Don't Tempt Me by Loretta Chase

annuities.
    Adderwood scanned the remaining columns of newsprint. Half the paper had been given over to Zoe Lexham. The story of her captivity and escape would appear in pamphlet form within hours, no doubt. With illustrations.
    â€œI can hardly take it in,” Adderwood said. “Is this all true? You were present when Beardsley spoke to her.”
    â€œHe took it from her almost verbatim,” said Marchmont. “He’s even managed to capture her—er—distinctive manner of expressing herself.”
    While listening to the lilting voice, with its shadows and soft edges, the Duke of Marchmont had been more deeply moved than he would ever admit.
    He hadn’t, until then, heard the true story of her disappearance. Only then had he learned that she hadn’t run away from the servants in charge of her.
    Well into her captivity, after Zoe had become fluentin Arabic, she’d learned that one of her parents’ servants had sold her for a vast sum, and the matter had been arranged and carefully planned well before the fateful day in the Cairo bazaar.
    Readers would learn, as Marchmont had, that the maid who’d sold her had not lived long. Within a week of Zoe’s disappearance, the servant was dead, of a “stomach ailment.” But of course she’d been poisoned, Zoe had told her two listeners so matter-of-factly. “She was merely another female, and she’d served her purpose. They wouldn’t want to take the chance of her repenting, and telling the truth.”
    Zoe had spoken in the same quietly devastating way about her capture. She hadn’t really understood what was happening, she’d said. They’d made her drink something that must have contained opiates, to quiet her. Perhaps the drug had dulled her senses.
    All the same, Marchmont could imagine what it must have been like when the drug wore off: twelve years old, among strangers who spoke a language she couldn’t understand…twelve years old, torn away from her family…
    His imagination started again, but he firmly thrust the images into the special mental cupboard.
    â€œI must wonder where a gently bred English girl would have found the fortitude to endure that long captivity,” Adderwood said, shaking his head.
    â€œI don’t know,” said Marchmont. “She didn’t dwell on life in the harem. The little she did say dispelled any illusions one might have about a Turkish harem being a sort of earthly paradise. For the man who ruled it, perhaps.”
    â€œWhere did she find the courage to escape?”
    â€œZoe never lacked for courage. All she wanted was an opportunity. You’ll see when you read on.”
    One opportunity in twelve years. It had come without warning: The master of the household and his favorite son, both dead within hours of each other…the house in turmoil…She’d had perhaps an hour at most to seize the chance and act. She’d taken the chance. If they’d caught her that time, they would have killed her, and probably not quickly. The men’s deaths, so close together, looked suspicious. “They would have said I poisoned them both,” she’d said. Marchmont had learned enough of “justice” in that part of the world to understand what this meant: She would have been tortured until she “confessed.”
    Marchmont banished those images, too.
    He fixed on the images he’d wanted Beardsley to plant in the public’s mind, with all the emphasis on her pluck and daring in the face of impossible odds, and her Englishness.
    In the course of the interview, the duke had casually mentioned a print of Princess Charlotte—was it only two years ago when the poor girl was alive and well?—titled “Is She Not a Spunky One.” In it the princess ascended a ship sailor style, in the process of running away because her father was trying to force her to marry the Prince of Orange. The image, as