The danger of fairy tales we are told is that they mislead girls into dreams of marrying Prince Charming. We are to believe that unless we snatch from our girls’ hands the stories of Cinderella, Snow White, and Beauty, and insist on the reading of Fordyce’s Sermons, they will marry badly. And yet the heroines of these tales are as humble, cheerful, competent, and caring in the domestic sphere in which each lives, whether castle or cottage, that each must be considered a model of female virtue. If there is a danger in these familiar tales, it is surely that the tales ignore Prince Charming’s life. There is no requirement that the heroine understand him, know his past, know the work that he is called to do in the world. She is left to imagine that the story is entirely about her rescue, not his.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Twelve
Jane did not want the service to end. For an hour she had felt English, at home in her surroundings. The worn red psalter in her hands, the sober cadence of the worship of the season, the light slanting down into the chaste white interior of the chapel from its upper windows had transported her back to that long ago time when she and her father had come to services on Sundays to pray for Mama.
Until she’d entered the chapel with her Grandmother, she had remembered little of her London childhood. As she crossed from the dark porch into the church proper, memories rushed back in with the smell of candles and the stirring notes of the organ prelude. She heard Hazelwood whisper in her ear, “Any single man under forty in this lot is probably yours for the taking.” Then he vanished, after dogging her footsteps for days. She did not yet understand the pattern of his disappearances and wondered what on earth so alarmed him about a Sunday church service that he’d fled her company.
She and her grandmother parted with Margaret at the rear of the church. Margaret slipped into a pew in the very back on the right, squeezing in with three ladies and two gentlemen, who nodded to her as she entered.
A trim white-haired gentleman noted her grandmother’s arrival and came to offer his arm to assist her. As they passed up the aisle, Jane heard whispers in their wake. At the front of the church where Jane and her grandmother sat, the dark, straight-backed pews with their blue velvet cushions felt instantly familiar as if nine years had not intervened since Jane’s last Sunday service but only the usual interval of a week. The service passed in a measured succession of creeds and collects and prayers for the king, clergy, and people. Only her questions over Hazelwood’s abrupt departure interrupted her thoughts. Hazelwood had a way of doing that, occupying her mind when she meant not to think about him.
Now the worshippers in their pew stirred, taking hymnbooks into gloved hands. They were to stand for a benediction and the recessional hymn. Around her the onion-thin pages of the hymnbooks rustled and people cleared their throats. She helped her grandmother to stand. The unseen organist struck the opening chord of a hymn of praise. Just then a broad-shouldered gentleman in a blue coat jostled his way into the pew, forcing everyone to shift to the left. The congregation began to sing, and Jane found her voice. It was a stirring tune to rouse a martial spirit.
As the organ notes died away, a procession of elegant people filled the main aisle, those from the first pews leading the way. The business of helping her grandmother stand and step into the aisle occupied her attention for several minutes as the crowd passed. When at last they began to move, Jane’s attention was caught by an elegant woman in dove-gray silk, her chestnut hair streaked with white at the temples. The woman’s fellow churchgoers bowed and greeted her with apparently little expectation of a return greeting.
“The Countess of Vange,” her grandmother whispered in her ear. “She’s a great patron of this chapel and a regular at Sunday services. Your scapegrace friend, Hazelwood, is her son.”
As soon as her grandmother spoke, Jane saw the resemblance. What little Hazelwood had admitted about his family came back to her. And something else. Hazelwood was wrong if he thought his mother felt about him as his father did. The countess’s drawn face and her brittle hauteur were signs of a woman suffering from a great loss.
“Come, Margaret will be waiting of us with her Last Bench Lending Library group. We’d best get it over with.”
