Don't Tempt Me (Fallen Women 2)

What foreboding he felt was simply due to the prospect of dealing with numbers. She’d been staring at long columns of them. She’d been writing them down. Though she’d scrubbed the smudges off her face, faint ink stains remained on her fingers.

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She took his hand, and he let her lead him to the breakfast table. “This is the darkest part of the room,” he said. “I thought you preferred to breakfast in the sunlight. My windows overlook the garden.”

“I assumed your head would ache this morning,” she said.

“I wasn’t nearly as drunk as I’d planned to be,” he said. “Getting drunk turned out not to be as much fun as it ought to be.” He held out a chair for her and she sat. He took his place opposite. It wasn’t far away. This was a good deal more intimate than even the breakfast room, one of the most informal rooms in the house.

They ate for a time in comfortable silence. He was used to silence and used to living alone. But he knew she savored the quiet, after so many riotous mealtimes at Lexham House. As for himself, he was content this day simply to have her near and not in a mood to throw things at him.

He seemed to be in a very bad way, stupidly attached to his wife.

When at last he set down his cutlery, she drew out a few sheets of folded foolscap from a pocket hidden in the folds of her dress.

“Those would be the sums, I collect,” he said, eyeing the papers with loathing.

“A few notes, only,” she said. “Merely some examples to support the main premise. The main premise is that you are being grossly overcharged and overprovisioned, and that, in short, members of this household have been cheating you.”

It was, perhaps, the last thing he could have expected to hear her say. He understood the words but couldn’t take them in. He looked at the papers in her hand. He looked at her, into her troubled countenance.

“I never expected this in a household so well run,” Zoe said. “I didn’t suspect anything was amiss until Harrison made such a fuss about letting me see the records. Even then cheating was only one of several possibilities that occurred to me.”

“Harrison,” he said. “Cheating me.” It was beginning to sink in, though he still felt numb.

“The first thing I noticed was the quantity of provisions,” she said. “It might have made sense if you entertained on the most lavish scale every single evening. But I know you don’t. You dine away from home most of the time, according to Osgood, who keeps track of all the invitations and appointments. I haven’t yet sent for your cook—or any of those who might be involved—to hear how they explain the quantities and prices. I didn’t want to do this until I’d spoken to you.”

“I can’t…” He remembered her sitting in the library, toiling over the books until long after midnight. She’d still been at it when he left in a sulk.

Yesterday afternoon and night and early this morning she’d studied and calculated.

“Oh, Zoe.” He held out his hand, and she put the notes into it. He looked down, and the notes and numbers were a blur.

“I know such things happen,” she said. “My sisters warned me. They said I must immediately study the records, and talk to the upper-level staff, to show that I understand how a household is run. They said I must assert myself at the beginning, or I would leave a void and others would move in to fill it. Then I should never have control. I knew this was true, because it’s the same in the harem.”

He hadn’t understood at all. He’d inherited his title. He’d inherited his position in the world. He’d never had to assert himself or prove who he was. The Duke of Marchmont simply was.

“Sometimes the cook or another orders more than can be used, and sells the extra,” she went on. “Sometimes they make arrangements with, say, the butcher. He charges more than what the correct price should be, and he and the servants split the profit. But it isn’t only the food and drink. Your laundry bills are ludicrous, even for a fashionable gentleman. Some of the tailor bills are forgeries, I think. I would not be surprised if we discover that some of the merchants whose names appear on the bills don’t exist.”

He stared blindly at the notes in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “One expects to discover minor pilfering. That happens everywhere, and it’s nearly impossible to prevent. This is beyond anything I could have expected. It’s very, very wicked. A betrayal of trust of the worst kind.”

The first blank shock was ebbing, and anger rushed in to fill its place. Harrison, whom he’d trusted, who’d stood before him, so piously correct yesterday.

A part of him still didn’t want to accept it.

Yet he knew in his heart it was true.

His trust had been betrayed.

All the same, he saw with painful clarity how easy he’d made it for others to betray him.

He gave the notes back to Zoe, rose from the table, crossed the room, and pulled the rope, to summon a servant.

A footman appeared within minutes.

“Send Harrison to me,” said Marchmont. “Now.”

“I’m sorry, Your Grace,” said the footman. “Mr. Harrison isn’t in the house.”

Zoe wasn’t surprised when they discovered that the house steward had run away, apparently during the night.

