It is necessary to cultivate the art of conversation. You must speak while dancing all but the most vigorous country dances and waltzes. But how is the Husband Hunter to learn the art of conversation? Practice, of course.
There is in every society a subject into which complete strangers enter readily and by which they signal their interest in continuing a conversation. In London that subject is the weather. Once you have established your partner’s willingness to converse, you may learn much through the weather. In talking about the incessant rain, or a severe frost, or the dry weather for harvest, the Husband Hunter may judge of the affability, the wit, and the balance of concern for others and self-concern her conversational partner possesses.
Inevitably, the topic of weather will exhaust itself, as surely as rain clouds move off. That is the moment in which the Husband Hunter must keep her wits about her. There are a number of topics on which she must never speak. Do not speak of anyone’s personal appearance, neither your rival’s, nor your own, nor that of the oddest looking person in the room. Furthermore, avoid speaking of yourself, your accomplishments, or your family. You may, on the other hand, always speak of principles and art and the beauties of the setting in which you find yourself.
Are there subjects that arise about which you have very little knowledge, but which are of great interest to your partner? So much the better. His knowledge of cricket or the arrangements for the officers’ living aboard his majesty’s ships or the intricate points of tithing is an opportunity for you to exercise your curiosity. In encouraging him to speak, you are not so much learning a new subject, as observing the workings of his mind and determining his character.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Thirteen
“Jane, I know you’re in here. Are you hiding?” The door closed, and Jane’s youngest cousin Annabel pushed her way in among the cloaks and coats.
Jane released the breath she’d been holding. Her thirteen-year-old cousin was no threat. “I am scouting the terrain.”
“Mama won’t like it if you ruin your hair and dress.”
“Promise you won’t tell.”
Annabel offered her solemn promise. “What are you scouting in the dark?”
“There’s a spy hole over the grand staircase.” And perhaps a concealed map that will help me find my father.
“Really? A spy hole? Not mice and spiders? Where are you?”
Jane reached out and found Annabel’s arm. “Come stand on this box, but don’t touch the…wall.” She lifted her hand from the spy hole, admitting a ray of light that illuminated Annabel’s face.
Annabel stepped up on the box and pressed her eye to the tiny opening. “Oh, you can see the whole entrance stair with everybody coming up. How cunning! But won’t people see us?”
“They won’t if we are careful not to touch the canvas.” Her uncle’s painting concealed the tiny hole in the end of Nelson’s famous telescope from the Battle of Copenhagen. From below guests would see only the glint at the end of the telescope. Her father loved the joke.
Annabel moved back from the peephole. “I see what you’re about Jane. You want to see the eligible gentlemen. I think it’s a good plan.”
“Do you see anyone eligible?” Jane wanted to laugh at her thirteen-year-old cousin. Obviously, husband hunting started early in London.
“You mean anyone young?” Annabel returned to her position looking down on the arriving guests. “I only see old married men and ladies so far, but don’t worry. Mama’s parties are famous, and young men always come late. How did you find this spy hole? I never knew it was here.”
“My father showed it to me.” Her father believed in watching the way people arranged their faces as they arrived at a meeting or a party. There were a dozen small gestures through which one could read honesty or falseness.
“Finally.” Annabel sighed and stepped back from the peephole, and Jane leaned forward to take a look.
She saw a fashionable young man in black evening wear with cropped ginger hair, ruddy fair looks, and an utterly guileless manner. “Is he an eligible?”
“Oh, yes!” Annabel sighed again. “That’s Cecil Eversley. He has dogs. Allegra won’t talk to him because his fortune’s too small for her. If it were my season, I would talk to him, but it won’t be my season for three years, seven months, and three days.”
“An eternity.”
Annabel sighed again, and Jane watched a pair of girls in white gowns make their curtsies to cousin Phoebe and nods to Allegra.
“What do you see now?” Annabel tugged at Jane’s sleeve.
“Allegra’s rivals, I think. They look very English in their white gowns.”
