met him without James before. I thought it was odd, but of course I couldn’t refuse to see him. So I invited him in . . . and he started asking all sorts of . . .” Violet trailed off, searching for a delicate way to phrase it. “Personal questions,” she finished.
Sophie stared at her, uncomprehending, for a moment, and Violet touched a hand quickly to her own midriff. Sophie’s eyes widened, understanding. “He didn’t,” she said in rapt horror.
“He did,” Violet confirmed. “Oh, he wasn’t so brash as to come straight out and ask when I’d be providing his son with an heir, but he danced quite close to it.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that I didn’t think it a conversation appropriate for the drawing room,” Violet said, sniffing in remembered outrage. She recalled being quite pleased with her response at the time, thinking that for once she had managed a reply that even her mother would have approved of—for of course, Lady Worthington considered pregnancy and the marital activities that led to it to be unsuitable topics for any conversation. Ever. Suffice to say, given her mother’s disinclination to discuss the topic, Violet’s wedding night had been highly educational.
Violet had followed up this remark by asking a question of the duke.
“I don’t know why you should ask me that question,” she had said irritably. “My husband isn’t your heir. I believe you have an elder son who perhaps is more deserving of your interrogation.”
“My elder son is unlikely to ever provide me with an heir,” the duke ground out, and Violet had looked at him blankly. Surely he wasn’t saying that West preferred men? She’d read of such things, of course, in her study of the Greeks, and in some of the more illicit poetry she had stumbled across—she had even once asked James a series of questions about the mechanics involved, which had been possibly the only time she’d ever seen him blush—but West’s reputation had always been that of a rake about town, and she had heard the whisperings of the near-engagement with Miss Wexham a couple of years before . . .
“I don’t understand why you should think that,” she said, when the duke seemed disinclined to elaborate. “The marquess is only six-and-twenty, I believe? Rather young to be considering marriage, so I wouldn’t despair that he hasn’t yet taken a wife—”
“He will never take a wife,” the duke cut in, enunciating each word so clearly that it sounded as though he were hacking them each off of a block of ice. “After that foolish accident, he seems to have been left with an injury that will prevent him from ever fathering children.”
“He—oh!” Violet said, understanding dawning. Pity followed closely on its heels—how awful for West. She had grown quite fond of him over the past year—though she did wonder at James never mentioning something of this great a magnitude about his brother. Perhaps he felt it too delicate to discuss with his wife.
None of this, however, could she share with Sophie. Aside from the fact that it was highly inappropriate drawing room conversation, she had no idea what the depth of Sophie’s feelings for West might still be—or any notion of what had passed between them in the past.
“He didn’t take too kindly to my comment about the appropriateness of the conversation,” she added, “and expressed some rather rude doubts about my suitability as James’s wife. I hadn’t intended to confront him before speaking to James of course, but at that point I rather lost my temper and told him I’d had quite enough of his interference in my marriage.”
“I do wish I could have witnessed this,” Sophie said somewhat dreamily. “I should so dearly love to see that man delivered a set-down . . .”
“Yes, well,” Violet said, preening a bit before subsiding, “it didn’t last long, I’m afraid. He wasted no time at all in informing me that he and my mother had interfered because neither of them had any confidence in their children’s ability to make appropriate matches on our own.”
“I needed an heir for the dukedom, and my elder son was unable to comply,” the duke said. “And you—your mother was worried that you wouldn’t take, I understand. How much easier to throw you two together than to leave it all to chance. You should be thanking me,” the duke said smugly. “It seems to me as though your happiness is entirely thanks to your mother and myself.”
“My mother