Chapter 12 #3
It was harder to bathe in England than it had been in Cairo, but daily bathing was one Mohammedan custom Zoe refused to abandon.
Here she had only a portable tub, not a great pool, and no coterie of slaves to wash and massage her and remove the hair from her body and oil and perfume her.
But the English were not troubled by hair, and she didn’t need the other attentions. The tub served the main purpose.
“He chose it himself,” Priscilla said.
“Chose what?” Zoe said as Jarvis wrapped the dressing gown about her.
“The ring.”
“What ring?”
“That monstrous great stone of yours. The engagement ring.”
“Oh,” said Zoe. “That was obvious.”
More obvious than she could have supposed.
He’d hidden it well, but she had been trained to see and hear what men hid. She was coming to understand him better. She was learning to read him better.
He’d thought about her.
He’d cared about whether she liked the ring or not. Cared deeply.
She felt a sob welling in her chest.
She told herself not to be a sentimental idiot.
She told herself his caring was only his pride.
She told herself not to imagine he cared deeply about her.
Even if that was true for the moment, it wouldn’t last. He was a handsome, wealthy, powerful man.
Every woman wanted him, and he knew it. To expect him to give his heart to one woman only was ludicrous.
She told herself she understood this about him and she could live with it, must live with it. But she cared and would never stop caring—he had lived in her heart all the time she’d been away—and she wanted him to feel the same.
She kept the tears back while she moved to the fire, where her morning chocolate awaited on a tray, alongside the newspaper.
She must have done too good a job of hiding her feelings, because Priscilla, apparently thinking her insufficiently impressed, said, “You don’t understand, do you? Marchmont never does that. His secretary always buys gifts. For everyone. Royals and relatives and mistresses alike.”
“If one of his concubines has a diamond from him like that,” Zoe said, “I shall have to accidentally break her finger. And his head will accidentally collide with a chamber pot.”
“No one has a diamond like that,” said Priscilla. “Oh, Zoe, may I see it again?”
Jarvis was told to fetch the ring. She brought it in its little box to Priscilla, who only opened the box and looked at the ring but didn’t touch it. “Put it on,” she said.
Zoe did so. The morning light caught in the facets and flashed rainbows.
“Osgood has excellent taste,” Priscilla said.
“And he can indulge his taste because Marchmont never cares what anything costs and refuses to be bothered with choosing gifts. He refuses to be bothered with anything that looks like a decision or a responsibility. All the world is agog that he chose your ring himself.”
Zoe had simply assumed he’d chosen it. She hadn’t realized how significant this was. Oh, this made it worse. He was making her feel special. She’d never be able to steel her heart against him, and he’d break it.
“There’s no making him out, to be sure,” said Priscilla, “but I’m very glad for you, indeed.”
She left minutes later.
When the door had closed and her sister’s footsteps had faded away, Zoe looked down at the diamond on her finger, the immense center stone surrounded by smaller ones, like a queen surrounded by her attendants.
She told herself not to be an idiot. She told herself not to be a sentimental fool. But how could she help it? He’d taken care about her ring, and he’d truly wanted her to like it—and that was too sweet of him, more sweetness than she could bear.
Her chest heaved and a sob escaped her. Then another. And another.
She put her face in her hands and wept.
The night before the wedding, Zoe held a little party in her bedroom.
The guests were her sisters.
“A party in your bedroom?” had been the first reaction. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”
She had waved her great diamond ring in their faces, and the fussing subsided.
They had all married well. They all owned heaps of fine jewelry. Zoe’s engagement ring, however, had a magical effect upon all of her sisters, not only Priscilla, the least insane of them all.
Zoe had ordered little sandwiches and delicate pastries and tea and lemonade and champagne.
When they’d supped and drunk and gossiped and offered the usual marital advice, she had Jarvis bring out the treasures Karim had showered upon his second so-called wife and favorite toy.
Rubies and garnets, sapphires and emeralds, diamonds and pearls and topaz of every color. Necklaces and bracelets and rings.
She gave them all away to her sisters, all but a few pieces she’d reserved for Jarvis.
They were shocked into silence.
Then, finally, Priscilla spoke up. “You said you’d share, I remember, Zoe, but all of it? Are you quite, quite sure?”
“That was my old life,” Zoe said. “I won’t take it with me into my new life.”
In the end, in spite of what Zoe’s sisters had claimed about hole-in-corner affairs, the wedding turned out to be large and complicated.
Once they’d invited all of Zoe’s siblings and their spouses, they’d had to invite Marchmont’s aunts and uncles and cousins.
And then, since Adderwood must stand at his side, the other fellows must be asked, too.
There were royals, too, who must come. Even leaving out the respective nieces and nephews, the large drawing room of Lexham House became suffocatingly crowded.
Or so it seemed to Marchmont.
At last the clergyman appeared, and Zoe entered the room soon thereafter, wearing a shimmering silvery confection that made Adderwood say in an undertone, “Oh, this is deuced unfair. Some fellows get all the luck. She looks like an angel.”
Zoe Octavia was not an angel, not by a long stretch, but at this moment she looked purely innocent.
At this moment it seemed to Marchmont that she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen.
As she joined him before the clergyman, he felt a surge of pride, which was not at all surprising, and a quick, deep stab to the heart, which was.
The ceremony began. No one speaking up when the time came to declare “any just cause, why they may not be lawfully joined together,” and neither of them announcing any impediments, it continued to the end, through each promise and “I will,” and through her father’s giving her to be married, his eyes sparkling with unshed tears, while his wife sobbed openly.
On it went through Marchmont’s placing the wedding ring on Zoe’s finger and wedding her and worshipping her with his body—the easiest of promises to make—and on through psalms and the prayer for fruitfulness and more prayers and advice from St. Paul.
It seemed to him that he’d spent a lifetime marrying Zoe, but at last the Solemnization of Matrimony came to an end.
At last she was the Duchess of Marchmont—his Duchess of Marchmont. His wife.
He had a wife.
He was responsible for her. He’d sworn it before heaven and before witnesses.
…to love her, comfort her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other…
Forsaking all other.
It dawned on him, then, what he’d done.
He’d given his word.
There was no turning back, no undoing.
His life was going to change, like it or not.