A brief word of caution is now in order. Upon arriving in London and beginning to go about in society, the Husband Hunter will observe many more gentlemen than she is used to seeing at home in her country town or village. Neither the village church nor the local assembly has likely ever drawn more than a few gentlemen into her orbit, while it is the nature of the great metropolis to draw men of all ranks and characters to mingle together seeking both prominence and pleasure as their individual characters direct them.
The Husband Hunter will not know at first glance which of these gentlemen has the respectable character she seeks. All may appear equally fashionable, equally polished in manner. Rather than descend into giddiness at the apparently limitless supply of gentlemen, she must develop the habit of listening carefully to a man’s speech and discerning from it, his true character. Where there are any hints from his manner of speaking of that he may be at heart a scoundrel, she must take steps to find credible informants to further elucidate his character.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Four
When Hazelwood returned to the club, his fellow spies, Blackstone and Clare, stripped to their waists and wearing padded leather gloves, were sparring with words and fists at one end of the cavernous coffee room. Nate Wilde, the club’s man of all work, was setting out a tray of sandwiches and liquid refreshments. Occasionally, Wilde offered a word of approval or advice to the pugilists.
Wilde, a youth in his early twenties, rescued from a life of crime nearly ten years earlier, had acquired the manners, accent, and above all, the wardrobe of a gentleman, though no fashionable gilding could hide the youth’s rough compact build, his toothy grin, and pronounced ears. He made excellent coffee, knew London’s streets intimately, and didn’t hesitate to back up his gentlemen in a fight.
As sobriety was a club rule, the steaming punch Wilde set out would likely be made from tea, spices, and hot milk. Neither Hazelwood nor Blackstone minded the ban on spirits, though Clare grumbled about it. The irony of Hazelwood’s disguise in the past year had been that he’d been perfectly sober while wearing claret-stained cravats and waistcoats reeking of brandy. He liked being sober, liked a clear head and quick reflexes. He had willingly accepted the benefits of sobriety in spite of its less-visible disadvantages. Sustained sobriety was humbling. It tended to make a man acutely aware of past follies, misjudgments, and character failings.
His friends exchanged another flurry of blows before Blackstone got in a solid hit. Sweating and panting, the two opponents let Wilde remove their gloves and hand them towels.
Hazelwood helped himself to the punch while the other two toweled off. He was particularly fond of the club’s coffee room with its high, curved ceiling, long comfortable sofas, and absence of feminine objects. He didn’t have brothers, and his school friends had fallen away from him as his fortunes sank. In Blackstone and Clare he had new friends, men of keen intelligence and a proper appreciation of a good fight.
“Hazelwood, did you meet the girl?” Clare asked, picking up a mug of punch and wrinkling his nose over the steaming drink.
“What girl? A new case?” Blackstone toweled his head dry. “Has Goldsworthy removed you from night work?”
Hazelwood nodded. “The girl is the daughter of that agent that went missing.”
“George Fawkener? Remind me where he disappeared.” Blackstone tossed his towel aside and accepted a mug from the discreetly hovering Wilde.
“Somewhere between Kourdistan and Kabul.”
“What happened to him?” Blackstone took his first taste of the drink.
Hazelwood lifted a brow. “You think Goldsworthy would tell? Fawkener was strangled, or beheaded, or tossed off a minaret in Bokhara. In any case, left for the birds and dogs.”
“And the government has done what for the poor sod?” Clare asked.
The three friends looked at each other. They knew the answer to that one. Exactly nothing. The Foreign Office had a way of regarding lost agents as private travelers for whom no help or ransom could be offered. Two years earlier Blackstone had spent his personal fortune ransoming his half-brother and a dozen other captives from a Greek warlord.
Hazelwood felt a pang of sympathy for Jane Fawkener. Her father probably mattered to her. “The Foreign Office has arranged for his royal highness to bestow a posthumous knighthood on the dead hero.”
Clare snorted and put down his drink in disgust. “Some consolation. A silver trinket in a velvet box.”
