Chapter 1
One
London
Lucien Charles Vincent de Grey, the eleventh Duke of Marchmont, stood on the threshold of the morning room of White’s Club, surveying the company through half-closed eyes.
Women tended to read deep meaning in those sleepy green eyes, when in fact there wasn’t any deeper thought in his mind than I wonder what you look like naked.
Women often got the wrong idea about him. The way his pale gold hair shimmered in certain lights lent his features an ethereal quality. The tendency of one wayward lock to fall over his forehead was deemed poetic.
Those who knew him knew better.
The twenty-nine-year-old Duke of Marchmont was neither ethereal nor poetic.
He avoided deep thoughts and allowed no strong feelings to churn inside him. He took nothing seriously. This included dress, women, politics, his friends, and even—or perhaps most especially—himself.
At present, no woman stood in danger of being deluded, because none were in the vicinity. This was White’s, after all, the exclusive preserve of five hundred privileged men.
Several of them had gathered at the famous bow window where Beau Brummell had once presided. Even at present, when the Beau languished in France, hiding from his creditors, seats in that holy place were reserved for a select few.
At the moment the occupants included Brummell’s great friend the second Baron Alvanley, as well as the Duke of Beaufort’s heir, the Marquis of Worcester.
Arguing with them were Lord Yarmouth, Lord Adderwood, and Grantley Berkeley.
Of the group, only Adderwood—thin, dark, and perhaps the most level-headed of the lot—had not been one of Brummell’s boon companions.
He was Marchmont’s. They’d been friends since their schooldays.
Though he broke half a dozen of the Beau’s rules daily and, worse, believed it didn’t signify, the Duke of Marchmont was one of the Chosen.
He didn’t know or care why they’d chosen him. Truth to tell, he considered Brummell an annoying great bitch, and preferred sitting in the bow window when the rest of that lot weren’t about, practicing their wit—such as it was—upon passersby in St. James’s Street.
Who the devil cared whether this carriage’s panels were too dark, or that fellow’s coat was an inch too short or that lady’s bonnet went out of fashion last week?
Not the Duke of Marchmont.
He cared about very little in this world.
His sleepy green gaze slid from the collection of wits and dandies at the bow window to a quiet area across the room, where a fellow dozed in a well-padded armchair.
As though he felt the ducal regard, the gentleman opened his eyes.
Marchmont made the smallest movement of his hand, a gesture universally recognized as Go away.
The gentleman quickly got up and left the room.
His Grace had scarcely folded his six-foot frame into the chair when he became aware of a buzz of excitement emanating from the bow window contingent. Their attention, he noticed, was not directed at passersby in St. James’s Street but at the leather-bound betting book.
After a moment, Lord Adderwood let his keen, dark gaze travel the room until it lit upon his erstwhile schoolmate. “There you are, Marchmont,” he said.
“What a noticing fellow you are, Adderwood,” said Marchmont. “Nothing escapes you.”
“I was about to search the club for you,” Adderwood said. “We could not possibly close the betting book without you. What do you say? I say she is.”
“Then I say she isn’t.”
“How much, then?”
“Put me down for a thousand pounds,” said the duke. “Then pray tell me firstly, Who is she? And secondly, Is she or isn’t she what?”
Every head came up, and every set of eyes swiveled in his direction.
“Good God, Marchmont, where have you been?” said Alvanley. “Patagonia?”
“Busy night,” said His Grace. “Don’t remember where I’ve been. Where’s Patagonia? Anywhere near Lisson Grove?”
“He doesn’t read the papers until bedtime,” Adderwood explained to the others.
“I find them an unfailing aid to a deep and dreamless sleep,” said His Grace.
“But you don’t need to read anything,” said Worcester. “They’ve plastered pictures in all the print shop windows.”
“I came the other way,” said Marchmont. “Didn’t see any pictures. What’s happened? Another one of the royal dukes wooing a German princess? No surprise there. I have long waited for one of the royal family to do something truly shocking, like marry an Englishwoman.”
Last November, following a long and agonizing labor, the country’s beloved Princess Charlotte had produced a stillborn son and died.
This sad end to England’s hopes—she’d been the Prince Regent’s only child and heir—had led her uncles, the royal dukes, to abandon their mistresses and numerous illegitimate offspring in order to commence marriage negotiations with various Germanic cousins.
