A quartet of crows.
“Who died?” he said.
“Cousin Horatio,” said Augusta.
“Ah, the recluse on the Isle of Skye,” said Marchmont.
Lexham had taken him there after Gerard died. Some thought it a strange place to take a grieving fifteen-year-old, but Lexham, as always, knew what to do. In hindsight, Marchmont saw how wise his guardian had been not to send the new Duke of Marchmont back to school. There he’d have to hide his grief. There, among his friends, he’d have no Gerard to boast of, no letters from Gerard to look forward to. Skye and the eccentric Cousin Horatio held no associations with Gerard or their dead parents. It was far away from the world in which they’d grown up, and it was beautiful. He and Lexham walked. They fished. They read books and talked. Sometimes even Cousin Horatio joined the conversation.
The brooding atmosphere of the place and the solitude had quieted Marchmont’s mind and brought him a measure of peace.
“He died a fortnight ago,” Dorothea said.
“He left his property to Papa.”
“The least one might do is wear mourning for him.”
Were they thinking of sending their youngest sister to Cousin Horatio’s? Zoe on a desolate, windswept island of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides? She’d think she was in Siberia. For one who’d spent twelve years in a land where the sun always shone and where even on winter nights the temperature rarely fell below sixty degrees, it would be exactly the same thing: bone-chilling and spirit-killing.
His gaze drifted to Zoe, in her wine-colored shawl and pale green frock. She was the antithesis of mourning, acutely alive and unmistakably carnal.
It wasn’t that her garments were seductive. It was the way she wore them and the languorous way she carried herself. Even standing still, she vibrated physicality.
“I did not have enough clothes, and the black dress my sisters found for me was too small,” she said, evidently misreading his prolonged survey as criticism. “To alter it was too much work. The maid must take a piece from here.” She pointed to the bottom of her skirt, drawing attention to her elegantly slender feet. “Then she must add it to this part, to cover my breasts.” She drew her hand over her bodice. “They must put in a piece here as well.” She slid her hands along her hips.
“Zoe,” Dorothea said warningly.
“What?”
“We don’t touch ourselves in that way.”
“Most certainly not in front of others who are not our husband,” Priscilla said.
“I forgot.” She looked at Marchmont. “We don’t touch. We don’t say what we feel in our hearts. We don’t lie on the rug. We keep our feet on the floor except in bed or on the chaise longue.”
“Where were you keeping your feet?” he said.
She gestured at the furniture. “No chairs in Cairo. When I sit in one, my legs want to curl up under me.”
“This isn’t Cairo,” Augusta said. “You would do well to remember that. But of course you won’t.” She turned to Marchmont, who was with difficulty maintaining his composure. “Marchmont, you may find this all very amusing, but it would be a kindness to Zoe to face facts: It will take years to civilize her.”
She’d got him aroused in an instant, the little witch, and made him laugh at the same time. Zoe Octavia had never been fully civilized. She’d never been like anybody else. Now she was less so.
He let his gaze slide up from the hips and bosom to which she’d called his attention. Up the white throat and delicate point of her stubborn chin and up, to meet her gaze.
It was the gaze of a grown woman, not the girl he’d known. That Zoe was gone forever, just as the boy he’d once been was gone forever. Which was as it should be, he told himself. That was life, perfectly normal and not at all mysterious. It was, in fact, as he preferred it.
“If by ‘civilized’ you mean she must turn into an English lady, it isn’t necessary,” he said. “The Countess Lieven isn’t English, yet she’s one of Almack’s patronesses.”
“What is Almack’s?” said Zoe. “They keep screaming about it, and I cannot decide whether it is the Garden of Paradise or a place of punishment.”
“Both,” he said. “It’s the most exclusive club in London, impossibly hard to get into and amazingly easy to get thrown out of. Birth and breeding aren’t sufficient. One must also dress and dance beautifully. Or, failing that, one must possess sufficient wit or arrogance to impress the patronesses. They keep a list of those who meet their standards. Some three-quarters of the nobility are not on the list. If you’re not on the list, you can’t buy an admission voucher and can’t get into the Wednesday night assemblies.”
“Are you on the list?” Zoe asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“Men’s moral failings tend to be overlooked,” Augusta said.
Marchmont ignored her. “You’ll be on it, too,” he told Zoe.
“That,” said Gertrude, “will take a miracle, and I have not noticed that you and Providence are on the best of terms.”
“I don’t believe in miracles,” he said. “Not that Almack’s signifies at present.”
“Doesn’t signify?” Augusta cried.
Why would they not go away? Why had Lexham not strangled them all at birth?
“I’ve disposed of the mob,” he said. “Next is the newspapers.”
He walked to the door, and the tragic chorus gave way.
He summoned a footman.
“You will find a disreputable-looking being named John Beardsley loitering in the square,” Marchmont told the servant. “Tell him I shall see him in the anteroom on the ground floor.”
As one would expect, this set off the chorus.
“Beardsley?”
“That horrid little person from the Delphian?”
“What is the Delphian?” came the lilting voice from behind him.
“A newspaper,” said a sister.
“Ghastly, gossipy newspaper.”
“He’s a vile little man who writes stories for it.”
“Sometimes in iambic pentameter. He fancies himself a writer.”
“You can’t mean to have him in the house, Marchmont.”
“What will Papa say?”
“Since I am not a mind reader, I haven’t the least idea what your father will say,” said Marchmont. “Perhaps he will say, ‘That was an excellent idea the ancient Greeks had, of abandoning female infants on a mountainside. Why was that practice given up, I wonder?’”
Having rendered them momentarily mute with outrage, he turned to Zoe. “Miss Lexham, would you be so good as to walk downstairs with me?”
Before she stepped out into the corridor, she smoothed her skirts. In another woman, the gesture would have seemed nervous. With her it was provocative. She did it in the way she’d trailed her hands across her bosom and along her hips.
I know all the arts of pleasing a man, she’d said.
He had not the smallest doubt she did. He was aware of heat racing along his skin and under it, speeding to his groin. He could almost feel his brain softening into warm wax, the wax a woman could do as she liked with.
Nothing wrong with that, he told himself. Men paid good money for women who possessed such arts. He’d be paying good money, too, come to that. He forgot about her annoying sisters and laughed—at himself, at the circumstances.
She looked up questioningly at him, and he almost believed she had no idea how provocative she was. Almost believed it.
I’m not innocent, she’d said. That he could believe.
“I was only thinking of the thousand pounds you’ve cost me,” he said.
“You refer to the wager with your friends,” she said. “You didn’t believe it was me. But why should you? I was worried at first that my own parents wouldn’t know me.”
“Well, none of us do, do we?” he said. “But it is you, beyond a doubt. And I am far too glad of that to begrudge the money.”
“You’re glad?” she said, her face lighting up. “You?