Some readers of this little volume may take exception to the term “Husband Hunter,” imagining that it suggests a degree of forwardness unbecoming in a young person entering society for the first time. While this guide does not recommend bold or presumptuous behavior, it does not condone coyness. Coyness is indeed a crime, as the poet would have it, in a world in which there must always be a surfeit of young ladies in relation to eligible partners. Therefore, I must insist on a young woman’s becoming a Husband Hunter, for no woman wishes to be mere “goods on a shelf” but an active seeker of her own happiness and well-being. Above all, a woman wishes to be in charge of her fate.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Seven
Jane stared at the door of her hotel suite and willed it to open. It was near nine. Her arms hung at her sides as dead as wilted as palm fronds in winter. Her empty stomach protested the long afternoon, sustained only by macaroons. Her busy brain contemplated what concession she wanted to wrest from Hazelwood—a true explanation of the episode with Slouch Hat in the park, an admission of whatever thing in his past had made him so disliked by her cousins, or a confession of how he had come to know Madame Celeste. Jane had insisted that the court dress remain at Madame’s until she needed it.
Behind her, Hazelwood and Mrs. Lowndes exchanged a few words, and behind them, she knew came three footmen bearing boxes of tissue-wrapped garments for her new wardrobe as a husband hunter. The resourceful Mrs. Lowndes had arranged for the milliner to send bonnets for Jane to try at her hotel room the following day.
Hazelwood reached around her for the door, which swung open on a distraught Nell, her hands clasped together against her breast. “Oh, Miss, I’m so sorry. Someone’s come to the rooms while I went to supper.”
A surge of quick alarm replaced Jane’s weariness. She reached out to the girl. “You’re unhurt, Nell?”
Nell nodded, and Jane went straight past her to the bedroom for her father’s letters, hidden in a red, Morocco-bound book, cleverly fitted out with a concealed hinge in the binding. She expected it to be missing, but it lay in a jumble of books scattered on the floor by her bed. She sank to her knees and took it up in shaking hands and slid the lock under the edge of the cover. The little box opened. The letters were still there, the blue ribbon in which she’d tied them undisturbed. She snapped the box shut.
Clearly, someone who knew she was staying at Mivart’s had passed that information along to an enemy, accidentally, or deliberately. Someone believed she possessed important information. Her heart pounded.
When she looked up, Hazelwood stood watching her from the doorway. “Nell has gone for refreshments. When you feel more the thing, you can identify what the thief or thieves might have taken.”
Jane nodded, grateful for the dim light of the room. Hazelwood’s words were neutral, but he was not a man to miss the details. She looked around as he lit additional candles. The drawers and doors of the walnut armoire hung open, its contents dumped on the floor. Shoes and chintz-covered pillows had been flung about violently. A shield-back chair lay overturned at the foot of the bed. A kid half-boot had apparently hit the drapery and dropped to the floor.
Hazelwood had said “thief,” not “spy,” but Jane knew that the intruder had not come to find hidden bank notes or jewelry. She wore a warm new cloak supplied by Madame Celeste, and yet she clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. She knew with cold certainty what the search of her rooms meant, and it had been a search, not a robbery—an enemy of her father’s was here in London. She wished she knew whether that enemy came from within the government or without it, and what he had expected to find.
The little book was safe in her bag, one more thing she had left of him. She shuddered at the thought that it might end up in a spy’s hands.
Hazelwood crossed the room and offered his hand to pull her up from the floor. “The fire’s lit in the sitting room, and the footmen have gone.”
He had removed his gloves. Jane took his hand. He lifted her to her feet in a swift, dizzying pull. Lightheadedness warred briefly with the sensation of his warm palm against her skin, not rough, but distinctly male. He let go, and she clenched her fist against a humming of her nerves. He didn’t move, but stood close to her, looking about the room. “Hasty, weren’t they?” he observed.
It was her thought, too, or else the spy would have noticed that the book with the concealed letters had not behaved like the other books. It had not fallen open along the spine. Its pages had not fluttered. She found that she’d been holding her breath, and she let it go. It was likely then that the man who had entered her room was a hireling with no real knowledge of what he was supposed to find. Her mind started ticking off the possibilities.
Hazelwood stood looking at her as she clutched the little box to her chest. He had a knack for catching her in moments of weakness. “What’s missing? The family diamonds?”