Margaret made the introductions. The others smiled and nodded at Jane and looked awed by her grandmother. Hazelwood’s words about husbands echoed in her head when Margaret introduced Captain Simon Mudge, a retired naval officer with a limp and brown military whiskers that curved from his ears along his fine square jaw, and Thomas Bickford, a tall, lean man of extraordinary pallor, a widowed barrister of the rank of King’s Counselor. The surprise was that her father’s indistinguishable twin sisters, Cassandra and Cordelia, in matching fox fur-trimmed pelisses and bonnets were part of the group, indeed its most elegant members. The final member was Lucy Holbrook, a young woman in a plain dark blue wool coat that could not limit her striking fair prettiness. Each of them clasped a book in hand.
“We are not Mudd’s Circulating Library, but we do keep books moving,” Cordelia confided, holding out her book for Jane’s inspection. “Have you read Mrs. Raby’s latest medieval romance?”
Jane shook her head.
“Hair raising stuff. I’ll lend you Volume One when Cassandra’s done with it. She’s the slowest reader of the bunch.”
“Yes, but, unlike Cordelia, I never forget what I’ve read. She’s the one who slows the group down by re-reading a book she read a month earlier.”
The group of friends moved toward the entrance. Margaret took over with Lady Eliza. Jane was looking for Hazelwood when the broad-shouldered gentleman who had entered late came up to her. “Jane Fawkener, is it? They told me you’d be here. Let me look at you.” His hearty voice echoed through the emptying church. “It’s your Uncle Thaddeus, niece.”
Jane looked up at a rosy-cheeked gentleman with smiling blue eyes. Now that she could observe him closely, she saw the threadbare condition of his coat. “Uncle Thaddeus, hello.”
“Doing my duty, don’t you know.” He looked around. “Used to come here after your mother passed. Put in a word or two, you know”—he glanced upward—“on her behalf. Not that she needed anything from the likes of a plain naval man like me. She always was a good sort of girl, even when she was mad for your father.” He cleared his throat. “Now, he, mind you, he probably needs all the words you’ve got to say, eh?”
“He needs more than words, Uncle. He needs our help. I’m sure he’s very much alive and probably in trouble.” Jane spoke quietly but clearly, sure that no one else could hear her in the general murmur of leave taking.
Her uncle’s brows shot up, and he glanced around. “Do you know what you’re saying, niece?”
She nodded.
His brows contracted in a heavy frown, and he offered his arm to her.
Again, Jane felt that moment of hesitation, caught between the ways of Halab and the ways of London. She took his arm, and he turned them toward the church door.
The crowd was thinning, but her uncle looked about before he spoke again. “Did your father leave you a map? Always giving maps to people, as if we were all about to go haring off on an adventure.”
“Did he give you one, Uncle?”
“No, but I have one, one he gave to your mother long ago. Don’t know where the thing has got to, but if you’ve got one, best to keep it to yourself. Don’t let anyone see it.” He looked around again although the vestibule was now nearly empty.
She nodded. She had believed the map in The Husband Hunter’s Guide to be significant from the moment she’d seen it. Now curiosity consumed her about her uncle’s map. She glanced around. No one seemed to note their conversation. The Last Bench Lending Library friends stood at the foot of the chapel steps, exchanging talk and laughs.
Her uncle looked chagrinned. “Well, I’d best be on my way, niece. You’ve got other fish to fry, eh? Your grandmamma tells me you’re on the lookout for a husband. Don’t want to hurt your chances by talking to an oldster like me.”
“I hope I may talk to family, Uncle Thaddeus, and still expect to attract a husband.” Jane smiled at him. She didn’t want to ask him outright for his map from her father, but she did want to see it. “May I call on you, Uncle? Is it done?”
His face brightened. “Of course, my girl. You’ve got some kind of companion, haven’t you?”
“I do.”
“Well, I’ve only my bachelor’s digs in Hampstead, but my man can make a decent cup of tea. You’ll come have a dish of tea, eh? This afternoon?”
Jane nodded. Her uncle had a map of her father’s. She would get Hazelwood to take her. “Thank you, Uncle Thaddeus.”
She joined the Last Bench Lending Library members as churchgoers waited for carriages to arrive. Margaret smiled at her. Her grandmother’s companion looked different after her talk with her friends, livelier, brighter, almost cheerful. Jane would have to get her grandmother out more often. “Now that you know how we operate, Miss Fawkener, you must bring a book next time.”
