The Husband Hunter's Guide to London

by Kate Moore

  “Papa,” Allegra wailed. “What do I want with such a creature? He’ll ruin everything. Mama”—she turned to her mother—“everyone’s forgotten me.”

  Eversley’s reddened further. “I only meant…”

  “Can I have him, if you don’t want him, Al?” Annabel asked, sliding from her seat, and offering the puppy a bit of bacon from her plate. He wagged his tail and went right to her as if they were old friends, snapped up the bacon, and buried his head in Annabel’s skirts.

  “If he should belong to anybody, he should be mine,” Philip declared. “I’m old enough to have my own dogs now.”

  Cousin Phoebe rose from her chair, her gaze steely. “Children, you forget yourselves. Annabel, unhand that dog, and wait for me in your room. Allegra, pull yourself together and thank Eversley for his gift. Strayde, see Eversley to the door. Philip prepare yourself for your tutor.”

  When her gaze came to Jane, she faltered, as if trying to determine in what way Jane was to blame for the poor showing the family made before a guest and potential suitor. Eversley might love dogs, but he did have thousands of acres in Wiltshire. “Jane…”

  Jane seized the moment. “Shall I take the gift to one of the footmen, cousin Phoebe? Perhaps a place can be found in the stables until you decide what to do with it?”

  “Yes.” Phoebe turned back to the rest. “Now, go, everyone. Allegra, come with me.”

  * * * *

  Jane found her footman lurking in the back of the foyer. He stepped out of the shadows without speaking and reached for the squirming puppy in her arms. As Jane surrendered her burden, she could hear Phoebe admonishing Allegra on the stairs above them. She looked at the earnest young man all ears and teeth, and it occurred to her how awkward it was going to be to convey the message she wished to convey to her love through the medium of the sturdy young man in front of her. Then he spoke.

  “Miss, Lord Hazelwood says we must get you out of here. He has a plan.” He spoke in a low, serious voice for her alone.

  Out of here? “Of course he does,” she said. So much for a deep exchange of sentiment with Hazelwood. “Help me take the puppy to the stable, will you?” she said in a carrying voice.

  “Yes, Miss. Follow me, Miss.” They passed through a concealed door in the wall into a narrow hallway. The puppy looked at Jane over the footman’s shoulder and licked the young man’s ear. Jane tried to see the danger in her situation. Allegra’s bedroom, the bedroom of a baron’s favored daughter, had to be one of the safest places in London. Jane had detected no signs of followers or intruders there. Her enemies had not been able to reach her in days. She had read her guide to Allegra, handed her cousin a glass of water, or helped her arrange the cards and flowers of admirers in her room. No one came to Jane’s own room except Nell, who helped her dress and undress, and the young maid who did the fires. If there was danger in her cousins’ house, she did not know where it lay.

  When they reached the stable, the young footman looked around. The grooms and coachman were not about. “Lord Hazelwood can’t protect you here.”

  “But I’m with my family,” she explained. She could not see Teddy or Philip as stout defenders, but surely Phoebe or Clive would stand up to an attacker. “Don’t my cousins need protection, too? Allegra was hurt when someone tampered with the carriage.”

  The puppy pulled on the young man’s ear. “Please, Miss. Lord Hazelwood wants you to go shopping today. You can take me to carry the packages. And we’ll get you to a place where he can keep you safe.”

  “I promised to stay with Allegra until after the Langford ball.”

  “He won’t like that, Miss.”

  Jane raised her brows. She looked around for someplace where the wriggling puppy could be contained and opened an empty horse stall.

  “You’re watched, Miss. There are two of them. They trade off. They know your window.” The footman let the puppy down, and he trotted into a corner and relieved himself.

  “But it’s Allegra’s window that I look out of, not my own. They can’t be very smart.”

  The young man snorted. “They’re not paid to be smart, Miss.”

  “I mean, we ought to be able to outsmart them. Tell Hazelwood I can leave from the ball.” Jane watched the puppy poke his nose into the straw and sneeze.

  “He won’t like it, Miss,” he repeated, shaking his head.

  “Tell him…tell him, I know. I understand.”

  Unless one is a duchess, the experience of taking one’s place in the great world of London society requires the enduring of slights. Inevitably, the Husband Hunter will meet people whose sense of their own superiority is so keen that they will look down on her as from a great height, as if she were an insect on a leaf, to be trod underfoot. These persons are conscious of every distinction of rank, particularly rankings of their devising. One person may be a snob in the matter of personal appearance and think everyone else deficient in handsomeness. Another person may be a snob in matters of accomplishment and may disdain your modest achievements with a musical instrument. Still others, many indeed, are snobs in matters of taste. These latter will see inferiority in every preference of yours that does not conform to their refined aesthetic sense.

  What is the Husband Hunter to do in the face of such slights? Surely, she should laugh.

  —The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Hazelwood swore quietly as he removed his evening pumps at the top of the servants’ stair. His love was inconveniently principled. He understood that a promise was a promise, but he regretted that she’d given hers to a vain beauty from a family of idle, self-indulgent twits, who hadn’t the wit to avoid a present danger. Jane’s promise was keeping her where Malikov and his thugs could get at her.