“Let me see.” Annabel took Jane’s place. “Oh, Lady Rivers’s daughters. Their mother thinks they are great beauties, but you needn’t worry. You look very English tonight, too.”
“Do I?” She did not feel English. She should, she supposed, feel excited and on edge with anticipation about her second venture into London society. She felt instead as if she were going to a play, as if everything that would happen would happen to other people, and that she would sit in the darkness observing, moved briefly, perhaps by the players’ distress or joy, but still on the outside. And later she would tell Hazelwood about it.
At the peephole Annabel gave a giggle. She stepped away and spun in a quick whirl, setting the coats in motion and stirring the musty air.
“What is it?”
“Just what Mama’s party needs.” Annabel pushed Jane back into place behind the painting.
A crowd of late arrivals, all young men, jostled their way up the stairs, talking and laughing, and tossing coats and hats at the butler, Bolton, and his footmen. Among them Jane spotted Hazelwood, bold as brass, flinging a cloak on the pile in a footman’s arms. Hazelwood looked directly at the painting. From below, it seemed impossible to steal without ladders and accomplices, but if Jane told him about the panel in the closet, Hazelwood would steal it. The feeling of being at a play vanished. Instead she felt as if one of the actors had called her up from the audience to join him on stage.
Behind her, Annabel sneezed. “Jane, you should go down, unless you want Allegra to have all the gentlemen to herself.”
Jane slid the panel back into place, secured the latch, and reminded Annabel to tell no one.
* * * *
Once past the beleaguered butler, Hazelwood took care to draw no attention to himself. He avoided any encounter with his hostess and her family, kept mainly to the window embrasures, and let his gaze slide away from anyone who gave him a puzzled glance of partial recognition.
An hour passed in which he listened to a florid Italian soprano, studied the pattern of Lady Strayde’s carpet, and looked for Jane in the crowd. He wasted no thought on the painting. He had seen from the stairs that they would not have an opportunity to steal it at present. He might make Uncle Thaddeus a loan.
Waiters ignored him, and over-warm guests passed rather closer to one another than all but the most licentious waltz permitted. Every ingénue looked the same. In his outcast state, he had forgotten the tyranny of fashion, which dictated a uniformity of dress for respectable young women that made them nearly indistinguishable. A Broadwind pianoforte, as yet untouched, told him the evening was far from over.
He spotted Jane at last in the interval after the soprano’s performance. She and Allegra shared opposite ends of a striped green and gold silk sofa. Allegra managed no fewer than four admirers from her end of the sofa with the cool command of a colonel of the line. Young men brought her refreshments, or held her fan, or gestured extravagantly to capture her flickering attention. At the opposite end of the sofa Jane talked quietly with a ginger-haired fellow, Cecil Eversley, who had her unwavering attention, and who, in Hazelwood’s opinion, would never do as a husband for Jane.
Hazelwood had not taken her husband hunting seriously, or he had not believed that she took it seriously. But now that she was out in the world where other men were free to admire her, to discover that gleam in her eye when she was about to say something sharp, he feared a husband might find her. Her thick hair was up, her slender neck and the hollows at the base of her throat, exposed. The customary white dress looked as substantial as a cloud.
He wanted to tell Allegra’s admirers that they had the wrong end of the sofa, but he realized that young men inevitably chose the wrong end of the sofa, as he had done years earlier.
* * * *
Jane had no idea where Hazelwood had gone. Once again he had entered a party, this time in violation of the agreement they’d made, where his hosts were likely to toss him out rather than offer him a seat of honor.
The rooms were crowded with guests, most of them in motion in the interval after the soprano. From her position at the end of Allegra’s sofa Jane could see little beyond the skirts and waistcoats of passing guests. The young man Annabel admired, Cecil Eversley, had looked so downcast at Allegra’s coldness that Jane had spoken to him.
“You like dogs, I hear,” she had said.
