The Husband Hunter's Guide to London

by Kate Moore

  Hazelwood was right about Lady Eliza being cross as a bear. Jane might deplore her grandmother’s attitude, but she could not help but notice that it was resentment that drove Lady Eliza. Her son had deserted her for places whose mysterious attractions she could not imagine, and then he’d been so foolish as to die and leave her with no one on whom to vent her displeasure. Jane wasn’t willing to be that person, but she could see that she had to push her grandmother to empty some of those vials and leave her drawing room.

  “Taking my grandmother to services will be good for her, but don’t think to use my grandmother to get me to that investiture ceremony.”

  Hazelwood cocked one dark brow at her. “Perhaps over a luncheon, we can consult your book again, lest we forget that your aim is to find a husband not to soothe angry bears.”

  He turned the carriage into a main thoroughfare, and they found themselves abruptly trapped. A wide cart had lost a rear wheel and spilled its cargo across the road. Heavy bags of grain had split open, spilling fragrant malted barley onto the cobbles. The driver of the cart appeared to consider the situation hopeless, for he had taken a seat on the curb opposite to fortify himself with swigs from a jug. A gentleman in a stalled carriage ahead of theirs stood berating the luckless driver for bringing his cargo up a hill in icy conditions.

  As carriages pulled up behind theirs and drivers shouted to clear the road, an elderly crossing sweeper threw down the tools of his trade, and with his hat began scooping up the spilled grain. His action drew the notice of several other passing persons who began using whatever they had handy to collect the grain. At that the driver roused himself, waving his arms and shouting to stop the wholesale plunder of his cargo. He set down his jug and seized a skinny boy who was shoveling barley into a large round wicker basket almost half his size. He tossed the boy aside, and another scavenger swung at him.

  For a moment the scramble reminded Jane of Halab, of the jumble and confusion one day in the main souk, when a donkey got stuck between the narrow walls, and a crowd of boys had emptied its baskets of pomegranates.

  “I don’t like it.” Hazelwood turned to his groom, who came forward to take the horses’ heads. “We’re getting out of here,” he told Jane.

  As he turned to leap down from the carriage, Jane felt a violent tug on her left arm, jerking her sideways, dragging her up over the edge of the seat. A startled cry escaped her. She twisted, clutching her bag, trying to see her assailant.

  Hazelwood caught her about her knees and held on. Her assailant dropped his hold, and her shoulder slammed against the sharp upper rim of the wheel. She couldn’t see beyond the brim of her bonnet. Hands clawed at her cloak. Hazelwood shouted for his groom. The man yelled at her attacker. The horses sidled uneasily, jerking her out of her assailant’s reach, and Hazelwood pulled her back up onto the seat.

  For a moment he held her in a tight embrace. Her heart raced madly, and her breathing came in gasps. Black dots danced before her eyes as she stared out from the depths of her bonnet. She gave vent to her feelings in the only words that came to her in the moment, pouring out a satisfying curse in the general direction of Hazelwood’s shoulder, heaping indignities on assailants and spies.

  After a long moment Hazelwood relaxed his hold. She took a deep breath and straightened, facing forward. A dozen or more persons old and young now swarmed around the spilled grain while a pair of laborers under the direction of the first angry gentleman helped the carter shift his load so that his horses might drag the ruined wagon to the curb.

  “Do you have your bag?” Hazelwood asked. She showed him. “Good. Don’t move. I’m going to get us out of this crush.”

  She nodded. The carriage tilted as he climbed down and disappeared into the crowd beyond the brim of her bonnet. Her heart had stopped racing. Her vision had cleared, and her breathing slowly steadied. Her left arm and shoulder ached. The cold made her breath a cloud, and the energy of the fight drained from her limbs, so that they trembled. Papa would say it was time to take stock of what she’d learned from the encounter.

  By the time she heard Hazelwood’s voice giving orders and felt him settle beside her again, she had reviewed the events of the past few minutes right up to Hazelwood’s embrace.

