The Husband Hunter's Guide to London

by Kate Moore

  “I suspect that it’s one of the early maps he sent your mother before they married,” said her uncle. “Perhaps even the first one.”

  “And he sent her other maps?” Hazelwood asked. With one finger he traced down the center of the map from the Banbury Road along St. Giles street through the town to where the River Cherwell met the Thames in the south.

  “It was their way,” her uncle replied. “Do you see these notes?” He pointed to a pair of initials inked onto the map, like those Jane had found in her book. “EF, JL?”

  “Yes, I see them. What’s the significance?” Hazelwood asked.

  “All family members’ initials, you see.”

  “Oh?”

  “EF, why that’s your grandmamma, Jane, Lady Eliza Fawkener. And JL, that’s your mother’s mother, Julia Leigh.”

  Jane nodded. She did see. The inked pairs of initials dotted the map the way the pairs of initials dotted the pages of her Husband Hunter’s Guide.

  “George and Julia would have a good laugh about those initials, I guess. The families, you see, didn’t want them to marry. Neither the Fawkeners nor the Drummonds. Julia was supposed to marry some fellow our parents picked out, so Fawkener and Julia invented a secret way of communicating.”

  “Communicating what?” Hazelwood asked.

  “When they were apart, and he was up at Oxford, he would write to her that he planned to visit some family member. It was his way of telling her where he’d be and when. He had initials for special places in London where they could meet when he was in town.”

  “So,” said Hazelwood, “she had the map, and when she received a letter, she would go to the map and know where to meet him?”

  “Just so. He’d write something like—will visit Uncle Matthew for tea. Then she would know to go to St. Martin’s or some such place. Or he’d write that he was coming to visit Henry, and she’d know that he meant for her to meet him in Old St. George’s burial ground where Henry is buried.” Thaddeus grinned at them, pleased to be able to explain. “This Oxford map was just the first. He gave her one when he went abroad, too, just after they married on his first mission.” Uncle Thaddeus cleared his throat. “That is, adventure, wanted her to be sure she knew how to follow his journey. Damned uncertain times to be on the continent.”

  Jane studied the map. She recognized the same sets of initials she had detected in her book. “Uncle Thaddeus, do you know who all these people are? RD and HD?”

  Thaddeus’s brow wrinkled. “It’s been a long time since I thought much about ‘em, but those are my dead brothers—Richard and Henry.” He tapped the map where JW appeared. “That’s your Great Uncle John Walhouse, I think. And,” he tapped another set of initials, “that’s Frederick Walhouse that died young. Your grandmamma will have all these people noted either in her peerage or her Bible.”

  Jane kept her gaze on the map. She had not been wrong. Her little book was full of clues to her father’s route, and now she understood her father’s two-part system. To trace a journey of his, you needed the marked map, and the letters with their deceptive air of chatty news about the family. It helped to know the family tree, in which he had trained her well.

  She looked up and found Hazelwood watching her, reminding her of one more thing she had—a protocol officer, who was the government’s man and who now possessed the key to her father’s secret methods of communication.

  “You’re welcome to take the map, niece. It was your mother’s after all.” Uncle Thaddeus gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder and began rolling up the map.

  “Thank you, Uncle. I’d like that. I have little that belonged to her.”

  Thaddeus cleared his throat. “Niece, would you mind doing your uncle a bit of a favor?”

  “If I can, I will, uncle.”

  Uncle Thaddeus tied a black ribbon around the rolled map and pointed with it to the bare wood above his mantel. “There’s a picture of mine that your papa was keeping for me. Now your cousins have it, and I’d like it back.”

  “Picture, uncle?”

  “It’s called Nelson Turning a Blind Eye. Clever as can be. There he is the great man himself, in the thick of the battle, putting his blind eye to the telescope, so that he can disregard orders and win the day. Painted by one of those big-canvas, history painters, you know.”

  “How did it end up with the cousins?” Hazelwood asked.

  Thaddeus shook his head. “When they took over Fawkener house, they claimed the furnishings, too. I was supposed to be there for the reading of your father’s will, niece. Damned quick it was. Somebody from the Foreign Office must have told them your papa was gone, because they were reading the will before any news of him reached the papers. I was lucky to catch wind of it from talk at the Admiralty, but I was too late to get the picture with Lady Phoebe already in possession.”

  “Uncle, is it the large painting above the staircase?”

  “That’s the one. Quite on the grand scale, must be five feet across and nearly seven feet high, I think. Thing is, I can’t see Phoebe caring about a picture like that. Not her style at all.”

  Jane nodded. She remembered that painting, more for what was behind it than what it looked like from the stairs. She would not be leaving the house tonight with her uncle’s picture tucked under her cloak.

  In the carriage, Hazelwood turned to her. “You do realize that your dear Uncle Thaddeus appears to be low on funds at the moment.”

  “I noticed.”

  “No doubt he intends to sell that painting. So are we stealing it tonight?”

  Jane turned to him. “On my second night as a husband hunter?”

  “In a hurry to get a husband, are you?”

  “How many gentlemen should I consider, do you think, before I make my choice? Five or six or a score?”