Hazelwood stretched out on his favorite couch. “Ah no, my friend. There’s to be a full investiture ceremony with bunting, a band, and royal personages. Fawkener’s daughter is to receive the honor in her father’s name. That’s where I come in. I’m the protocol officer assigned to see the girl through the ceremony.”
Clare saluted him. “Is she pretty?”
The question shouldn’t throw him. It was the expected question after all. They had joked for a year about their mysterious benefactor and spymaster Goldsworthy having an ugly daughter tucked away somewhere that he planned to foist on one of them. But Hazelwood found he didn’t quite know how to answer. Jane Fawkener wasn’t pretty in the conventional sense, but he had wanted to wake her with a kiss, an odd impulse in a man of his experience.
Blackstone spoke up next. “More to the point, Hazelwood, why the government charade? Why does the Foreign Office want you to shadow the girl?”
Trust Blackstone to focus on the main point. Hazelwood took a pull on his mug of punch. “It’s more a case of keeping British secrets from the enemy. Goldsworthy suspects they will try to get some papers off of her.”
“No one entrusted dispatches to her, did they?” As a professional soldier, Clare hated it when the government used unreliable civilians for its business.
“Not at all, but the girl insists her father’s alive, and she seems to know his route. In other words, she knows more than she should about the government’s secrets.”
They were silent a moment.
“So your real job is to keep her from falling into the enemy’s hands.” Blackstone was instantly grim. He knew from personal experience how dangerous England’s enemies could be and how easily they could strike within London itself. “The Russians won’t be kind.”
And we will be? Hazelwood finished his punch. He meant to keep the girl from the Russians, but he doubted she’d appreciate his efforts. He couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that he had pushed her into declaring her intention to become a husband hunter. After years of living abroad, she would have no idea what that meant.
Wilde picked up the mug Hazelwood had put aside, and Hazelwood had a thought. “Wilde, I could use your help with this one.”
“My help, my lord?” The youth set down his tray.
“I’d like you to get a copy of this book for me tomorrow.” Hazelwood found a pencil on the table and scrawled the title and publisher’s name on a two-day-old copy of the Morning Chronicle. “Go to as many booksellers as you need to, but get it.”
Wilde studied the scrap of paper, a dismayed expression on his face, his ears reddening. “The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London? But, Lord Hazelwood, sir, you can’t be serious. I can’t ask for this book in…”
“Public? Afraid of a little humor at your expense, Wilde?”
“Sir, I’ll be laughed out of every shop I enter.”
“You could say it’s for your sister.”
“Don’t ‘ave a sister, my lord.” Wilde’s old accent slipped out with his unease.
“I know what. Take Miranda with you. Tell her she’ll be doing me a favor.”
The youth’s face changed instantly at the girl’s name. Miranda Kirby was the daughter of the club’s in-house tailor. With her fiery hair, smooth rosy cheeks, china-blue eyes, and lush figure, she possessed Wilde’s heart. Whether she would eventually return Wilde’s admiration or not was the subject of a wager between Hazelwood and Clare. Hazelwood was glad to give the lad another opportunity to win the girl’s affections.
“Yes, my lord. Tomorrow, my lord?”
“If you can manage it, Wilde.”
As soon as the youth left the coffee room, Clare turned to Hazelwood. “You’ll set the whelp back,” Clare grumbled. “He was making a good recovery by staying away from Miranda for weeks.”
Hazelwood shook his head. “He’s not going to get over her, Clare, and he needs all the help he can get.”
“The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London? Doesn’t sound like your usual reading, Hazelwood.” Blackstone turned the discussion back to the case.
Hazelwood sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “Not in the least. But tell me what you think. Fawkener used his bankers, the Hammersleys, to deliver one thing to his daughter.”
“This absurd book?” Clare asked.
“Exactly. And the girl holds on to the book as if it were the Holy Grail.”
“So?” Blackstone raised a skeptical brow.
