by Kate Moore
Hazelwood halted, stripping off his great coat and handing it to the youth. He looked at the two faces turned his way and read the signs of a quarrel in progress. “Find the book helpful?” he asked.
“We’re in some disagreement about that, sir,” Wilde said grimly. “Coffee, sir?”
Hazelwood nodded. “I’ll hear your report in a minute.”
“Sir.” Wilde strode off.
Hazelwood turned to Miranda. The girl was striking, and he could see why Wilde was smitten. He wondered what made him immune. Age, he thought, or a distaste for petulant beauties like Miranda, with her pretty mouth drawn up in a pout. “Are you to hunt a husband, too, Miranda?”
“Doesn’t the book say I must?” Miranda stood and offered him the book with a brief curtsy and an irritated swish of kerseymere skirts.
“But you’ll have your father’s shop some day.” Hazelwood took the book to a reading table and opened it to one of the pages he remembered as marked.
Miranda followed him. “A shop’s no substitute for a husband, Lord Hazelwood.”
“Ah, so you want a man to be something more than a reliable source of revenue.”
“How you men talk as if marriage were a business. You sound as cold as Nate Wilde.”
“Then you must not take me seriously.” He found a pencil, and concentrated on filling in from memory the notations he’d seen on several pages of Jane’s book earlier. One thing was clear from the day’s events—Jane’s enemies rather desperately wanted the information she possessed. As Hazelwood saw it, that information was contained in the book her father had sent her through the most secure means at his disposal, his ever-so-discreet London bankers. Piece by piece he would extract her father’s notes from her copy of the book, but he also had to decode them, and he suspected that only Jane Fawkener herself possessed the key to understanding her father’s marginalia.
The enemy seemed to be ahead of them on that point. Their attention to the girl’s movements and the attempt to snatch her from his carriage made it clear they believed she knew something.
Wilde put a cup of steaming coffee at his elbow. Hazelwood took a swallow and let the rich liquid warm him. He finished inscribing the notes he remembered then turned to Wilde for his report.
“The stable sacked the fellow who followed you yesterday, sir, but I found the man in the Dog’s Head, drinking and complaining about horse thieves and bad luck. According to his story, a toff hired him to spy on you for a wager.”
“Did our luckless fellow remember anything else?”
“He said the toff told him there was a bet in his club on where you’d go first with your new…mistress, and he wanted to beat the other fellows out.”
Hazelwood nodded. It had been a clever ruse, and it explained why Slouch Hat had not taken great pains to conceal himself. “Did he remember what the man who hired him looked like?”
Wilde shook his head. “I pressed him, sir, but he just kept saying the fellow was a toff like every other toff. Said the fellow had a fine hat. Sorry, sir.”
“You did well, Wilde. We were attacked today, and I did no better at getting a look at the attacker.”
“Attacked?” Miranda asked.
“Someone staged an accident in the street, trapping us in the confusion, and sent a hired fist to pull Miss Fawkener from the carriage.”
Wilde gave a low whistle. “You think that changes things, sir?”
“I do.” He was looking at the notes he’d collected so far. A pair of letters appeared on the left or right page under the number. Was there a sequence? Was there a relationship between the page number and the letters? Did the left or right position mean anything?
The thought that had occurred to him while he held the girl’s trembling body against his was that book did not merely contain information about the friends of England in the East, but that it might also contain information about Russian plans for the region. The repeated and escalating attacks might mean that the Russians feared that information about their plans might fall into English hands.
He opened the fold out map of London. It charted a journey from the east end to the west end of the city in six vertical columns. As he pondered the map, he became aware of an argument growing louder behind him.
“It’s no place to take a lady,” Wilde said.
“It’s the most fashionable park in London. The Husband Hunter’s Guide recommends that a young lady be seen there.”
“Not at a fool stunt for a wager. No one will be looking at you, Miranda.”
“You’re the one who said a man must make his mark in London.”
“Not by driving four blood horses and a blacking van over pond ice that could open under him and every other nodcock that’s skating about to watch his foolishness.”
“Hah! You don’t want to take me because you don’t know how to skate, and you don’t know how to drive.”
“I know better than to do something idiotic.” Wilde’s usual toothy grin had vanished.
Hazelwood felt the moment had come to interrupt. “Children, I have not the pleasure of understanding this dispute.”
Wilde seized the opening to make his case. “Sir, everyone’s saying that the Serpentine’s going to freeze over, and Orator Hunt’s son has wagered a hundred guineas that he can drive his father’s blacking van across the lake and back over the ice. Madness.”
“Ah, and when is he to test this claim?” It sounded like the sort of thing Hazelwood would have done in his youth.
“Saturday next at two.”
Hazelwood turned to Miranda. “You’d like to witness the event?”
“I would, my lord, and Nate Wilde should not have told me about it, if he didn’t want me to go.”
“If you go, you may witness a scene of injury and death to horses and men.”
