Chapter 17
Seventeen
For a moment, Zoe couldn’t form a thought, let alone speak. It was as though she’d plunged into a deep, cold well.
To be trapped in a house for who knew how long, after she’d only begun to taste freedom, and while everyone else about her was free—when she wouldn’t have even the companionship, such as it was, and the amusements, such as they were, of the harem…
Her heart was racing, and her mind raced, too, pointlessly.
All the past rushed at her in an icy wave of panic—the moment they’d taken her away in the bazaar…
the voices speaking a language she couldn’t understand…
the darkness…the men touching her…she, screaming for her father, until they gagged her…
the drink they’d forced down her throat that brought strange dreams but never complete oblivion… the slaves stripping off her clothes—
She shook it off and made herself stare out of the window and breathe, slowly. This was England. She was in London, with her husband. She was safe, and all he wanted was to keep her safe.
He was upset, she reminded herself. When men were upset, their instincts took over, and their instincts were not always rational. Even she was disturbed by what had happened, though the danger was nothing to what she’d lived with day after day and night after night in the harem.
She made herself answer calmly. “I know you wish to protect me, but this isn’t reasonable.”
“Harrison isn’t reasonable,” Marchmont said.
“We’re dealing with a man who’s either deranged or evil.
You said so yourself. He thought nothing of brutally attacking a dumb animal.
He didn’t care what a creature maddened with pain would do.
He didn’t care who else might have been injured when the horses panicked. There’s no predicting what he’ll do.”
“There’s no predicting how long it will take to find him,” she said.
“It could be days or even weeks. What if he comes to his senses and runs away from London, as he should have done? What if he falls into the Thames and drowns? His body might never be found. You’d make me a prisoner in Marchmont House indefinitely? ”
“I am not making you a prisoner,” he said. “I’m making sure he can’t get at you.”
“It’s prison to me,” she said. “You ought to understand this. I thought you did. I was kept caged for twelve years. I lived in a vast house, larger than yours—a great palace with a great, walled garden. A prison is a prison, no matter how big or how beautiful.”
“It’s not the same.”
“It’s the same to me,” she said. “I can’t abide to be confined.”
“And I can’t abide risking your life,” he said. “Until we know he’s in custody or dead or abroad, you’ll stay home. You said the Runners would find him. You said they had every reason to do so. You were the one reassuring me about this. Reassure yourself.”
“You cannot keep me in the house,” she said.
“I can and will. Don’t be childish, Zoe. This is for your own good.”
“Childish?” she said. “Childish? I risked my life to be free. You don’t know what they would have done to me if they had caught me.
I risked my life for this.” She waved her hand at the window, where the shadowy figures hurried along the pavement, and riders and carriages passed in the busy street.
“I risked everything to be in a world where women can go out of their houses to shop and visit their friends, where they can even talk to and dance with other men. For twelve years I dreamed of this world, and it came to be my idea of heaven: a place where I could move freely among other people, where I could go to the theater and the ballet and the opera. For twelve years I was an amusing pet in a cage. For twelve years they let me out only for the entertainment of watching me try to run away. Now I have my own horse, and I can ride in Hyde Park—”
“Only listen to what you’re saying,” he said. “Everything you want to do will expose you. Hyde Park is completely out of the question.”
“You can’t do this,” she said. “I won’t be locked up. I won’t hide from that horrible man. He’s a bully, and this is bullying, and you’re letting him do it. You’re letting him make the rules, because you’re afraid of what he’ll do.”
“He’s not making any rules, Zoe! I’m making the rules. You’re my wife, and on the day we wed, I promised to look after you—and you promised to obey.”
She started to retort, but paused.
She knew that keeping his word was a strict point of honor to him.
Everyone knows that he regards his word as sacred, Papa had said.
When she had promised to obey, she’d given her word, too. To fail to keep her word to him would be dishonorable, a betrayal of trust.
“I did promise,” she said. “And I shall obey.”
They traveled in silence the rest of the way home. All the while Marchmont’s gut churned.
He heard it over and over: the snap of the housekeeper’s fingers, and the words she’d repeated.