Hazelwood leaned forward. “I think that if her father wanted to get a message to her without the idiots in the Foreign Office—”
“Or any spies—”
“—knowing what that message was, he’d send it through his bankers. We all know the Hammersleys are skilled at codes and at getting information across the continent.”
Blackstone nodded. “And you’re going after a second copy of the book—why?”
“For comparison’s sake. I want to know what’s in it, so that when I get my hands on her copy, I can catch what’s been added or altered.”
“What do you think her father is trying to tell her?”
“That depends on how much she already knows.” It would be Hazelwood’s job to find out.
“Her father’s probably trying to tell her to stay out of the spy business and get herself a husband as fast as she can,” observed Clare, setting down his cup.
Hazelwood laughed. “Goldsworthy is working up a list of eligible young men.”
“The girl’s doomed then. Better all the matchmaking mamas of London than Goldsworthy. Does she have family? Does she have money?” Clare was on the girl’s side for sure.
“Little money, I suspect.” Hazelwood turned back to Blackstone. “Your banker wife will know.”
“And Violet will never tell. But you think this Jane Fawkener knows that her father was a government agent and not merely a merchant?”
“No question about that, and she believes she can prove that he’s alive. She seems to have information that differs from the government’s account of things.”
“Then what if someone else gets their hands on the book? The Russians will try.”
“It will be time to break heads and throw bodies down stairwells. I expect you gentlemen are up for whatever it takes.” Hazelwood grinned at his two friends. In the end, they’d be in it together.
* * * *
Nate Wilde passed through the bare garden in the back of the club and entered the rear of the tailor’s shop. A long, narrow hallway led to the front of the shop, which faced a fashionable street and masqueraded as a chemist’s establishment selling gentleman’s toiletries—soaps and brushes, salves and pomades, toothpowders and scents. Though Kirby & Sons was the name on the door, there was no son, only a daughter—Miranda.
From the time he’d come to work at the club, Nate had been unable to resist the chemist’s shop. One day he’d seized the biggest chance of his life to leave behind his childhood in a notorious London rookery, and the next he’d met Miranda Kirby, and discovered how powerful a hold the most insignificant things could have on a man’s mind, things like chestnut curls against a white throat and the swell of a silk-covered bosom.
He closed the rear door behind him. Coming in the back way meant that no shop bell jingled, so Miranda had no warning of his approach. He liked to catch her at her work and tease her about it afterward. She waited on gentlemen who were in awe of her beauty, or she helped her father with the fitting and measuring of the spies for their disguises. Miranda regarded every gentleman who came through the door as a potential husband, a man who could make her a lady, not a shopgirl.
He paused on his side of the crimson velvet curtains that separated the hall from the shop to listen for the presence of a customer. Miranda had a story she liked to tell her gentlemen clients about her French mother as a child escaping from the Revolution in spite of the silver buckles on her shoes. She believed that her mother had named her Miranda like a duke’s daughter in a play to remind her of her lofty origins. Nate was pretty sure that she’d had an Irish mother who’d come to London and got herself in trouble until old Mr. Kirby rescued her.
Still his Miranda was shrewd and alert, so she readily sorted out unlikely candidates for her plan of becoming Lady Somebody, but her shrewdness did not protect her from Hazelwood. The disgraced viscount with his easy charm and laughing eyes appeared to Miranda as hers to claim. To her way of thinking, no lady of his own class wanted him, so he was hers, like some rich cake sent back to the kitchen because the lofty guests had already had their fill.
Yesterday she had been thrilled to hear that Hazelwood’s new assignment meant no more stained and stinking clothes. She had been beside her father as he fitted the viscount for his new clothes.
Nate heard no voices, so he pushed aside the curtain and entered the shop. Miranda looked up from her needlework, something fine and silken with small covered buttons, most likely a waistcoat for Hazelwood. She wore fingerless gloves with a blue woolen shawl draped over her shoulders.
“You could use a brazier of coal,” he observed. He could see his breath in the shop.
“Did you bring one then?”
“Easily managed.”
“No need. I’ll close up soon for tea.”
