“Yes,” Penvale said, more cheerfully now. “That’s about the shape of it.”
James resisted, with great effort, the urge to seize Penvale by the neckcloth and shake him. He had always thought that his distrust of others was a sign of his own strength; the relatively few people he allowed into his inner circle must somehow be inherently more worthy. But it had transpired that first Violet, and now Penvale, had lied by omission; he seemed to be a less astute judge of character than he had thought. And yet, the revelation of Penvale’s complicity in this wild scheme did not send him into the towering rage he might have expected; rather, the involvement of one of his best friends merely made him curious to learn more about what was afoot. For the first time, he wondered if a single lie was perhaps not the unforgivable betrayal he had once believed it to be.
“I would be most gratified,” he said, enunciating every word clearly, “if you would tell me, in clear and concise fashion, what the hell is going on.”
“Allow me to assist you, then,” came an amused voice from behind them, and James and Penvale turned. Belfry was leaning in the doorway at the entrance to the room. He was clothed in a simple shirt and breeches, a scarlet banyan completing the ensemble. His dark hair was tousled, and his eyes were bleary. He had the look of a man who had recently awoken from a rough night—and who had enjoyed every minute of it.
“Belfry,” James said shortly.
Belfry offered him a bow that went beyond the bounds of what politeness required and veered dangerously close to mockery. One of James’s palms curled into a fist at his side, but he was resolved, as always, to keep his temper, at least until he gained the information he sought.
After that? Well. He made no promises. Every gentleman had his limits.
“I’m touched by your eagerness to call upon me,” Belfry said, pushing off from the doorjamb and sauntering into the room. “But I must ask whether it was necessary to do so at such an hour.” He paused at the sideboard, considered the decanter sitting there, then seemed to think better of it and continued his progress into the room.
“I can assure you, Belfry, I’d rather be anywhere than here at the moment,” James said shortly. “But, you see, when a man discovers another man visiting his wife in her bedchamber, he suddenly finds himself with some questions that need answering.”
“Does he?” Belfry flung himself onto a chaise. “I should think that it would all be rather obvious.” He did not smile, but James suspected that Belfry was trying to bait him.
“Why did you call upon my wife?”
“Why does a man ever call upon a lady?”
“Give it up, Belfry. You gave me your damned card. A man caught out in an improper liaison doesn’t usually leave behind his calling card.”
“Did I?” Belfry widened his eyes, and tapped his chin. “Must have been a mistake on my part.”
Keeping one’s temper was all very well, but there were times, James decided in an instant, when action was called for. He crossed the room in three great strides and seized the fabric of Belfry’s banyan, hauling him into a sitting position upon the chaise. James leaned close, his eyes locking with the other man’s.
“Tell me what is afoot,” he said with deadly calm, “or I shall ask you to meet me with pistols at dawn.”
“I believe, as the challenged party, I would have the right to select the weapon,” Belfry said, but when James’s grip tightened, he sighed. “All right, let me go, you bloody madman.” He slumped back against the chaise when James loosened his hands, and surveyed James with some degree of irritation.
“I was invited, apropos of nothing, to dine with your friend here”—Belfry jerked his chin in Penvale’s direction—“at his sister’s house. I accepted. At said dinner party, your wife requested that I show up at your home disguised as a physician and make some sort of dark prognosis. I declined, naturally. She was persistent. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you?”
It did not.
“Not having any desire to remain trapped at that dinner table for the rest of my natural life, I eventually agreed, provided she and Lady Templeton agreed to attend a show at the Belfry. I’m trying to attract a more respectable clientele.”
“Why did you give me your card, then?” James was genuinely curious. “I wouldn’t have recognized you under all that fur you had plastered onto your face.”
“I dislike being managed by women,” Belfry said, crossing one knee over the other. Even clad in a banyan, barefoot, dark hair mussed, he looked like a prince.
“I strongly advise you not to marry, then,” James suggested.
“No need to tell me that,” Belfry said with a thin smile. He gave James an assessing look. “I also thought, based on your reaction to my news, that your wife might have rather misjudged you.”
“What do you mean by that?” James asked. It was galling to have a man he barely knew making judgments about the state of his marriage. Belfry merely smirked.
“What are you going to do, Audley?” This was Penvale, who was eyeing James warily. As well he should be, considering the role he had played in this entire bloody mess. “Speak to Violet, I hope?”
James gave him a tight grin. “Something to that effect.”
* * *
Cataloguing a library from the confines of a bedchamber was no easy task, Violet reflected. She had thought that after the excitement of last night’s outing, a day of relapse might be called for, and had thrown herself into the role with great enthusiasm, especially since it had given her an excuse to revoke the invitation to tea she had extended to her mother the day before. She’d had all of her meals delivered to her chamber on trays, and had spent no small amount of time selecting the most innocent- and virginal-looking of her chemises—invalids, of course, being entirely excluded from the realm of earthly pleasures. She had braided her hair, then unbraided it, allowing it to flow over her shoulders in dark waves. She had practiced her cough several times, until she thought that she had it calibrated to a perfect degree of frailty.