“Nothing to do with them,” said Adderwood. “It’s to do with Lexham. We are evenly divided between those who say his lordship has finally taken leave of his senses and those who say he was right all along.”
Marchmont’s eyes opened a little wider then, and his indolent mind came to something like attention.
“Zoe Octavia,” he said. If they were making bets about Lexham, it must have to do with his long-lost daughter.
A dozen years ago, Lexham had taken his wife and youngest child on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean. This had not struck Marchmont as the wisest enterprise during wartime.
True, the French had surrendered Egypt to the British in 1801, and Lord Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar had demonstrated England’s naval supremacy.
But the seas remained far from safe. Furthermore, European power struggles meant nothing to the various pashas and beys and whatnot ruling their bits of the Ottoman Empire.
Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land were part of that empire, and rulers and ruled alike all carried on as they’d always done.
The slave trade was lucrative, and white slaves were always wanted for the harems—as the pirates lurking in the Mediterranean well knew.
The region was not, in short, the safest place to take any twelve-year-old, fair-haired, blue-eyed English girl, let alone Zoe. They’d scarcely reached Egypt when the fool girl had bolted, naturally, the way she’d so often done at home.
But this time Marchmont wasn’t there to track her down, and those who’d searched could find no trace of her. It was believed she’d been kidnapped. Lexham waited for a ransom note. It never came.
He never gave up trying to find her. Though eventually he’d had to return to England, he’d hired agents to carry on the work.
They had traveled up and down the Nile, and they’d made their way from Algiers to Constantinople and back again.
They’d heard she was here and they’d heard she was there.
They’d gathered rumors and nothing else.
Marchmont had given up hope a decade ago, and locked away Zoe in the mental cupboard with the others he’d lost and the feelings he no longer let himself have.
“What number is this?” he said. “Has anyone kept track of how many females have appeared on Lexham’s doorstep, claiming to be his long-lost daughter?”
“I made it to be twoscore,” said Alvanley. “The greater number in the early years. It’s dwindled considerably of late. I’d nearly forgotten about her.”
Though everyone believed him mad to continue searching for her, Lexham had proved sufficiently compos mentis to reject every last one of the would-be Zoes.
“Then I reckon we can put the total at twoscore and one,” said Marchmont.
Alvanley shook his head.
“This time he took her in,” said Adderwood.
The Duke of Marchmont left his chair and stalked to the bow window.
Berkeley picked up one of the newspapers from the table there and gave it to him.
“Lord Lexham Welcomes Harem Girl,” the headline proclaimed.
Marchmont’s usually unexcitable—some said nonexistent—heart began to pound in a very strange manner. Not that anyone could tell. His drowsy expression never wavered while he scanned the lengthy article in the Morning Post.
“‘Mysterious young woman,’” he read aloud.
“‘Arrived in London on Monday night with Lord Winterton…. Family forewarned, gathered at Lexham House, prepared to confront and oust yet another imposter…’ and so on and so forth.” He shook his head as he skimmed the columns.
“‘The reader will imagine the tears shed upon the joyful discovery—’” He looked up.
“I believe I shall be sick. Who writes this drivel?”
He read on dramatically, “‘But indeed it was she, restored at last to the bosom of her family, after twelve long years as a captive in the palace of Yusri Pasha.’” He skipped a few more paragraphs.
“‘Shocking crime…Lexham…ancient barony…youngest daughter kidnapped and sold in the slave market of Cairo…’”
With a laugh, he dropped the newspaper onto the table. “Vastly amusing. You didn’t happen to notice the date, perchance?”
“I didn’t need to notice,” said Adderwood.
“On the way here, any number of urchins told me my handkerchief was hanging out of my pocket. Does there exist an April Fool jest older than that one? I vow, boys must have tried it on Socrates. April Fool was the first thing I thought when I saw the paper. But what, exactly, is the joke?”
“Everyone’s forgotten about her,” said Alvanley. “Why make her a joke? Why not choose a more timely topic?”
“You saw who brought her home,” said Berkeley.
“Winterton.” England’s second most cynical cynic. The Duke of Marchmont came first. “Even had I failed to observe the date, that name would have aroused my suspicions.” Cold-blooded and single-minded, Winterton was not the sort of man who rescued damsels in distress.
“Still, the fact remains, a girl has turned up at Lexham’s, claiming to be Lexham’s youngest,” said Worcester. “That part isn’t an April Fool joke.”