She shook her head and relaxed her hold on the box, as if it were a mere nothing. She offered him a blank look. “No diamonds. I suspect the thieves were after money.”
He scanned the room again. “It’s a bold thief that enters Mivart’s.” His watchful gaze came back to her.
She made herself put the book box lightly on the table by the bed, and reached down to gather the other fallen books. Hazelwood scooped up two of them, and she stacked them on the table. She did not think he had noticed the trick box, but she could not be sure.
“You said there’s a fire?”
He nodded and gestured for her to lead the way back to the sitting room. She found Mrs. Lowndes arranging a plate of sandwiches and cups on a tea tray, and Nell standing by, looking anxious. Jane sent Nell to put the bedroom to rights and told the girl she might go to bed. Then she accepted Mrs. Lowndes’s help with her cloak, and settled on a small sofa by the hearth with a cup of tea.
Hazelwood stood staring at the sitting room desk. It, too, had been searched, its drawers left open. Hazelwood’s gaze settled on her cousins’ invitation, leaning undisturbed against the lamp where Clive had put it. The thought crossed her mind that she was imagining government spies in Lord Chartwell’s office. Perhaps her cousins had talked quite innocently about their visit to her at Mivart’s, and some enemy of England had heard their talk. There were such, she knew.
A knock at the door called Hazelwood away briefly. When he returned he accepted a cup of tea and turned to Jane, a harsh cast to his usually laughing features. “I’ve arranged for a man to stay outside your door tonight, but we need to move you to a safe location.”
Jane shook her head. Hazelwood took his duties as protocol officer quite seriously, but she had no intention of letting him or the government control her movements. “I’d rather not rely on the government overmuch, but on a more secure and committed protector.”
He appeared to choke on a sip of tea, and then recovered.
Jane turned to her entirely unruffled companion. “Mrs. Lowndes, can you tell me what protocol I’ve offended now?”
“Not protector, my dear. The word implies that the gentleman in question has not offered marriage before accepting its full rights.”
Jane put down her cup. “Hazelwood, how very challenging a job you have to keep me from social peril.”
“Forgive me,” he said in an unrepentant voice, “I was momentarily more concerned with the peril to your person.”
Jane waited to reply until he lifted the teacup to his lips again. “Quite right. Especially after we were followed to the dressmaker’s today.”
Once again she made him start and gulp the hot liquid down. It had taken her awhile to work out what had provoked him to confront Slouch Hat. The encounter had not been over an imagined social offense.
Her gaze held his for a moment while Mrs. Lowndes did her best imitation of a stuffed armchair.
Hazelwood put his teacup on the mantel. “Do you have your book, Jane?”
“In my bag.” She pointed.
He retrieved the little blue book. With a look, he made her shift her skirts to make room for him on the sofa. In his hands the book looked quite small and helpless.
She grabbed a sandwich from the tray. “Here, let me. I know where to begin. I read most of it last night.”
“Eager for the hunt, are you?”
She ignored the sarcasm. Her job was to follow her father’s guide wherever that led her. “We want to start with the chapter on a woman’s first appearance in society.” She found the page. “Here.”
The fire popped and hissed and sent out welcome warmth. Every outing in London so far had chilled Jane to the bone. She handed Hazelwood a sandwich and slipped out of her shoes, folding her legs under her on the sofa. In Halab she would have left her shoes just inside the door. For a moment, as she thawed, she felt almost comfortable. While turning the pages of the little book kept Hazelwood occupied, she considered what to do about the spy or spies. There was no question that she must take action, but she was already learning that a woman in London had a different set of restrictions placed on her than a woman in Halab. New rules appeared as fast as she broke the old ones. The sooner she could figure out where her father’s travels had taken him, the sooner she could act.
She nibbled a sandwich while he read. She missed the flat, warm bread of home with the raised brown bubbles like freckles that one wrapped around meat and vegetables, but she approved the yeasty sweetness of English bread. Mrs. Lowndes rose and excused herself. “I’ll leave you two to make plans for tomorrow.”
The atmosphere in the room changed. Jane felt it at once. Though neither had moved on the little sofa, the distance between them had shrunk and become charged. In his hands the book looked small and feminine. He turned past the chapter she pointed out, flipping through the book to a page where her father’s annotations were plain in the margin, his thumb coming to rest next to her father’s notes. She held her breath.
