you think that’s how it happened. I landed your father every aristocratic investor he has. He exists because of my goodwill. And I spend the money with pleasure,” he spat, “because being trapped into marriage by your whore of a sister has made me a laughingstock.”
Sophie bit back her gasp at the insult. She knew the stories about her sister landing the duke, knew that her mother had crowed far and wide when her eldest had become a duchess. But it did not make his insults fair. “She’s to bear your child.”
“So she says.” He pushed past them, making for the exit of the greenhouse.
“You doubt she increases?” she called after him, shocked, turning wide eyes on Seraphina, looking down at her hands clasped over the swell of her growing body. As though she could keep her child from the knowledge that his father was a monster of a man.
And then Sophie realized what he really meant. She chased after the duke. “You cannot doubt that it is your child?”
He swung around, gaze cold and filled with disdain. He did not look at Sophie, though. Instead, he looked at his wife. “I doubt every word that drips from her lying lips.” He turned away, and Sophie looked to her sister, tall and proud and filled with cool reserve. Except for the single tear that spilled down her cheek as she watched her husband leave.
And in that moment, Sophie could no longer bear it, this world of rules and hierarchy and disdain. This world into which she had not been born. This world she had never chosen.
This world she hated.
She followed her brother-in-law, wanting nothing more than to avenge her sister.
He turned, possibly because he heard the desperation with which her sister called her name, or possibly because the sound of a woman running toward him was strange enough to surprise, or possibly because Sophie couldn’t help but voice her frustration, the sound echoing loud and nearly feral in the glass enclosure.
She pushed him as hard as she could.
If he hadn’t been turning, already off balance . . .
If she hadn’t had momentum on her side . . .
If the ground beneath him hadn’t been slick from the gardeners’ thorough attention to their duties earlier in the day . . .
If the Countess of Liverpool hadn’t had such a fondness for her fish . . .
“You little shrew!” the duke cried from the spot where he landed, at the center of the fishpond, knees drawn up, dark hair plastered to his head, eyes full of fury, making a promise he did not have to voice, but did nonetheless. “I shall destroy you!”
Sophie took a deep breath—knowing with utter certainty that, in this case, in for a penny was most definitely in for a pound—and stood, arms akimbo, at the edge of the pool, staring down on her usually imposing brother-in-law.
Not so imposing, now.
She grinned, unable to help herself. “I should like to see you try.”
“Sophie,” her sister said, and she heard the dismay and regret and sorrow in her name.
“Oh, Sera,” she said, turning her smile on her sister, ignoring the dulcet tones of her brother-in-law’s sputtering. “Tell me you didn’t thoroughly enjoy that.”
Sophie hadn’t had such a pleasing moment in all her time in London.
“I did,” her sister allowed quietly, “But I am, unfortunately, not the only one.”
The duchess pointed over Sophie’s shoulder, and she turned, dread pooling, to find the entirety of London staring at her through the enormous glass wall of the greenhouse.
The shaming came almost immediately.
It did not matter that her brother-in-law had deserved every bit of wet clothing, ruined boots, and embarrassment. It did not matter that any man who flaunted his sexual escapades before his increasing wife and her unmarried sister was the worst kind of beast. It did not matter that the scandal should have belonged wholly and exclusively to him.
Scandal did not stick to dukes.
To the young ladies Talbot, however, it stuck like honey on horsehair.
Once Jack Talbot had become the Earl of Wight and all of London had directed its attention and its disdain at the coarse, unrefined, supremely unaristocratic family, it had stuck, and it had stayed. That the newly minted earl’s fortune had come from coal made the jests easy—the sisters were called the Soiled S’s, which Sophie assumed was considered clever because the Talbot sisters were named, in order, Seraphina, Sesily, Seleste, Seline, and Sophie.
Though Sophie would prefer the Soiled S’s to the other, less flattering moniker—whispered in ballrooms