  “You sound as if you’re hiring for the position.”

  “Could I? Would an ad in the papers be a more direct method of finding just the man I want?”

  Jane smiled to herself as he turned the carriage at the end of the narrow lane. At least for the moment she’d made him forget about paintings and maps.

  * * * *

  It was dark by the time Hazelwood returned to the club and growing colder by the hour. He had sent Wilde off on an assignment earlier, and Miranda had taken over the youth’s duties temporarily, setting out a tray of sandwiches and coffee. He asked her to bring him what he called the club copy of The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London.

  Drawing a chair close to the fire, he settled down to review the pages of the little book, thinking about what he’d learned from Jane’s uncle and what he still needed to know.

  He had read dozens of George Fawkener’s letters, which had been copied by a man in the Foreign Office, but Hazelwood had read them, as a man indifferent to family connections, skipping over the chatty news of tea with aunts, walks with uncles, and visits to cousins. He had been searching for anything that might reveal the state of England’s friends in the East. He’d been wrong. He should, apparently, have been paying attention to the very thing he’d ignored, Fawkener’s accounts of visiting his relatives. That was the code.

  He stretched his feet out and propped his boots on the brass fender. The question was—how well acquainted was Jane with her father’s code? This afternoon she’d given nothing away, neither in her face nor manner. Yet presumably, she knew her father’s code, and with the book, she had a sequence of points on a map. He wondered, whether she had the corresponding map in her possession, as well. Had the code and the map given her the certainty that her father was alive?

  He flipped through the little book again. The coded pairs of letters appeared on the left or right pages, in the upper or lower corner to convey some element of Fawkener’s journey as yet undetermined. As he puzzled over the possibilities, a passage caught his eye, and he read:

  The Husband Hunter’s
first evening in society will be a success, if but one gentleman in the crowd takes note of her. However limited her beauty and accomplishments, the element of novelty in her appearance among the familiar faces of several seasons will assist her in drawing notice. Her youth and her eagerness to please and to be pleased in company will encourage gentlemen to stay by her side long enough to discover her charms of character as well as appearance. Young men will vie for her attention, and a prudent woman will not deny any an opportunity to make her better acquaintance until she discovers an irredeemable character flaw that requires her to dismiss a gentleman from her suitors.

  —The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  Tonight Jane would be that fresh girl at the party, a girl Allegra could never be. Few men might notice, but if even one man saw Jane the way she was, the game would change. Hazelwood didn’t like it. He had all the advantage of private time with her, of a hundred opportunities to meet and hold her gaze, to make a joke, to touch in all the ways that he knew could awaken her sleeping sensuality. But he had none of the rights of a suitor. He could do nothing honest.

  What he had was a job to do. He closed the little book and stood and stretched and turned from the fire. He needed to get his hands on Jane’s copy of the book, the one she carried with her at all times. He must charm and mislead and deceive until he had possession of the book. And then he had to find the corresponding map.

  If Jane Fawkener learned to flirt and dance and accept the attentions of dozens of men of fashion, it should not matter to him in the least.

  * * * *

  At Clive’s request and over Hazelwood’s objections, Jane arrived ahead of the other guests to meet her family. She was shown up to her cousin Phoebe’s dressing room, where a pair of lady’s maids were engaged in finishing Phoebe and Allegra’s hair for the evening.

  Phoebe gave Jane’s appearance a thorough scrutiny. “I can’t fault you, Jane, except perhaps to recommend the regular application of Gowland’s Lotion for the freckles. We’ll send a jar of lotion home with you tonight, and your maid can apply it at bedtime.”

  Her cousin turned back to look critically at her own appearance and direct her maid in adjustments to her coiffure, and Jane saw a chance to slip out of the room. Her uncle’s painting beckoned.

  Jane paused in the hall as the sounds of servants preparing for the party drifted up the grand staircase from below. On either side of her were concealed jib doors, made to look like the wall itself, one door led to the servants’ stair and the other to a closet above the grand staircase behind her uncle’s painting. A flash of memory of her younger self in the closet sent her hand reaching under the molding to push the concealed latch. The door opened, and she stepped into the dark.

  She took a deep breath, inhaling musty smells of forgotten things. The scratchy folds of a wool coat and the slippery perfumed silk of some old evening cape enclosed her as if she were wearing the chadri again, that tent-like covering of a modest woman in the public places of the East. Behind the mesh face piece and under the blue concealing folds of her chadri she had watched her father’s guests and hosts over the years. Silent and unobserved, she might as well have been in a closet.

  When she was ten, her father had shown her the spy hole concealed in her uncle’s grand painting. A panel in the wall slid to one side, exposing the back of the painting. Her father had given her the job of watching a group of men arriving for a meeting and telling him, if she could, which of them were on his side and which were against him. If only it were as easy now.

  She found the latch and slid the panel aside. A beam of light shot through the hole. The trick was not to touch the canvas itself. Behind her the concealed door opened. She lifted her hand to cover the spy hole.

  It is necessary to cultivate the art of conversation. You must speak while dancing all but the most vigorous country dances and waltzes. But how is the Husband Hunter to learn the art of conversation? Practice, of course.