When his rooms were searched, his belongings—and a number of things that didn’t belong to him—were gone.

Mrs. Dunstan had gone out to the market early this morning and had not come back. Neither of them had warned Dove and Hoare. These two must have assumed that the new duchess would never in a million years make heads or tails of the household records, else they’d have vanished, too.

By the end of the day, after questioning every member of the staff, Marchmont was left in no doubt whatsoever that his upper servants, led by Harrison, had been systematically siphoning off a portion of his income—and this had been going on for as much as a decade.

Hoare, for instance, had cultivated a network of tailors, glove makers, haberdashers, laundresses, and so on, all of whom overcharged His Grace and split the excess with the valet, who paid a percentage to his other partners in crime. The others—cook, butler, housekeeper—did the same in their own spheres.

Some of the lower servants knew what was going on, some suspected, and some knew nothing. Those who knew had been afraid, until now, to inform. They believed that no one would take their word against Harrison’s, and they were terrified of what he would do if they tattled.

Situations at Marchmont House were highly paid and of high status. One couldn’t hope to do as well elsewhere. Furthermore, one mightn’t find any work anywhere else, because Harrison let offending servants go without a character. A servant who hadn’t a letter of recommendation was unlikely to find another good position. Too, Harrison could be vindictive, spreading poison about those he’d dismissed. No one within ten miles of London would hire them for even the most menial positions.

“He was a bully, as I knew,” Zoe said after the last of the servants, a scullery maid, had left the study.

“I didn’t,” Marchmont said. “I never noticed anything amiss. I had no idea that most of my servants lived in fear of him. Even if I had noticed, I probably would have thought that was as it ought to be. But fear and respect are not the same thing. Gad, Zoe, what a mess.”

He got up and walked to the fire and gazed into the grate, his hands clasped behind him.

It was the way her father so often stood, thinking as he stared into the fire.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You trusted these people and they betrayed your trust.”

He shook his head. “Not everyone can resist temptation. If I had taken responsibility, they wouldn’t have been tempted. I set a bad example. I was not the master of the house. Someone had to be. And it’s too tempting, when one has great power, to abuse it.” He turned back to her. “What would happen in the harem, in such a case? Off with their heads?”

She nodded. “No one would care whether they were truly innocent or guilty.”

“I know I ought to have the lot of them—Harrison, Cook, Dove, Dunstan, Hoare—taken up and prosecuted. But they’ll hang—and then I’ll always wonder whether, if I’d behaved differently, none of this would have happened.”

“If Harrison and the ho

usekeeper have any sense, they’ll be on their way out of the country by this time,” Zoe said. “It doesn’t seem fair that they should escape and the others hang.”

“The others are equally guilty. We can add to that the crime of stupidity for lingering in the house a minute after you’d opened the ledgers.” He still studied the burning coals.

“It wouldn’t be the first time servants have underestimated my obstinacy,” Zoe said. “When you came to the library last night and told me to come to bed, I wanted to. I wanted us to kiss and make up. I didn’t want to keep staring at those columns of numbers. You know I never liked sums.”

“I know.”

“But I’m like the dog with the bone. As soon as I saw something wasn’t right, it became a challenge, to find out exactly what was wrong and how and where. It was the same in the harem. If I weren’t so obstinate, I should never have got away. But I was determined to master the place. And because I mastered it, when the time came, I found the way out.”

“Oh, Zoe.” He turned to look at her, but she didn’t need to read his face. She heard it all in his anguished voice. She went to him. It was instinctive. She put her arms around him, the way she’d done this morning, because she loved him—she couldn’t help it—and she wanted him to be happy.

His arms went around her, the way they’d done this morning, warm and strong and reassuring. He kissed the top of her head, and the tenderness of that small touch made her heart ache.

“Your mother and father never gave up hope, but I did,” he said tightly. “I gave up on you, on everything. You never gave up.”

“I’m stubborn,” she murmured against his chest.

“Don’t give up on me, Zoe Octavia. Don’t ever give up on me.”

“I won’t,” she said.

And No, I won’t, she thought. I’m afraid I never will.

Fifteen

Only a few short weeks ago, the Duke of Marchmont couldn’t be bothered to decide which waistcoat to wear.

Now he found himself holding the power of life and death over his felonious servants.

He had to make a decision, and he had to do it quickly. Dove, Hoare, and Cook were locked in Harrison’s parlor, guarded by an army of footmen and maidservants.