Nine
“Have you quite lost your mind?” Jeremy demanded.
It was later the same evening, and Jeremy and James were seated in Jeremy’s study—Jeremy at his desk, James lounging across from him in an armchair, brandy in hand. In truth, the study at Willingham House was not a room Jeremy frequented, and James was nearly certain that he had elected to receive him here as a show of authority. It would have been a more effective display if Jeremy had not looked so uncomfortable in the seat his father and brother had once occupied.
“Perhaps,” James said, tilting the glass in his hand so that the liquid within caught the last rays of summer evening light streaming in through the windows. “I assume you are referring to our meeting in Hyde Park?”
“Of course I bloody am!” Jeremy exploded. Jeremy was mild-tempered in the extreme—he was rather famous for it, in truth. The trait had served him well—it was impossible that one could sleep with as many men’s wives as Jeremy had without making some enemies, and James was certain that Jeremy’s famous charm and good cheer were the only reason he hadn’t yet been smothered in his bed.
“What the devil do you think you’re about?” Jeremy continued, sitting up straighter behind his desk. His own glass of brandy was sitting untouched before him—a sure sign of how deadly serious he was. “Fawning all over Sophie like that—and in front of Violet, no less?”
“I was under the impression—from you yourself—that you and Lady Fitzwilliam were ending your liaison,” James murmured.
“That’s not the bloody point,” Jeremy replied, which was his standard response in any situation in which he didn’t want to acknowledge the truth of someone else’s words. “I still want to know what the deuce you thought you were doing.”
James shoved his chair back and stood, suddenly unable to bear the thought of sitting still a moment longer. He’d been filled with a sort of frenzied energy ever since he and Violet had left the park. He’d been unable to settle to any single task at home, despite the numerous ones that demanded his attention, and hadn’t waited long before seizing his hat and gloves to visit Jeremy. Instead of calling for his horse or carriage, he’d walked to Jeremy’s house in Fitzroy Square, the exercise doing little to calm the jangle of his nerves.
Besting one’s wife, it seemed, was highly invigorating.
“I’m giving Violet a dose of her own medicine,” he said, pacing back and forth across the length of the room. Jeremy was a marquess, so his study was larger than most, despite how infrequently it was used, and yet James still felt caged.
Jeremy leaned back in his chair. “Don’t you think this has gone a bit far?”
“I apologized to her,” James said, stopping his pacing to look Jeremy directly in the eye. It felt odd to admit something so personal aloud, even to as close a friend as Jeremy. He was accustomed to keeping everything of real significance held tightly within him; discussing anything of his conversation with Violet made him feel strange, slightly uncomfortable in his own skin. And yet, as soon as the words were uttered, more followed, almost without conscious thought. “I apologized to her for the incident with the blasted horse, and she is still lying to me.”
“I see,” Jeremy said, and James rather thought Jeremy did see, and that he pitied him. It was galling. However, they were Englishmen, and Englishmen certainly didn’t sit about discussing their feelings, of all things. “So your new scheme is to pant over every widow you see until your wife becomes so enraged that she murders you in a jealous passion?” He lifted his glass to James in a mocking tribute. “Congratulations. I’ve no doubt the drama they pen about you will be performed before generations to come.”
James took a hearty sip of his drink. “I’ve no plan at all,” he admitted, dropping back into his chair. “Unless you consider needling her until she admits she’s been lying to me a plan.”
“You’ve likely caused a fair bit of gossip, and likely gained nothing for it,” Jeremy pointed out. “We were hardly the only people in Hyde Park today. There were plenty of witnesses to you making an ass of yourself.” He took a sip of brandy. “Don’t you think it would be easier to just speak with her?” Jeremy’s voice was uncommonly serious, his gaze direct. In that moment, he looked every inch the marquess, and not at all like the Jeremy that James had known for fifteen years—the devil-may-care rogue, the second son without a whit of responsibility. In the nearly six years since Jeremy’s brother’s death, James had seen flickers of this—hints of the man that Jeremy could perhaps be, if he were ever to dedicate his thoughts to matters more weighty than which young widow of the ton was the most desirable at any given moment. Usually, he found these glimpses comforting, an indication of the person that James had always known lurked within Jeremy, underneath all the flash and charm and merrymaking.
At the moment, however, he just found it dashed inconvenient, as he was the one bearing the brunt of Jeremy’s attention.
“It’s been four years,” James reminded him. “I’m not sure we’ve much to say to one another after four years.” A more accurate statement would be that they had entirely too much to say to one another after four years, but he didn’t feel like sharing that sentiment with even his closest friend.
Jeremy opened his mouth, then closed it again. James could see the internal struggle taking place, could see how desperately Jeremy wished to ask questions. Seeming to give up the battle, he said, “If you would just tell me what your argument was all about—”
“No,” James insisted, and something in his tone must had been thoroughly convincing, because Jeremy fell silent at once, which was entirely unlike him. James had no desire to discuss the events of that day, to share the conversation between his father and Violet that he had overheard. And he didn’t care to pause long enough to examine why exactly he was so bent upon keeping the details of that day locked up within himself. A small voice in the very corner of his mind, one that was easily silenced, whispered that he feared someone telling him that he had been in the wrong four years ago. That was a possibility that he did not wish to consider. Because if he had been, then Violet’s anger with him was every bit as justified as his with her. Perhaps even more so.
No. He could not bear to think on it. He merely avoided speaking of that day because no man liked to admit that he had been out-maneuvered. And four years ago, he had learned that the circumstances of his marriage had involved a good deal more maneuvering than he’d had any notion of.
“Fine,” Jeremy said, settling even deeper into his chair like a petulant child. His posture was beginning to rival Penvale’s for lazy indolence. “But you’re being a bloody idiot, and I begin to wonder that Violet hasn’t left you and taken up with the first dashing Italian to waltz across the Channel. For Christ’s sake, Audley, do you know that Penvale and I didn’t realize that you and Violet had stopped speaking for months after it happened?”
James frowned. “That can’t be true.”
“It’s true,” Jeremy said firmly. “We knew you were drinking yourself into a stupor on a nightly basis, but we’d no notion of the reason until Penvale finally resorted to asking that sister of his”—Jeremy said the word sister the way he might have said succubus—“and she told him what was afoot.”