Don't Tempt Me (Fallen Women 2)

“If anyone interrupts, I’ll cut off their heads,” he said.

“It excites me when you’re masterful,” she said.

He picked her up and tossed her onto the desk. He unbuttoned his pantaloons.

Later

Zoe put the undercook in the cook’s place and had Jarvis, as the highest-ranking woman servant, supervise the female staff. After talking to the men-servants, Marchmont decided not to promote the under-butler—whose greatest skill seemed to be obsequiousness—but to make Thomas, the most experienced of the footmen, his butler and valet.

All of this was for the time being only.

Other households might make do with a combination butler-valet or housekeeper-lady’s maid. Other households did not have porters or under-butlers or steward’s boys. The Duke and Duchess of Marchmont did not make do. They had everything and more. It was their patriotic duty to be waited upon by scores of servants, whether they needed them or not, and the servants were as well aware of this as they were.

Still, the staff performed admirably in the circumstances, and Zoe and Marchmont were able to go out to the theater as they had planned, and afterward to a ball at Hargate House, where Zoe danced with the Earl of Hargate, three of his five sons, and most of Marchmont’s friends.

The duke and duchess knew rumors would start circulating soon, regarding the sudden disappearance of their senior staff, but that was for tomorrow and the days to come. For this night, all people talked about was what a handsome couple the Marchmonts made and how amiable and witty the duke was—wittier and in better spirits than anyone could remember seeing him before.

The happy couple returned home at half past two in the morning.

They did not see the shrouded figure skulking in the shadows of the square.

Wednesday, 6 May

April showers, the wags said, came in May, the result of what some still deemed the misguided change, several generations earlier, from Julian to Gregorian calendar.

A glance out of the window told Marchmont that one April shower was in the offing this morning. Black clouds were massing overhead, and an un-May-like wind blasted through St. James’s Square.

It was not the most inviting day to go out, but the Duchess of Marchmont needn’t worry about bad weather. He’d ordered a closed carriage for her. Servants would hold an umbrella over her head when she walked the few paces between vehicle and door. Furthermore, as she pointed out to him, she wasn’t sweet enough to melt.

She needed to visit her parents, and that errand oughtn’t to be put off. They already knew she was happy and well, because they’d seen for themselves—at Lexham House and various social gatherings. But she wanted to seek their advice regarding the servant problem, particularly the matter of finding a housekeeper.

Marchmont couldn’t go with her. He’d sent for his solicitor, to work out the details of Cook’s, Dove’s, and Hoare’s philanthropic servitude. It was a tedious process, sifting through all the possible situations, and deciding where the miscreants would do the most good. This matter couldn’t be put off, either. He could hardly keep them locked up in Harrison’s room indefinitely.

He did leave his solicitor for long enough to see his wife off, though.

“This is exciting,” she said as they crossed the entrance hall. “It’s my first time out alone as a married woman.”

“Not entirely alone,” he said.

Jarvis trailed behind her mistress, umbrella in hand as always.

“I told her she needn’t come,” Zoe said. “I told her there would be two big, strong footmen standing at the back of the coach and a burly coachman driving, and we’re only going a short distance.”

“We must hope that the housemaids don’t run amok while she’s away,” he said.

“What do housemaids do when they run amok?” Zoe said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Excessive dusting?”

She smiled up at him, and he could actually feel his heart melting. Marriage had a deleterious effect on a man’s dignity. If he didn’t watch out, he’d be giving her idiotish smiles in return.

He pretended the feathers of her bonnet needed straightening. Then he had to adjust the satin puffs at her shoulders. Then he had to step back and regard her critically.

Then she had to laugh at him and step closer and grasp his lapels.

“Zoe, you’re wrinkling me,” he said reproachfully.

She tugged.

He bent and kissed her, there, in front of the servants. When he straightened, he noticed with amusement that Jarvis was pointedly looking the other way and the footmen and hall porter were carefully looking at nothing.

Marchmont walked with her to the door and out of it, and down the steps to the waiting carriage. He helped her in and closed the door behind her.

He watched the carriage proceed westward, round the fence enclosing the circular pond in the center of the square. When he saw the vehicle turn into King Street, he started back into the house. He’d scarcely crossed the threshold and the door hadn’t yet closed behind him when he heard horses shrieking, people shouting and screaming, and a thunderous crash.

He leapt down the short flight of steps and ran through the square and into King Street.

Everyone about him was screaming and shouting, but it was all background noise. He was aware of people running out of buildings, but they were shadows. He saw bodies on the pavement and in the street. Blood everywhere. People crowded about the overturned carriage. He pushed them out of his way. He saw the crest. His crest.

Zoe was in there.

He saw her in his mind’s eye, galloping ahead of him on a narrow bridle path, the sky grey, the tree leaves shining, the ground slick with wet. It was the last time she’d run away. The last time he’d chased her, exasperated, as always, and afraid, as always. It had rained for two days and she was supposed to be safe at home, studying her Greek and Latin. She’d promised to study very hard, because she was going abroad, to visit Greece and Egypt and the Holy Land with her parents.

It was the last time she’d run away, the last time he’d chased her. Not a year later, she was gone. Forever.

Gone forever.

Someone was shouting at him, but the sounds made no sense.

He was climbing up onto the wreckage. He had to fight to wrench open the door.

The first thing he saw was the ostrich plumes. They didn’t move.

Nothing moved.

His heart stopped moving, too.

“Zoe.”

Then, louder. “Zoe.”

A small movement. A feather quivering.

But the wind was whistling through the street on this dreary day—the same wind that had blasted through the square only a moment ago, ruffling the water in the basin.

He reached down, his hand shaking.

The feathers fluttered.

One slim, gloved hand moved, rose, and reached for his.

His heart gave such a lurch that he nearly fell off the

vehicle. Then he was clasping her hand tightly, so tightly. “Zoe.”

“Lucien.”

She shook her head and looked up. The bonnet tilted over one blue eye. “What are you doing up there?”

He remembered little of what happened immediately afterward. He’d fallen into some kind of frenzy, and all the world seemed to have gone mad, too. People had crowded into King Street from everywhere.

He vaguely recalled the footmen helping him get Zoe and her maid out of the carriage. The footmen accounted for two of the bodies he’d seen. They’d been thrown or had jumped from their perch behind the carriage. They were bruised and their livery was torn and filthy, but that was the worst of their sufferings.

Marchmont carried Zoe back to the house in his arms. One of the footmen tried to carry Jarvis, but she wouldn’t have any part of it, instead limping after her master and mistress, umbrella tightly clutched in her hand.

Bystanders helped carry the coachman back to the duke’s coach house on a litter.

Some of the blood Marchmont had seen was the coachman’s, apparently.

But most of it must have been the horses’, given what the servants told him later.

It took a while to sort things out.

There were witnesses, as there usually are, but everyone told a different story, and all told it at the same time. In any case, Marchmont refused to wait about to listen.

John Coachman had had the best view of events. He was in no condition to be interrogated, though, even had Marchmont wished to question him. He didn’t. He left his servant in the physician’s care, waiting only to be sure the man was not fatally injured.

Then he returned to Zoe, whom he’d carried up to his bedroom.

He wouldn’t have left her, even to see about the coachman, but she’d assured him she was unhurt—and she wanted to bathe.

By the time he returned, she was clean and dressed in one of her pretty nightdresses, sitting up in his bed, propped up by a brace of pillows. If she hadn’t sat there so quietly—too quietly for Zoe—wearing a small furrow between her brows, he might have believed the accident had not disturbed her in the least.