  The night had gone three. The watcher across the way had retreated to someplace where he wouldn’t be turned to a block of ice by morning, and Wilde had admitted Hazelwood to the house through the kitchen and directed him up the servants’ stair to the floor where she had a bedroom. He found his way to her door, which was locked, used the key Wilde had procured and let himself in. She breathed softly in sleep, on her side, turned toward the window. He didn’t risk a light, but crossed to the bed and placed his hand over her mouth. “Jane, it’s Hazelwood,” he whispered.

  She started and her teeth sank into his fingers. He held on, repeating his earlier words. She let go with her teeth and shook her head free of his hand, and he heard her push herself upright in the bed.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered hoarsely.

  What was he doing there? Momentarily, he was a man drawn to the temptation of a warm woman newly roused from sleep. In the cold room, her warmth was as palpable as the embers of a banked fire waiting to be stirred to life. He was perfectly willing to do the stirring, to tend and stoke that fire till it blazed.

  Of course, he was a spy, and his mission was to remove this girl with her valuable information from the path of the enemy. They were closing in. He only hoped they did not know how much she knew.

  “I believe you started this particular game.”

  “Ah, so I did.”

  “I don’t think you fully understood the message I sent through Wilde.”

  “I promised I’d stay with Allegra through the Langford ball.”

  “Because she’s so sweet and charming and attached to you?”

  “Because Clive asked me to, and because whoever tampered with that carriage, did it to get at me, but caused Allegra real harm.”

  “How is she?”

  “Improving.”

  “Clive didn’t ask you to stay longer than the ball?”

  “No.”

  Hazelwood let her think about that. The best possible outcome would be for her to descend with him now through the sleeping house and let him take her to the room above Kirby’s shop prepared for her.
She need only take her guidebook. The government could replace anything she left behind. She would be safe. He held himself still while she thought, though his toes were growing decidedly cold.

  She let out a breath. “Surely, Clive doesn’t want the information I have. He’s not a spy.“

  “But his friend Malikov most likely is.”

  She went back to her thinking, and he tucked his cold hands under his arms. “So Malikov might exert some pressure on Clive to…” Her voice trailed off, puzzled.

  “To get information from you.” He didn’t want to admit to his deeper fear that Malikov was planning to abduct her.

  The bedclothes rustled around her. “And this is what you came here in the night to my room, against all protocol and decorum and sense, to tell me?”

  He felt off-balance. There was no point in admitting anything else. His feelings about her had changed, had grown into a fitting punishment for a man who had in his youth disdained propriety and who now was well-served in loving a woman he could not wed without involving her in his own ruin and disgrace. Such selfish love did not deserve to be called love at all.

  “Hazelwood, think,” she said.

  He was trying to. “Leave with me now, and I will get you to secure place, where the enemy can’t reach you.”

  “And help me prove that my father is alive?”

  Was her father alive? Hazelwood doubted it, but if the proof was in that guidebook, he would gladly help her uncover it. Goldsworthy would ask him to betray her again, but Hazelwood could not lose her more than she was already lost to him. The thought cleared his head.

  “Of course.”

  “Liar. You don’t believe he’s alive.” She spoke without anger or resentment, a reasonable woman stating a fact.

  “Alive or dead, your father would want you safe.” That was a truth he could agree on.

  “My father would want me to finish the mission. He would want the information he gathered to get into the right hands.”

  Hazelwood heard the bedclothes rustle again. A draft of warm air full of the scent of her washed over him. More silken noise, and she struck a light on the bedside table. The glow illuminated her hands and the lace cuffs of her night rail. Her toes peeked from under the hem of the modest gown. The sheet and coverlet had been flung back on the bed exposing the slight depression where her hips had lain. The narrow bed called to him and he turned from it.

  She faced him with the book in her hand. “You took it before. Now, I’m giving it to you.”

  Extravagant declarations rose to his lips. The book didn’t matter. Goldsworthy didn’t matter. England didn’t matter. The Russians could have the book. They could have the whole of the East for all he cared, its vast deserts, its towering mountains, and its passes to India, if she would come with him.

  He steadied himself and swallowed the words clamoring inside him. She would smack him in the head for such sentiment.

  “Kiss me,” he said.

  She shook the book at him. “Take it.”

  “Kiss me first,” he amended. “Put it down, and kiss me.”

  “A kiss won’t change my mind.”

  “If you’re so sure, you have nothing to lose.”

  She gave him a measuring look, a weighing of an adversary’s strength. He’d kissed her before, but not as he meant to kiss her now. Apparently she decided she could meet the challenge.

  “Remember,” she said. “It’s all about the family.” She put the book back on the bedside table and stood waiting for him to make the first move. He reached out and drew her into his arms and settled her against his chest. She leaned back immediately to look up into his face, a smile playing on her lips.

  “You’re cold.”

  Not all of me. “Only my toes, but you don’t have to kiss my toes.”

  She shivered in his arms, and he pressed her closer, sliding his hands around her. Without stays, there was just the natural shape of her, the straight back, the bend of her waist, and the flare of her hips. She lifted her face to his, the smile gone, replaced by a look he recognized all too well.

