Satisfaction
Lady Violet Crawley had been very pleased when she noticed that her middle granddaughter's waist was beginning to widen in an unmistakable way, though as yet it took a trained eye like her own to notice it. She had been very much against this marriage, not wanting her favourite granddaughter to end up as a nursemaid to this old and crippled man.
"I think Edith is going to have a baby", she said with a low whisper to her daughter in law. "I wonder how he managed to do that with only one arm."
The whisper was not quite low enough not to be overheard by Edith who was sitting not very far from her mother and her grandmother. She was glad her husband hadn't heard it where he was sitting a bit further away, deep in conversation with his father in law. Anthony was probably talking about the new farm equipment they were planning to buy, judging from her father's polite but rather bored expression.
Edith found her grandmother's comment strangely insulting. She blushed when she thought about all the different ways they had managed to make love during their short marriage. When there's a will there's a way, she thought with a satisfied little smile. Or even many ways.
Maybe she should tell Granny that an arm was not the most essential part of a man's anatomy when it came to making babies, Edith thought with a wry smile. No matter, it was impossible and unladylike both to say anything about things like that and to admit that she had heard her grandmother's remark.
Edith didn't hear what her mother answered, due to the fact that Cora was a much more discreet whisperer than her mother in law. But she noticed her mother taking a quick glance at the middle part of her middle daughter, so Edith drew in air and tried to make her belly look bigger. She was most eager for her mother to notice her pregnancy, since she was very proud of it, and it was still considered too early to tell people about it.
"Well, at least he hasn't denied her that satisfaction," her grandmother continued with a prim voice. Edith's blush deepened - honestly, to have her grandmother discuss such things - until she realized that her grandmother was most certainly referring to the satisfaction of motherhood and not to that of the marital bed.
...
A/N: This story started with the sentence: "I wonder how he managed to do that with only one arm". I thought that would be Lady Violet's rather blunt reaction if Edith got pregnant by Sir Anthony.