It was a question Violet had asked herself, on nights when she lay sleepless in her own bed, conscious of James in his own room, not so very far away and yet seemingly separated by miles and miles of space between them.
“We quarreled,” she said simply, which was the truth and yet not even close to explaining what had happened. “We’d quarreled before, of course, but never quite like this—I don’t know if it all just came to a head, or . . .” She trailed off, thinking. “No, I think it was his father’s presence that made it so awful.”
“The duke was there when you quarreled?” Sophie asked incredulously, and with a note of alarm in her voice that made Violet curious about what had happened between Sophie and West all those years ago.
“No, he’d left by then,” Violet said. “But it was his presence that set everything off.” She took a deep breath, thinking back to that long-ago morning.
“A couple of days before we quarreled, I had been to tea with my mother. She and I—” She broke off, searching for a delicate way of describing her relationship with Lady Worthington. “Don’t always see eye to eye,” she finished.
“I have met Lady Worthington on several occasions, and I must confess that does not entirely surprise me,” Sophie said diplomatically.
“She was needling me about my marriage,” Violet continued. “I had made some offhand comment about James in jest and she took offense. She said it wasn’t my place to comment on my husband’s activities”—she could feel herself growing irate just recounting this conversation—“and I told her that when I wished for her opinion on my marriage, I’d ask for it.”
Sophie let out a laugh at that. “I take it that went over well?”
“As well as you’d imagine, I expect. She then informed me that my marriage wouldn’t have come about at all if it wasn’t for her—she was the one who found James and myself on a balcony at a ball and more or less forced him to propose,” Violet explained. “So I naturally told her that we would have found ourselves in the same spot sooner or later regardless of whether she’d forced the issue.” She paused. “That was when she told me that she and the duke were the only reason James had gone looking for me on the balcony in the first place.”
Sophie’s jaw dropped. “They staged your meeting.”
Violet nodded. “Apparently my mother saw me leave with Lord Willingham, and rather than coming and fetching me herself, she informed the duke, who sent James out as a sort of knight in shining armor. I suppose as soon as my mother saw Jeremy come back indoors she made her way out there as quickly as possible to intercept us.” She paused. “I’ve never asked Jeremy about it, but she implied that she was the reason he’d escorted me out there in the first place. She can be quite intimidating when she wishes to be; even a rake like Jeremy would be cowed by her, and I wouldn’t put it past her to send me out there like a lamb to slaughter, just waiting for James’s rescue.”
“I have to give your mother credit,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “It doesn’t seem as though it should have worked, and yet it did. You must have been angry.”
“I was,” Violet admitted. “And confused—I didn’t know how to feel about it at all. I was so in love with James, and to now know that my happiness was owed to the machinations of my mother and his father—it made it all seem rather sordid.” She sighed. “I wanted to discuss it with James, of course, but I was so muddled about it all that I didn’t quite feel ready. I was concerned it would make him feel differently about our marriage—he has such a difficult relationship with his father, and I hesitated to confide something that would have made it worse . . .”
She leaned forward. “You must understand, I fully intended to tell him—and soon, at that. I just needed a bit more time.”
“Of course.” Sophie frowned. “I take it you didn’t receive it?”
Violet shook her head. “This is where the duke comes in. I was at home a couple of mornings later, and the duke came to call. This in and of itself was unusual—James liked to avoid him as much as possible. I’d never 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.