Page 24 of To Woo and to Wed
“Has she?” Wexham drummed his fingertips together once, twice. “Are you asking my permission? A bit belated, if she’s already said yes, I think?” His tone was mild, but his gaze was sharp.
“Sophie is an adult, sir, and knows her own mind. We do not need your permission to marry… but we would appreciate your blessing.” West was excruciatingly uncomfortable as he spoke, the words feeling like a mockery of the conversation he’d hoped to have with Wexham seven years earlier—one that had never occurred.
Silence met these words, one that lengthened without Wexham displaying any inclination to break it. He continued to gaze at West,his brown eyes so similar to those of his daughter, his expression thoughtful.
“This is the second time someone has asked to marry Sophie, as you well know,” he said. He leaned back in his seat, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair. His gaze wandered up to the ceiling as he spoke. “And both times, it’s come as a surprise. Bridewell’s father was a school chum of mine—did you know that?” He glanced down in time to see West shake his head. “I’d always liked Fitz, but you could have knocked me over with a feather when he asked to marry my daughter—I wasn’t even aware they were acquainted. But he assured me they’d come to some sort of understanding—Sophie herself was waiting outside the study door for the entire conversation. I’ve never been interested in dictating my daughters’ matrimonial choices, as long as they weren’t attempting to marry complete bounders, so I said yes.” His gaze dropped back to West’s now, razor sharp. “But he was not the man I’d been expecting—hoping—to have that conversation with.” He paused a moment, presumably to ensure that West took his meaning.
“I do not know what passed between you and Sophie, seven years ago. I presume it was some idiocy to do with young love and too many emotions; I wonder now if I should have said no to poor Fitz when he asked for her hand—forced her to wait a bit, so that you might have mended whatever it was that had gone wrong between you.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I love my wife a great deal, Weston; I do not think Fitz and Sophie were unhappy, precisely, but it gave me pain to see her in a marriage that did not seem as happy as mine has been.”
“You and Lady Wexham have been very fortunate, sir,” West said quietly. One only needed to look at the many examples of unhappy marriages that surrounded them in thetonto understand just howfortunate. He wondered idly if Sophie was aware of how clearly her father had seen her marriage—she, who was so fixated on ensuring that no one in her family had any cause to fret over her.
“We have,” Wexham agreed. “A fact I reflect on nearly every day. My other daughters seem similarly fortunate.” Another pause. “I would wish that for Sophie, too. And I am more pleased than I can say that you two have worked things out at last.”
He stood, and West did as well, automatically reaching across the desk to take the hand Wexham was offering him. “I merely wish for her to be happy, West. And I know that you can make her so.”
If only, West thought—as they left the study and returned to the breakfast room, where he was greeted by a tearful embrace from Lady Wexham, and an exasperated look from his supposed fiancée—he could convince Sophie of that.
Chapter Eight
Sophie almost—but not quite—felt badfor West.
It was Sunday, as fine an early June afternoon as one might have ordered from a catalogue of English delights. She and West had just arrived at the riverfront, having glided over the cobblestoned streets lined with dirty warehouses in the peaceful, quiet splendor of a well-sprung carriage with West’s gleaming crest on the door.
No sooner had they made their careful way onto the yacht that would transport them to Richmond, however, than her family descended.
“West!” Betsy cried joyfully as soon as she spotted him. “When Sophie told us your news—”
“Have you decided on a date?” Harriet interjected eagerly. “She was muttering some nonsense about a long engagement, when obviously—”
“Have you finished terrifying the poor man yet?” her father asked jovially, making his way into the fray. “It will be good to have a son at last—”
“You havethree sons-in-law already,” Maria said through gritted teeth, and for once Sophie felt entirely in sympathy with her sister, considering that all three gentlemen were present on this very boat.
“Ah, but young Weston was meant to be the first!” her father said,and Sophie shut her eyes, mortified. She did love her family, but she was beginning to wonder if she would love them more if she lived in Italy, perhaps.