With a quick pump of his arms, he boosted himself up to sit on the broad marble-topped counter. He wanted to show her that he’d healed from the injury to his collarbone, and he liked to look down at her. She tilted her head when she worked. Her left ear peeked out from her burnished curls, and the slight rounded curve of her breast rose above her lace tucker. Today her skin was very white against the blue wool of the shawl. Usually, he could not detect her scent in the competing odors of the shop—the citrus, bergamot, and lavender of the soaps and pomades, the rosewater of various lotions, and the cloves and cinnamon of toothpowders, or the peppermint of lozenges. But today Miranda was the only warm thing in the shop, and she smelled like the almond milk lotion she used on her skin.
“Make yourself at home, then.”
“I am home.” In the spring, he’d been beaten and tossed for dead by a pair of hired fists in Wapping when he’d come too close to their lair on a case. Since then he’d spent some time away from the club with his grand friends in their fine London houses. The time away was supposed to cure him of his attachment to Miranda. “The shop is club premises, isn’t it?”
“What makes you idle then? No one needs you on the other side?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been given a commission to get something relevant to the latest case.” He liked using big words to describe the jobs they gave him.
She shot him a suspicious glance. “So you can get yourself knocked senseless again?”
He shook his head. “Not a chance with this assignment. You could go with me.”
“Go with you? The places you go? Hah!”
“Not this time. You would have to dress as a lady, if you wanted to come.”
“As if I don’t always.” She gave a haughty toss of her head that set the curls bouncing.
He concealed a grin at having riled her. With her eye for detail, she always dressed like the real ladies he knew—his friends’ wives, Cleo Jones and Helen Jones, and the grandest lady of them all, the Marchioness of Daventry. Miranda just never talked the way those ladies did; no she sounded more like the women of Bread Street where he’d spent his early days.
“You think I want to be seen with you?” He noted that she hadn’t turned him down yet.
“You might. I’ve been asked to go around to some booksellers.”
“Booksellers?”
“For a book.”
He could almost hear her calculating little brain spinning, like a turnspit dog racing to keep the roast from burning. She’d be thinking of the great bookshops—Hatchard’s and Lackington’s—and he’d take her to those places first, and hope that they wouldn’t need to comb the rubbishy bins outside the used book dealers on Holywell Street. He didn’t want to take her to his old haunts.
“What sort of book could possibly help solve a case?” His Miranda didn’t lack for wits.
“You won’t believe it.” He pulled the newspaper with Lord Hazelwood’s scrawl from inside his coat. He felt foolish even reading the title to her. He cleared his throat. “The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London.”
She shot him a skeptical glance. “You’re bamming me. How is such a book to help one of our gentlemen catch a spy?”
He pushed off the counter. He admired her brains, but he didn’t want her getting too smart on him. “They think the book contains a code, like that Spanish bank note I showed you last spring.”
“They?” she asked. “Whose case is it?” She put aside her needlework and slid from her stool. “It’s Lord Hazelwood’s new case, isn’t it?” Her eyes lit up.
He nodded, momentarily distracted by the effect of her quick movement on her bosom.
“Of course I’ll go with you. When do we go?” She bounced a little on her toes, and a very distracting motion ensued. Nate’s privy member, not his brain, took note.
“Tomorrow morning.” He swallowed hard. He’d won and lost simultaneously. He’d have hours of time with her while she thought about her viscount. It was full dark and bitterly cold when he passed from the back of the shop to the club again.
* * * *
Clive Walhouse leaned against the gold-flocked wall of a discreet gaming establishment in Cleveland Row admiring Lady Pamela Ravenhurst as she placed her bets at the faro table. The eager gleam in Lady Pamela’s violet eyes and the candlelight gilding the half moons of her breasts rising from the dark blue velvet of her gown stirred his cock to a pleasant state of anticipation. He had no trouble imagining how Pamela’s capacity for losing herself in play would translate into wanton abandonment in bed, or even in the closed carriage, which would convey them from the club later in the evening.