“Do you want to tell me what you’re hiding in your bedroom?”
“No more than you wish to tell me who followed us today.”
“Ah, we’ve reached another impasse.”
She smiled cordially. “Except that we’ve agreed that I’m to continue my husband hunt.”
The teasing look was back in his eyes. He was not a man to push foolishly against a locked door. “Not a moment to waste. A woman must seek marriage while she’s young. Her great attraction, beauty, is entirely ephemeral.”
She twisted on the sofa to face him. Teasing talk was a game to him. “You claim a man’s attractions are more lasting than a woman’s?”
“Obviously. A man may always marry unless he’s poor. He may be a gout-ridden octogenarian, but if he has property, he’ll find a willing lady. Indeed, he may find himself more sought after the shorter his apparent lease on life.”
She pretended to consider it. “I had not thought of older gentlemen, but perhaps I should aim my efforts in that direction.”
“And where will you find these potential suitors?”
There was a note in his voice that she was beginning to recognize. It irked him when she appeared to be in earnest about her husband hunt.
His voice was a dangerous reminder of the intimacies of the day. One could dash through the rain and emerge to shake a few drops from one’s hair or coat, but she had stood in a downpour of Hazelwood. From their first meeting, their eyes and hands and voices had been free to meet in ways she had never imagined in Halab. She reminded herself that such touches and glances were commonplace to him. It occurred to her that he knew Madame Celeste because he had come to the shop before with a woman whose wardrobe he was buying not so that she could meet the monarch, but so that she could please Hazelwood.
Jane took the book in unsteady hands, and opened to a passage she remembered and read in an only slightly shaking voice. “The Husband Hunter prepares for her first appearance in society by calling upon those family members and acquaintances with the power to introduce her to willing partners in the ballroom.”
He tapped the page with his finger. “I thought your Walhouse cousins put you off your London family.”
“I don’t know them. I suppose I must give them a try.” As she said it, she recognized that the letters in the margin next to Hazelwood’s thumb were likely initials. The EF could be her father’s mother Lady Eliza Fawkener. TD could be her uncle, her mother’s brother, Thaddeus Drummond. Most of her father’s codes over the years had involved the names of his relations. She cast a glance at Hazelwood. He was chewing a bite of sandwich, giving no sign of having noticed her father’s marginalia.
Her father had always described his extended family as the cast of a farce. He had stressed that it was only possible to endure their company by seeing one at a time, and that a visit to any of them was a major exercise in diplomacy. Now it occurred to her that he might have been using such a characterization of their family to signal information about the rulers he met in his journeys across the near East.
She sat up a little straighter at the thought, and Hazelwood turned to her with a penetrating look. It was time to send her protocol officer away. She reached for the sandwich tray. He took hold of her wrist, arresting her movement. “Jane, what are you thinking?”
She offered him her blandest smile. “You know, I’d like to visit my grandmother tomorrow.”
“You felt such a warm, family-feeling from your cousins this morning that you wish to connect with the rest of your relations?”
“One must always seek family connections. My father’s mother is an invalid, I believe. My mother’s brother lives precariously by gaming, and my father has a pair of twin cousins who could not interrupt their schedule of social engagements to take me on. Are you shocked?”
“By a lack of family feeling among the aristocracy of Britain? Hardly. Only by your desire to visit your grandmother.”
“She may know an octogenarian widower or two.” She covered a yawn with one hand. Her relations might not have welcomed her to London, but they might be willing to help her find her father.
She looked up and found him watching her. “You must be tired, too, and eager for your bed.” She saw his half smile and knew that she’d blundered conversationally again. “What?”
“I’ll bid you goodnight then.” He stood and offered a hand. She took it and let him lift her from the sofa, but the foot she had tucked under her caught in her skirts and she fell forward. Putting out a hand to stop her fall, her palm flattened against his midriff.
“Steady,” he said. “Foot go to sleep?”
She nodded, looking at her hand pressed against the hard, flat surface of his middle, her senses trying to comprehend the unfamiliar message buzzing along her nerves from her fingertips to her toes.
He laughed. “No need to break my ribs. I’m going.”
She dropped her hand and recovered her sense.
With a brief bow he was gone, and she was left wondering what she’d felt, as if she’d had a brief glimpse through a door left ajar of some unexpected view and now could not say what she’d seen.