“Temporarily.” Zoe’s father, who’d quietly entered the vestibule between servants, stood watching the parade of parcels. “Zoe’s been shopping, I see,” he said.
“Oh, this hardly signifies,” said Marchmont. “These are merely some fripperies and trinkets we bought in the futile attempt to sweeten her ghastly temper.”
Zoe stormed out of the vestibule, hips swaying, skirts swishing.
“Never mind, sir,” Marchmont said, pitching his voice so that she’d hear him. “I promised I would see this thing through, and I shall, no matter what.”
Seven
Zoe might have become calmer and more rational if her sister Augusta hadn’t condescended to join the family after dinner that evening.
She had nowhere else to go, she said. She still did not dare show her face to her acquaintance. She wondered if she ever would dare, or whether she ought to remove to the country permanently.
“After Zoe’s carryings-on this day, I do not see how even the Duke of Marchmont can restore the family honor,” she said.
As Marchmont had predicted, news of their contretemps, in Grafton Street and in the dressmaker’s shop, was already making the rounds of the Beau Monde. Augusta enlightened their parents.
“Oh, Zoe,” Mama said. “How could you?”
Even when Zoe gave her version of events, her father, to her dismay, did not take her side.
“Marchmont was right to shout at you,” said Papa. “In his place I should have done the same. That was damned reckless of you, to pull a child from an overturned carriage. You should have left it to Marchmont. He’s perfectly capable of dealing with such matters.”
“You made him look ridiculous,” said Augusta.
“I?” Zoe said. “I have not noticed you or any of my other sisters showing him any respect. All of you criticize him and say he is useless and lazy—”
“We don’t say it inpublic. But you act like a ten-year-old child—and an ill-bred ten-year-old at that. Throwing a vase at him. Does that not strike you as childish?”
“It was a book!”
“Oh, Zoe,” said Mama.
“You are very lucky he came back, after the vulgar display you treated him to,” said Augusta. “But he at least thinks of Papa and his obligation to him. You think of nobody but yourself.”
“Obligation?” Zoe said.
“He’s under no obligation to me, I’m sure,” said Papa.
“You know he has always regarded you as a father,” Augusta said.
Did you think I wanted to find that your father had been taken in by an imposter? Did you think I wanted to see him made a fool of?
The words hung in Zoe’s mind. She remembered Jarvis’s interpretation of his words:Everybody knows he don’t care about much,but what he said to you means he cares about your father.
Now the memories flooded in, of the summers when Lucien and Gerard joined the Lexhams in the country. The two families had often spent weeks together, but she didn’t remember the early times, when the boys’ parents were alive. She didn’t remember what the duke and duchess looked like or sounded like. She remembered vividly, though, the dreadful time after Gerard was killed, when Lucien shrank into himself and avoided everybody. Papa took him away, only the two of them, for what had seemed to her a very long time: months and months. When they returned, Lucien was himself again, or nearly.
Marchmont had returned to the dressmaker’s shop because of Papa. Zoe looked at her father.
“Obligation has nothing to do with it,” Papa said. “Everyone knows that Marchmont would never run away from a fight. Everyone knows that he regards his word as sacred.”
I promised I would see this thing through,and I shall,no matter what, he’d said.
“It’s all pride, and nothing to do with me,” Papa said. “Really, Augusta, you have a knack for twisting things about.”
She did have that knack. Augusta was a killjoy of the first order.
Pride or obligation, it hardly mattered, Zoe told herself. For her, Marchmont was simply a means to an end. She needed to remember this. She needed to remember this was all he was to her.
