Sophie hastened to a sideboard and opened a cabinet, removing a decanter half full of brandy and two crystal tumblers. She poured a couple of fingers of brandy into each glass.
“Cheers,” she said, offering Violet a glass.
“Cheers.” Violet raised it in reply. She took a sip.
“So,” Sophie said, selecting the armchair closest to Violet’s own, “I presume you’re here to discuss our meeting in the park yesterday.” Her brown gaze was direct, holding Violet’s own without blinking.
“I am, yes,” Violet said. She paused, momentarily uncertain—she wasn’t at all sure how to phrase her request. Being at a loss for words was not a condition she was terribly accustomed to. “I presume you are somewhat familiar with the rumors surrounding my marriage.”
Sophie’s mouth quirked up slightly. “I’ve heard some whisperings that you and Lord James are not as close as you once were.”
“My husband and I married for love, but we were very young,” Violet said bluntly. “We have discovered that we did not suit so well as we thought.”
Sophie arched a golden brow. “It did not seem that way to me yesterday afternoon.”
Violet lowered her glass, momentarily diverted from her purpose. “I beg your pardon?”
Sophie shrugged elegantly and took another sip of her drink. “You two seemed rather . . . connected. I assumed that was why he was so friendly with me, when Lord Willingham and I appeared. To make you jealous,” she clarified, though Violet had taken her meaning.
“He and I are currently engaged in a bit of a . . . duel,” Violet said, failing to find a more appropriate word.
“Indeed?” Sophie leaned forward slightly, clearly interested. “Do go on.”
And so Violet did. She gave Sophie a somewhat condensed version of events, but thorough enough that by the time she had finished speaking, Sophie’s eyebrows were near her hairline, creating small wrinkles in her normally smooth brow.
“And so that is what you stumbled upon in Hyde Park yesterday,” Violet finished. “I apologize that my husband saw fit to drag you into this, and that he treated you so abominably in the process.”
Sophie waved a dismissive hand in a gesture eerily reminiscent of Diana, though twenty minutes ago Violet would not have thought the two ladies similar in the least. “I assumed it was something like that,” she said. “Well, not like what you have described, precisely, because I do not think my imagination rich enough to conjure that scenario.” She took another sip of brandy, and Violet followed suit. “As it happens, I received a profusely apologetic letter from your husband just an hour or so ago.”
Violet was impressed, though she supposed she shouldn’t have expected anything less. James was a man who, once set upon a course of action, tended to see it through immediately.
“It all seemed rather out of character for Audley, truth be told—his behavior yesterday, I mean,” Sophie amended. “Not the apology.” She paused. “Although nothing you’ve told me sounds terribly in character for him. Except for the stubbornness, of course. That sounds exactly right.”
It was interesting, Violet reflected, speaking to a woman who had known her husband longer than she had. Not as well as she had, of course, but still—before Violet had met James, before she had even had her first Season, West and Sophie had been courting. James would have been all of two-and-twenty at the time—a boy. A boy that Violet rather missed, much as it pained her to admit it.
“I thought, when I came here this afternoon, to ask you to play along with him,” Violet said a bit hesitantly.
“What, flirt with him in turn?” Sophie’s voice sounded amused, although it was with a straight face that she lifted her tumbler to her lips once again.
“Yes, rather. It would no doubt confuse and horrify him, and I’m irritated enough at the moment to relish the prospect.”
“Has it ever occurred to you to speak to him instead?” Sophie asked, posing a question that Violet had considered on more than one occasion over the course of the past week.
“I can’t,” Violet said simply. “When we quarreled . . . well, I’m certain I’m not blameless, but the issues we quarreled over really have to do with him. They’re all in his head.”
She could practically see the curiosity radiating from Sophie’s person, but of course she was entirely too well-bred to ask probing questions. And yet, Violet felt an almost painful desire to unburden herself. It had been four years, and she had never told anyone the story of that morning, which was really the story of the year that led to it. Diana, Emily, even her mother—they had all asked, of course. But she had never wished to speak of it—it felt like a betrayal of James, of her marriage and the secrets it held. And yet, here she was, with a woman she barely knew, and she found the words bubbling up within her so that she could barely contain them.
“We were very much in love when we married,” she said, having made up her mind in an instant. “I was only eighteen, you know—it was early in my very first Season that James and I met.”
“How did you meet?”
“At a ball—on a balcony, actually,” Violet said, smiling at the memory. “But it was instant—I fell in love with him so fast, it made my head spin.” She paused, thinking. “Of course, now I think it was merely infatuation at first—the real love came later, the more I grew to know him. But at the time, I thought that it was love at first sight, and he seemed to feel the same way. It was . . .” She paused, a lump rising in her throat at the memory. “It was wonderful.
“And we were happy at first, of course. James’s father made a gift of Audley House as a wedding present—it was far more than James was expecting to receive from him. James has never wished to be dependent on his father, but I think he wanted to prove something to the duke—show him that he was capable of this task that he’d been set. I think he enjoyed the challenge of it, too, in some ways. He studied mathematics at university, you know, and there are quite a lot of numbers involved in running successful stables. So in some ways, he enjoyed it. But he was always doing it for the wrong reason, I felt—always looking over his shoulder at his father, as if to make sure the duke saw that he was managing, that he could be more than some mere afterthought of a second son.
“James and I quarreled about it, sometimes,” Violet added, lost in memories. “I thought he spent far too much time on the stables—he would ride down to Kent once a week sometimes, despite employing a number of grooms. And when he was in London, he spent hours holed up going over the finances, despite having a man of business employed for that very purpose. But he would never listen to me. I think that he felt he had something to prove to me, too, which was ridiculous, but I could never convince him to see things that way. And other than that, things were so splendid—I kept myself busy, and James was always popping home at odd hours in the middle of the day to see me. It sounds frightfully silly now, but at the time, it was very romantic.”
“It sounds lovely,” Sophie said, and Violet looked up sharply, detecting a wistful note in her voice. She wondered what Sophie’s marriage had been like—and what a marriage between Sophie and West could have been like instead. “But what happened?”