might leave Violet with her own, but such an arrangement had been made with thoughts of her needing to visit her modiste, or the circulating library—not Kent.
Penvale stumbled to a halt behind James.
“What is it? Audley?”
“Unless the fall has got me more out of sorts than I suspected,” James said, more calmly than he felt, “that is my carriage standing there. And unless it has been stolen—in which case this is a piece of very good fortune indeed—that would mean that my wife is here somewhere.”
Rather than the swift intake of breath or the surprised exclamation that James might have expected, Penvale swore: “Bloody buggering Christ. I shouldn’t have sent that damn letter.”
James turned to fully face his friend, his eyebrows raised. “I beg your pardon?”
Penvale looked unusually shifty as he stood before James. Penvale usually had an air of lazy, lethal calm—one that his sister shared—but at the moment he looked like nothing so much as a nervous schoolboy, his hazel eyes apologetic as they met James’s green ones. “I might have . . . sent your wife a note when you had your accident yesterday.”
James strove to keep his voice even. “Oh?”
“And, well . . .” Penvale ran a hand through his hair, looking desperately around the inn yard as though hoping to find someone to rescue him. “You woke up nearly as soon as I’d sent it. And I might have forgotten to send her a second letter informing her that you weren’t dying.”
James opened his mouth to respond, but before he could get a word out, Jeremy’s voice rang out from where he was standing by their carriage, having just emerged. “Darling Lady James! What on earth are you doing here?”
With a sinking feeling of dread, James turned to see—of course it was Violet. She was standing in the doorway of the inn, dressed in a plain frock for traveling, her hair in slight disorder, as though she had dressed in a great hurry that morning. No doubt she had, he reminded himself, given that she had received a letter informing her—well, James didn’t know what precisely Penvale had written in that blasted letter, but he had no doubt that whatever it was had been sufficient to cause concern.
Her face was very pale as she stood there, staring at him, her brown eyes wide, dark tendrils of hair framing her face in a way that he found enticing rather than unkempt. It made him, entirely inappropriately, wish to kiss her.