  He was angry. She sensed that anger in the deliberate care with which he adjusted the carriage rug over their knees. “Jane, I can’t see you.”

  At a gentle tug on the brim of her bonnet she turned to meet his fierce green gaze.

  “What hurts?” he asked.

  “My arm. I suspect it’s bruised. But nothing’s broken,” she assured him. “May we return to the hotel now?”

  He didn’t move. She regarded his gloved hands. Carefully, he secured the reins and turned to her. The soft leather tips of his fingers under her chin warmed her to her toes.

  “You need a new a new bonnet, you know. If you’re going to be attacked, I want you to see your assailants coming.” He tilted her chin up and began undoing her bonnet strings, his fingers quick and clever against her throat.

  She swallowed. “Wouldn’t a big stick be handier than a new bonnet?”

  “Handier, perhaps, but less fashionable. Perhaps your attacker simply took offense at this disastrous bonnet. It certainly offends me.” He lifted her bonnet from her head and frowned at the thing, which now had a fist-sized dent in the crown.

  She looked away, an unaccustomed warmth burning in her cheeks. She had not batted his hands aside, as a respectable woman of Halab would have done had a man outside of her family presumed to touch her in a public place. She knew that no one regarded them in the tangle of horses and vehicles, but she felt exposed with her head bare, her hair uncovered, her thoughts unruly.

  Next to her Hazelwood turned the bonnet around in his hands, studying it as if it were a puzzle to be solved. “Of course, it might be my hat, to which our assailant objected. There are legions of men in London who object to a high-crowned beaver worn at a jaunty angle. Our assailant might have been trying to get to me through you.”

  Our assailant. He made of the attack a shared adventure, willingly taking on her enemies as his. She considered telling him what she really believed about the attacks.

  She stole a glance at his profile. In spite of his customary joking tone, his mouth had settled into a taut, implacable line. Without the deep-poked bonnet her glance could range as freely as his over their surroundings. He’d anticipated danger from the moment he’d seen the broken cart. Yesterday, he had made a game of danger and acted with a cheerful lack of hesitation in the face of it. He’d returned to the dress shop, his fashionable clothes soaked and torn, his face and arm scraped, indifferent to the damage. He had saved his most severe frown, his brow contracted in displeasure, for her poor bonnet.

  What she’d been thinking, before he’d touched her and stalled her brain, was that the ferocity of the attack confirmed the value of the information her father had gathered. Her father knew something truly vital to this game between England and Russia. His enemies believed he had passed the information to her, and now they were here in London. In protecting her, Hazelwood protected her information. He was, after all, the government’s man, not hers.

  She had, somewhere on her or with her, information for which her father had risked, and perhaps given his life. She could not give that information away until she knew for certain who had betrayed her father.

  “Husband hunting in London is more dangerous than I supposed. I did not imagine it would lead to being tugged violently by opposing forces and dropped like a sack of lentils.”

  He looked up from her damaged bonnet with an unreadable gaze. “Ah, sadly, husband hunting is not for the faint of heart. You’re not afraid to carry on, are you?”

  She understood him. His answer told her it was a game they were playing, different from the one England and Russia played, and she did not yet know the moves. “Apparently, my situation raises doubt
s in some quarters about my sincerity as a husband hunter.”

  “Then we must do our best to let it be widely known that the objective of your London visit is to bring a man to his knees in the most honorable way possible. An advertisement in the papers might do. Newly arrived from abroad, Miss Jane Fawkener seeks an eligible gentleman with whom to contract that lifelong partnership sanctioned by the church—the holy bond of matrimony. Only men of means need apply.”

  “You are absurd. Are you never serious?”

  His expression changed again, startled recognition sharpened his gaze, which caught and held hers. “No matter how many despicable cowards object to your bonnets, Jane, as your protocol officer I will defend you.”

