To Have and to Hoax

by Martha Waters

  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.

  But then, James always wished to kiss her. The kissing had never been the problem. It was the talking that seemed to give them trouble.

  He took a step forward, dimly registering that she was likely in a state of shock at seeing him so suddenly standing before her, healthy and well, when Penvale’s missive had doubtless made it sound as though he were knocking at death’s door.

  “Violet,” he said, and as he heard his own voice, he registered that the note of hesitation it contained made him sound stiff.

  “You… Penvale’s note…” She seemed to struggle for words, unusual for a woman who loved to talk as much as Violet did. Never mind that she didn’t share most of her words with James anymore; he still heard her sometimes, as he passed by the drawing room while she had her friends to tea, chattering away much as she ever had. He was always torn, on those occasions, between the desire to smile at the familiar sound of her voice and the desire to punch something.

  The course of true love ne’er did run smooth, naturally, but James rather thought that his path had been unnecessarily choppy. When sitting through a particularly icily silent meal, he thought of another set of famous words more applicable to his life.

  Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

  These thoughts—or fragmented versions of them—flitted through his mind in an instant as he watched Violet make a valiant effort to regain her composure. She looked weary and shocked and travel-mussed, a far cry from the oh-so-elegant young miss he had met on that balcony five years ago, and yet she was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He tried to hate her for it, but couldn’t quite get there.

  A moment later, however, hating her seemed to require considerably less effort, given that she recovered enough to take several rapid steps forward, raise her hand, and slap him across the face with impressive force.

  “Jesus—” He bit off the rest of what would have been a truly foul curse and raised a hand to his cheek, which felt hot beneath his fingers. His wife was not a terribly physically imposing woman, but she was stronger than she looked. “Violet—”

  “How dare you,” she said, her voice shaking with more emotion than he had heard from her in quite some time. “How dare you stand there so… so…” She seemed to struggle to find a word to adequately convey the severity of his crime.

  “Healthily?” he asked acidly, lowering his hand from his still-smarting cheek. “I do apologize, my dear wife, if my continued existence proves an inconvenience to you.”

  Her eyes flashed dangerously. “What’s inconvenient is receiving a note from your friend over there…” She jerked h
er head in the direction of Penvale; James risked a quick glance over his shoulder, and saw both Penvale and Jeremy watching himself and Violet with a mixture of amusement and apprehension. James was touched by their concern for his continued well-being, as it was a concern he shared quite earnestly.

  Violet was speaking again. “… making it sound as though you were about to be laid out in a coffin. And when you consider that I’ve been expecting to receive a note like this every time you set foot in those blasted stables, climbing on top of some horse you’ve no business sitting on, it’s not surprising that I was a touch worried.” Her voice was positively dripping with scorn. It seemed she was not yet finished. “And yet, when I hasten to your side, what do I find in the midst of my journey but you, my allegedly ailing husband, standing before me as though you haven’t a care in the world?” James opened his mouth to respond, but closed it again hastily. It was common knowledge that it was best not to interrupt Violet in the midst of one of her rants.

  “In fact,” she continued, “if we hadn’t happened to be at this inn at the same time, I would have arrived at Audley House to find it empty! Is this your idea of a joke? Have you decided to up the ante beyond merely ignoring me, and are now going to start sending me on wild-goose chases across all of England instead?”

  She fell silent, breathing heavily in a way that was most distracting to any man with a measure of appreciation for the female bosom—and James was certainly such a man. He determined, after a moment, that she expected some sort of response from him at last.

  He was silent a moment longer, not because he had nothing to say, but rather because it was so difficult to know precisely where to start. Should he begin by pointing out that making it a quarter of the way from London to Kent could hardly be counted as a journey across England? Or perhaps by drawing her attention to the fact that, as far as the art of ignoring one’s spouse went, he was merely an amateur aping the true master who sat across the table from him at dinner each night?

  In the end, however, he chose to begin with the most obvious point. “I didn’t know Penvale sent you the blasted note.”

  She gave an unladylike snort, which should have been wildly unattractive but somehow wasn’t.

  “It is rather hard, you see,” he said with what he considered to be admirable patience, “to keep track of with whom, precisely, one’s friends are corresponding when one is unconscious.”

  Her eyes narrowed further, a sure sign of trouble, but James didn’t care. He felt reckless, alive, the way he always had when they had argued during the first year of their marriage. The way he hadn’t felt in years.

  “So you really were injured, then?” she asked skeptically, and James expected he only had moments before she turned to call for a physician to perform a full physical examination to verify his claim.

  “I was,” he said hastily, hoping to avoid such an occurrence—he’d had quite enough of physicians in the past day. “Your father’s new stallion threw me from the saddle and knocked me unconscious.” He should probably have been embarrassed to admit it, but he wasn’t—he was a good horseman under ordinary circumstances, but that horse was deranged.

  “And once you regained consciousness, it didn’t occur to your friend ”—she pronounced the word as she might say your pet cockroach—“to alert me to the fact that you were not, in fact, steps away from death?”

  “I can’t really say,” James said, trying to suppress his own irritation and not entirely succeeding, “as I know nothing about what possessed him to write to you in the first place.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew they had been a mistake. Violet’s eyes flashed, and he had to resist the urge to take a step back.

  “Oh, of course,” she said in a lethally quiet voice. “How silly of someone to alert a wife to her husband’s possible demise. How ridiculous!” She cackled, the sound totally foreign compared to her usual laugh—not that her laugh was a sound James had heard much over the past four years.

