Chapter 10 #3
Being a head taller than much of the company, Marchmont had no trouble scanning the crowd. He soon spotted Lady Lexham. She looked very worried.
The worried look, he surmised, was not on account of Zoe, for her ladyship would trust him to look after her daughter. It was on account of the tallish woman with the great black plumes waving from her head.
“It appears that my mad aunt has got your mother in her clutches,” said Marchmont.
“Aunt Sophronia can be entertaining in the right time and place. This is not the time or place. There’s no help for it, though.
We must attempt to rescue your mother—Oh, drat the woman! She’s taken Emma hostage, too.”
“I have faced the Queen,” Zoe said. “I can face anything today.”
“You say that because you’ve never dealt with my lunatic aunt,” he said.
He’d dealt with her, though, time and again. He led Zoe to the cluster of women. They stood before his carriage.
“Oh, there you are, dear,” said Lady Lexham. “I was trying to explain to Lady Sophronia. She seems to believe this is her carriage.”
“Never mind him,” said his auntie. “Marchmont has his own carriage.”
“That is my carriage, Auntie,” he said. “There is the ducal crest, plain as day.”
“This is no time for your jokes, Marchmont,” said his aunt. “Get in, get in,” she told Lady Lexham, waving her diamond-encrusted, black-gloved hands. “The company is waiting. You, too, Emma.”
“But Cousin Sophronia,” Emma said, “as I recall, your carriage is the one with the blue—”
“Is that the bolter?” said Aunt Sophronia. Her gaze had fallen upon Zoe.
“Yes, Auntie, and I brought her and her mama here in that—”
“Get in, get in, Emma,” said his aunt. “What are you waiting for? Do you not see the carriages lined up behind us?”
Emma threw Marchmont a panicked look. He gestured her to get into the carriage. With a look of resignation, she obeyed.
“Zoe Octavia,” said Lady Sophronia. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Lady Sophronia.” Zoe managed to negotiate a curtsey while being jostled by the milling crowd.
“That was a curtsey,” said his aunt. “How everyone stared. Most exciting. They should write it down and put it in a book. But we’ve no time at present for snakes. Marchmont will bring you to dine with me. Lady Lexham, if you please. Without swords, we shall fit three comfortably.”
“Please go ahead,” Marchmont told Lady Lexham. “She never admits she’s wrong, and we should be hours redirecting her. Zoe and I will take my aunt’s—that is to say, the other carriage.”
He saw the other two ladies safely into the carriage and told his coachman to take them all to Lexham House.
He watched them drive away.
“Will you know which one is your aunt’s carriage?” Zoe said.
“Certainly. It’s my carriage. They’re all my carriages.
If I let her have her own, I’d never be able to keep track of her.
This way, I have at least a modicum of control over her doings.
Some wonder why I have not put her in an asylum.
But I’ve always maintained that every great, ancient family must have at least one mad relation living in a haunted house. ”
Zoe smiled. “I didn’t know you owned a haunted house.”
“Baldwick House looks as though it’s haunted,” he said. “And appearances are everything. Ah, here comes her carriage.”
Very much as she’d done on the way here, Zoe watched the passing scene through the window. They left the palace along with a long parade of other vehicles. Crowds lined the way here, as well, and progress was slow, an endless series of stops and starts, but she didn’t seem to mind the snail’s pace.
“So much green,” she said. “In Egypt there’s only a narrow strip of green along the sides of the river.
And it isn’t the same green at all. We had gardens, too, but nothing like this—so many trees and acres and acres of grass.
And there’s the canal. I see it sparkling between the trees. I’m so glad to be home.”
Every word made the duke’s heart ache, but the last words most of all. Though he’d seen her smile and heard her laugh, he’d never seen her so happy as she was now, the lighthearted Zoe he’d known so long ago.
She turned from the window and smiled at him.
“I’m glad to see you so happy,” he said.
“It’s all your doing,” she said.
“Not very much needed doing,” he said.
“Ah, yes. ‘Nothing could be simpler,’ you said.”
He had the royal ear—several of them, in fact, and a scribbler like Beardsley wasn’t the only one who knew how to tell a story.
Still, it wasn’t all his doing.
All the royals had to do was look at her to be disposed in her favor.
Zoe had told him she wasn’t innocent, but she was, in ways that some might not understand. This innocence shone in her eyes and warmed her smile. It had made the Prince Regent teary-eyed. He’d said he wept because she reminded him of his daughter.
She didn’t resemble Princess Charlotte physically.
What she reminded everyone of was the life and hope the princess had represented.
And this was partly because Zoe wasn’t practiced in hiding her feelings.
She had glowed, visibly, when the Queen made her welcome.
Her joy had vibrated through the saloon.
