After a moment, Lord Adderwood let his keen, dark gaze travel the room until it lit upon his erstwhile schoolmate. “There you are, Marchmont,” he said.
“What a noticing fellow you are, Adderwood,” said Marchmont. “Nothing escapes you.”
“I was about to search the club for you,” Adderwood said. “We could not possibly close the betting book without you. What do you say? I say she is.”
“Then I say she isn’t.”
“How much, then?”
“Put me down for a thousand pounds,” said the duke. “Then pray tell me firstly, Who is she? And secondly, Is she or isn’t she what?”
Every head came up, and every set of eyes swiveled in his direction.
“Good God, Marchmont, where have you been?” said Alvanley. “Patagonia?”
“Busy night,” said His Grace. “Don’t remember where I’ve been. Where’s Patagonia? Anywhere near Lisson Grove?”
“He doesn’t read the papers until bedtime,” Adderwood explained to the others.
“I find them an unfailing aid to a deep and dreamless sleep,” said His Grace.
“But you don’t need to read anything,” said Worcester. “They’ve plastered pictures in all the print shop windows.”
“I came the other way,” said Marchmont. “Didn’t see any pictures. What’s happened? Another one of the royal dukes wooing a German princess? No surprise there. I have long waited for one of the royal family to do something truly shocking, like marry an Englishwoman.”
Last November, following a long and agonizing labor, the country’s beloved Princess Charlotte had produced a stillborn son and died. This sad end to England’s hopes—she’d been the Prince Regent’s only child and heir—had led her uncles, the royal dukes, to abandon their mistresses and numerous illegitimate offspring in order to commence marriage negotiations with various Germanic cousins.
“Nothing to do with them,” said Adderwood. “It’s to do with Lexham. We are evenly divided between those who say his lordship has finally taken leave of his senses and those who say he was right all along.”
Marchmont’s eyes opened a little wider then, and his indolent mind came to something like attention.
“Zoe Octavia,” he said. If they were making bets about Lexham, it must have to do with his long-lost daughter.
A dozen years ago, Lexham had taken his wife and youngest child on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean. This had not struck Marchmont as the wisest enterprise during wartime.
True, the French had surrendered Egypt to the British in 1801, and Lord Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar had demonstrated England’s naval supremacy. But the seas remained far from safe. Furthermore, European power struggles meant nothing to the various pashas and beys and whatnot ruling their bits of the Ottoman Empire. Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land were part of that empire, and rulers and ruled alike all carried on as they’d always done. The slave trade was lucrative, and white slaves were always wanted for the harems—as the pirates lurking in the Mediterranean well knew.
The region was not, in short, the safest place to take any twelve-year-old, fair-haired, blue-eyed English girl, let alone Zoe. They’d scarcely reached Egypt when the fool girl had bolted, naturally, the way she’d so often done at home.
But this time Marchmont wasn’t there to track her down, and those who’d searched could find no trace of her. It was believed she’d been kidnapped. Lexham waited for a ransom note. It never came.
He never gave up trying to find her. Though eventually he’d had to return to England, he’d hired agents to carry on the work. They had traveled up and down the Nile, and they’d made their way from Algiers to Constantinople and back again. They’d heard she was here and they’d heard she was there. They’d gathered rumors and nothing else.
Marchmont had given up hope a decade ago, and locked away Zoe in the mental cupboard with the others he’d lost and the feelings he no longer let himself have.
“What number is this?” he said. “Has anyone kept track of how many females have appeared on Lexham’s doorstep, claiming to be his long-lost daughter?”
“I made it to be twoscore,” said Alvanley. “The greater number in the early years. It’s dwindled considerably of late. I’d nearly forgotten about her.”
Though everyone believed him mad to continue searching for her, Lexham had proved sufficiently compos mentis to reject every last one of the would-be Zoes.
“Then I reckon we can put the total at twoscore and one,” said Marchmont.
Alvanley shook his head.
“This time he took her in,” said Adderwood.
The Duke of Marchmont left his chair and stalked to the bow window.
