The man you want to marry wishes to become a husband in time. That is to say, he, like the famous sinners of the past, wishes to repent of the follies and excesses of his youth, after he has fully enjoyed them and not before. The title “husband” has such a settled air of gravity and responsibility about it that young men do not rush to acquire it with the same eagerness with which they seek to become captains or majors in the army, commanders in the navy, or nonpareils of the sporting set. Therefore, you must consider the length of time a gentleman has been on the town and seek to learn from his acquaintance or his reputation whether he has acquired the dashing titles he once sought and is now disposed to seek the very title you alone can confer.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Two
Edmund Dalby, Viscount Hazelwood, stirred as a particularly heavy dray rumbled past, shaking the carriage from which he watched the white portico of Hammersley’s Bank. He had chosen to remain in the carriage across the pavement from the bank to await his quarry in relative warmth. London was currently experiencing Arctic temperatures, and he saw no sense in congealing into a block of ice before the appointed time. Jane Fawkener had entered the bank not thirty minutes earlier. No one appeared to be following her, except himself.
Outside the carriage, clouds roiled overhead in a dull pewter sky. The pavements glistened from a brief downpour, more ice than rain. A penetrating wind came up off the river, and blew the sooty smoke of chimney pots away in long black plumes. Rows of pillars and columns glared self-importantly at one another across the narrow street in the heart of London’s banking district, competing in dignity, oblivious to the more modest commerce of hawkers on the pavement.
Hazelwood contemplated his new and unexpected assignment—playing nursemaid and guardian to Jane Fawkener. It would be his last assignment for the spies. Nearly a year earlier, he’d been recruited by Samuel Goldsworthy, a shaggy giant of a man with the solidity of a craggy red bluff of rock jutting out of a mossy bank.
Years after the long war with Bonaparte, England was now engaged in an unspoken conflict with Russia for influence over the vast territory from the Crimea to Afghanistan. At the moment, it was a war of spies rather than soldiers, and the inscrutable Goldsworthy was the Foreign Office’s chief recruiter of gentleman spies.
Hazelwood couldn’t say why he’d taken Goldsworthy’s offer in that moment, why he’d turned his back on the path to ruin he’d been cheerfully pursuing since his father, the Earl of Vange, had disinherited him in his twenty-fifth year, but he hadn’t regretted it.
One day Hazelwood had been playing vingt-et-un in a dismal sponging house to earn his keep, and the next, he’d been lounging in the elegant coffee room of Goldsworthy’s Pantheon Club accepting the attentions of its very competent staff. The terms of the agreement meant that he lived in Goldsworthy’s club with his fellow spies, Lord Blackstone and Captain Clare, and that in return for a year and day of service as a government spy, all his debts would be paid.
Hazelwood liked the club, with its good coffee, clean sheets, and excellent tailor. He liked his fellow spies, Blackstone and Clare. They’d had some blood-rousing adventures together in spite of the different spheres of London society to which each had been assigned. Blackstone, with his title and scandalous reputation as a womanizer, had been assigned to the ballrooms and bedrooms of the West End. Clare, with his hero’s honors from Waterloo, roamed the public houses where old soldiers gathered to air their discontents. As for himself, his reputation for idle dissipation, had fitted him for work in the pleasure houses and gaming hells where young men squandered their fortunes and opened themselves to the temptations of foreign agents, like the wily Russian Count Malikov.
Hazelwood had seen little daylight in the months he’d been working for the government, but spying suited him, and he liked being sober. The ruse, of course, was that he was a regular tosspot, a four-bottle man. Kirby, the club’s tailor, had contrived a series of claret-stained cravats, and waistcoats reeking of brandy that kept the objects of his scrutiny from noting his attention. In the eleven months he’d been a spy, no one seeing him in a brothel or a gaming hell had credited him with a brain unfuddled enough to take note of meetings, exchanges, or stray bits of conversation. As a result, he had intercepted a number of foreign office papers before they passed from English hands into Russian ones.
At midnight Goldsworthy had summoned him from a gaming hell where he’d been observing the downward slide of a young lordling whose brother’s ties to the Foreign Office meant that the man was a potential target of Malikov and his followers.
Now Hazelwood wished for cotton stuffing for his ears. The din of working day London, of horses, wheels on stone, and hawkers shouting their wares was only slightly muffled in the carriage’s interior. As he waited, his mind restlessly turned over the few facts he knew about the girl and her missing father.