“I shall.” Jane smiled back.
Across the narrow street Hazelwood emerged from behind his carriage, and she wondered whether he had seen his mother leave the church.
* * * *
In the end Jane could get him to say nothing about his family other than to admit that he had an older, married sister. When the conversation shifted back to the investiture ceremony, she was able to persuade him to take her to Hampstead by refusing to practice another minute and by agreeing that she would return from her cousins’ musicale that evening in his carriage.
Uncle Thaddeus’s white cottage was tucked away among other houses on a hillside sloping toward the heath. A narrow lane passed by the high-walled garden, and the interior was fitted up like the inside of the ship that had brought Jane back to London with wood paneled walls, upon which hung the brass tools of the sailor’s trade—clocks, barometers, and sextants.
Uncle Thaddeus settled them in the small dark parlor in heavy chairs with worn leather seats. His man brought the tea tray and set it on a battered old sea chest that filled the center of the room. The tea was weak, the old-fashioned dishes worn and chipped, and the plate of biscuits quite sparse. A meager fire burned in the grate. Her uncle was either very frugal or very short of cash. For a few moments they talked about the house and how her uncle’s prize money had allowed him to settle there when he left the navy. A large square of blank paneling above the hearth drew Hazelwood’s attention.
“Are you missing a work of art, Captain Drummond?”
Uncle Thaddeus put down his dish of tea and patted his whiskers with a napkin. “That I am, Hazelwood. Hoping to ask my niece Jane for some help in the matter, but first things first. Promised to show her one of her father’s maps.”
Thaddeus rose from his chair and signaled them both to stand, beckoning them across the room to a large desk under a round window like a ship’s porthole. He lit a lamp.
“Didn’t think I’d know where this was, but I found it right off.” He unrolled a sheet of heavy yellowing paper and spread it on his desk anchoring the ends with a compass and some bits of sea-weathered wood and loops of iron that Jane did not recognize.
She bit back her disappointment when she leaned over to look and found that it was a map of the city of Oxford, the locations of the ancient colleges marked by shields of their coats of arms.
“I suspect that it’s one of the early maps he sent your mother before they married,” said her uncle. “Perhaps even the first one.”
“And he sent her other maps?” Hazelwood asked. With one finger he traced down the center of the map from the Banbury Road along St. Giles street through the town to where the River Cherwell met the Thames in the south.
“It was their way,” her uncle replied. “Do you see these notes?” He pointed to a pair of initials inked onto the map, like those Jane had found in her book. “EF, JL?”
“Yes, I see them. What’s the significance?” Hazelwood asked.
“All family members’ initials, you see.”
“Oh?”
“EF, why that’s your grandmamma, Jane, Lady Eliza Fawkener. And JL, that’s your mother’s mother, Julia Leigh.”
Jane nodded. She did see. The inked pairs of initials dotted the map the way the pairs of initials dotted the pages of her Husband Hunter’s Guide.
“George and Julia would have a good laugh about those initials, I guess. The families, you see, didn’t want them to marry. Neither the Fawkeners nor the Drummonds. Julia was supposed to marry some fellow our parents picked out, so Fawkener and Julia invented a secret way of communicating.”
“Communicating what?” Hazelwood asked.
“When they were apart, and he was up at Oxford, he would write to her that he planned to visit some family member. It was his way of telling her where he’d be and when. He had initials for special places in London where they could meet when he was in town.”
“So,” said Hazelwood, “she had the map, and when she received a letter, she would go to the map and know where to meet him?”
“Just so. He’d write something like—will visit Uncle Matthew for tea. Then she would know to go to St. Martin’s or some such place. Or he’d write that he was coming to visit Henry, and she’d know that he meant for her to meet him in Old St. George’s burial ground where Henry is buried.” Thaddeus grinned at them, pleased to be able to explain. “This Oxford map was just the first. He gave her one when he went abroad, too, just after they married on his first mission.” Uncle Thaddeus cleared his throat. “That is, adventure, wanted her to be sure she knew how to follow his journey. Damned uncertain times to be on the continent.”