The Regent had felt the joy. He’d seen the glow.
What had she said, shocking everyone so, on the first day—was it only three weeks ago?—Marchmont had seen her?
I crossed seas, and it was like crossing years. To everyone it must seem as though I have come back from the dead.
That’s what they’d seen, those royals who’d seen and borne shame and disappointment and madness and the early deaths of loved ones: They’d seen life and courage and hope.
Zoe had glowed like the summer sun, and it was impossible to look at her and not feel the warmth and the optimism of her spirit.
That’s what the Regent had seen. That, combined with youth and good nature and beauty, had touched his sentimental heart.
Marchmont realized he’d been woolgathering and staring at her for rather a long time. He discovered that she hadn’t turned back to the window and the fascinating greenery outside. She was watching him.
“Are we done being proper?” she said.
“Oh, no,” he said. “That part’s only begun.”
“But isn’t this improper?” One gloved, braceleted hand took in the vehicle’s interior with a little sweep. “To be alone in a closed carriage? I wondered whether the court presentation changed the rules.”
“It doesn’t,” he said. “But others’ rules don’t apply to Aunt Sophronia.
She makes her own.” He forced his mind away from the dangerous fact of being alone with Zoe in a closed carriage.
He wrenched his attention from the warm bosom so generously displayed an arm’s length away, and changed the subject.
“You swept all before you, too. That curtsey my aunt remarked upon was the most spectacular I’ve ever seen. ”
Also the most arousing, but he wouldn’t let his mind dwell on that, either.
“Once I learned the way of it, I had no trouble,” she said. “I’ve prostrated myself wearing very complicated clothing. Everyone imagines we were always naked in the harem—or wearing a few veils—but that was not the case.”
He’d seen her naked a thousand and one nights, in his dreams.
“We were naked in our thoughts and feelings, though,” she went on. “That has been one of the hardest things about coming home: not saying what’s in my heart.”
What was in her heart was not his concern. What was in his was not her concern. “You don’t need to say anything,” he said. “You show it.”
“That, too, is a difficulty here.”
“You’re happy,” he said. “That shows. This was what you wanted—the life you would have had if those swine hadn’t torn you from it. Today that life begins, with royal blessing.”
She folded her gloved hands in her lap and looked down at them. “My heart is too full for words. You think I’m ungrateful and capricious, but that isn’t so.”
“I never thought you ungrateful,” he said. He remembered the light kiss on the top of his head and the whispered thank you and the sweetness of that moment.
“But capricious?” she said. “Because I flirt with your friends?”
“Oh, that.” He waved his hand. “Perhaps I was overprotective.”
“Oh, Marchmont, is that what you call it?”
Jealous and possessive and selfish was what he’d called it the day after.
Then he’d told himself, Out of sight, out of mind.
“What do you want me to call it?” he said lightly.
“What it is,” she said. “Not what’s convenient or witty or agreeable to your pride. But you’ll never do that, will you?”
To his consternation, she began to cry.
Zoe never cried.
She brushed away the tears. “Never mind. I’m too excited. I need some air. I’ll walk.”
“You can’t walk. No one walks in court dress, from court.”
She flashed her Is that a dare? look and reached for the carriage handle.
The carriage, which had stopped for the hundredth time, lurched into motion as she was leaving her seat and leaning toward the door. She lost her balance and fell on the floor in a heap of hoops and waves of satin and lace and net, her plumes tumbling forward.
She reached up for the door handle. He grabbed her hand.
“Let go of me!” she said. “Let me go.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
She tried to pull free.
“Stop it,” he said. “If you open the door you’ll fall out onto your head.”
“I don’t care!”
“Zoe.”
She was trying to pull away, still.
He kept his grip on her hand and got his other arm under her shoulder and hauled her up.
She struggled all the way, squirming, feathers flying and diamonds flashing.
“Stop it, drat you!”
“No, no, no.”
He pulled her up and onto his lap, and held her there, his arms wrapped about her. Her tiara had slipped forward. The plumes tickled his cheek, and she wouldn’t stop squirming.
His manly parts couldn’t distinguish between a struggling sort of squirm and an invitational sort of squirm. They came to attention and his brain thickened.
He was lost in the cloud of satin and lace and net and the scent of Zoe and the warmth of her.
“If you don’t stop,” he said, “I’ll drop you on the floor and hold you down with my feet.”
She reached up and grasped a fistful of his hair. She brought her face close to his. “Possessive,” she said. “The word you want is possessive.”
He didn’t know what she was saying. Her mouth was a breath away from his and her scent was everywhere, in the cloud of satin and lace and net and femininity. The cloud billowed about him.
His hand slid up to the back of her neck, to cup the back of her head, and he kissed her.