The Husband Hunter, of course, wishes for the blessings of her friends and family when she has found that man above all others that she can truly love. While she hopes that they may see her delight and his merits, not having her knowledge of his character, they doubt his worthiness from worldly standards. She will now hear from all and sundry the flaws in his manner, his education, his politics, and the size of his income. Now that her success as a Husband Hunter is assured, her relations will predict the unhappiness and failure of the very enterprise they have been insisting she embark upon. They now wish to prevent her ever becoming a wife, for what is her success, but the breakup of the family in which she had lived these eighteen or twenty years. The Husband Hunter must be prepared, indeed, to defend her love.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Twenty-five
For once on the morning of her father’s return Jane did not mind the overheated drawing room in her grandmother’s house. An unexpected shudder shook her body now and then, rattling her cup against the saucer, as she and her father drank coffee together. Margaret had found a faded blue wool gown for Jane to wear until her clothes could be retrieved from her cousins. Her father wore a coat of his from before their time in Halab. It made a striking contrast—the old-fashioned English coat and the full beard and swarthy looks of a man of Halab. She could not stop looking at him.
“You look very English,” he told her, putting down his cup. It was a signal to begin the real talk they had not yet had.
“How long have you been in London?” she asked him. He had brought her pistachios and almonds. Margaret put them in a dish on the little table that held the coffee tray.
“I arrived just days after your own arrival. I had to remain dead until we could find out for certain who was betraying our people in the East.”
“Clive?”
“Clive and others who have been passing secrets to Malikov. We suspected him, but were never able to prove anything.”
“We?”
“Goldsworthy and I.”
She put down her cup as well. “Why?” She wanted him to tell the story, to explain why he’d let her think him dead, and why she’d been shipped to London, and told she must become someone she was not.
The question seemed to stump him. He stood and walked away to the window, looking out into the street. She did not know whether he found London familiar or unfamiliar.
“I’d been compromised. Our friends were in danger. One of them died getting me that map. I knew I could no longer do the work I’d been doing. I knew I had to get you out of Halab before anyone decided to use you against me. And I had to find out who had compromised our network. It had to be someone in London.”
“But you could not tell me any of this, any of your plans? You had to let me imagine you captured or dead?” Jane’s throat ached. He was explaining the spy’s reasons for doing what he’d done. Not the father’s reasons. “I did not mind, you know, that we lived in Halab surrounded by families, by markets full of tetas and ammis and kaitis. We were only two, but I was Rana, and you were Abu Rana, Rana’s father. It was enough for me. I did not miss family, but when you were no more, what was I to feel?”
He turned back to her from the window, his expression changed. “Ah, I see you are ahead of me. It wasn’t until I went to Barker, the English Consul, to arrange your return to England, that I saw the error of my ways as a father.”
He came back to the sofa and sat facing her, his clasped hands hanging between his knees, his head down. She waited for him to go on.
“Barker gave me a piece of his mind when he realized how we had been living. He made me understand that I’d deprived you of the English life you were meant to have, of all the things I had taken for granted because I had had them as a boy and because they no longer mattered to me when your mother died. You were supposed to be an English girl.”
“And you thought giving me a book would make me an English girl?” She said it gently, but she could not help but think of that black moment in the bank when the Hammersleys had first put the book in her hands, and she had cursed it.
He looked up then, his eyes bleak with loss. “It was your mother’s book. I thought… I wanted you to have it no matter what happened to me. Can you forgive me?”
“Oh, Papa, I forgive you. How could I not?” Jane crossed the room and knelt and took his clasped hands in hers, searching his face. How could she blame him when she had failed to recognize the love behind his gift. “I thought I’d lost you when you were the only family I had.” Then she stood, pulling him up with her and offering him a grin she knew was every bit as cheeky as a Hazelwood grin. “But I have to get my book back, Papa, and there’s only one way.”
Her Papa held her hands and looked into her face, the bleakness in his eyes replaced by a wary questioning look. “You don’t have the book?”
She shook her head. That was the spy in him still. “It’s quite safe.”
“Who has it?”
“Lord Hazelwood.” Her papa looked shocked. “You see, Papa, I did become a husband hunter, and I’ve found the husband I want.”
He freed his hands from hers abruptly, looking shocked. “You can’t be serious. Not Hazelwood? Do you know that man’s past, his history, his—” He bit off further details.
Jane smiled. Her father’s objections were just what she expected. “I’m going to marry him just as soon as you get him out of jail. Today, would be good.”
“I can’t do that. He gave the map to Malikov.”
Jane shook her head. “No. He didn’t. He used your notes in the book to make a map to deceive Malikov. I have the real map, and I will return it to you when I marry Lord Hazelwood.”
“You really want to marry this man?”
“I do. Just as soon as you secure his release from prison and clear him of the charge of treason.” He was her father, and he loved her in his way, but he had loved his spying more for a very long time. Hazelwood, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, had tossed aside his spying when it was the only thing he had, just for her. “And, Papa,” she said, “you will arrange our marriage today like a good papa in Halab.”