“Yes, my lady,” Price said, bobbing a curtsey and resuming her frenetic pace. Violet retreated to her neatly made bed, upon which she lay down in the precise center, staring up at the canopy above. She was conscious as she never had been before of the rhythm of her heart in her chest, its pace still accelerated even as she lay entirely still. She couldn’t remove the image from her mind of James lying in the mud, a horse’s hooves dancing precariously near his head.
That head of his—one she had held in her hands, and kissed, and, more recently, wanted to scream at until her throat was raw—contained everything that made him James. Those green eyes, capable of conveying or masking great feeling, as he wished. The mouth she had kissed so many countless times in their first year of marriage, and not at all since then. And that mind—that clever, infuriating mind. She was angry with him—she had been angry with him for years. But she was not prepared for how devastating she would find the prospect of any harm befalling him.
In the first year of their marriage, before their awful falling-out, she’d pleaded with him to be careful at the stables—he enjoyed riding, but the attention he devoted to Audley House’s stables verged on obsessive, a product of his desire to prove himself to his father, and the idea of him injuring himself for such an absurd reason had worried her as much as it had irritated her. He had largely ignored her concerns, refusing to delegate tasks at the stables that could easily be performed by a groom, and spending long hours poring over the books despite having a perfectly competent steward in his employ. She’d tried to bite her tongue at times, not wishing to nag, but there had been occasions when she could not resist raising the issue—after a week that involved two separate trips to Kent to check on the stables, for instance, or a morning when he appeared wearily at the breakfast table after working late into the night.
She asked him to step back a bit from the stables; she told him he had nothing to prove to his father. He, however, insisted that he wished to make a success of the stables for her sake, for the sake of their future children—which inevitably led to a quarrel. A quarrel followed shortly by a reconciliation, but still, a quarrel. Even now, Violet’s hackles rose at the memory of this—of his inability to trust her to know her own mind. His inability to trust that she would love him even without the income of the (wildly lucrative, it must be said) stables.
And, of course, at the time, James had spent far less time at the stables than he did now.
Furthermore, given the current state of noncommunication between them, it had been a long time since Violet had reminded him to be careful.
Four years, if one wanted to be precise.
Violet could, in truth, offer the exact date of her last conversation with James before the event that had come to be known, in her head, as The Argument. She gave it the honor of capital letters because although it was not by any stretch the first argument they’d had in their marriage, none of their previous spats had rivaled it for passion—or for lasting damage.
She could still remember lying in bed with him that last morning, her head resting on his bare shoulder as his arm curved around her back, keeping her tucked firmly against his side. She had revisited the memory of that morning so many times that it was growing frayed at the edges, some of the details becoming confused in her mind—had it really been raining, or was the sound of raindrops a detail that she had fabricated?
In any case, she had learned from nearly four years of experience that to dwell too long upon this was to sink into melancholy. Which brought her back to her present circumstances: lying on her bed, contemplating a man who could, at this exact moment, very well be—
No. Violet quite simply refused to even consider it. James was fine—he had to be fine—because if he wasn’t, that would mean that the past four years would be the end of their story, not a mere rough stretch in the middle. And somewhere, deep down, without even admitting it to herself, Violet had always assumed it would be the latter.