Miranda brought her hands to rest on her hips in the universal gesture of female frustration with men. “You men, you chase after danger and adventure and insist that women sew and sit and pour tea, as if we hadn’t any courage or spirit. You were attacked yesterday, Lord Hazelwood. And Nate Wilde has just mended from his injuries last spring.”
“You are not advocating that women get their heads broken regularly, are you?”
Miranda exhaled a breath of frustration and raised blue eyes full of appeal. “I’d be perfectly safe in a carriage with you, Lord Hazelwood.”
Hazelwood sobered instantly. He didn’t want Wilde cut out.
Miranda went on pleading, indifferent to the bleak expression on the youth’s face. “It will be exciting. All London will be talking about it. I want to be there.”
Hazelwood stood. Maybe he’d been wrong to encourage the youth’s passion for a very young and slightly selfish beauty.
“Sorry, Miranda, I’m in the middle of a case.”
Miranda’s ripe lower lip quivered ever so slightly. Her eyes filled with the bright glitter of tears. “I know, Lord Hazelwood, I just thought to leave the shop one afternoon for a lark.” Hazelwood knew he was being played, but the girl did it very prettily.
“If we go,” he said, “we will naturally take Wilde, as he’s a good man to have on hand should any danger arise to threaten you. We will refrain from going out on the ice. And you must have your father’s permission in any case.”
The beauty’s tears vanished. She flashed a triumphant look at her adversary. “I’ll ask my father,” she said. “But I know he’ll say yes.” She was gone in a rustle of skirts.
In the coffee room Hazelwood turned to Wilde. “I’m sure there’s a lesson in this for both of us. You told her about Hunt’s wager?”
“I did, sir.” His shoulders slumped. “She sees the idiot as some kind of hero. She needs a steadier hand than someone who’d do such a mad thing.”
“And you tried to explain that?”
“I did.” Wilde’s voice
was a mumble.
“I’m not sure she’s worthy of you, but I’m on your side, Wilde.”
“I know, sir.”
“Let’s hope for a thaw. Now, I want your opinion on this code.”
If the Husband Hunter is to judge rightly the degree to which a gentleman’s attentions please her, there is a sense she must cultivate above the other, common senses. This new sense has, at present, no name in our language, yet it is as valuable to the Husband Hunter as the eye to the marksman, the ear to the musician, or the nose to the cook. It is a sense that begins to operate as soon as a gentleman enters her presence. It is chiefly through the skin and the movement of the blood through the body that the Husband Hunter observes this sense acting to inform her of her pleasure or disgust in the nearness of a particular gentleman. Much unhappiness in life may be averted by careful attention to the difference between a shiver and a shudder of awareness at a particular gentleman’s nearness. Perhaps in this modern age that looks forward to so many advances in knowledge, there will come a scientist whose study of the nature of love between women and men will lead her to name this sense for us.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Eleven
“You want me to do what?” A bead of sweat trickled down Jane’s back in short, ragged runs beneath the layers of her English clothes. It was not so much what he’d said, as the way he’d said it. The distinct note of satisfaction in his voice made her rebel.
And then abruptly he seemed to forget his own command, as if he were one of Tamerlane’s great astronomers seized by some sudden realization, the solution to a deep cosmic mystery. She waited for him to return to his peremptory self.
Most of the day he’d been angry, well not angry perhaps, but underneath all that charming civility, he’d been at least miffed. He didn’t like it that in the morning she’d accepted her cousins’ invitation to the musicale, and he’d taken it out on her in hours of ordering her about in the name of protocol as if he’d bought her in the slave market in Khiva, instead of being assigned by the government to help her through a hollow ceremony that would not bring her father back.
He thought to wear down her resistance by numbing her mind and making her limbs tremble with fatigue. He could order her about all he liked. She would not change her mind about her cousins’ party.
They had left the cold behind for an oasis of tropical warmth in the central courtyard of Hammersley House. He had let Mrs. Lowndes off to visit with her former charge, Lady Blackstone, and brought Jane here, where the servants were invisible. They could not be more alone if he had strapped her on a donkey and taken her to his desert tent. Tall, potted palms arched overhead. From somewhere came the splash of water in a fountain as if a spring gurgled up from underground. The black and white tiled floor underfoot was warm from some hidden heating source, and a glass ceiling far above them admitted wan winter light. Round, white-painted iron tables, each with a cluster of chairs, stood under the palms at the edge of the room, leaving the open center, where she and Hazelwood practiced for the investiture ceremony.
Jane felt flushed and heated. She breathed the fragrant air of the place and let her tired limbs rest a minute. Though she had heard her father’s stories of meeting lofty personages in distant palaces, she had not imagined how hard it was to move in such a controlled fashion, to bend her knees just so, while dipping her head, and holding her skirts in a way that was both courteous and prudent. Only once had she made it through the entire sequence of moves without stepping on the sheet tied about her waist. Now he wanted her to kneel again. Even if her spirit had been willing, which it wasn’t, her knees refused.
“Remind me how practicing for the investiture ceremony helps me to a husband.”