Goldsworthy had handed him a year-old letter from George Fawkener to his cousin Teddy Walhouse, asking the cousin to look out for the girl if he did not return from his mission. And the man had in fact disappeared. The government had collected the girl from foreign parts and returned her to London, but the family had not taken her in as expected.
Goldsworthy, as usual, was sparing of the details of the father’s fate, but he had told Hazelwood about the girl’s insistence, against the odds, that her father was alive and that the government should be looking for him. Apparently, the Russians were quite interested in what the girl knew about her father’s travels. Any papers in her possession were up for grabs.
Hazelwood understood what Goldsworthy wasn’t saying. The government had a problem. Some chit of girl knew more than she should about government secrets. The Foreign Office had told her a convenient lie about her missing father, and she had turned the tables on them. She might even know what her father had been up to. Hazelwood’s job was clear—keep the girl from falling into the enemy’s hands.
He had formed no plan as yet for winning her confidence. He was to introduce himself as the protocol officer assigned to her case to see her through the investiture ceremony in which the king would bestow a posthumous knighthood on her father. It went without saying that she should not suspect him of spying. Though how he would get much out of her through a discussion of a brief public ritual, he did not know. Even a half-wit could learn to kneel on a red velvet cushion and back away from His Royal Highness on cue.
A sharp rap on the carriage door brought his thoughts back to the present. The youth he’d employed to keep an eye out for his quarry opened the door and announced, “Look alive, Guv, the lady in black’s come out of the bank.”
Hazelwood grabbed his hat and slipped from the carriage to the pavement. Letting the girl go about London unprotected was not the plan. The Hammersleys knew he was expected, so what was going on? He told the driver to walk the horses, and set off across the pavement, dodging vehicles, and keeping his eye on the party standing at the columned entrance to the bank.
There was no mistaking old George Hammersley or his son, Frank, and daughter, Violet, now the wife of Hazelwood’s friend and fellow spy, Blackstone. The unfamiliar figure in the group was a woman in severe and matronly mourning dress with one hand resting on the elder Hammersley’s arm. Hazelwood observed her as she stood poised at the top of the bank steps. An ugly brown bonnet with a deep coal scuttle poke hid her face, and the overlarge black gown with its skirts dragging on the wet stones concealed most of her shape. Not a beauty, apparently.
The little group paused as Hazelwood reached the bottom of the wide steps. Clearly, the Hammersley’s didn’t realize the danger to which they were exposing the girl. Hazelwood glanced up, intending to catch Violet’s gaze, when the lady in black swayed as if the ground under her had shifted. She started to crumple, and sliding from her companion’s grasp, pitched forward into the air.
Instinctively, Hazelwood stepped forward. Well then, Miss Fawkener, aren’t you the lucky one! Instead of falling into the enemy’s arms, just fall into mine.
Down she came with a flutter of skirts, like a shot bird with slack wings. With a grunt, Hazelwood staggered back as he bore the impact of her unconscious form. His hat tumbled from his head, and he found himself clasping to his chest the first fully clothed female body he’d held in his arms in more than a year. The clothes had deceived him. The girl was light and limp as a straw effigy, and encased in what felt to be a set of stays akin to medieval armor.
No wonder she had passed out.
Her head lolled back over his arm, and the bonnet fell from her face, hanging by its black ribbons from her white throat. He looked down at the curve of a smooth cheek, straight dark lashes, and thick glossy hair, as dark as winter fields. Her heavy hair had been gathered at her nape, not been teased into frothy curls about her face as was the fashion. She had a strong face in profile, a high forehead and a long, straight nose with a slight bump in the middle that saved it from cold perfection. He loosened the girl’s bonnet strings and shifted her in his hold, getting an arm under her knees.
“Where may I take her?” he asked Violet.
“My office. At once. I’m afraid she’s had a shocking day.”
“And she’s laced as tight as the Exchequer’s purse,” Hazelwood muttered. He wondered, not for the first time, how women managed such ordinary activities as breathing with their lungs squeezed like a cheese in a press.
At Violet’s command, doors opened and bank employees scurried.
In her office, Hazelwood set the unconscious girl on a low blue couch and rolled her to one side facing him. As he felt for the girl’s pulse under her chin, he could hear Violet sending her brother and father away and ordering a restorative.
“Have you something sharp? Scissors?” he asked, reaching out.
Immediately, Violet slapped a bone-handled paper knife into his open palm. Hazelwood stuck the point of it inside the row of covered buttons up the girl’s spine and popped them open. As he’d expected, she was trussed like a goose.
