The best remedy for the inevitable disappointments and embarrassments of the Husband Hunter’s misjudgment in one case is a return to the fray. One ball, one rout party, one excursion to the park or to a museum, or one evening at the theatre is inevitably followed by another. A certain stamina for pleasure is a necessary quality of the serious Husband Hunter. She must be willing, even after severe disappointment to dry her tears, don her best raiment, and go forth to give and receive pleasure in the company of others. A willingness to let go of the anticipated pleasures denied her and to look with favor on the pleasures immediately available marks her as a woman worthy of the happiness that will ultimately be hers.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Seventeen
When Jane returned to the hotel, she discovered that Hazelwood had been there and left her a message. There was an evening to be got through, and then she would put her plan in motion.
It was plain that Hazelwood was not strictly a protocol officer. He was a tool of the government. He had stuck to her side and flattered her and even made love to her simply to obtain her father’s hard won information while doing nothing to find her father.
She would get her book back and move out of Hazelwood’s reach. She would be safe from him in her cousins’ house. Once there, she would take the first opportunity to find the hidden map. As long as she, not Hazelwood, possessed the information for which her father had risked his life, she would be in a position to bargain with the Foreign Office.
Mrs. Lowndes listened without comment to Jane’s plan of moving to her cousins’ house and began to help direct Nell in packing Jane’s things. Jane offered her a hug, and the good lady waved away Jane’s thanks. Jane set to work immediately sending messages. Activity kept her mind as fully occupied as she could wish right up until the moment that Hazelwood called to collect them for the evening’s engagement.
In the carriage no one remarked on anything other than the weather. Hazelwood and Mrs. Lowndes agreed they’d not experienced a colder January. Jane said nothing about mountain caves and passes in that part of the world where her father might be held captive through the winter because the British government refused to come to his aid and instead set a protocol officer to spy on his daughter.
Outside the grand house, where the party was to be held, they waited in a long string of carriages, growing colder by the moment, until it was their turn to alight and enter the heated rooms of their hosts. The requirements of politeness, the noise of guests greeting their hostess, and the tide of movement made conversation impossible for nearly half an hour as they ascended a grand staircase and passed into a vast glittering salon. The press of the crowd did not permit Hazelwood to offer both ladies an arm, so Jane insisted he give his arm to Mrs. Lowndes while she walked behind them. The ladies around them looked so lightly clad they might have been in the disrobing room of the women’s baths of Halab. Beside them, Jane felt invisible.
As they finally entered the salon, Hazelwood grasped her arm firmly above the elbow, arresting her movement. He spoke directly into her right ear. “Shall we argue?”
“Later,” she said, shaking off his hold and smiling to see Lady Violet present. Violet at once introduced Jane to a gentleman of her acquaintance. Jane accepted the arm he offered and followed him into a room arranged for dancing. Jane’s partner led her to a place in the set that was forming, and she set herself to concentrate on the pattern of the unfamiliar dance. Her partner was handsome, young, rich, and mad for politics. And Jane discovered how difficult it was to attend to an eligible partner when invisible gossamer strings bound one to another person in the room.
In spite of a warm welcome from Lady Violet and the dignity of Mrs. Lowndes on his arm, most of the guests, as they recognized Hazelwood, turned away. Jane tried to give her partner her smiles and her attention, but against her will, her gaze kept returning to Hazelwood as he crossed the salon speaking lightly as in jest to Mrs. Lowndes, apparently indifferent to the shoulders and heads that turned away from him. When he had settled Mrs. Lowndes among the chaperones, he did something Jane now knew him to be an expert at. He made himself invisible.
She told herself that he deserved such slights if he had done to others the sort of thing he had done to her, if he made girls love him with no intention of loving them back. He had probably made some ladies among the guests tonight love him, and now they punished him for having rejected them.
By the end of the first set, she could no longer find him, and she accepted her partner’s offer to accompany her to the refreshment room. From there it was easy to find her way back to the dancing with a new partner. She expected to wear away her slippers with dancing until it was time to collect their cloaks and gloves and step back into the carriage. The musicians upset her plan by taking break. Her partner of a moment before was distracted by an acquaintance. Jane turned and found Mrs. Lowndes beside her.
“My dear, I am going to accompany Lady Violet home. Can you manage on your own with Hazelwood?”
Jane nodded. She could. She was undeceived now about his character. One short carriage ride more, and she would be free of him.
He was there to meet her just beyond the blaze of torches that lighted a path to the waiting vehicles of the guests. Hazelwood hauled her into their coach beside him with a firm grip on her arm. “Let’s have that argument now,” he said.
“All right then.” She twisted on the bench and leveled a fierce gaze at him. “You stole my book.”
“You exposed yourself to unnecessary danger.”
“You mean, rather, that I exposed the book to danger, that had I been felled by that brick or stone or whatever it was that smashed the shop window, the book you wanted would now be in someone else’s hands.”
“The hands of an enemy with the will and means to destroy your father and his friends.”
“Like a certain large, redheaded man who entered Kirby & Sons shop? Are you not in league with him against my father?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Do you deny that you know the man?”
“I work for him.”
She gasped and backed as far away from him as the narrow bench permitted. “From the moment we met you have attempted to charm me into giving up that book. The only motive for such a campaign of deception has to be your belief that the book contains information your employer wants.”
“In that we agree. It’s no accident that your father gave you a ‘guide’ with a sequence of initials in the margins of its pages. You and I both heard your uncle describe your father’s long habit of using family names to identify places on maps. And you and I both suspect that the painting of Nelson above the staircase in what was once your father’s house conceals a map that is the key to unraveling your father’s journey and identifying England’s friends in the East. Have I left anything out?”