She played recklessly, as she did when her marital frustrations were driving her. At nineteen she had married a man fifteen years her senior, whose interest in the minutiae of foreign policy was profound enough to close all of Argus’s famed one hundred eyes. Clive had heard it said in the Foreign Office that Ravenhurst slept more often with his red dispatch box than with his wife. Nevertheless, in seven years of marriage Lady Pamela had produced three credible replicas of her husband and was now apparently free to pursue her own interests. Clive would be her first, her liberator from the toils of the marriage bed.
He raised a glass of the house’s very tolerable claret in a silent toast. He owed it all to his father’s dead cousin George Fawkener. Rest in peace, cousin.
A stir at the door of the card room drew his gaze from Pamela’s charms. Clive’s friends, Lutrell and Archer, had arrived with Count Malikov and the usual group of young blades that surrounded the Russian émigré. Lutrell and Archer headed straight for Clive while Malikov, ever attentive to the ladies, bowed over the hand of the club’s hostess in her purple gown and turban.
“Walhouse, you sly dog,” Archer began. “I thought you were out of the game, up to your frayed collars in debt.”
Clive came away from the wall and shook his friends’ hands. “Never count the Walhouses out, my friends. We always come about.” He signaled a waiter to bring the drinks tray.
“Must have been a very rich cousin who popped off, Walhouse.” Lutrell accepted a glass from the waiter. “I saw your esteemed pater in Tattersall’s Thursday dropping his blunt on a pair of showy grays.”
“A baron must be seen to live like a baron, my friends.” Clive tipped his glass to theirs. It was his father’s chief principle of money management. Theodore Walhouse, Baron Strayde—Teddy to his friends—had run through his own inheritance long before Clive was out of short coats, and had subsequently worked his way through his wife’s fortune as well.
From across the room Pamela caught Clive’s gaze and smiled an intimate smile at him. Their exchange of glances was not lost on his two friends. Gentlemen inclined to wager on such things as a married woman’s first lover had put their money on his rivals. Clive enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing that tonight those bets were lost.
“Now that you’ve stolen the fair Pamela from under our noses, Walhouse, the least you could do is stake us to a rouleau for the EO table. Each,” Archer suggested.
“Of course.” Clive had no objections. With his father enjoying George Fawkener’s vast fortune, Clive at last had an allowance that permitted him to live like a gentleman and not a mere clerk. He offered Archer a fat wad of notes, and when the two friends went in search of the EO table, Clive resumed his study of Lady Pamela’s bosom.
Since his university years he had been poor Walhouse, the butt of jokes, the one fellow in his circle of friends with barely enough money to scrape by from one quarter to the next. Poverty had ultimately obliged him to take a job in the Foreign Office as an undersecretary to Lord Chartwell. It was the sort of position for which he had been told to feel grateful as the son of a titled but impoverished gentleman. Clive, however, had been unable to summon much gratitude for a position that required piles of tedious work and a degree of anonymity that grated on his sense of himself. He had ideas. He wished to be heard. But no one solicited his opinion or imagined that he had one.
He had chafed under the burden of mounting debts, which arose not from extravagance, but simply from the effort to live as a gentleman in London, and he resented the duns that gathered on the family doorstep. His father only gave a helpless shrug at the duns and pointed out that Clive had been provided with a fine education and could make his own way in the world. “And besides,” his father had added, tossing a scrap of paper at him, “Fawkener may die, and with the entail I’ll inherit his bloody fortune.”
The words on that paper started Clive thinking how handy it would be if his father’s cousin Fawkener, on assignment for the Foreign Office in some benighted place of sunbaked camel dung and feuding warlords, would die. From that moment Clive had taken an interest in George Fawkener’s career. Clive supposed he would have gone on toiling for Chartwell and hoping for news of Fawkener’s demise except for Lady Pamela. One night at an endless musicale while watching Lady Pamela slide her fan along the thigh of the scandalous Lord Blackstone, Clive had confessed his hopeless infatuation to Malikov. His career frustrations and his family’s appalling dependence on an inheritance that might never come got mixed into his account of the folly of Lord Chartwell.