And then she had taken to her bed and rung for Price. She did not think she was imagining the look of weary resignation that flickered over her maid’s face when she repeated her request of the day before. Violet supposed Price had better things to do than spend her day hauling small stacks of books up and down the stairs. However, she—Violet—also had more important work to do than reading improper novels in bed, and to do this work, she needed Price’s assistance.
And so Violet had set to work again. However, the work gave her less satisfaction than it had done before. Productivity was all well and good when one had the freedom to roam about the house when necessary; after hours and hours of nothing but books, papers, and a tea tray for company, she was growing a bit… well… restless. She was discovering that there was a vast difference between being an invalid when one was truly ill and being an invalid in the full bloom of health. And while some society ladies did nothing more strenuous than lift a teapot each day, Violet was not one of them. A day in bed did not suit her, to say nothing of three days in bed in a row.
In a brief moment of weakness, she wondered if this plan of hers was not, in truth, an entirely disastrous idea. James was proving overall to be a less doting and devoted attendee at her sickbed than she would have wished. In her mind, she’d had vague fantasies of a dimly lit room, herself lying prone beneath the bed linens, her face pale. Sitting at her bedside was the worried husband, a tragic, romantic figure who clutched her hand and mopped her brow and proclaimed that she had never been more beautiful than she was in that precise moment, at the point of expiring.
Of course, Violet found upon closer examination of this fantasy that neither participant remotely resembled herself or James. Which, in turn, might explain why none of this was going precisely to plan.
It was as she was pondering how soon would be too soon to appear downstairs, fully clothed and miraculously on the mend, that there was a light tapping at her bedroom door. She started at the sound.
&n
bsp; “Bugger,” she muttered. She had been so engrossed in her fantasies of freedom that she hadn’t heard footsteps approaching in the hallway. While Violet rather prided herself on never losing her head, there was no denying that there was a slight panic to her motions as she hastily yanked a blanket over the books on her tray, just as the door opened and James walked in.
Violet’s heart—treasonous organ that it was—immediately picked up its pace. Why, oh why, did he have to be so handsome? He was dressed in fawn-colored breeches and a dark blue coat. His dark curls were slightly mussed, as though he’d been outdoors. It was as though, whenever he walked into a room, something primal within her cried out to him, and some part of him answered.
It was, as ever, thoroughly unnerving.
And, most unsettling of all, at the moment his full attention was focused entirely on her.
With effort, she resisted the urge to pull the bedclothes up to her neck. She was a married woman, she reminded herself, not an innocent girl of sixteen. There was no need to cower in the presence of a man—not just any man, but her husband. He had, after all, seen her naked on any number of occasions. Recalling the rather large number of such occasions—and the creative locations in which some of them had occurred—brought warmth to her cheeks, which she hoped James would mistake for fever.
Wait. Was fever a symptom of consumption?
Drat. She had no idea.
“Violet,” he said, bowing slightly before shutting the door behind him.
“James.” She watched warily as he approached the bed with purpose. He reminded her of a graceful predator in the wild, stalking his prey. A lion, perhaps, or a tiger. There was something catlike about his movements.
“When I returned home and Wooton informed me that you were ill once again, I knew I must come see you immediately.” He stopped at her bedside, close enough for her to catch a whiff of his scent—a combination of sandalwood and soap. She tried not to admire the way his coat fit across his broad shoulders. “How are you feeling?” He reached out and seized her hand, and she allowed herself one moment of weakness in which to savor the warmth of his grasp, the comfort it conveyed.
“A bit better,” she said weakly, then coughed. “Certainly less poorly than I was feeling this morning.” She smiled at him, allowing the corners of her mouth to tremble a bit, as though she were merely putting on a brave face. This was not entirely an act—she had risked death by boredom today, which she felt was brave in its own way.
“Good, good,” James muttered, though Violet was not certain he had listened to her words as carefully as he ought. There was something rather… odd… in his eyes, and he was lavishing a perhaps undue amount of attention upon the hand he held so tightly in his own. It was a bit disconcerting, after the woefully inadequate displays of concern he had offered until this point. Violet was immediately suspicious.
He sat down beside her on the bed, then immediately leaped to his feet once more. Violet watched him, perplexed, before she realized the cause of his sudden motion: the feeling of several sturdy leatherbound books beneath the bedspread. He reached underneath the counterpane and retrieved one of the offending volumes.
“Er,” Violet said.
He quirked an eyebrow at her.
“You see,” she said, improvising hastily, “I felt my mind growing—er—disordered, and so I felt that reading something familiar and comforting might make me less confused.” It was, as even Violet would admit, not her best work. She was supposed to have consumption, for heaven’s sake; she wasn’t a mad old maiden aunt who wandered about the house at all hours of the night in confusion.
“I see,” James said, then peered at the spine. “And you found Agricultural Innovations of Shropshire, 1700–1800 to be just the sort of comfort read you were looking for?”
Drat. “Er,” Violet said again, thinking quickly. “I thought it might include some sheep.”
“Sheep?” James said blankly.
