by Kate Moore
Behind her, Annabel sneezed. “Jane, you should go down, unless you want Allegra to have all the gentlemen to herself.”
Jane slid the panel back into place, secured the latch, and reminded Annabel to tell no one.
* * * *
Once past the beleaguered butler, Hazelwood took care to draw no attention to himself. He avoided any encounter with his hostess and her family, kept mainly to the window embrasures, and let his gaze slide away from anyone who gave him a puzzled glance of partial recognition.
An hour passed in which he listened to a florid Italian soprano, studied the pattern of Lady Strayde’s carpet, and looked for Jane in the crowd. He wasted no thought on the painting. He had seen from the stairs that they would not have an opportunity to steal it at present. He might make Uncle Thaddeus a loan.
Waiters ignored him, and over-warm guests passed rather closer to one another than all but the most licentious waltz permitted. Every ingénue looked the same. In his outcast state, he had forgotten the tyranny of fashion, which dictated a uniformity of dress for respectable young women that made them nearly indistinguishable. A Broadwind pianoforte, as yet untouched, told him the evening was far from over.
He spotted Jane at last in the interval after the soprano’s performance. She and Allegra shared opposite ends of a striped green and gold silk sofa. Allegra managed no fewer than four admirers from her end of the sofa with the cool command of a colonel of the line. Young men brought her refreshments, or held her fan, or gestured extravagantly to capture her flickering attention. At the opposite end of the sofa Jane talked quietly with a ginger-haired fellow, Cecil Eversley, who had her unwavering attention, and who, in Hazelwood’s opinion, would never do as a husband for Jane.
Hazelwood had not taken her husband hunting seriously, or he had not believed that she took it seriously. But now that she was out in the world where other men were free to admire her, to discover that gleam in her eye when she was about to say something sharp, he feared a husband might find her. Her thick hair was up, her slender neck and the hollows at the base of her throat, exposed. The customary white dress looked as substantial as a cloud.
He wanted to tell Allegra’s admirers that they had the wrong end of the sofa, but he realized that young men inevitably chose the wrong end of the sofa, as he had done years earlier.
* * * *
Jane had no idea where Hazelwood had gone. Once again he had entered a party, this time in violation of the agreement they’d made, where his hosts were likely to toss him out rather than offer him a seat of honor.
The rooms were crowded with guests, most of them in motion in the interval after the soprano. From her position at the end of Allegra’s sofa Jane could see little beyond the skirts and waistcoats of passing guests. The young man Annabel admired, Cecil Eversley, had looked so downcast at Allegra’s coldness that Jane had spoken to him.
“You like dogs, I hear,” she had said.
He had brightened at once, and they had been talking ever since. To be honest, he had done most of the talking, but that had left her brain free to worry about what Hazelwood might be up to. He was not supposed to enter the house. He was to collect Jane at the end of the evening. That was the plan. He had spoken in jest about stealing the painting, and she hoped he would not attempt the impossible. But he had already gone beyond what they’d agreed to by entering the party.
She widened her smile and gave Eversley a reply to help his story of one of his dogs giving birth to a large litter of puppies. Poor man. He had all the qualities her guide admired, yet he’d never be a favored suitor as long as Allegra was doing the choosing. She wondered whether he would wait to choose a wife until Annabel’s three years, seven months, and three days expired, and she tried to remember what the Husband Hunter’s Guide said about persistence.
It occurred to her that if she were truly hunting a husband, she would choose very differently from the man in front of her. She would choose a man who was competent and fearless, indifferent to opinion, and inclined to confront authority rather than bow to it.
In the next moment Lady Strayde called on Allegra to display her musical accomplishments. Allegra stood. Eversley stopped speaking. His gaze swung from Jane to Allegra. She smiled at her other admirers and turned to Eversley. His face colored, a stunned look of pleasure came into his eyes, and he stuck out both his elbows, like a bird preparing for flight. With a toss of her head and a swift punishing glance at Jane, Allegra seized Eversley’s arm and hauled him toward the pianoforte. Her followers hurried after her, and a general rearrangement of guests and chairs left Jane alone. She supposed she should be downcast, but she felt relieved to be alone.
She was thinking about that look in Eversley’s eyes when a tug on her right wrist made her turn and glance over her shoulder. Hazelwood had her by the arm and pulled her between the heavy velvet curtains at the edge of a deep window embrasure. “Figured out yet how to get your uncle’s painting back?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.” She turned resolutely toward Allegra as the girl began to play. The guests now occupied irregular rows of little gilt chairs facing the pianoforte.
“You’re not going to tell me?”
She disengaged her hand. “I’m not, because you should not be here, and my cousins must not see you.”
“Thanks to the wonders of English architecture, I’ve been invisible these past two hours.”
“We agreed that you were to collect me later.” They had agreed that it was unlikely that an assailant would strike at her while Allegra Walhouse played the pianoforte. She wondered what had prompted him to change his plan. Now he took her by the shoulders and shifted her position. “If you stand here, just so, no one will see me.”
“If you had an ounce of common sense, you would—”
“Stick to the plan? How dull! You don’t like dull men.”
