Before she had further time to reconsider, however, the lady of the house appeared in the doorway. She was dressed simply in a gray afternoon gown—Violet knew that she was out of mourning, but this looked like one of her frocks from the months of half mourning that had concluded that period. Her golden hair was pulled back from her face into a simple knot at the nape of her neck, and her features bore an expression of polite curiosity.

“Lady James,” Lady Fitzwilliam said, walking into the room. “What an unexpected pleasure.” Her tone was wary, as well it might be—Violet had never spoken to her outside of a ballroom before, barring their meeting of the previous day, and she knew that for her to call upon Lady Fitzwilliam in her own home was curious indeed.

“Please, call me Violet,” Violet said, abandoning all etiquette as she stood. Her mother would have fainted at this breach of propriety—but then, Lady Worthington tended to swoon at the slightest provocation. Violet secretly suspected that she laced her corsets tighter to ensure said swooning—though, valuing her life (or at least her ears), she had of course never voiced her suspicion to her mother.

“Then you must call me Sophie,” was the reply, and Lady Fitzwilliam—Sophie—crossed the room to take Violet’s hand and squeeze it lightly, seemingly unfazed by how highly irregular everything about this was. “Would you care for some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Violet said, resuming her seat.

Sophie cast a quick glance around the room, as though reassuring herself that they were alone, then said, “Something stronger, perhaps? I’ve some brandy stowed away for special circumstances—and I rather suspect that this is going to be one.”

Violet realized in an instant why West had been so taken with Sophie Wexham. On the surface, she was all that was prim and proper—her hair pulled neatly back, her trim figure clothed in an entirely appropriate gown—but there was clearly more to her that lurked just beneath the surface, and Violet found herself rather intrigued by what, precisely, that more might be.

“Yes, I think that might be just the thing,” she said by way of reply, and Sophie shot her a pleased smile, rather as if she had sized Violet up correctly.

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.