  She turned away. He spoke nonsense, but she thought that her hair might escape its pins and tumble down her shoulders from the look he gave her. With a self-mocking laugh, he sent the bonnet, its black strings fluttering, sailing out over the crowd of scavengers, and took up the reins.

  The female visitor to London is right to regard the bonnet as an indispensable item of fashion. She notes with astonishment, and perhaps envy, confections of silk and ribbon adorning the heads of ladies of every station and condition. Her first impulse is to seek a known milliner with a reputation for elegance, and to purchase, at great cost, a bit of headwear that will secure her reputation as a woman of taste, forgetting the very reason for which bonnets were devised.

  While she accepts the compliments of her friends, the sun beats down, mists rise off the Thames, winds howl, and rains descend. While she, with smug complacency, repeats the name of her clever hatmaker, a half a million chimneys spew into the air the smoke of sea coal, which settles as a fine soot on every street and dwelling and blackens the whitest stone. The Husband Hunter who would preserve her fair beauty wears a bonnet not to advertise her taste or fortune, but to protect her hair and face from the elements.

  —The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  Chapter Ten

  Hazelwood put down the book and looked up. He had not touched the girl since they’d returned to the hotel. While they were calling on her grandmother, three bonnets had arrived for her. He’d taken a seat as far from Jane Fawkener as the hotel sitting room permitted and occupied himself with reading aloud to her while she tried on the bonnets. The plan was to distract her, to keep her focused on husband hunting, not on England’s enemies or her agents. Instead he was the distracted one, worried that England’s enemies could get to her all too easily. The boldness of the attack bothered him.

  She was neither a green girl nor the waif Goldsworthy described. She’d stood up to her grandmother and an assailant without flinching. If Hazelwood let her think, her busy brain would figure out more than he wanted her to understand about the attack and his response to it. He had gone far beyond the brief of any protocol officer.

  Now he ventured a look at her. “Sensible advice. I’m inclined to revise my estimate of the usefulness of your little guide.”

  She glanced at him from under a fetching blue velvet cap. “I’m sure the author would be gratified.”

  “She should be. Perhaps I could provide a commendation to appear in the front matter of any further editions.” He put the book on the table beside him. Later he would add to his copy more of the notations her father had penned in the margin of certain pages. If George Fawkener were using the book to pass along information, it was in code, and the letters in the margins of the page needed examining.

  Her father’s notes were a further reminder of the mission. Hazelwood had had an unfortunate moment earlier in the public street when his anger at her attacker had opened the way for other feelings. Looking up from the ugly bonnet in his hands, he’d seen the beauty of the ordinary, the round cheek, the clear, frank gaze, and the resolute chin. He’d felt as if he’d let his guard down and taken a direct hit from some fourteen-stone bruiser wearing weighted gloves.

  It did not help his frame of mind that the milliner from whom the bonnets had arrived had been one Mrs. Paxton, proprietress of an establishment with which he was quite familiar. The last woman for whom he’d purchased Mrs. Paxton’s bonnets had been a high flyer of a sportive temperament who had been as familiar as he was with Aretino’s Postures and whose reputation had helped to prompt his father’s legal action against him. Jane Fawkener might be a woman of spirit, but she had no experience of desire or its consequences.

  She was studying her reflection in a glass and trying to tie the bow under her chin. The close-fitting cap of cerulean blue velvet framed her face perfectly and gave her skin a pale gleam like pearls.

  He took up the book again. “What makes you trust a woman writer, likely a spinster, to be your guide?” he asked.

  “Who better?” She was holding her head perfectly straight.

  He leaned back on the sofa. “Why a man, of course, the object of the hunt. Wouldn’t a woman like to hear directly from a man how he may be ensnared?”

  “I doubt any man would reveal such a thing.” She let go of the black ribbons under her chin to begin again. “Besides, a husband may be the object of the hunt, but as a treasure rather than a trophy to mount on the wall.”