I’ll finish her, I will, like this.
The words echoed in his mind as they entered Marchmont House and crossed the marble entrance hall.
He heard them as he and Zoe climbed the stairs.
He was aware—oh, very well aware—of his wife walking alongside him with all the light and life gone out of her, and he knew he’d killed her happiness and humor and delicious insouciance.
He told himself she was making too much of it. The trouble was, he knew why she made so much of it.
Her freedom was precious to her, far more precious than it was to other Englishwomen, who simply took it for granted, the way he’d taken his servants and his smoothly running household for granted.
He remembered what she’d said that first day, after she’d proposed to him and he’d declined.
I was married from the time I was twelve years old, and it seemed a very long time, and I would rather not be married again straightaway.
Yet she had married again, straightaway, because he’d lacked the will to resist temptation.
She’d never had a chance to be courted by other men.
She’d never had a chance to decide for herself which of them she truly wanted.
He’d wanted her, and he’d had to have her, and that was that.
Still, he’d hardly condemned her to a life of misery.
Being married to him offered more freedom than most other women had, including other aristocratic women.
No doors were closed to the Duchess of Marchmont.
She would never lack for money to buy whatever she wanted.
She could still flirt with other men and dance with them.
And she could go where she pleased, to a point.
Until tonight.
I want fun, she’d told him that day in Hyde Park after she’d raced with Lady Tarling. I want a life. In Egypt I was a toy, a game. I was a pet in a cage. I vowed never to endure such an existence again.
He watched her enter her apartments, then he walked on to his.
He told Ebdon he would not be going out this evening, and ordered a bath. The odor of Bow Street seemed to cling to his skin as well as his clothes.
The bath should have calmed him. It didn’t.
The new valet had laid out a clean shirt, pantaloons, and stockings. The duke stood and gazed at them for a long time. He felt so weary, suddenly, not in his body but in his mind and heart, as though he’d carried a great burden, inside, for an endless time.
“Give me my dressing gown,” he said.
He didn’t bother with the clothes readied for him, to be worn under his damask dressing gown: the full costume of “undress.” He shrugged his naked body into his dressing gown and slid his bare feet into his slippers.
The maroon leather mules had pointed, upturned toes, in imitation of Turkish fashion.
Like a pasha’s. Like the men in another world, who kept their women caged.
“Plague take me,” he said.
“Your Grace?” Ebdon was obviously baffled. He bore his confusion like a man, however. No weeping or fainting or trembling. Merely a slight crease between his brows.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Marchmont said.
He left the dressing room, crossed his bedroom to the connecting door, and walked in.
He found his wife in her bath, her face on her arm, resting on the linens draping the tub. She was weeping.
“Oh, Zoe,” he said.
She’d been so lost in misery that she hadn’t heard him approach—another bad sign.
She was losing her old skills. She didn’t care.
She was too wretched to care. She loved him, and she wanted to be a good wife.
She knew he only wanted to protect her—but she couldn’t bear this, to have the walls close in on her again, so soon.
She wiped her eyes and looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s mad to feel this way, but I can’t help it.”
He simply reached down and lifted her up, out of the bathtub. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it about her, then he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. He buried his face in her damp hair.
“You’re all I have left,” he said. “You’re all I have left.”
His voice was hoarse, broken.
“Lucien,” she said, her face against his chest.
“You’re all I have left, Zoe,” he said. “They’re all gone—everyone I ever loved. Gone forever. You, too, I thought. But you weren’t. You came back from the dead—and if I lose you, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
She held him tightly, as tightly as she could.
His parents. His brother. Gone.
He’d had her family, but it wasn’t the same.
Everyone I ever loved.
You, too, I thought.
She was one of them, one of the loved.
Loved. He loved her.
It was as simple as that.
Her heart lifted, the way it always used to do when she caught sight of him, when Lucien came back from school to spend the summer with them. When he came, her world brightened.
“Lucien,” she said softly. She had learned Latin and Greek, and she knew lux was the Latin for “light.” Her heart lifted, because he was the light of her life and had been from the first day she met him. “Oh, Lucien, we’re both a little mad.”