Jane studied the map. She recognized the same sets of initials she had detected in her book. “Uncle Thaddeus, do you know who all these people are? RD and HD?”
Thaddeus’s brow wrinkled. “It’s been a long time since I thought much about ‘em, but those are my dead brothers—Richard and Henry.” He tapped the map where JW appeared. “That’s your Great Uncle John Walhouse, I think. And,” he tapped another set of initials, “that’s Frederick Walhouse that died young. Your grandmamma will have all these people noted either in her peerage or her Bible.”
Jane kept her gaze on the map. She had not been wrong. Her little book was full of clues to her father’s route, and now she understood her father’s two-part system. To trace a journey of his, you needed the marked map, and the letters with their deceptive air of chatty news about the family. It helped to know the family tree, in which he had trained her well.
She looked up and found Hazelwood watching her, reminding her of one more thing she had—a protocol officer, who was the government’s man and who now possessed the key to her father’s secret methods of communication.
“You’re welcome to take the map, niece. It was your mother’s after all.” Uncle Thaddeus gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder and began rolling up the map.
“Thank you, Uncle. I’d like that. I have little that belonged to her.”
Thaddeus cleared his throat. “Niece, would you mind doing your uncle a bit of a favor?”
“If I can, I will, uncle.”
Uncle Thaddeus tied a black ribbon around the rolled map and pointed with it to the bare wood above his mantel. “There’s a picture of mine that your papa was keeping for me. Now your cousins have it, and I’d like it back.”
“Picture, uncle?”
“It’s called Nelson Turning a Blind Eye. Clever as can be. There he is the great man himself, in the thick of the battle, putting his blind eye to the telescope, so that he can disregard orders and win the day. Painted by one of those big-canvas, history painters, you know.”
“How did it end up with the cousins?” Hazelwood asked.
Thaddeus shook his head. “When they took over Fawkener house, they claimed the furnishings, too. I was supposed to be there for the reading of your father’s will, niece. Damned quick it was. Somebody from the Foreign Office must have told them your papa was gone, because they were reading the will before any news of him reached the papers. I was lucky to catch wind of it from talk at the Admiralty, but I was too late to get the picture with Lady Phoebe already in possession.”
“Uncle, is it the large painting above the staircase?”
“That’s the one. Quite on the grand scale, must be five feet across and nearly seven feet high, I think. Thing is, I can’t see Phoebe caring about a picture like that. Not her style at all.”
Jane nodded. She remembered that painting, more for what was behind it than what it looked like from the stairs. She would not be leaving the house tonight with her uncle’s picture tucked under her cloak.
In the carriage, Hazelwood turned to her. “You do realize that your dear Uncle Thaddeus appears to be low on funds at the moment.”
“I noticed.”
“No doubt he intends to sell that painting. So are we stealing it tonight?”
Jane turned to him. “On my second night as a husband hunter?”
“In a hurry to get a husband, are you?”
“How many gentlemen should I consider, do you think, before I make my choice? Five or six or a score?”
“You sound as if you’re hiring for the position.”
“Could I? Would an ad in the papers be a more direct method of finding just the man I want?”
Jane smiled to herself as he turned the carriage at the end of the narrow lane. At least for the moment she’d made him forget about paintings and maps.
* * * *
It was dark by the time Hazelwood returned to the club and growing colder by the hour. He had sent Wilde off on an assignment earlier, and Miranda had taken over the youth’s duties temporarily, setting out a tray of sandwiches and coffee. He asked her to bring him what he called the club copy of The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London.
Drawing a chair close to the fire, he settled down to review the pages of the little book, thinking about what he’d learned from Jane’s uncle and what he still needed to know.
He had read dozens of George Fawkener’s letters, which had been copied by a man in the Foreign Office, but Hazelwood had read them, as a man indifferent to family connections, skipping over the chatty news of tea with aunts, walks with uncles, and visits to cousins. He had been searching for anything that might reveal the state of England’s friends in the East. He’d been wrong. He should, apparently, have been paying attention to the very thing he’d ignored, Fawkener’s accounts of visiting his relatives. That was the code.