  “I merely meant he shouldn’t have alarmed you unnecessarily,” he said impatiently, waving his hand dismissively. “There was no need to worry you without cause.” He spared a moment’s thought for the very appealing fantasy of choking Penvale. It seemed a fair payment.

  “And if he hadn’t written to me,” Violet said heatedly, “I expect I never would have heard about this little accident at all! Which is exactly how you’d like things, I expect. You’d never imagine my delicate female sensibilities could possibly handle the trauma.” Her voice was so sharp that he was half surprised the words didn’t draw blood as she flung them at him.

  “There’s nothing to tell!” James said, belatedly realizing that he had raised his voice. He cast a glance around and was relieved to note that no one in the inn yard—with the irritating exception of Jeremy and Penvale, of course—was paying them much heed. Clearly the grooms and travelers had better things to do with their afternoon than gape at a pair of bickering aristocrats. James agreed, considering that he himself had better things to do than be one of the aforementioned bickering aristocrats.

  Violet crossed both of her arms over her chest in a way that managed to do extremely distracting things to her bosom. James spared a moment to be grateful that she was not wearing a more revealing frock, if only for the sake of his ability to concentrate.

  “How often has this happened to you, then?” Violet asked, eyeing him with great scrutiny. “If you’re in the habit of receiving head injuries without informing me, should I assume this is an everyday occurrence for you?” She spoke as though he had asked the bloody horse to throw him.

  “This is the first time it has happened in recent memory, madam,” he said through gritted teeth, his arms stiff and straight at his sides as he fought against his sudden desire to give her a good shaking. He made an effort to lower his voice, if only for the sake of making himself unintelligible to a certain viscount and marquess a few feet away.

  “I’m not sure I believe you,” Violet said with a delicate sniff. “And if this isn’t the first such accident you’ve had, who knows what sort of damage you’ve done to your mental capacity?” She gave him an assessing look. “I mean… should I really trust you with the family finances, James, if it’s possible that you’ve gone soft in the head?”

  James’s hand flexed of its own accord, but somehow, miraculously, his voice was still even. “I believe, my lady, that my mental state remains as undiminished as it ever was.”

  Violet arched a dark brow. “I will, of course, take you at your word, since I have no other choice…” She trailed off, an expression of carefully calculated skepticism on her face that spoke volumes. It was a look, he knew, that was calibrated to annoy him—and it worked. He hated that she knew him so well; he hated that he had once allowed her to get close enough to him to now use this knowledge as a weapon.

  “Damn it, Violet,” he began.

  “I don’t want to hear anything else from you,” she said, and looked over his shoulder at Jeremy and Penvale. “Penvale,” she called, raising her voice slightly, “next time he’s enough of a fool to climb onto the back of a horse that my father told me just last week was unbreakable, please wait to notify me until you’re certain about whether he’ll live or die. I should hate to make a habit of exhausting the horses unnecessarily in mad dashes across the country.”

  She stepped neatly past James as she spoke, taking quick, tidy steps toward her—his, damn it!—carriage.

  “London to Kent isn’t across the country!” James called after her in frustration, unable to remain silent but equally unable to muster a better parting shot than that. “And you didn’t even make it halfway!”

  Violet spared him one last, scornful look over her shoulder before climbing into the carriage and disappearing.

  “Not your best effort, old chap,” Jeremy said, having appeared at James’s side as he watched Violet walk away. “Bit embarrassing, really.”

  “Get in the carriage,” James demanded. “The
n take me to London, and never speak of this again.” He paused a moment, considering. “Actually, first, get me a damn drink.”

  “That,” said Jeremy, clapping him on the shoulder, “is the most sense you’ve made all day.”

  Three

  By the time her carriage rolled to a halt in front of their house on Curzon Street late that evening, Violet was so tired that the edge had worn off her anger. The events of the day floated through her mind as she made her way into the house and then up the stairs toward her bedchamber, but she couldn’t focus on any of them. While her conviction that she was in the right had not weakened in the slightest, she found herself so exhausted that she cared little for anything beyond the prospect of a bath, followed shortly by bed.

  The next morning, however, Violet awoke feeling considerably more energized. She could tell by the light streaming through the windows that it was not terribly late, and after she had rung for Price and sat down at her dressing table to brush her hair, she found herself wondering whether she would find her husband at the breakfast table.

  If he had returned home at all, that was. She assumed he had, but he might have been so irritated after their meeting at the coaching inn that he returned to Audley House.

  Not that the man had any cause to be annoyed, Violet fumed. It had been infuriating enough when he’d accepted the stables as a wedding gift from his father without so much as a word to her until several days into their marriage, and worse still when she’d discovered that on days he spent at the stables or holed up in his study going over the figures, he met her at the dinner table in a prickly mood. Previously, however, her frustration had only ever slid into true anger when he tried to insist to her that the work he did at the stables was for her, for them—as though only he was aware of what she truly wanted.

  She could not, no matter how many times they squabbled about it, understand why he dedicated such obsessive attention to the running of the stables at Audley House. To be sure, she knew her husband enjoyed a good ride in the park or across his estate as much as the next man, but James was not naturally inclined to spend an afternoon at Tattersalls eyeing and endlessly debating the latest horseflesh. And while he was undoubtedly excellent with figures—and had indeed seen revenues from the stables increase under his stewardship—she could not understand why he refused to hand over some of the responsibility to others, and any debate with him on the subject tended to only provoke her ire.