AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Everyone knew he’d lost all respect for Brummell when the man had sneaked away in the dead of night, leaving his friends responsible for thousands of pounds in loans and annuities.
Adderwood scanned the remaining columns of newsprint. Half the paper had been given over to Zoe Lexham. The story of her captivity and escape would appear in pamphlet form within hours, no doubt. With illustrations.
“I can hardly take it in,” Adderwood said. “Is this all true? You were present when Beardsley spoke to her.”
“He took it from her almost verbatim,” said Marchmont. “He’s even managed to capture her—er—distinctive manner of expressing herself.”
While listening to the lilting voice, with its shadows and soft edges, the Duke of Marchmont had been more deeply moved than he would ever admit.
He hadn’t, until then, heard the true story of her disappearance. Only then had he learned that she hadn’t run away from the servants in charge of her.
Well into her captivity, after Zoe had become fluent in Arabic, she’d learned that one of her parents’ servants had sold her for a vast sum, and the matter had been arranged and carefully planned well before the fateful day in the Cairo bazaar.
Readers would learn, as Marchmont had, that the maid who’d sold her had not lived long. Within a week of Zoe’s disappearance, the servant was dead, of a “stomach ailment.” But of course she’d been poisoned, Zoe had told her two listeners so matter-of-factly. “She was merely another female, and she’d served her purpose. They wouldn’t want to take the chance of her repenting, and telling the truth.”
Zoe had spoken in the same quietly devastating way about her capture. She hadn’t really understood what was happening, she’d said. They’d made her drink something that must have contained opiates, to quiet her. Perhaps the drug had dulled her senses.
All the same, Marchmont could imagine what it must have been like when the drug wore off: twelve years old, among strangers who spoke a language she couldn’t understand…twelve years old, torn away from her family…
His imagination started again, but he firmly thrust the images into the special mental cupboard.
“I must wonder where a gently bred English girl would have found the fortitude to endure that long captivity,” Adderwood said, shaking his head.
“I don’t know,” said Marchmont. “She didn’t dwell on life in the harem. The little she did say dispelled any illusions one might have about a Turkish harem being a sort of earthly paradise. For the man who ruled it, perhaps.”
“Where did she find the courage to escape?”
“Zoe never lacked for courage. All she wanted was an opportunity. You’ll see when you read on.”
One opportunity in twelve years. It had come without warning: The master of the household and his favorite son, both dead within hours of each other…the house in turmoil…She’d had perhaps an hour at most to seize the chance and act. She’d taken the chance. If they’d caught her that time, they would have killed her, and probably not quickly. The men’s deaths, so close together, looked suspicious. “They would have said I poisoned them both,” she’d said. Marchmont had learned enough of “justice” in that part of the world to understand what this meant: She would have been tortured until she “confessed.”
Marchmont banished those images, too.
He fixed on the images he’d wanted Beardsley to plant in the public’s mind, with all the emphasis on her pluck and daring in the face of impossible odds, and her Englishness.
In the course of the interview, the duke had casually mentioned a print of Princess Charlotte—was it only two years ago when the poor girl was alive and well?—titled “Is She Not a Spunky One.” In it the princess ascended a ship sailor style, in the process of running away because her father was trying to force her to marry the Prince of Orange. The image, as Marchmont had intended, stuck in Beardsley’s mind and influenced his tone.
Marchmont wasn’t sure, though, that the resulting sympathetic story was entirely the result of his own manipulations. He’d noticed the way Zoe moved and the way she looked at or away from Beardsley at crucial moments while she spoke.
She was cleverer, too, than anyone could have supposed. Without actually lying, she’d contrived to create the impression that she’d been given as a slave to Karim’s first wife. That had reduced the salaciousness factor considerably.
I know the arts of pleasing a man, she’d told Marchmont. She’d pleased a hardened journalist out of his natural cynicism, certainly.
“Almack’s must have been atwitter last night,” said Adderwood. “Everyone would know you’d gone to Lexham House.”