He stretched his feet out and propped his boots on the brass fender. The question was—how well acquainted was Jane with her father’s code? This afternoon she’d given nothing away, neither in her face nor manner. Yet presumably, she knew her father’s code, and with the book, she had a sequence of points on a map. He wondered, whether she had the corresponding map in her possession, as well. Had the code and the map given her the certainty that her father was alive?
He flipped through the little book again. The coded pairs of letters appeared on the left or right pages, in the upper or lower corner to convey some element of Fawkener’s journey as yet undetermined. As he puzzled over the possibilities, a passage caught his eye, and he read:
The Husband Hunter’s first evening in society will be a success, if but one gentleman in the crowd takes note of her. However limited her beauty and accomplishments, the element of novelty in her appearance among the familiar faces of several seasons will assist her in drawing notice. Her youth and her eagerness to please and to be pleased in company will encourage gentlemen to stay by her side long enough to discover her charms of character as well as appearance. Young men will vie for her attention, and a prudent woman will not deny any an opportunity to make her better acquaintance until she discovers an irredeemable character flaw that requires her to dismiss a gentleman from her suitors.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Tonight Jane would be that fresh girl at the party, a girl Allegra could never be. Few men might notice, but if even one man saw Jane the way she was, the game would change. Hazelwood didn’t like it. He had all the advantage of private time with her, of a hundred opportunities to meet and hold her gaze, to make a joke, to touch in all the ways that he knew could awaken her sleeping sensuality. But he had none of the rights of a suitor. He could do nothing honest.
What he had was a job to do. He closed the little book and stood and stretched and turned from the fire. He needed to get his hands on Jane’s copy of the book, the one she carried with her at all times. He must charm and mislead and deceive until he had possession of the book. And then he had to find the corresponding map.
If Jane Fawkener learned to flirt and dance and accept the attentions of dozens of men of fashion, it should not matter to him in the least.
* * * *
At Clive’s request and over Hazelwood’s objections, Jane arrived ahead of the other guests to meet her family. She was shown up to her cousin Phoebe’s dressing room, where a pair of lady’s maids were engaged in finishing Phoebe and Allegra’s hair for the evening.
Phoebe gave Jane’s appearance a thorough scrutiny. “I can’t fault you, Jane, except perhaps to recommend the regular application of Gowland’s Lotion for the freckles. We’ll send a jar of lotion home with you tonight, and your maid can apply it at bedtime.”
Her cousin turned back to look critically at her own appearance and direct her maid in adjustments to her coiffure, and Jane saw a chance to slip out of the room. Her uncle’s painting beckoned.
Jane paused in the hall as the sounds of servants preparing for the party drifted up the grand staircase from below. On either side of her were concealed jib doors, made to look like the wall itself, one door led to the servants’ stair and the other to a closet above the grand staircase behind her uncle’s painting. A flash of memory of her younger self in the closet sent her hand reaching under the molding to push the concealed latch. The door opened, and she stepped into the dark.
She took a deep breath, inhaling musty smells of forgotten things. The scratchy folds of a wool coat and the slippery perfumed silk of some old evening cape enclosed her as if she were wearing the chadri again, that tent-like covering of a modest woman in the public places of the East. Behind the mesh face piece and under the blue concealing folds of her chadri she had watched her father’s guests and hosts over the years. Silent and unobserved, she might as well have been in a closet.
When she was ten, her father had shown her the spy hole concealed in her uncle’s grand painting. A panel in the wall slid to one side, exposing the back of the painting. Her father had given her the job of watching a group of men arriving for a meeting and telling him, if she could, which of them were on his side and which were against him. If only it were as easy now.
She found the latch and slid the panel aside. A beam of light shot through the hole. The trick was not to touch the canvas itself. Behind her the concealed door opened. She lifted her hand to cover the spy hole.