“You admit it all. You are no protocol officer. You were sent to spy on me.”
“I was.”
If she expected remorse, she heard none. His voice was hard and flat. “Then you and I must have no further connection.”
His gaze searched her face. “Ah, you think the big red-haired man betrayed him.”
“You know his name?”
“Goldsworthy. I’ve worked for him for a year. He’s as loyal a man as there is, as secret as the grave, and an enemy to all of England’s enemies. Don’t mistake him for your father’s real enemies.”
She turned her face straight ahead. There was no more to say. She could not credit his assertion of the big man’s honesty.
She did not quarrel with him about seeing her to the door or speaking with the guard. As she opened her door, he caught her by the arm one more time and spoke in a low voice.
“Before you go, there is one last thing you must allow me to tell you.”
“Must I?” She kept her gaze on her hand on the doorknob. She would not look again at the handsome face so near her own.
“Yes, because it concerns another to whom you would not wish to be unjust.”
“Very well.” She waited.
“Miranda Kirby, a girl of seventeen, is not my mistress. She is not under my protection. She is a husband hunter, like yourself, and she will, in time, make sure of her man before she offers up her person to him.”
“And you have not led her to believe that you will offer her marriage some day?”
“Far from it. I have proclaimed my unworthiness as a husband many a time.”
* * * *
At the appointed hour of the morning when by some persons’ reckoning it was still night, Jane, a shivering Nell by her side, knocked on the chemist’s shop door. Along the street a few lights gleamed in windows from which came the noise of reveling, but there was no one to observe the two cloaked women.
The door opened, and they hurried inside. Miranda faced them, cloaked and gloved herself. A candle on the counter cast a dim glow over the dark shelves.
Jane nerved herself to deal with the girl. “Did you bring the book?”
Miranda shook her head.
“You agreed to meet me with the book,” Jane protested.
“First, you must promise to give up Lord Hazelwood.”
“He is not mine to keep or to give, but I will cut my connection with him directly. You know where the book is? Where he lodges?”
Miranda nodded. “I deserve him, you know. I am kind to him when no one else is. I keep him fine. Everyone thinks ill of him, but I know the truth of his…character.”
“Then we are agreed.” Jane stuck out her hand in the English way, and after a brief hesitation, the girl took it.
“Come then,” she invited. “Be quick, say nothing, and mind your steps on the path. It’s icy.”
They left Nell in the shop with a second candle. Jane gave Nell’s hand a squeeze, and told her not to worry.
Miranda took a candle and led Jane through the curtains, along a hallway and out a door into cold so sharp her chest ached when she drew breath. She concentrated on her steps over a patch of icy grass that crunched under foot. They reached another set of steps at the back of a larger building. Miranda opened a door and they descended into the basement of the house, where Jane could hear servants stirring in the kitchen. She could smell bread baking.
They turned and began to ascend the servants’ stairs. Miranda moved quickly and surely, and Jane stayed right at her heels. At the top of a third flight of stairs, Miranda opened a door into a carpeted hallway lighted with sconces. She led Jane to a door on the left and nodded. She mouthed the word, here.
Jane mouthed back, locked?
Miranda shook her head. She turned and headed back for the stairs.
Jane let Miranda’s footsteps die away. She listened carefully at the door, and when she heard no sound from within, she put her hand to the knob and turned.
* * * *
Hazelwood woke on his back in the darkness in a state familiar from his Cambridge days, his body ready for female companionship of the most intimate sort. Jane. He recalled no dream of her that had stirred him, so he could only blame his present discomfort on the folly of kissing her the night before. He lay staring at the invisible ceiling, waiting for his brain to take over his thinking processes.
He became aware that his feet were cold, colder than the rest of him. He must have kicked the counterpane aside in whatever unremembered dream he’d been having. In the next moment he realized that he wasn’t alone in his room. Even as he had the thought, he steadied his breathing, wondered how the club’s defenses had been breached, and weighed the chances that the book still lay on the table beside his bed.
“Shall we have some light, so that I may see you?” he asked the invisible presence. He tried to guess the time and whether anyone would be stirring yet. He had no weapon, but Clare was sleeping just down the hall. A shout would bring him.
“No need.” Jane’s voice answered. “I have what I came for.”
His body had an instant and enthusiastic response to her presence in his room. His mind applauded her boldness. “Have you?”
She must be cold. He could hear it in the little quaver in her voice. He could warm her. A rapid succession of images passed through his mind of taking her hand, drawing her to the bed, pulling her down, removing her cloak and gloves, opening the covers, and letting her slip in beside him. Her clothes would be cold against his skin, but he would remove those too. All the veils would fall away. They could sleep skin to skin.
He tried to push upright and discovered that his feet were bound together and to the end of the bed to judge from the pull on them.
“I’m just leaving now. Do not trouble yourself to rise.”
“You took pains apparently that I should not.” She had been touching his naked feet. No wonder he’d awakened as he had. It occurred to him that Jane was the sort of intrepid girl he’d dreamed of as a boy, not a sleeping princess to be kissed awake after all, but a girl who would pick up a dropped sword and face the dragon.
“I’m afraid I’ve ruined one of your cravats, but you have others, I’m sure.”
He tried to shift his feet to see how much give there was in the binding and found none. “You could stay, you know. We could work out the book’s code together.”
He couldn’t see her in the dark, but he imagined her shaking her head.
“I’ve left the hotel. I will remain with my cousins until the investiture.” Her voice sounded sad. It was a farewell she was offering.