He slit through the knots of petticoats and stay laces at her waist and again applied the knife to the spiral of ties that held her plain muslin corset in place. When he pulled apart the sides of corset, the creased folds of her chemise stuck to the skin of her back. Whoever had helped the girl to dress apparently had all the fashion sense of a medieval torturer.
He rolled the girl onto her back and pulled the top half of the stiff black dress off her shoulders and down her arms. Her corset was remarkably ugly, almost as ugly as the gown, and he couldn’t help but pull it away, too, exposing white shoulders and the rounded tops of her breasts, watching for rise and fall of her chest. He took one of her small hands in his and pulled off the glove, thinking to chafe her hand and perhaps restore her to consciousness that way. Her other hand clutched a small blue volume. Even in a swoon she had not relaxed her grip on the little book. He could not see the title, but he guessed its importance from her hold on the thing.
He warmed her free hand between his palms. His job was going to be easier than he’d thought. She was in his debt. He had merely to explain that he had been about to enter the bank for their appointment when she fainted. He was only too glad to be of assistance in the moment, and of course, ready to be of further assistance in the weeks ahead.
She did not stir. Her pale cheeks gave no sign of a blush. He did not recall seeing such perfect stillness in a female before. The unmarried girls he remembered from before his fall from grace had never been still. Their curls bounced, their eyelashes fluttered, and their bosoms rose intriguingly in a constant motion that drew the eye—at least it had always drawn his eye.
Jane Fawkener slept like a princess under a spell, and in her face Hazelwood saw not plainness but dignity, an untainted dignity that made him feel the weight of his dissolute years. He wondered briefly how the fairy-tale prince leaning over the sleeping beauty had dared to wake her with a kiss. Hazelwood had not been tempted to kiss a female, let alone a chaste maiden, in a very long time. But princes were a different lot altogether from wastrels like himself. It was their privilege to kiss a princess and claim her.
A quiet hand touched his shoulder, and he turned to look up at Violet.
“Hazelwood,” she spoke softly, “how fortuitous for Miss Fawkener that you appeared on the scene.”
“Not at all. I’m the protocol officer assigned to her.”
Violet’s dark brows knit in a little frown. “Ah, so this spontaneous gallantry is government-backed.”
“Entirely.” He smiled grimly. He had a job to do. He should be looking at the book in Jane Fawkener’s hand, not at her face. “Why is she clutching a book, Violet?”
“It’s a gift from her father.”
With one hand Hazelwood pushed the slim volume up through the girl’s fingers until he could read the title. The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London. He straightened. The title brought him back from the realm of fantasy. The girl possessed no secret papers, no map of her father’s journey, and she was not a princess after all, but a more common variety of female intent on marrying to advantage.
His jaw tightened, he knew the type and had once been their quarry. He glanced at Violet for an explanation. She merely shrugged. Her expression said she would not betray another woman.
“Miss Fawkener might not wish to wake with an unfamiliar protocol officer staring down at her in a state of undress. I suggest you leave us, and let me and my female assistants help her dress before you spring that bit of information on her.”
“Right.” He looked down at the sleeping maiden. He could not reconcile the solemn face with the light-minded pursuits of a London flirt. He should step back and let her awaken with a woman at her side, but he found himself reluctant to let go of the small hand before he received a sign of returning life. He uncurled the slack fingers in his and rested his thumb in her palm.
Violet spoke again. “You never know, my friend, with a sudden waking, the lady might fall in love with the first man she sees.”
“Now that would be fatal for the aspiring husband hunter,” he said briskly. “I’ll let your father and brother know that she’s under your care, but promise me you’ll find her something decent to wear and burn this gown. And, Violet, I’d prefer to introduce myself, if I may.”
Violet gave him a shrewd glance. “As you wish.”
He nodded. He took the small hand and laid it gently on the sofa, and the girl exhaled a long, shaky breath. Her eyes fluttered open, and for brief moment a dark gleam of sharp intelligence met his gaze. The hand with the book clutched it tighter.
Her lips moved to form a “Thank you.” Then with a flutter of those straight lashes, light as a leaf settling, the eyes closed again.
Hazelwood stood. It was nothing to disturb his peace, after all, a mere glance, nothing that should get in the way of his assignment. It was just that those eyes had been unexpectedly keen, not dazed at all, and he’d been caught gazing at her like a man starving for a kiss from a sleeping princess.