“I should have got the truth out of that maidservant,” he said, “if only I had been there.”
“Even if you had got it out of her before they killed her, would that have made a difference?” Zoe said. “Once they had me, do you think they’d give me up? Have you any idea how valuable I was?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know how valuable you are.”
“I was a rare, rare creature to them,” she said. “I learned this later—that I was like one of the magical beings in theThousand and One Nights. The slavers had followed us from Greece. They knew they’d get a lot of money for me: White slaves are valuable—and I wasn’t merely a Circassian but an English girl. My coloring was different. Everything about me was different. How many twelve-year-old, blonde, blue-eyed European girls turn up in that part of the world? Especially during that time, when Europe was at war. They knew the pasha would pay a fortune for me, for his sick son. For the magic. The slavers knew Yusri Pasha would believe I would have the power to arouse his favorite son Karim’s desires at last, and he would produce sons.”
“And none of this would have happened but for an easily corrupted servant,” Marchmont said.
“They had all the reason in the world to make it happen, one way or another,” Zoe said. “They offered her more money than she could hope to earn in twenty years. If they hadn’t got to her, they would have got to someone else in our party. They would have found a way. They were very determined.”
“I should have been there,” he said.
She turned to him then. “You were seventeen years old. What would you have done that Papa didn’t do?”
“I would have found you,” he said. “I always found you.”
She turned round fully and rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder. His fingers threaded through her hair. “No,” she said. “They killed the maid to make sure she’d say nothing. If you had found me, they would have killed you without hesitation. For years, I was terrified that you or my father would burst into the palace and be killed. Even when it became obvious that I was useless—that I couldn’t cure Karim and he’d never sire sons—even then they wouldn’t have given me back. He was his father’s favorite, and I was Karim’s favorite toy, and they’d kill anybody who tried to take me away from him. If you’d found me—and they’d killed you, what would I have done, Lucien?”
He said nothing for a time, only kept drawing his fingers through her hair, caressing, soothing.
She lifted her hand and laid it over his heart, and felt its reassuring beat while she lay there, safely snuggled against his big body.
“I worry that you’ll be killed in a carriage crash,” he said after a long silence. “I worry that you’ll fall ill so suddenly, as my parents did, and die. I worry that you’ll fall off your horse and break your neck, the way Gerard did. I worry that you’ll die in childbed. I try to push these thoughts from my mind—I used to be so good at not thinking. But since the trouble with the servants began, I’ve become…” He paused. “Not Aunt Sophronia—not yet, I hope. But I seem to be not altogether rational.”
“All of those things you worry about can happen,” she said. “They can happen to me and they can happen to you—except for the childbed part.” She grinned up at him. “Unless you die of fright when I grow as gigantic as my sisters.”
He moved his head back to look at her. “If you grow as gigantic as they, I shall certainly die of fright.”
She pulled away from him to use her hands to draw a big mound over her belly. “The women of my family tend to become as big as houses,” she said. “Very round houses.”
Though the room was dimly lit, she had no trouble seeing the laughter dance in his eyes.
“You’re picturing it,” she said.
He nodded. His lips trembled. Then it burst from him: a great whoop of laughter.
He rolled away onto his back and laughed and laughed.
She laughed, too.
This was the boy she’d known so long ago, the boy who’d fallen down laughing when she tried to hit him with a cricket bat.
She remembered how, when he’d finally sobered, he’d stood up and marched to her, and plucked her up off the ground as easily as if she’d been a rag doll. He’d carried her, kicking and hitting and calling him names, back to the house and up to the schoolroom and plunked her into a chair.
“Learn something, you stupid girl,” he’d said, and walked out.
And she had learned something: Greek and Latin, because that’s what boys learned and she was determined to know what boys knew. She’d learned not only how to do sums but harder kinds of mathematics, like geometry and trigonometry. She did this not because she enjoyed the subjects but because boys learned those things—and she was determined to showhim. She’d never been the best or most conscientious student. Still she’d learned some things that most girls didn’t know: how to hide fear and how to think logically and how to jockey for position and how to be dogged and how to fight when one had to. Such knowledge had helped her survive the harem. It had helped her escape the harem. And it had helped her remove a blight from this great house.
Perhaps, too, what she had learned, in the schoolroom and in the last twelve years, had helped remove a shadow from this man’s heart.
When they sobered at last, she sat up and bent over him and kissed him. “If something bad happens,” she said, “we must promise each other to remember all the times like this when we laughed. And until something bad happens, we must enjoy ourselves. We are most fortunate people, Lucien. I am a most fortunate woman, and I mean to enjoy my good fortune as much as I can.”
“I should enjoy it better,” he said, “had we only the normal concerns of life. A deranged servant out to murder my wife is not a normal concern.”
She sat back. “In the harem, there was always somebody wanting to kill somebody,” she said. “I heard it was even more dangerous in Constantinople, in the sultan’s palace.”
“That’s why I’ve become deranged and you haven’t,” he said. “To me, this is outrageous. To you, it’s normal.”
