by Kate Moore
“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.
The Husband Hunter must be seen, and therefore, must take great care of her appearance. This attention to appearance is not vanity but an effort to present her best self wherever she goes. The first element of her appearance is color. The Husband Hunter needs to draw from a consistent color palette flattering to her complexion. The second element of her appearance is fashion. The Husband Hunter must take care neither to be in the vanguard of fashion, dressed in styles that will pass before the Season ends, nor in the arrears of fashion in clothes that suggest more her mother’s youth than her own. To this end a reliable dressmaker and a friend with a discerning eye are invaluable aids.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Five
Jane stood at the hotel window, the little blue book in her hands, trying to compose a suitably shriveling curse for a government functionary with an irritating sense of command. The world outside the glass was an uninspiring gray from the leaden clouds above to the damp cobbles below. She did not wish Hazelwood ill health or a tragic fate, but she could not shake the niggling feeling, like a grain of sand in one’s boot, that he was more than a protocol officer.
The point of a curse her father had taught her was to imagine vividly a host of indignities heaped upon one’s foe. It was a technique to quell fear, to remind a woman that whatever her enemy’s power over her, he was no grander or less mortal than she, and just as subject to misfortune and shifting circumstances. She and her father had vied to invent the perfect one.
Yesterday, Hazelwood had delivered her to the hotel and into the hands of two competent and helpful women—Mrs. Augusta Lowndes, Lady Violet’s former governess, and a young maid named Nell. In short order Jane had enjoyed a long bath, eaten a leek soup and roast chicken, and had her few possessions arranged in her suite. Then she had been left in solitude in a magnificent canopied bed to recover from her journey. She had no quarrel with the arrangements except their cost. Every penny spent now was a penny she would not have to mount a search for her father. Even London-bred Nell had been shocked at Mivart’s costs and had refused to give Jane’s private garments to the hotel for laundering when she learned what they charged per item.
The window rattled with a sharp gust of wind. Jane wondered if she’d lost the capacity to devise a curse now that she was so far from her old home. The previous day’s curse had had no effect on The Husband Hunter’s Guide. She had spent half the night reading the little book. It had not crumbled to dust as her candle burned to a stub, nor had it yielded any obvious clues to her father’s whereabouts. When she’d wakened from dozing over its pages, she felt no closer to him. The book was full of wry observations that made her smile, and advice she would never need. A book was not a father.
His annotations in the margins appeared throughout the book, more than a dozen pairs of letters on the left or right page of text. Her tired brain knew the letters were part of code, but she needed the other half of the code, which would be a map. But the only map in her book was of London, not of the East, where her father had likely disappeared along the branching lines of the old Silk Road. Besides her father’s notes, there were some in a hand she did not recognize, and she could make no sense of those markings at all. It all meant that she was precisely nowhere in her search.
Over the years Jane had come to understand that her father was not really a merchant. Rather he was a sort of geographer, one who mapped not rivers and mountains, but rather friends. He knew the family histories of dozens of small rulers back to the Battle of Kerbela, the intermarriages, the slights, the losses both avenged and unavenged that would be remembered when the time came to choose sides. He could find an English-friendly caliph or Bedouin chief and know to an exact degree how each man’s binding kinship connections and loyalties would tie him to England or send him over to the other side in a moment of crisis. And he believed that crisis was coming. Russian railways stretched farther and farther south to bring the Czar’s troops and supplies.
Now when her father needed rescuing, when he had done his best for England, the government refused to help him, and his daughter had missed some important clue. The sting of the government’s ingratitude, the lost weeks of her journey at sea made her feel desperate to begin, but desperation was pointless. Patience was needed and steady attention to detail. Somewhere there was a prison or a cave. There were guards and cooks, who had cousins and neighbors. There was a commander overseeing the prison. He, too, had a wife and servants and relations, and he reported to a ruler. In the ruler’s palace there was perhaps a servant holding a basket of apricots and nuts, hearing the talk of the palace, a servant who would, for the right favor, reveal what he heard. That was the way of the East.
Behind the thick clouds the sun rose, brightening the landscape almost imperceptibly, though there were no blue domes to sparkle in its light. Her world had stopped rocking, and in her borrowed gown, she had the appearance of an English gentlewoman. With Nell’s help she wore stays that did not cut off her breathing. There was no danger of fainting into a stranger’s arms. She picked up her bag and tucked the little blue book inside. One notation she thought she understood was the phrase Madame Celeste next to a passage about the number and style of gowns a serious husband hunter should have. The dressmaker’s shop would be the starting place of her search.
In the street below, an open black vehicle with a high-perched seat pulled up. A groom stepped forward to hold the horses’ heads, and Hazelwood leaped down. The perfect curse came to her.
May the cold wind toss your hat into the gutter. May your snowy cravat wilt like jasmine in the desert heat. May dirt find the folds of your silk waistcoat, and may the mud and muck
of London streets mire your boots from tassel to toe.
At a knock on the suite door, she turned, and Nell, her maid, hastened to open the door. Making a hasty dip of her knees, she admitted not Hazelwood, but two strangers.
They were golden-haired and blue-eyed with long faces and such a strong similarity of appearance that Jane immediately knew they were brother and sister. They were as bright and colorful as a spice seller’s cart, the young woman in a fur-lined, rose silk bonnet, and the young man in a bottle-green coat over a bold green and gold striped waistcoat. Beside the lady’s beribboned hat, Jane’s bonnet sitting on the desk looked like an overdone loaf of brown bread.
“Cousin,” the gentleman said with a bow. “We’ve come to welcome you back to England.”
“Are we cousins?” Jane could not keep the note of disbelief from her voice.
The gentleman laughed. “Miss Fawkener, you must forgive our presumption. We certainly are related. Our fathers were cousins, and that makes us cousins, too.” He bowed again. “Clive Walhouse. May I present my sister, Allegra.”
Allegra’s sharp, measuring gaze roamed the crowded sitting room taking in the desk at the window, the blue velvet sofa, and the rose-striped chairs by the white marble hearth. She glanced through Nell as if the girl did not exist.
Clive’s smile never wavered from Jane’s face. “We’ve come to offer you a tour of the amusements of London, cousin.”
His sister added, “You must be dying for good company after living abroad so long.”
“Thank you.” Jane regarded the first family she’d seen in years. There were eight words in Arabic for first cousin and sixteen for second cousin, and none of them seemed to apply to these two. Jane had no idea what to do with them. In her father’s house in Halab she would invite them to sit on low, cushioned divans and offer them coffee, bread, and tomatoes. They did not look prepared to sit on cushions and eat tomatoes, however.