Don't Tempt Me Read online

  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.”

  “We can’t, miss. Lady Lexham said His Grace would call for you and you might go out with him.”

  “He hasn’t called,” said Zoe. “He hasn’t been here since Thursday, and then he spoke only to my mother.” She’d been with her sisters, learning the correct way to serve tea.

  “You can’t go out alone, miss,” Jarvis said.

  “I’m not going alone. You’re coming with me.”

  “You’d do much better to wait for His Grace,” Jarvis said. “If he’s with you, no one will dare to stare or behave disrespectfully toward you, her ladyship said. She said if anyone else was to go about with you, they would have to call out the guards again and read the Riot Act and if you was killed by the mob, even by accident because of too much enthusiasm, what would she and his lordship do? she said.”

  “The mob is gone,” Zoe said. “Even the newspaper men have left the square. Last night the Princess Elizabeth married the Prince of Hesse-Homburg at the Queen’s House. She is the news. I am not the news.”

  “But, miss, her ladyship said—”

  “If we travel in a hackney, no one will know it’s me,” Zoe said. “No one in my family travels in a hired vehicle.”

  “That’s true, miss, which is why I never fetched one before. And if anyone ever did want one, it’s rightfully a task for one of the under footmen or—”

  “There is a stand, I believe, not very far away,” said the implacable Zoe.

  “Yes, miss, on Bond Street, but—”

  “Then go to Bond Street.”

  It was the voice of command. Jarvis went.

  A short time later

  The maid had been obliged to run up and down Bond Street, waving her umbrella, to procure the hackney, with dubious results. Judging by the creakiness, crumbling interior, and smell, the carriage had probably done service in the time of the first King George, if not the eighth Henry. Still, it moved, which was all Zoe required.

  Once they were safely enclosed in the ancient coach, embarked on their journey, Jarvis showed a more adventurous spirit and began naming the sights along the way.

  They traveled along Bond Street to Piccadilly, with the maid pointing out dressmakers’ shops and furriers, goldsmiths and jewelers, bookshops and print sellers, and houses of the great. They made their way through Haymarket and continued southeastward to the Strand, then headed westward again by another route that took them to Covent Garden.

  Zoe gazed out of the coach window, entranced. For a time, the sights of London took her mind off the capricious Marchmont, but only for a time. She did not see how she was to become fashionable with only her sisters to guide her. He seemed not to take this matter seriously. He did not care, certainly, that she’d been cooped inside Lexham House forever.

  Perhaps he’d forgotten?

  It would be easy for a man to forget about a woman when she wasn’t right in front of him. Life offered men a great many more distractions than it did women. Then, too, men were so easily distracted.

  “Where to next, miss?” said Jarvis. “Would you like to see the Tower? Or would you like to go back?”

  “I’m not ready to go back,” said Zoe.

  “Whitehall, then?”

  After a moment’s thought, Zoe said, “I want to see White’s Club.” She knew Marchmont spent a large portion of his day there, not thinking about her or the tortures she’d be undergoing at her sisters’ hands.

  The driver, amply paid to indulge the lady’s whim to wander through London, took them back to the West End. They passed Charing Cross and the King’s Mews and the Opera House. At another street, the maid pointed out Marchmont House, nearby in St. James’s Square. They did not enter the square, though, but continued along Pall Mall to St. James’s Street.

  All the coaches, carts, riders, and pedestrians in London seemed to have crammed themselves into it this day. As they neared the top of the hill, the hackney slowed to a crawl. At White’s, close to the corner of Piccadilly, it came to a dead stop. This gave Zoe ample time to study the building. It was handsome but did not look very exciting. What on earth did he find there to amuse him, day after day? Or was it merely a comfortable place in which to get drunk with other idle men?

  “There’s the bow window,” said Jarvis. “The gentlemen gather there and watch the passersby. But only certain gentlemen are allowed.”

  Several were gathered in the window at present. Zoe couldn’t make out their faces, though, through the dirty glass of the hackney’s window.

  “Curse it,” she said. “I can’t see a thing.” She wrestled the window open and leant out for a clearer view. At the same moment, one very fair head turned to look out of White’s bow window, straight at her.

  She regarded the gentleman for a moment, then sat back. “Close the window,” she told Jarvis.

  The traffic gave way and the hackney lurched forward.

  Meanwhile in White’s

  The Duke of Marchmont was half-listening to his friends’ unstimulating conversation and gazing out of the bow window in hopes of a diversion when an ancient hackney paused in the street outside and its window went down and a young woman’s face appeared.

  He blinked.

  The face disappeared, the window went up, a space opened in the crush on St. James’s Street, and the hackney pushed into it.

  He stared for a moment at the place where the vehicle had been and told himself he’d imagined the whole thing. Lexham would never allow a daughter of his to drive about London in a hired vehicle, especially a broken-down one like that.

  “That was a deuced pretty girl,” said Adderwood.

  “Which girl?” said Worcester.

  “Hanging out of the window of the hackney. The oldest one in London, I vow. The vehicle, I mean. Not the girl.”

  “Didn’t see her,” said Worcester.

  “Pity,” said Adderwood. “She was a peach. Put me in mind of somebody but I can’t think who it is. Did you see her, Marchmont?”

  “Yes,” His Grace said tightly. “That reminds me. I have an appointment.”

  While his friends began betting about how old the oldest hackney was, he made his exit.

  He did not hurry out of the room. He told himself that Zoe Octavia was her father’s responsibility. If she was wandering about London in a ramshackle hackney—and thus couldn’t possibly have a family member with her, because they’d all rather set themselves on fire than be seen in a hired vehicle—this was not Marchmont’s problem but Lexham’s.

  The duke told himself that if Lexham chose to let her loose, to get into who knew what kind of trouble, this was Lexham’s decision, though one would think the man would know better.

  On the other hand, this was Zoe Octavia, who had a pernicious habi
t of running away….

  His Grace took care not to run out of the club and race to the hackney stand in St. James’s Street.

  He walked at his usual unhurried pace. He selected the least disgusting vehicle he could find. He described the one he’d seen.

  The driver knew it. It was famous, apparently, for it was, as Adderwood had asserted, the oldest London hackney in operation.

  “I shall pay you fifty pounds to find it,” said His Grace.

  “I’ll wager anything he didn’t see me,” Zoe muttered. “That would be like him, not to notice. I should have given him more time. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he was too drunk to focus clearly.”

  “Miss?” said Jarvis.

  “Never mind.”

  She should have waited longer before moving away from the window, Zoe chided herself. She’d watched ladies of the harem do it countless times when they traveled outside the house. If they saw a handsome stranger, they’d let their veils fall “accidentally.” Then they took their time about covering their faces again. Even at home they found ways to show themselves to attractive men passing in the street below. They’d peep through curtains or window shutters and be slow to close them or to move away from the window.

  She might not have been slow enough.

  Marchmont might have been looking at another vehicle or a rider or a pedestrian. She’d shown herself for only a moment. Even if he’d spotted her, he might not have recognized her. He might be in a haze. He had been in a haze when he agreed to introduce her to his world. Perhaps he had only a vague recollection of what she looked like.

  She should have allowed for the haze and his not being overly intelligent.

  Ah, well, too late to mend it. Either he’d recollected her existence or he hadn’t.

  A short while later, as the hackney was proceeding westward along Piccadilly, she became aware of shouts nearby.

  She looked out of the window. She saw only passing vehicles, horses, people, and, farther to the left, a stretch of hilly meadow dotted with a few clumps of trees.