Chapter 8
As much as Violet wished to stay in bed with her head buried beneath the covers for, oh, another three decades or so, she forced herself down to the breakfast room early the next morning. Prepared to face her husband.
However, when she entered the sunny room with the large, oblong table and well-stocked sideboard, it was empty of anyone save for a footman.
“Good morning, madam.” The footman—Thomas, she remembered, from her introduction to the servants yesterday—bowed courteously. “Would you like me to serve you?”
Delicious smells wafted from the sideboard, but she hesitated, the tentative confidence she’d summoned while dressing dissolving like sugar in a teacup. “Perhaps I should wait for Mr. Prescott.”
Thomas’s brow gave the slightest lift. “Mr. Prescott has come and gone, madam. He said he had an early meeting with his land agent.”
“Right. I must have forgotten.” She conjured a semblance of a smile, taking mechanical steps toward the sideboard.
Above all else, she wouldn’t give the staff additional cause to speculate on what must already appear a sham of a marriage.
“I’ll serve myself, thank you. But perhaps you could get me a fresh pot of tea. I like it especially hot.”
“Of course. I’ll return with it directly.” Thomas bowed again and disappeared through a door that blended with the wainscoting.
With the room well and truly empty, she released a shaky breath before hurrying to the sideboard and tossing a slice of toast and a spoonful of eggs onto a plate.
She wasn’t particularly hungry, nor did she have a true desire for piping hot tea.
Her real craving was for a moment of solitude while she reworked her expectations of how breakfast was to proceed.
She sank into a chair at the foot of the table, taking a nibble of toast that turned to sawdust in her mouth.
Wasn’t it a good thing that she could avoid seeing her husband after their mortifying encounter last night?
If anything, she should be flitting about the breakfast room with a weight removed from her chest.
However, she’d spent the better part of a sleepless night, and then the entirety of her time getting ready at her vanity this morning, quelling her anxieties and steeling herself for how she would act when they came face to face.
How she would look him in the eye and comment on the weather, and it would be as if her question in the darkness of his study, and his subsequent rejection, didn’t matter in the least. The fact that the man she’d envisioned—slicked back hair, tightly knotted cravat, ironed newspaper in hand—wasn’t here, and that their next meeting would take place at an undetermined time, meant she had to undergo another agonizing, lonely stretch in which her worries built right back up.
She abandoned her toast, turning to peer mindlessly at the garden beyond the window. Drat Benedict Prescott. Drat him! He’d made it clear how he viewed her: as an obligation, nothing more. And even so, she’d been foolish enough to go to him. To suggest …
Her cheeks burned, and not from the sunlight streaming through the glass. Why should she have expected anything from him beyond aloofness? Beyond the strictest propriety? He’d met most of her questions with non-answers. The mention of intimacy clearly horrified him. And yet …
And yet, there’d been that one easy moment where a single brick in the wall that sequestered him crumbled away. It’s Benedict, he’d said.
Benedict. The name she pictured in print, taking the place of by an author who shall remain anonymous.
The name that mixed with the other words in the lines of those pamphlets, for she’d brought them with her to her new home, flipping through the pages before shoving them into the drawer of her bedside table. Caress. Crisis. Cunt. Cock—
“Here’s your tea, madam.” Thomas burst back in through the hidden door with a silver tea service in hand, causing Violet to startle to attention.
Heavens, her face was hot. Her entire body was hot. But somehow, she had the presence of mind to summon an artificial smile and nod her thanks as Thomas set down the tray before her. She even managed to unclench her fists—for it would seem she’d bunched her fingers into the folds of her skirts.
The tea tray contained milk and sugar, but she ignored them, pouring herself a steaming cup of the dark liquid and bringing it directly to her lips. Unsurprisingly, she scalded her tongue, felt fire in her throat. That didn’t stop her, though, from taking another sip. And then another.
She’d drink the whole blasted pot if it distracted her from pondering her mystery of a husband.
Ultimately, Violet decided to spend her afternoon taking a lengthy walk.
After breakfast was through, she’d done her best to focus on menu planning for the week with the housekeeper, Mrs. Wheeler.