He had brightened at once, and they had been talking ever since. To be honest, he had done most of the talking, but that had left her brain free to worry about what Hazelwood might be up to. He was not supposed to enter the house. He was to collect Jane at the end of the evening. That was the plan. He had spoken in jest about stealing the painting, and she hoped he would not attempt the impossible. But he had already gone beyond what they’d agreed to by entering the party.
She widened her smile and gave Eversley a reply to help his story of one of his dogs giving birth to a large litter of puppies. Poor man. He had all the qualities her guide admired, yet he’d never be a favored suitor as long as Allegra was doing the choosing. She wondered whether he would wait to choose a wife until Annabel’s three years, seven months, and three days expired, and she tried to remember what the Husband Hunter’s Guide said about persistence.
It occurred to her that if she were truly hunting a husband, she would choose very differently from the man in front of her. She would choose a man who was competent and fearless, indifferent to opinion, and inclined to confront authority rather than bow to it.
In the next moment Lady Strayde called on Allegra to display her musical accomplishments. Allegra stood. Eversley stopped speaking. His gaze swung from Jane to Allegra. She smiled at her other admirers and turned to Eversley. His face colored, a stunned look of pleasure came into his eyes, and he stuck out both his elbows, like a bird preparing for flight. With a toss of her head and a swift punishing glance at Jane, Allegra seized Eversley’s arm and hauled him toward the pianoforte. Her followers hurried after her, and a general rearrangement of guests and chairs left Jane alone. She supposed she should be downcast, but she felt relieved to be alone.
She was thinking about that look in Eversley’s eyes when a tug on her right wrist made her turn and glance over her shoulder. Hazelwood had her by the arm and pulled her between the heavy velvet curtains at the edge of a deep window embrasure. “Figured out yet how to get your uncle’s painting back?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.” She turned resolutely toward Allegra as the girl began to play. The guests now occupied irregular rows of little gilt chairs facing the pianoforte.
“You’re not going to tell me?”
She disengaged her hand. “I’m not, because you should not be here, and my cousins must not see you.”
“Thanks to the wonders of English architecture, I’ve been invisible these past two hours.”
“We agreed that you were to collect me later.” They had agreed that it was unlikely that an assailant would strike at her while Allegra Walhouse played the pianoforte. She wondered what had prompted him to change his plan. Now he took her by the shoulders and shifted her position. “If you stand here, just so, no one will see me.”
“If you had an ounce of common sense, you would—”
“Stick to the plan? How dull! You don’t like dull men.”
“Don’t I? I quite enjoyed talking with Cecil Eversley just now.”
“Did you? Should I tell you how that exchange looked to me?”
She shook her head. He was far too perceptive.
“I think I must in the interest of your husband hunting plans. There was Eversley, prosing on, probably about his dogs. He’s famous for talking about them. There you were, with polite and perhaps even kindly indulgence, letting him tell you about some mastiff’s pedigree and the animal’s astonishing cleverness, with your hands folded in your lap and your lips fixed in a bland smile just short of rigor mortis.”
She laughed and drew a sharp reproving glance from a turbaned matron, even as she felt Hazelwood tug the blue ribbons dangling from her high waist and pull her farther back into the deep window embrasure. Jane had a feeling she was violating all the rules her guide recommended.
“You are so wrong. Is there no guide for young men? Eversley apparently has no idea about how to…”
“Talk with a woman? Flirt a little?”
“None. I like him the better for it.”
“It won’t win him Allegra’s heart, that is, if she has a heart to be won.” Hazelwood spoke directly in her ear, so that his breath disturbed a loose strand of her hair. She could not help a slight shiver at the sensation.
“He’s already won a heart I think.” She was thinking of poor besotted Annabel.
Her words were almost lost in the applause for Allegra’s first piece, but Hazelwood gave a start as if he’d seen some danger. Jane glanced around but could see no threat as Allegra immediately moved to her next selection.
“Shouldn’t you slip out while Allegra is playing?”
