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’mmaking the rules. You’re my wife, and on the day we wed, I promised to look after you—and you promised toobey.”
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.