“Don’t I? I quite enjoyed talking with Cecil Eversley just now.”
“Did you? Should I tell you how that exchange looked to me?”
She shook her head. He was far too perceptive.
“I think I must in the interest of your husband hunting plans. There was Eversley, prosing on, probably about his dogs. He’s famous for talking about them. There you were, with polite and perhaps even kindly indulgence, letting him tell you about some mastiff’s pedigree and the animal’s astonishing cleverness, with your hands folded in your lap and your lips fixed in a bland smile just short of rigor mortis.”
She laughed and drew a sharp reproving glance from a turbaned matron, even as she felt Hazelwood tug the blue ribbons dangling from her high waist and pull her farther back into the deep window embrasure. Jane had a feeling she was violating all the rules her guide recommended.
“You are so wrong. Is there no guide for young men? Eversley apparently has no idea about how to…”
“Talk with a woman? Flirt a little?”
“None. I like him the better for it.”
“It won’t win him Allegra’s heart, that is, if she has a heart to be won.” Hazelwood spoke directly in her ear, so that his breath disturbed a loose strand of her hair. She could not help a slight shiver at the sensation.
“He’s already won a heart I think.” She was thinking of poor besotted Annabel.
Her words were almost lost in the applause for Allegra’s first piece, but Hazelwood gave a start as if he’d seen some danger. Jane glanced around but could see no threat as Allegra immediately moved to her next selection.
“Shouldn’t you slip out while Allegra is playing?”
“Are you so eager to return to Eversley?”
“Merely hinting that great stealth is the proper protocol for an uninvited guest’s leave-taking.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll manage.”
“It—”
“Jane!” At the sound of her name, she turned and saw Clive.
�
�What are you doing so far in the shadows? Didn’t mother have a seat for you in the front?” As he caught sight of Hazelwood, his smile vanished. “How in the deuce did you get in here, sir? My mother will have an apoplexy if she sees you.”
Hazelwood stepped from behind Jane. “Lady Strayde’s house, is it? I must have mistaken the place for a more entertaining establishment. I’ll take my leave.”
“Just a minute.” Clive’s face flushed an angry red. “I don’t know what permits you to claim an acquaintance with my cousin, but you can’t go pulling her into corners in this shabby way.”
“Worried that my presence will cost your mother an invitation to the famous Vange ball?”
Clive caught the eye of a footman and gave the man a curt order.
Hazelwood bowed to Jane, his eyes alight with unholy satisfaction, and turned toward the salon doors, his movement unhurried.
Clive pulled Jane’s arm through his and patted her hand. “That fellow has no sense of how unwelcome he is here and elsewhere. He takes advantage of your ignorance.”
“My ignorance?” Jane could not help asking. She made a note that if she were ever to write a guide to husband hunting if would include a list of those condescending gestures gentlemen made that really should disqualify them as potential husbands. Hand patting would be on her list.
“He’s debauched, hopelessly in debt, and utterly cast off by his family. You don’t know the story, of course, but his outrageous behavior nearly ruined my mother’s sister.”
“Can you tell me?”
Clive momentarily checked his tongue, his gaze on Bolton approaching with two footmen. He nodded to the butler and cocked his head toward Hazelwood’s back. “Perhaps you should know.” Clive hesitated. “Hazelwood interrupted my youngest aunt’s wedding, stormed in really, sword drawn, and hauled her out. He claimed that they had an understanding and that she was being forced to marry Stafford. Of course, nothing could have been farther from the truth.”
“When was that?” Jane asked. Across the room she could see Bolton and two footmen move purposely around the seated guests, who turned to stare after them, in spite of Allegra’s cascading notes.
“Years ago. I was just a boy, younger than Percy. It must have been ought five or six.” Clive, too, watched Bolton rather than his sister.
When Hazelwood was twenty. “And your aunt, did she ever marry?”
“Oh yes, Stafford, of course. She’s quite the happy matron.”
“I’m glad to hear it. It would be sad if one day’s folly by an ill-judging young man had cast a shadow over a woman’s whole life.”
Clive laughed. “You’re a sly one, Jane, getting me to admit that my aunt recovered.”
Once, Jane and her father had broken a journey in the month of Moharren, to attend a mystery play that lasted ten days in which the slaughter of Imam Hoossein at the battle of Karbala was reenacted. Apart from her father among the women, Jane had been surprised when the audience reacted with a grief as keen and unrestrained as if the death had happened only that week and not centuries earlier. When she had asked her father about it, he told her that families were great keepers of grievances. Trust me, he’d said, families have libraries and chests full of them. She remembered the incident because her father had been uncharacteristically serious. No laugh or playful wink had accompanied the words. They had been spoken instead as a solemn truth.
Hazelwood had reached the salon doors when he simply stopped to look at her uncle’s painting. Jane tensed, willing him to keep moving as Bolton advanced.
Allegra moved into the final flourishes of her performance, the audience stirred, and another footman, looking at his tray of glasses, oblivious of the phalanx bearing down on Hazelwood, stepped directly into the path of the oncoming men. At the collision his tray went askew, and glasses flew upward. Guests jumped aside as champagne rained down, and when Jane glanced back, Hazelwood was gone.