“I did always think you and Sophie would have the most beautiful babies!” her mother added, near tears, causing Sophie to reconsider her previous thought. Italy would still be too close. Perhaps the North Pole would suffice.
“It is a pleasure to see you again so soon, Lady Wexham,” West said calmly, as polite as ever in the face of her family’s frankly unhinged behavior, and Sophie’s embarrassment faded on a wave of unexpected fondness. There was something so dreadfully comforting about West, she thought—a man who could be trusted to steer a steady course no matter what storm of wildly inappropriate comments he had to weather. She did notwantto find him comforting—not when there wasn’t any future for them—and she futilely attempted to will away the feeling.
“You must call me Mama!” her mother said, all aflutter, and Sophie contemplated flinging herself into the Thames.
“That is very kind of you,” West replied, nothing in his tone indicating what Sophie knew to be perfectly true: that he would address her mother so informally only were he to sustain some sort of head injury. Perhaps not even then, come to think of it—she could just imagine him, concussed and suffering from a bout of amnesia, laid up in bed, still strictly and rigorously polite in his forms of address to every person who visited him in his sickbed.
She didn’t like to think of him in a sickbed, she realized; it reminded her of when hehadbeen confined to bed once before—when she had been young and in love and terribly sad and afraid, and she’d not been allowed to see him.
It had felt as though her heart were splitting open, then. And even now, the memory dragged up complicated feelings, ones she’d just as happily ignore.
By the time they had made their leisurely way several miles west down the Thames and alighted at the Wexhams’ riverfront manor in Richmond, West had been made to dandle one of Maria’s twin babies on his knee, consulted about potential names forBetsy’sbaby, quizzed quite rigorously by Alexandra on the subject of Lord Byron (whom West evidently knew personally, and by whom he was not remotely impressed), and even received a grudging nod of approval from Maria when he happily joined her in a discussion of abolition, of which they were both supporters.
Sophie tried very hard not to notice any of this, uncomfortably aware that they were essentially lying to her family. She’d thought this would be easier, for some reason. Perhaps, she thought, watching West solemnly offer his index finger for Harriet’s baby, Cecily, to shake, her discomfort stemmed from the fact that this all skirted dangerously close to the future shehadenvisioned for herself, once upon a time. A future that she had done her best to put out of her mind for the past seven years.
It was a beautiful spring day, and they arrived in Richmond to find that a number of blankets had been spread on the lawns stretching down to the river, along with picnic baskets overflowing with sandwiches, savory pies, heaping platters of strawberries, cakes, and bottles of wine; they disembarked from the boat and made their way up the steps that ascended the sloping lawn toward the feast on offer. It felt natural, somehow, for Sophie to fall into step next to West, who, without making it obvious he was doing so, had carefully allowed the rest of the party to precede him.
“I’m sorry not to offer you my arm—but if I topple over, I fear I’d take you with me.” His voice was wry, self-deprecating, amused—but underneath there was a note of bitterness that Sophie disliked.
She thought, momentarily, of making a joke in turn, of assuring him that she was clumsy enough to be the likelier candidate to send them tumbling. But no sooner had the thought crossed her mind than she sensed that this would not be the correct thing to say at all; instead she replied, “You needn’t apologize for such things, you know.”
His gaze was fixed carefully on the steps as they slowly ascended, and a quick glance sideways showed that his jaw was tight. “I am not bothered by my leg, most of the time. On days when it is particularly damp and it is aching something fierce, or when I have gone on too long a ride or danced one too many waltzes or fenced for too long with Hawthorne, it pains me, but most days, it is a regular sort of ache, a pain I have grown accustomed to. I barely even notice my cane these days—the weight of it in my hand feels natural to me. And I am not such a fool, nor so proud, that I am resentful of the thing that helps me walk nearly as quickly as I once did before my accident.” He paused, but Sophie said nothing in response, sensing that he was just now working himself up to whatever it was he really wanted to say.