“Yes, sheep,” she said with greater enthusiasm. If she was going to do the thing, she might as well get into the spirit of it. “You know, about hip height? Very woolly?”
“I understand what a sheep is,” James said. Violet could practically see him grinding his teeth. “How, precisely, is this a source of comfort for you in your moment of need?”
“Sheep remind me of my childhood,” Violet said mournfully. She heaved a great sigh, one that might have been more convincing had James not been perfectly well aware how eager she had been to escape her mother’s clutches at the age of eighteen. “It wasn’t all lovely, of course, but there were moments… walking through the gardens with Roland when he was a baby… seeing the sheep dotting the hills behind the house… all that baa-ing…” She trailed off, staring into the middle distance with a wistful expression.
“So adorable. So pudgy. With such fluffy hair.” She sniffled.
“The sheep?” James asked.
“No, Roland!” Violet said with indignation. “He’s a bit of a rotter as far as brothers go, especially now that he’s at Oxford, but he was a darling baby.”
This was in fact something of a stretch. Roland had been a very red, very fussy, very smelly baby. Violet, however, smiled a watery smile at her husband, as though barely able to refrain from bursting into tears.
James regarded her as though she’d entirely taken leave of her senses—which, Violet was forced to admit, was not an unfair reaction to the past three minutes of conversation.
“Well,” he said as though he’d come to some sort of decision, placing the book down on the bedside table. “It is clear that you shouldn’t leave this bed anytime soon.”
“Er,” Violet said, her mind racing. The words she was thinking at the moment were decidedly unladylike.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked, reaching behind her to plump her pillows. Violet caught her breath at his proximity—he hadn’t touched her, and yet he was so close to her that if she were but to lean forward a hairsbreadth she could press her lips to the underside of his jaw. That decidedly unhelpful thought sent her heart racing once again. His scent was stronger at such close range, and she recalled how in the early days of their marriage she could tell as soon as he entered a room, no matter how crowded—as though she were somehow more attuned to his scent than to anyone else’s. At first, she had thought it rather odd; after a while, however, it had merely been comforting, to look up in a room full of people and find his gaze unerringly, see those green eyes seeking out her own.
It had all been so… lovely. There was a great sense of peace that came from the knowledge that there was one person above all others who was always on her side.
Until, of course, he hadn’t been.
Until he had chosen to believe the worst of her, of her motives for marrying him.
Until he had added her name to the long list of people that he could not trust. She understood to a certain extent why he had such difficulty trusting others—a childhood with the Duke of Dovington would have that effect on many men, she suspected. What she could not understand was why she had not been worthy of his trust. Why, four years ago, he had allowed a single argument to do such damage to a marriage that had been—to her, at least—so precious.
Her usual surge of anger came upon her, and she embraced it, finding it a relief after a few days spent in James’s company, during which her defenses had lowered infinitesimally. This anger was a welcome reminder that before her was the man who had made her fall head over heels in love with him—and then pushed her away just as abruptly, making the past four years a misery.
Well, she was finished with all of that. She refused to allow one person to be the sole keeper of her happiness a moment longer.
So she would cough, and she would wheeze, and she would bring him to his knees—and then she would move on with her life.
It would be a bit easier to do so, of course, if the close proximity of his forearms to her person did not send her into a fit of swooning, but she was determined to be stronger than this trai
torous body of hers.
Beginning now.
“I am quite comfortable, thank you,” she said, a note of steel in her voice, and reached out with one hand to grasp one of his arms. “My pillows are entirely satisfactory.”
“Of course,” he murmured, the very picture of solicitousness as he withdrew his arms from behind her. The welcome space that was created between them was erased a moment later, however, when he sat back down on the edge of the bed. Mercifully, he managed to avoid either of the other two books that were somewhere under the bedspread.
“Did you require something else from me, husband?” she asked sweetly.
He raised an eyebrow; it made creases in his forehead that she found annoyingly endearing, and she quickly drew her eyes away from that treacherous terrain. She could afford no skin-wrinkle-induced moments of weakness.
“I am merely here to ensure that you are as comfortable as possible, in your weakened state. Especially as it seems that your mind may be going.” Something about the way he said the word comfortable sent a shiver down her spine, despite the fact that the look on his face was one of bland concern. It was distracting—she realized that he was still speaking to her, though she hadn’t been attending anything he’d said.
He raised a sardonic brow at her. “If I were a more easily offended man, I’d think you weren’t paying attention.”
“Funny, because I believe that the current status of our marriage is predicated on your being easily offended.”
As soon as the words were out of Violet’s mouth, she wished them back; she very nearly clapped a hand over her mouth, in fact. What on earth had possessed her? Over the past four years, she and James had developed a set of unwritten rules, and one of them was a refusal to acknowledge anything about the argument that had led to their current state of affairs. And, indeed, if Violet were being truthful, she knew that her words hadn’t been entirely fair. James was not, in fact, an easily offended man—he was merely a distrustful one, and for reasons that she knew enough about to feel were valid, to a certain degree at least.
To Have and to Hoax Page 13