Jane was left staring at the painting. She joined in the polite applause, turning to watch Allegra take her bows, sure that Hazelwood had come to the same conclusion she had. The painting concealed the map.
Contrary to what the Husband Hunter might expect this guide to suggest, she must not fall in love. It is no more advantageous to “fall” in love, than to fall from a horse or a bridge or down a flight of steps. The uncontrolled path of a falling object and the inevitable end of a fall in a broken head or broken limbs is no apt metaphor for the onset of deep and lasting affection. Love does not happen to us as a result of chance or a misstep. It is not induced by Cupid’s arrows, nor by the juices of rare flowers applied to one’s eyelids. We may discover that love has begun, or that we are in the midst of love with another person, but not because we have fallen but because, in a fertile garden carefully planted and tended, love has bloomed in its season and place when perhaps we were not looking.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter Fourteen
Hazelwood handed Jane into the carriage and climbed in after her without speaking. He settled a rug over their legs and feet. The carriage lamps cast a faint light into the cold interior.
“Are you sure you want to leave? We could make a push to get your uncle’s painting. Cut it out of the frame, roll it up.”
“You already created a sufficient stir this evening, you know.”
“Did I?” He knocked against the forward panel for the coachman to start the horses and leaned back against the leather upholstery. The dim light revealed his profile, the straight line of his brow above the deep-set eyes, the plain thrust of his nose, and the faint pull of a smile on his lips. In profile he looked almost ordinary, almost like the sort of man her guide would recommend, a sensible man of good character and respectable reputation. She reminded herself that he was no such thing.
“The clumsy footman, I take it, is an associate of yours?” She hardly needed to ask.
“Did Clive give you trouble on my account?”
“Clive forgave my ignorance in connecting myself with you.”
“Generous of him.”
“He explained how you offended his family at his aunt’s wedding. Do you want to tell me your version of the story?” She could imagine how offhandedly he would tell the story, making light of his feelings for the bride. She guessed he might have been very much in love, at twenty.
“I’m sure Clive’s version sheds a sufficiently glaring light on my faults.”
“Must you play the hero all on your own?”
“The situation called for action. That’s what I do. I act. Are you going to tell me what you discovered about the painting?” There was a touch of irritation in his tone.
“After you have confessed to a habit of independent action more likely to harm you than anyone else?”
“Clive’s story is an old one. No damage done. You can see for yourself.” He took her gloved hand in his, slipped it inside his greatcoat, and pressed it against his chest, his warm, hard chest. Through soft wool and silk and linen she could feel the strong beat of his heart. The sudden intimacy altered the smooth rhythm of her pulse.
The carriage rattled along over the stones, and under the rug her knee bumped against his thigh. Hazelwood’s other hand slid around the back of her neck and pulled her closer. The wool scarf over her head slipped back.
“We didn’t finish our conversation about how to behave alone with a gentleman in the dark.”
She swallowed. “I decided never to be alone with a gentleman in the dark.”
“Yet here you are.” His low voice had that break in it that turned her insides to jelly and made the inches apart seem like too much. His mouth was near but not near enough. It was like the end of a desert journey, when the donkeys stumbled on their feet, and it was dangerous to even think of water.
He took her other hand in his and lifted it to his face. “Eversley’s not the man for you, you know.�
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“He is exactly the sort of man my guide recommends.”
He shook his head. “Let me show you why your guide is wrong.”
“You mean tell me.”
“Eversley’s touch doesn’t move you, and what’s more, you know it.”
She could not deny the truth of it. Though she had no experience by which to judge, some instinct of which she had been previously unaware told her as much. She had barely tolerated Clive’s patting her hand, yet Hazelwood’s tying her bonnet or tugging at her ribbons drew her whole person to him, like a wave sucked back to the sea.
She should lean away from him, but her body refused to move. “You know, I have had suitors before.” She was not as green as he supposed.
“Have you?” He pulled the wool garment from around her throat.
“Once, the woodcutter’s son asked my father what price he would accept for me. And another time the neighborhood widower who raised pigeons on his roof told my father that the sight of me in our courtyard had inspired him to think of marriage again.”
“How is a fellow to impress a woman of such vast experience, I wonder?” She could hear the laughter in his voice. And felt the change in him when the laughter died.
He lowered his head and leaned forward across the narrow space where their breath already mingled in the frigid air. Then he kissed her.
At first it was a lazy, teasing kiss, lips meeting in a touch as light and airy as words and wit. It coaxed her along, floating lightly on the tide of their wordless exchange, until she was far out from shore, not anchored any more to the bench of a rocking carriage rolling through London. A deeper current of feeling welled up and knocked her off-balance. She clung to him more. He was solid and real.
His mouth took firm and unyielding possession of hers. The kiss became a question about who she truly was, the husband hunter she claimed to be, or a daring woman who would put her trust in a stranger who was still a mystery to her yet who seemed to understand her as no one ever had. The dark, rocking coach seemed made for their encounter. He slid so that his body angled down and made a hard slope against which she lay, held in place by his arm around the small of her back and his mouth on hers.