His Russian friend reminded him to be patient and offered the comfort of the old saying that—Graveyards are full of indispensable men. The sympathetic count further suggested a way that Clive could earn some money while he waited for George Fawkener’s inevitable demise. If Clive were willing, he could help Malikov shape a more favorable political climate for himself back in Russia.
After that, Clive’s job had become easy and profitable. It was nothing to slip a letter here, or a document there to a man Malikov knew in return for the allowance Clive’s father could not provide. Almost at once he had been able to enter the competition for Lady Pamela’s favors, and he had seen what even Malikov missed, a way to the lady’s heart. And now with Fawkener’s death, Clive had resigned his post under Chartwell. He could at last live as a gentleman with no need to work or to sell scraps of paper. And he had Pamela.
He smiled as Malikov at last headed his way. Though Clive no longer helped his friend directly, they remained on good terms. Really, it was impossible to be at odds with the affable Russian. Malikov moved in the first ranks of London society and knew nearly everyone connected with the Foreign Office. He had come to England at the end of the long war with Napoleon and found it convenient to remain. With his easy manners and tall, fair good looks he was invited everywhere. Tonight the count’s apparent good humor left Clive unprepared for the sober face that looked into his when his friend approached.
“You’ve had bad news about the situation in St. Petersburg?” Clive asked, straightening from the wall.
“Not at all, my friend.” Malikov glanced at Lady Pamela. “You’ve won the fair lady, I hear.”
Clive permitted himself a grin.
Malikov gave him a congratulatory thump on the shoulder. “I knew you’d be the one, no matter the odds in the clubs. You’ll make her happy.”
The count studied him rather earnestly.
“But you didn’t come to congratulate me, did you?”
Malikov looked down into his drink, giving the wine a swirl in the glass. He shook his head. “Ah, no. My news concerns you, my friend. Nothing, perhaps to be too alarmed about, but nevertheless, a prudent man…” The count glanced around the room as if they might be overheard, but there was no chance of that.
Clive saw that Pamela was absorbed in the game and that the pile of chits in front of her was still sufficient for her to continue playing. “Tell me.”
“Your cousin’s daughter has returned to England.”
“Her return was to be expected, wasn’t it?” He studied the count’s face and found it surprisingly blank, devoid of its usual sympathetic warmth. “Jane Fawkener inherits next to nothing, a thousand pounds at most.”
“It’s not the immediate loss that should concern you.”
“What then? She has no legal recourse, has she?”
“She’s gone to the Foreign Office.”
Clive swallowed a substantial mouthful of claret. Malikov was making him uneasy, and he suspected the man enjoyed it. “Well, then I think my family has nothing to fear. We all know the level of confusion and error that reigns in that department.”
Malikov laughed, though Clive noted a distinct lack of warmth in the sound.
“Jane Fawkener claims to have proof that her father is alive.”
“Alive?”
Malikov watched him carefully.
Clive felt his self-command was just equal to that scrutiny. “Unlikely, isn’t it? And the Foreign Office will hardly act on some waif’s hopes.” He took another swallow of his wine.
Malikov’s glance shifted to Pamela. “You’re right, of course. I mention it only because apparently the Foreign Office tried to pass her off to your family, and your mother declined to take her in.”
“You think we should?”
Malikov shrugged. “It is up to you to protect your own interests, of course, but in your shoes, I’d want the girl where I could keep a close watch on her.”
Clive got the hint. Malikov was putting him on his guard, offering him a way of dealing with the situation. His parents were hopeless. They would go on spending, without heeding the threat the girl posed and without making any provision to hold on to what George Fawkener’s death had won them all. His sisters and younger brother who had not yet felt the worst effects of the family’s spending habits would now suffer. Clive was the one who would have to do something. He would have to seek out this Jane Fawkener, discover her secrets, and make sure her father stayed dead.
Pamela gave a laugh of delight and leaned forward to receive a pile of chips. Clive promised himself that he would not let anything or anyone keep him from enjoying what he had won.