  There is in every society a subject into which complete strangers enter readily and by which they signal their interest in continuing a conversation. In London that subject is the weather. Once you have established your partner’s willingness to converse, you may learn much through the weather. In talking about the incessant rain, or a severe frost, or the dry weather for harvest, the Husband Hunter may judge of the affability, the wit, and the balance of concern for others and self-concern her conversational partner possesses.

  Inevitably, the topic of weather will exhaust itself, as surely as rain clouds move off. That is the moment in which the Husband Hunter must keep her wits about her. There are a number of topics on which she must never speak. Do not speak of anyone’s personal appearance, neither your rival’s, nor your own, nor that of the oddest looking person in the room. Furthermore, avoid speaking of yourself, your accomplishments, or your family. You may, on the other hand, always speak of principles and art and the beauties of the setting in which you find yourself.

  Are there subjects that arise about which you have very little knowledge, but which are of great interest to your partner? So much the better. His knowledge of cricket or the arrangements for the officers’ living aboard his majesty’s ships or the intricate points of tithing is an opportunity for you to exercise your curiosity. In encouraging him to speak, you are not so much learning a new subject, as observing the workings of his mind and determining his character.

  —The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Jane, I know you’re in here. Are you hiding?” The door closed, and Jane’s youngest cousin Annabel pushed her way in among the cloaks and coats.

  Jane released the breath she’d been holding. Her thirteen-year-old cousin was no threat. “I am scouting the terrain.”

  “Mama won’t like it if you ruin your hair and dress.”

  “Promise you won’t tell.”

  Annabel offered her solemn promise. “What are you scouting in the dark?”

  “There’s a spy hole over the grand staircase.” And perhaps a concealed map that will help me find my father.

  “Really? A spy hole? Not mice and spiders? Where are you?”

  Jane reached out and found Annabel’s arm. “Come stand on this box, but don’t touch the…wall.” She lifted her hand from the spy hole, admitting a ray of light that illuminated Annabel’s face.

  Annabel stepped up on the box and pressed her eye to the tiny opening. “Oh, you can see the whole entrance stair with everybody coming up. How cunning! But won’t people see us?”

  “They won’t if we are careful not to touch the canvas.” Her uncle’s painting concealed the tiny hole in the end of Nelson’s famous telescope from the Battle of Copenhagen. From below guests would see only the glint at the end of the telescope. Her father loved the joke.

  Annabel moved back from the peephole. “I see what you’re about Jane. You want to see the eligible gentlemen. I think it’s a good plan.”

  “Do you see anyone eligible?” Jane wanted to laugh at her thirteen-year-old cousin. Obviously, husband hunting started early in London.

  “You mean anyone young?” Annabel returned to her position looking down on the arriving guests. “I only see old married men and ladies so far, but don’t worry. Mama’s parties are famous, and young men always come late. How did you find this spy hole? I never knew it was here.”

  “My father showed it to me.” Her father believed in watching the way people arranged their faces as they arrived at a meeting or a party. There were a dozen small gestures through which one could read honesty or falseness.

  “Finally.” Annabel sighed and stepped back from the peephole, and Jane leaned forward to take a look.

  She saw a fashionable young man in black evening wear with cropped ginger hair, ruddy fair looks, and an utterly guileless manner. “Is he an eligible?”

  “Oh, yes!” Annabel sighed again. “That�
��s Cecil Eversley. He has dogs. Allegra won’t talk to him because his fortune’s too small for her. If it were my season, I would talk to him, but it won’t be my season for three years, seven months, and three days.”

  “An eternity.”

  Annabel sighed again, and Jane watched a pair of girls in white gowns make their curtsies to cousin Phoebe and nods to Allegra.

  “What do you see now?” Annabel tugged at Jane’s sleeve.

  “Allegra’s rivals, I think. They look very English in their white gowns.”

  “Let me see.” Annabel took Jane’s place. “Oh, Lady Rivers’s daughters. Their mother thinks they are great beauties, but you needn’t worry. You look very English tonight, too.”

  “Do I?” She did not feel English. She should, she supposed, feel excited and on edge with anticipation about her second venture into London society. She felt instead as if she were going to a play, as if everything that would happen would happen to other people, and that she would sit in the darkness observing, moved briefly, perhaps by the players’ distress or joy, but still on the outside. And later she would tell Hazelwood about it.

  At the peephole Annabel gave a giggle. She stepped away and spun in a quick whirl, setting the coats in motion and stirring the musty air.

  “What is it?”

  “Just what Mama’s party needs.” Annabel pushed Jane back into place behind the painting.

  A crowd of late arrivals, all young men, jostled their way up the stairs, talking and laughing, and tossing coats and hats at the butler, Bolton, and his footmen. Among them Jane spotted Hazelwood, bold as brass, flinging a cloak on the pile in a footman’s arms. Hazelwood looked directly at the painting. From below, it seemed impossible to steal without ladders and accomplices, but if Jane told him about the panel in the closet, Hazelwood would steal it. The feeling of being at a play vanished. Instead she felt as if one of the actors had called her up from the audience to join him on stage.