“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?”

It was a question Violet had asked herself, on nights when she lay sleepless in her own bed, conscious of James in his own room, not so very far away and yet seemingly separated by miles and miles of space between them.

“We quarreled,” she said simply, which was the truth and yet not even close to explaining what had happened. “We’d quarreled before, of course, but never quite like this—I don’t know if it all just came to a head, or . . .” She trailed off, thinking. “No, I think it was his father’s presence that made it so awful.”

“The duke was there when you quarreled?” Sophie asked incredulously, and with a note of alarm in her voice that made Violet curious about what had happened between Sophie and West all those years ago.

“No, he’d left by then,” Violet said. “But it was his presence that set everything off.” She took a deep breath, thinking back to that long-ago morning.

“A couple of days before we quarreled, I had been to tea with my mother. She and I—” She broke off, searching for a delicate way of describing her relationship with Lady Worthington. “Don’t always see eye to eye,” she finished.

“I have met Lady Worthington on several occasions, and I must confess that does not entirely surprise me,” Sophie said diplomatically.

“She was needling me about my marriage,” Violet continued. “I had made some offhand comment about James in jest and she took offense. She said it wasn’t my place to comment on my husband’s activities”—she could feel herself growing irate just recounting this conversation—“and I told her that when I wished for her opinion on my marriage, I’d ask for it.”