“Let me get this straight,” Alex said resignedly. “Last month you and Sophie weren’t sharing a bedroom. Now it seems you’re having a fit of the blue devils over her pregnancy. For God’s sake, Patrick, I was under the impression that your marriage was about to flounder.”

Alex hesitated. “Not sleeping together can draw a man and woman apart. If you ask me, that rule is rubbish.”

“It is Sophie’s prerogative,” Patrick said shortly. “At any rate, this will be our only child. I won’t allow her to go through this a second time.”

“Sophie is a young, healthy woman. I am certain that she will deliver the baby with no problem.”

“The way Charlotte had no problem?”

Alex’s body went rigid. He knew as well as Patrick did that Charlotte’s being near death while delivering their daughter had nothing to do with her size or build.

“All I’m saying,” Patrick continued, “is that even a very large woman like Charlotte is in grave danger when pregnant. Sophie is a little scrap … like Mother.”

Alex looked over at his lovely, slender wife and almost smiled to hear that she was “very large.” But he picked his way carefully. He knew, better than anyone, how bitterly Patrick had taken their mother’s death in childbirth.

“Sophie is not Mother,” he said firmly. “Don’t you remember the fragile air that Mother had? Sophie is small, perhaps, but not fragile.”

Patrick opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment Clemens paused in the large doorway of the drawing room and announced the arrival of the Marquis and Marchioness of Brandenburg.

“Maman!” Sophie hurried to the door.

Eloise met her with a stream of rapid French; her father merely smiled affectionately and strolled over to the other side of the room. Although Eloise had seen her daughter only two days previously, she was full of reminders, rejoinders, suggestions.

“Oh, Maman,” Sophie said, half laughing, “a milk bath? Pooh!”

Eloise switched into English. “A milk bath is vital to a woman’s constitution and you must keep your constitution up while enceinte. Think of Marie Antoinette! She had a milk bath once a week.”

“I don’t want to think about that poor woman,” Sophie said with a shiver, dismissing the idea of King Louis XVI’s wife. “And I don’t want a milk bath, Maman. It sounds horribly sticky. Besides, I think that Marie Antoinette took those baths to improve her skin, not her health.”

Clemens appeared in the doorway again. “Lady Skiffing; Lady Madeleine Corneille, daughter of the Marquis de Flammarion, and Mrs. Trevelyan; Mr. Sylvester Bredbeck; Misters Erskine and Peter Dewland.”