She’d also let Mrs. Wheeler show her all the fine china and silverware.
However, when the housekeeper suggested they move on to take inventory of the linen room, she’d drawn the line.
Violet tried to be a good mistress of the house—after all, what else did she have to occupy her time?
Yet when every slight creak in the floor put her in mind of Benedict’s polished boots approaching, when every shadow that hit the periphery of her vision became a suggestion of him, she knew she had to escape.
She turned down the offer of a horse and groom, or even a footman to accompany her. If she was going to clear her head, she needed to walk. And she needed to do it alone.
Fortunately, the sun continued to blaze high in the sky, and she didn’t go twenty paces into the garden before pulling off her bonnet so warmth could wash over her skin.
With no mother around to lecture her about the risk of freckles, why shouldn’t she?
She could stay outdoors as long as she liked, letting sunlight and fresh air soak deep into her veins until they pushed everything else out—the uncertainty, the frustration, the apprehension.
Having undertaken that small act of rebellion, she continued her journey with a little more lightness in her step. Not knowing where she went, but not caring, either.
The land was both familiar and unfamiliar.
Prior to the day of the shepherd’s hut incident, she’d never been to Aldercombe during any of her visits to Wiltshire, for the property had remained vacant since before her birth.
However, it bore natural similarities to Meadowleigh given its proximity.
Gentle emerald hills. Air scented with freshly turned earth and blossoming hawthorn. Limestone walls bordering corn fields.
It certainly wasn’t London. No, she was far removed from the bustle of the Season and didn’t know when—if—she would get that part of her life back. Yet there was beauty in the countryside. Some people, perhaps, found happiness here.
She took a long breath, then quickened her pace before the ache in her chest could take hold.
Her half-boots tramped over meadows of primrose and cowslip.
Past a field of grazing sheep and alongside a riverbank, where a group of laborers were hard at work with plows and spades amidst the channels on the other side.
She nodded a brief greeting before following the river’s path into a copse of trees, breaking into a near-run until the din of animated chatter was drowned out by the water’s steady trickle. Until the knots in her stomach were caused by exertion, nothing more.
This was what she needed: fresh air. Solitude. A space where nothing existed beyond the river, birdsong, and new-grown oak and beech leaves.
Except suddenly, another round of voices emerged. Not the same amicable hum as back at the water meadow but indistinct words that were terse and harsh.
Her feet crept forward as if of their own volition, silently padding atop the underbrush until the voices grew louder, and two men materialized from behind a massive beech, each gesturing indignantly toward the river.
“I’m telling you, there’s too little clay,” said the man with the scuffed twill coat, his voice painted with a note of urgency. “Suppose we get the same rains as last year. It will never hold.”
“And I’m telling you,” the other snapped, his vowels rounded and polished, “it will suffice. Last year was an anomaly, and I have both a survey and an architectural plan. Do you presume to know more than your betters?”
“No, m’lord, but …”
Violet startled backward, shielding herself behind the nearest tree trunk. Whatever else they said became a discordant whir, for she could hear nothing beyond my lord.
She should have known the moment she laid eyes on him. The aristocratic set of his shoulders. The fine pair of Hessians. The glimpse of wavy, wheat-colored hair beneath his top hat. Wherever the boundary lay between Aldercombe and Watley, she’d apparently crossed it.
Blast, why would nothing go right today? Her heart thumped skittishly against the wall of her chest, and her body suddenly felt too conspicuous, too exposed, as if she were a beacon in the dead of night.
No. No. This was no time to lose her head and get in a flutter. Lord Frederick hadn’t seen her, which meant she still had the chance to remove herself without detection. He and the other man remained facing the river, absorbed in their disagreement, so if she just backed away slowly—
A twig snapped beneath her boot, and Lord Frederick whirled around, his eyes frantically scanning the coppice and landing on the worst place possible. Upon her.
“What are you doing here?” He marched toward her with indignant strides, ruffling up dirt and old leaves before grinding to a halt mere inches from her face. “Did he send you to spy?”