Hazelwood stepped forward to adjust the pillows and the Holland cloth he had tied about her waist to approximate the panniers she was to wear. “To be the daughter of Sir George Fawkener gives you a distinction you would otherwise lack.”
“People in London take such minor distinctions into account?”
“They do, and so much more. That’s why you need a protocol officer.”
It was easy for him to say. He was not the one sweating. He had removed his jacket, but he had not exerted himself more than to raise his voice or position her limbs. She should be used, by now, to his close-fitting English clothes, and to his habit of touching her, but she wasn’t. They were alone in their tropical garden, which had not seemed to matter while he instructed her to come forward, curtsy, take the handrail, kneel, wait, rise, wait, bow, and back away, always managing her skirts, until the separate steps of the process had begun to blur together in her mind.
Now that they’d stopped for a moment, her concentration shifted from her own limbs and movements to his. His least motion drew her eye to his person. Her fingers remembered being pressed to his flat middle.
He turned away and crossed to one of the tables where a footman had left a silver tray of tea and sandwiches. “Besides, you might need to know what to say to a fellow who leads you from a crowded ballroom to a conservatory, or a balcony, or a garden.”
“As you have done?”
“Just so,” he said without looking at her.
Jane studied his back as he poured the tea. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. He had the same number of limbs in the same arrangement as any other man. He was person-shaped. His hair could perhaps be called interesting, dark as the darkest black coffee beans roasted in the Halab way, but not striking, nothing like the golden hue of her cousin Clive’s curls. Though she stood perfectly straight, she could feel her whole inner being incline his way, like some leaning, earthquake-damaged tower.
Her inner leaning made no sense. She ought to thank him for his instruction and dismiss him. He might even be a social liability with his past scandals clinging to him. She could deal with her difficult, “un”familial relations and follow her guide to a husband without an interfering protocol officer.
He turned back to her, offering a cup of tea, and she had to admit that his eyes were not ordinary at all. The changeable green of them was sometimes like the first green of spring in the hills near the coast and sometimes like the dappled green under the leaves of a mulberry tree at noon in her father’s courtyard. At the moment she read in them some alteration in the nature of his attention.
“You were, what, fifteen when you left England?” he asked.
She nodded.
“And you had not yet started thinking about young men? I thought most husband hunters began early.”
She shrugged. “I had my father and my lessons. He had so much to teach me. I suppose I had his undivided attention for those lessons, and I could please him by doing well. How was a young man to compare?”
“Was there not some manly figure in fiction that stole your heart?”
She looked up from the tea. “You mean like Achilles or Odysseus? There was Hector. I suppose I did love him. Paris and Telemachus were simply annoying.”
He laughed. “My schoolmates found all of them tedious and annoying. I meant was there not a Henry or an Edmund perhaps?”
“From a novel you mean? I didn’t read novels.”
“A flaw in your education, I think. What do you know of your feelings? How will you recognize an inclination for one of your dance partners?”
“I think I will know whether I like someone or not.”
“Will you?” His voice dropped into its lowest register. “You’ll be warm from the crowd or the dancing, and your companion will offer you refreshment, and the night air will be so pleasant, and the dark such a relief from the over brightness of the rooms.”
“And?”
“In such a moment, some fellows are apt to lose their heads.” He busied himself with a second cup of tea.
“Perhaps I should make it a rule never to leave a ballroom with a gentleman.”
He nodded. “A wise precaution. But will you remain wise when you have dozens of suitors?”
“Dozens? No one imagines that I will have dozens of suitors.”
“They underestimate you, I think.” He put his tea down on a nearby table.
The distance between them had shrunk without her notice. He was standing within arm’s reach, and she had the oddest feeling that he might seize her by the waist and whirl her around the open courtyard, pillows and all. Moments earlier he had just been a voice explaining the turn of the left wrist required to manage her skirts, while with her right hand she took hold of the rail of the kneeler and descended in a smooth move neither lowering nor raising her chin, but keeping her eyes respectfully downcast in the king’s august presence. He had warned her that it might be difficult, that anyone, seeing the king in all his corpulent majesty for the first time, was apt stare.
He swallowed. “You see the challenge, I think, and we need a better practice space, one where you need not labor so hard to imagine the palace. This room doesn’t do it justice.”
She regarded him a taut moment longer. “Are we done then?”
“For today. Do you wish to sit?”
“If I may.” She set her tea aside and reached for the ties around her waist, and he reached to help her. Their hands met. His fingers, warm and relaxed, tangled with hers, stiff, and unfamiliar with the knots. The moment caught and held them arrested, standing close in the dim light and fragrant air. His words of a minute before came back to her, but he was not a man to lose his head over some awkward girl standing with a pair of pillows strapped to her waist.
“Let me,” he said. She held her arms away from her sides while he untied the ribbon holding the pillows and sheet in place. He tossed the pillows on a chair and concentrated on rolling the loose sheet into a ball.
She sat in one of the chairs, taking up her tea and looking into the cup.
A moment later he cleared his throat and asked, “Have I been too harsh an instructor today?”
“Were your own instructors so harsh?”