“Are you so eager to return to Eversley?”
“Merely hinting that great stealth is the proper protocol for an uninvited guest’s leave-taking.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll manage.”
“It—”
“Jane!” At the sound of her name, she turned and saw Clive.
“What are you doing so far in the shadows? Didn’t mother have a seat for you in the front?” As he caught sight of Hazelwood, his smile vanished. “How in the deuce did you get in here, sir? My mother will have an apoplexy if she sees you.”
Hazelwood stepped from behind Jane. “Lady Strayde’s house, is it? I must have mistaken the place for a more entertaining establishment. I’ll take my leave.”
“Just a minute.” Clive’s face flushed an angry red. “I don’t know what permits you to claim an acquaintance with my cousin, but you can’t go pulling her into corners in this shabby way.”
“Worried that my presence will cost your mother an invitation to the famous Vange ball?”
Clive caught the eye of a footman and gave the man a curt order.
Hazelwood bowed to Jane, his eyes alight with unholy satisfaction, and turned toward the salon doors, his movement unhurried.
Clive pulled Jane’s arm through his and patted her hand. “That fellow has no sense of how unwelcome he is here and elsewhere. He takes advantage of your ignorance.”
“My ignorance?” Jane could not help asking. She made a note that if she were ever to write a guide to husband hunting if would include a list of those condescending gestures gentlemen made that really should disqualify them as potential husbands. Hand patting would be on her list.
“He’s debauched, hopelessly in debt, and utterly cast off by his family. You don’t know the story, of course, but his outrageous behavior nearly ruined my mother’s sister.”
“Can you tell me?”
Clive momentarily checked his tongue, his gaze on Bolton approaching with two footmen. He nodded to the butler and cocked his head toward Hazelwood’s back. “Perhaps you should know.” Clive hesitated. “Hazelwood interrupted my youngest aunt’s wedding, stormed in really, sword drawn, and hauled her out. He claimed that they had an understanding and that she was being forced to marry Stafford. Of course, nothing could have been farther from the truth.”
“When was that?” Jane asked. Across the room she could see Bolton and two footmen move purposely around the seated guests, who turned to stare after them, in spite of Allegra’s cascading notes.
“Years ago. I was just a boy, younger than Percy. It must have been ought five or six.” Clive, too, watched Bolton rather than his sister.
When Hazelwood was twenty. “And your aunt, did she ever marry?”
“Oh yes, Stafford, of course. She’s quite the happy matron.”
“I’m glad to hear it. It would be sad if one day’s folly by an ill-judging young man had cast a shadow over a woman’s whole life.”
Clive laughed. “You’re a sly one, Jane, getting me to admit that my aunt recovered.”
Once, Jane and her father had broken a journey in the month of Moharren, to attend a mystery play that lasted ten days in which the slaughter of Imam Hoossein at the battle of Karbala was reenacted. Apart from her father among the women, Jane had been surprised when the audience reacted with a grief as keen and unrestrained as if the death had happened only that week and not centuries earlier. When she had asked her father about it, he told her that families were great keepers of grievances. Trust me, he’d said, families have libraries and chests full of them. She remembered the incident because her father had been uncharacteristically serious. No laugh or playful wink had accompanied the words. They had been spoken instead as a solemn truth.
Hazelwood had reached the salon doors when he simply stopped to look at her uncle’s painting. Jane tensed, willing him to keep moving as Bolton advanced.
Allegra moved into the final flourishes of her performance, the audience stirred, and another footman, looking at his tray of glasses, oblivious of the phalanx bearing down on Hazelwood, stepped directly into the path of the oncoming men. At the collision his tray went askew, and glasses flew upward. Guests jumped aside as champagne rained down, and when Jane glanced back, Hazelwood was gone.
Jane was left staring at the painting. She joined in the polite applause, turning to watch Allegra take her bows, sure that Hazelwood had come to the same conclusion she had. The painting concealed the map.