To Have and to Hoax(90)

He felt like a five-year-old who had been caught spying on his parents, which was absurd—this was his house, for Christ’s sake. And yet, feeling like a fool, he did the only thing that seemed reasonable at the moment: he left again.

It was at his club that Jeremy found him.

“Awake rather early, aren’t you?” James asked, lowering the newspaper that he’d been staring at blankly for the past thirty minutes.

“Come off it,” Jeremy said, sitting down. “Did you overhear the entire bloody conversation, then?”

“Just a snippet,” James said, casting his newspaper aside with a sigh. He saw no reason to lie; he assumed, since Jeremy was here, that Wooton had told Violet that he’d been home, albeit briefly, meaning that his wife now knew precisely how much of an idiot he had acted.

“And you ran away.”

“I didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping and have Violet get the wrong idea,” James said, feeling more and more foolish by the moment.

“You might have avoided that possibility by not skulking in the hallway in the first place,” said Jeremy with great dignity. It was a bit galling to be condescended to by a man who had only recently had to leave a bedroom window by way of a rose trellis, and James told him so.

“Besides,” he added, “I’m the son of a duke, as my father reminded me just this afternoon. Ducal sons don’t skulk.”

Jeremy straightened in his chair, his gaze razor sharp. “You saw your father today? Whatever for, old boy? Felt like beating your head against a brick wall?”

“It was unintentional, I assure you,” James said, rather testily. “I encountered him out riding in the park—the meeting was not coincidental, I think.” He hesitated a moment, then took the plunge. “Over the course of our rather enlightening conversation, he had some interesting things to say about you.”

“Did he?” Jeremy asked, suddenly very interested in the cuffs on his shirt.

“He did,” James confirmed, and after a moment during which he looked at Jeremy and Jeremy looked everywhere but at him, his friend raised his eyes and met James’s gaze full-on.

“He told you about the night you met Violet, then?” Jeremy asked directly.

“I’d really like to hear it from you.” James had learned—rather belatedly—his lesson about taking his father at his word.

Jeremy heaved a sigh and ran a hand through his hair. James couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him look so uncomfortable; he had grown used to the lazy, always-slightly-drunken Jeremy, the womanizing good-for-nothing marquess who was amused by everything and moved by nothing. It was a very effective mask, but James hadn’t realized that it was almost too good; those were all parts of Jeremy, it was true, but he was more than the sum of his parts, and James wondered if perhaps he had forgotten this of late. He wondered if Jeremy had forgotten, too.

“You recall what it was like when I’d first inherited the marquessate?” Jeremy asked. He didn’t elaborate, but James nodded, understanding all that was implied. Jeremy’s father hadn’t left the marquessate destitute, but its coffers had been reduced by years of neglect and bad investments. Jeremy’s elder brother, who had inherited the title upon their father’s death when Jeremy was still at Eton, had managed, through some creative rearranging of accounts, to come up with the blunt to pay the death duties, but it had been a stretch. He had then spent his remaining capital at hand—almost all of the liquid funds the Overington family had left—on a series of costly improvements to the estate. These improvements had, over the past decade, yielded great results, and the estate was solvent once more—flourishing, even. But at the time, it had sharply limited the amount of ready funds—James could distinctly remember Jeremy grumbling at the reduction in his allowance.

Needless to say, when Jeremy’s brother had died in a racing accident with West, the death duties that Jeremy had been forced to pay when he had inherited the title in turn had nearly bankrupted the marquessate. James often thought it amusing how carefully Jeremy had cultivated the reputation of a carefree rake, when in truth he’d had to fight bitterly—at the age of two-and-twenty, no less—to keep his family estate solvent. James had always admired him for it—and he wondered what, precisely, this had to do with the topic at hand.

The question must have been evident on his face, because Jeremy responded as though he’d voiced the query aloud.

“Your father approached me the week before that evening,” he said bluntly, his gaze never moving from James’s own, and James reflected that this was one of the things he liked best about Jeremy—he might hem and haw about doing what was right, but once he had made up his mind to do so, he never wavered. “He told me that he knew I’d been under a great deal of strain of late, and that he’d be happy to do a bit to alleviate the burden—for a tiny price. Just lure a certain young lady onto a balcony at a certain ball that you’d be attending.” He paused then, breaking eye contact and looking down at his hands. He took a deep breath and raised his eyes once more. “I could lie and say he blackmailed me, or approached me when I was foxed, but it’s not true. I was sober as a judge; he visited me at home one night. I knew how fraught your relationship with your father was, and I did it anyway.” He stated this plainly, without breaking eye contact, making no excuses.