“But—”
“I said, go.”
The woman knew when she was forgotten and she did as she was told, straightening her tassels and smoothing her skirts before taking her leave.
The duke turned, still buttoning the falls of his trousers. His duchess looked away. Sophie did not, moving in front of her sister, as though she could protect Seraphina from this horrible man she’d married. “If you think to frighten us off with your crassness, it won’t work.”
He raised a brow. “Of course it won’t. Your family thrives on crassness.”
The words were meant to sting, and they did.
The Talbot family was the scandal of the aristocracy. Sophie’s father was a newly minted earl, having received his title a decade earlier from the then King. Though her father had never confirmed the gossip, it was generally accepted that Jack Talbot’s fortune—made in coal—had purchased his title. Some said it was won in a round of faro; some said it was payment for the earl assuming a particularly embarrassing debt belonging to the King.
Sophie did not know, and she did not much care. After all, her father’s title had nothing to do with her, and this aristocratic world was not one she would have chosen for herself.
Indeed, she would have chosen any world but this one, where people so misjudged and mistreated her sisters. She lifted her chin and faced her brother-in-law. “You don’t seem to mind spending our money.”
“Sophie,” her sister said again, and this time, she heard the censure in the word.
She turned on Seraphina. “You cannot mean to protect him. It’s true, isn’t it? Before you, he was impoverished. What good is a dukedom if it’s in shambles? He should be on his knees in gratitude that you came along and saved his name.”
“Saved my name, did she?” The duke straightened one coat sleeve. “You’re addled if 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 and tearooms and especially gentlemen’s clubs, she had no doubt. A warning, ever since Seraphina had famously trapped her perfect duke into marriage. The meaning was clear; money might have purchased the earldom, the home in Mayfair, the beautiful—if extravagant—clothes, the perfect horseflesh, the overly gilded carriages, but it could never purchase a proper bloodline, and the girls might do anything necessary to marry into long-standing aristocratic circles.
The Dangerous Daughters.
The label was borne out by her three unmarried older sisters, each of whom was in the midst of an extravagant courtship with an equally extravagant suitor—courtships that bordered on the scandalous, and were at constant risk of remaining unfulfilled. Sesily was widely known to be the muse of Derek Hawkins, renowned artist and proprietor and star of the Hawkins Theater. Hawkins did not boast a title, but he boasted in every other imaginable way, and that was enough to win Sesily’s heart—though Sophie couldn’t for the life of her understand what her sister, or anyone else in Society, saw in the insufferable man.