  “You make husband hunting sound quite mercenary.”

  “You are being deliberately provoking.” She looked away from the mirror and had more success tying the bow. Of course, she tied it primly, with perfect symmetry, directly beneath her chin.

  “Am I?” His fingers itched to adjust that bow.

  “Of course. The guide is for a woman of sense who looks upon marriage as…as a partnership.” She frowned at herself in the glass. “In the East the poets write that marriage is the free will of the two partners based on love.”

  “I’m not sure a man sees marriage in those terms.” He put the book aside and crossed the room, threading his way through the furniture. He had to fix that bow.

  “In what terms then, does a man see marriage?” She appeared surprised to see him so near.

  “As a catastrophe to be avoided until the last possible moment.” He took her by the shoulders, turned her to face him, and once more tilted her chin up.

  She gave him a wary glance. “And how did you escape the catastrophe?”

  He tugged the ends of the hat ribbons undoing her insipid bow. “In my youth—”

  “And you are now in your dotage?”

  “Flannel waistcoats are next.” He pulled the ribbons to one side and began to tie a bow in the hollow between her right ear and the edge of her jaw. “In my youth I resisted the prescribed path laid out for my father’s heir. I courted women of the demi-monde. I speculated in trade. I refused to marry a lady of birth and rank to whom my father had betrothed me. It was a great scandal. For my sins, my father cut off my allowance, and when that measure did not seem to arrest my downward slide, he went to parliament to cut me off from him in a more permanent way.”

  “He ruined you.”

  He smiled at her plain speaking. “I ruined myself. My father merely contained the damage to a single generation.”

  “And your lack of fortune makes you ineligible?”

  “In the eyes of husband hunters, like yourself.” He gave a shrug. “Nevertheless, my friends tell me to beware the woman with maternal ambitions who will take me in order to become the mother of the next Earl of Vange.”

  “Such a hopeful outlook on conjugal bliss. No wonder you doubt my guide’s wisdom.”

  He turned her to face the glass again. “Always tie your bow on one side or the other, Jane, or you’ll look a complete dowd.”

  Hazelwood thought for a moment that he’d succeeded in turning her mind from the conversation they’d been having. She looked pretty, her eyes bright with the argument. He rang the bell for Nell to bring his greatcoat, hat, and gloves.

  Jane twisted away from the mirror. “How does your mother feel about your father’s casting you off?”

&
nbsp; Nell entered with his things, and he thanked her and shrugged into his coat, letting the question of his mother’s feelings go unanswered. When Nell left, he started a different conversation.

  “We need to practice the investiture ceremony, and I know a place that might give us room and privacy.”

  “Privacy?”

  “To spare you any embarrassment.” He picked up his hat and gloves and moved toward the door. “You may find it quite difficult to manage the kneeling and bowing.”

  Her expression shifted rapidly from exasperation to shrewdness. “I’ll manage. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “About your mother?”

  He shrugged. “She has washed her hands of such a son as I am. You know—hang, beg, starve, die in the streets.”

  She watched his face closely. She doubted he understood how his mother felt about him at all. “It is a good thing, then, that you are reading my guidebook. Likely, it will help you as much as it helps me.”

  “Help me?”

  “Oh yes, because marrying well will be your best revenge on those who underestimate you.” She turned her head slowly from side to side. “I like this blue hat best. It lets me see the most.”

  * * * *

  Hazelwood walked back to the club from the hotel. Ordinarily, he would find a walk in the night air a good head-clearing exercise, but London was turning arctic and he hastened his steps. He went straight to Goldsworthy’s office, but found no sign of the big man. In the coffee room minutes later, Hazelwood shed his greatcoat and shouted for Wilde.

  “Here, sir,” the youth called. He jumped up, looking abashed, from one of the sofas, leaving Miranda Kirby sitting next to the spot he’d left. “We’ve been reading your book, sir.”