  He tried to keep his head, to remember that he was the one seducing her, making her forget her determination to stay with her cousins, but she stirred the forgotten longings of his boyhood, when he’d dreamed of being a knight and rescuing a fair damsel and earning her love as a reward for his noble deeds. He had dreamed then of being worthy of the prize. So he let himself kiss her as he wanted to kiss her.

  He pulled her close, as close as their clothes permitted, locking his arms around her, lifting her off her feet so that her weight, which was nothing, rested against him, so that she had only him to hold her up. Her kisses rained down on him, melting his indifference to fate, washing away the slights he had endured for so long that they seemed a part of him. He had perfected his own form of self-mockery in defense, but there was no defense against her love.

  When, minutes later, he set her lightly down, she rested her head against his chest.

  “What was that?” she demanded.

  “That was an argument,” he said, breathing unevenly. “That was the whole of Aristotle, all the grammar, rhetoric, and logic I ever learned. It was a speech in the Lords. Are you going to come with me?”

  She shook her head. “It was very persuasive. I was moved. But I made a promise.”

  “I can’t protect you here.”

  “But you can protect my information. Take the book.” The solemn expression had returned to her face. She slipped from his arms, took up the book, and held it out to him. He slid it into his jacket. She turned him around and gave him a shove toward her door, and he went because though he was a man in love, he was also a spy.

  His hand on the doorknob, he turned to have one last glimpse of her over his shoulder. She came up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

  He swallowed. “I will come for you. Do not leave that ball with anyone other than me.”

  “I promise.”

  * * * *

  Miranda held the note in her hand. She had only to knock at the servants’ entrance to be admitted. She had promised to deliver the note directly into the hands of Miss Fawkener this morning, but she knew she would be asked to wait in a dark hall on a narrow bench or in some shabby, out-of-the-way room where the housekeeper dealt with tradespeople.

  Though Lord Hazelwood had sent her in one of the club’s closed carriages with a driver and a footman, the lofty butler had turned her away from the front door with its brass knocker. And now, standing below the street with the iron railing above, the smell of the coal cellar around her, and the mean little door in front of her, Miranda felt her grievances fully.

  Jane Fawkener had gone back on her promise to keep away from Lord Hazelwood. She had contrived somehow to ensnare him when it was Miranda who had loved him best and longest. She knew that Lord Hazelwood could love her with the proper encouragement. He had thanked her for her willingness to contribute to his last case. He had squeezed her hand with the note in it and said he owed her a great deal because she had believed him when no one else did.

  And Jane Fawkener had exposed Miranda to Nate Wilde’s mockery. And worse, his pity. Nate Wilde, who came from nowhere and who was nobody in spite of his fashionable coats and his big words. Nate Wilde, who had been a pickpocket and a spy before better men had taken notice of him. Nate Wilde, who thought she, Miranda, should pick him, when she’d had a mother who’d been born a lady in France. What did his fine shoulders and his sweet kiss matter when he could never make Miranda a lady?

  A swirl of cold, gritty air eddied around her, and she turned away from the door. She tucked the little note into her bodice and held her cloak close about her. Her gentlemen spies did not need Jane Fawkener to crack the code and save those Englishmen abroad in heathen places. Lord Hazelwood had figured out most of it himself. No doubt he would solve the case by himself. Miranda w
ould help him.

  Jane Fawkener didn’t love Lord Hazelwood. She had been willing to toss him aside, and now she was going to a great ball where there would be dozens of gentlemen. Let Jane Fawkener take one of them. Miranda would not help her to take the one gentleman that rightfully belonged to Miranda.

  A ball is thrilling. Whatever the intentions of the host and hostess, whatever the motives of the individual guests, a ball promotes courtship, that form of intercourse between a lady and a gentleman that leads to love. In a ballroom a gentleman and a lady, though strangers, may progress rapidly through the stages of growing intimacy from first glances to direct gazes to conversation to an electric meeting of hands, and beyond to a striking degree of intimacy where the dance permits—the touch of a gentleman’s hand to a lady’s waist or her hand to his shoulder.

  The ballroom itself is an altered space that delights the senses. Under the dazzling lights of the chandeliers, warmed by the exertions of the dance, breathing the perfume of banks of flowers, and feeling the pulse of the music in her very soul, the Husband Hunter feels exhilarated. Once singled out from among the ladies present to receive a charming gentleman’s particular attention, she must be hardheaded indeed not to be misled into believing instantly that she has found the husband she seeks.

  —The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Until Jane entered the Langford ballroom, she had forgotten how her appearance marked her as a husband hunter of the common English variety. In little more than a fortnight of following her guide, she had acquired an appropriate look and manner and sufficient acquaintance to insure invitations to dance a set or two. Now all that remained was to complete the conquest of some available manly heart and choose a life for the years granted to her. Around her were gentlemen from the most humble who could offer a comfortable establishment to the most exalted. In choosing one man she might be called to be a political hostess. In choosing another she might be mistress of a vast estate and involve herself in the health and happiness of its staff and tenants and in the stewardship of its great treasures. She laughed at the idea. Allegra would choose one of those lives, not Jane.