“They not only knew it, but had me racing to Doctors’ Commons for a special license,” said Marchmont.
Doctors’ Commons, which lay in the neighborhood of St. Paul’s, was the lair of ecclesiastical lawyers. Therein was the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom a gentleman applied for a special license. Such a license allowed him to dispense with banns and marry when and where he chose.
A short, intense silence ensued.
Then, “You wouldn’t,” Adderwood said. “I know you’re a careless fellow. I know you regard yourself as under a great obligation to Lexham. All the same…” He trailed off, clearly unsure whether he was approaching dangerous waters.
“I’m under the greatest possible obligation,” said Marchmont. He could not imagine a greater one.
He’d gone a little mad after Gerard died. He’d wanted to shoot every horse in the stables and shut himself away with his grief.
But Lexham wouldn’t let him.
“You’re the Duke of Marchmont now,” Lexham had said. “You must carry on, for your father’s sake. And for Gerard’s sake.”
Lexham had taken him away on a rambling tour of the English countryside, then up into Scotland, into the Highlands and thence to the Inner Hebrides, whose bleak beauty and isolation had worked their magic. It had taken a long time for Marchmont to calm and begin to heal. Lexham had given up months with his own family and the parliamentary work he loved. He’d given up precious time he’d never get back. He’d done it for another man’s son.
There was a debt of honor if ever there was one.
“Still, marriage would be…extreme,” the duke went on with his normal sleepy amusement. “I’ve only promised to launch Miss Lexham into Society. It shouldn’t be difficult.”
Adderwood’s eyebrows went up. “Not difficult? It’s one thing to captivate one of those inky newspaper fellows. Winning over the ladies of the ton is another proposition entirely.”
“Who cares about them?” said Marchmont. “I mean to win over the Queen.”
“You’re joking.”
“It will be amusing, but I’m not joking.”
“You think you can arrange for Miss Lexham to be presented at court?”
“Nothing could be simpler.”
“You’re mad.”
“It runs in the family.”
“Marchmont, you know the Queen is a stickler for propriety,” Adderwood said. “Miss Lexham has spent the last twelve years in what Her Majesty will regard as a dubious situation. One touching story in a grubby newspaper is not going to earn the lady an invitation to court.”
“A thousand pounds says I can obtain that invitation,” Marchmont said. “It says, furthermore, that Miss Lexham will make her curtsey to the Queen before the month is out.”
“Done,” said Adderwood.
Lexham House
Wednesday, 8 April
Zoe gave one last, dissatisfied glance at her reflection in the dressing glass and turned to her maid. “Well, Jarvis?”
The maid ran her gaze over the carriage dress Dorothea had donated. It was pale yellow, trimmed in green.
“Very becoming, miss.”
“It’s last year’s style,” Zoe said. “Everyone will know. No fashionable woman wears green this year.”
And Marchmont was a leader of fashion. Not that he was likely to see what sh
e was wearing.
Not that she wanted him about.
Still, she’d thought he’d be a little more involved in helping her into Society.
Everyone said they must wait until she was presented at court. This, they said, would settle everything.
He’d stopped by briefly on Thursday to tell Mama that he would arrange for the court presentation, but so far the invitation had not arrived. Meanwhile, her sisters were determined to civilize her, a process Zoe found extremely trying.
She had not been allowed out of Lexham House since the night she’d arrived. She’d practiced her English, learned dance steps, read books, and studied household management. She’d memorized fashion plates, as well as the names and activities of all the aristocrats to be found in the scandal sheets. Except for the dancing—which she loved—it had grown very boring—and if she had to spend another ten minutes with her sisters, somebody would die.
They would be here within the next hour, all four of them.
“I could sew on fresh trim, miss, and if I was to—”
“Never mind,” Zoe said, waving her hand. “It will do. Now you must go out and find a hackney.”
Jarvis’s eyes widened in horror. “A hackney, miss?”
“Yes, we are going out.”
