The Husband Hunter's Guide to London

by Kate Moore

  “What if,” she said, “Malikov were to be holding the map in his hands when your friends arrive?”

  “That would be brilliant.” There was a flaw in her plan, but he would not mention that now. “If you are determined not to leave, can you faint on command?”

  “I can drop to the ground.”

  “Good. I suspect that our guard may lose his head and fire at some point.”

  “What’s to be my cue?” she asked.

  He did not get to answer as the door opened at the far end of the room, and Malikov came striding back. Their guard began to speak in rapid angry bursts of words, gesturing at the two of them.

  Malikov glanced at them as he dropped a satchel on the baize table. “What have you two been hatching that causes the fellow such distress?”

  Hazelwood shrugged and stepped away from Jane. “Malikov, what brings you to Crannock House in the middle of the night if not cards?”

  Malikov looked at him, a man still deciding how to solve an unexpected problem. “Crannock is a friend of mine. He suspected that someone was abusing his hospitality and making a home for himself here. He asked me to look into it.”

  “Did you find the interloper?”

  “I fear your presence here tonight may have frightened him off.”

  “I had no idea. Perhaps the evening will not go to waste if you acquire the map.”

  “Hazelwood, you grow tiresome. I have not seen this map you offer me. A quarter of an hour ago, you claimed you could lead me to it. Now, you claim to have it.”

  “Would you care to see it, to verify that it is the map you seek? My condition this time will cost you nothing.” Hazelwood angled toward Malikov, crossing between Jane and the man by the fire. He stopped a few feet from the baize table.

  “What is it?”

  “Simply that your man put his pistol in the corner.”

  Malikov looked at the jumble of papers on the baize table. The disorder reminded Hazelwood of Goldsworthy’s desk. The truth of it struck him. Malikov was Russia’s Goldsworthy in London. He dispatched spies and collected information from them to send home, and he was about to pack his satchel with a treasure trove. And still he wanted that map. He motioned to the man on the hearth to put the pistol in the corner.

  Hazelwood lifted his right foot and reached into his shoe for a piece of paper. Jane gave a smothered cry.

  Malikov’s gaze stayed on the paper. “It’s a folded piece of paper.”

  “As is a bank note, yet most men find it valuable. Are you ready to hear my condition?” Hazelwood began to unfold the paper.

  * * * *

  In spite of the cold Nate found himself sweating as he led his party through the back of the darkened house to the very door of the room where they could hear Hazelwood and Malikov in conversation. He would never have guessed that a man as large as Goldsworthy or one as stiff-rumped as Chartwell could move so stealthily. The third man created no sound at all. All but two of the horse guard troops were to wait in place on the Piccadilly side of the house, ready to intercept anyone who tried to bolt out the front.

  Clare had his ear to the door from which the faint voices came. He turned the handle, and pushed the door ajar enough to hear Hazelwood offer Malikov a map. Chartwell stiffened in the dark. Clare raised his arm to give the signal.

  Clare’s arm dropped and they burst through the doors, fanning out across the bare floor, Blackstone and Clare at the center, Goldsworthy and Chartwell to the left, and Nate and the third man to the right, boots smacking the floor and weapons jingling. Behind them the Horse Guards.

  Malikov’s hand swept up a paper from the table in front of him, crumpling it in his fist and pivoting toward the fire. Hazelwood’s left fist shot out and caught Malikov squarely in the face, knocking him back, and making his nose gush blood. A dark figure from the hearth dashed for the corner and spun, wielding a pistol.

  The shooter in the corner looked wildly at the firepower arrayed against him, and coldly took aim at the stranger beside Nate.

  Hazelwood called out to Miss Fawkener, “Jane, your stays are too tight.”

  The girl collapsed, and the man at Nate’s side dropped to his knees on the floor at her side as the dark fellow on the hearth fired. His shot whistled over the kneeling man’s head, past Nate’s sleeve, and into the woodwork at the dark end of the room.

  The shooter turned to flee, but a bullet from Clare’s pistol brought him moaning to the ground clutching his leg. The room rang with echoes of shots fired and stank of burnt powder. Blackstone hauled Malikov to his feet and secured the crumpled paper he’d attempted to discard. Malikov pressed his ruined cravat to his streaming nose.

  Clare moved to stand next to Hazelwood. They all looked to Goldsworthy, but it was Chartwell who strode up to Malikov and Hazelwood. “Arrest them both,” he said.

  “No,” the girl shouted, her gaze on Hazelwood. She attempted to stand, but stumbled, her feet caught in her skirts and the folds of her cloak. The man at her side reached to help, and when she took his hand and turned to him, she cried out, “Papa?”

  The stranger took her in his embrace, and Nate did not hear what they said. She was sobbing and laughing and beating the man with her fists.

  The Horse Guards marched forward to seize and bind Malikov and Hazelwood. Manacles clanked as they were applied. It was wrong. It was mad. Nate glanced at Blackstone and Clare. Their faces had turned to stone. The girl, caught in her father’s embrace, did not see Hazelwood marched off.

  As Chartwell passed out the door behind the manacled men, he turned to Goldsworthy, and under the noise and confusion of shouted orders and jingling metal, Nate heard him say, “I’m shutting your club down, man. Your unorthodox methods are a formula for catastrophe. No more.”

  The Husband Hunter, of course, wishes for the blessings of her friends and family when she has found that man above all others that she can truly love. While she hopes that they may see her delight and his merits, not having her knowledge of his character, they doubt his worthiness from worldly standards. She will now hear from all and sundry the flaws in his manner, his education, his politics, and the size of his income. Now that her success as a Husband Hunter is assured, her relations will predict the unhappiness and failure of the very enterprise they have been insisting she embark upon. They now wish to prevent her ever becoming a wife, for what is her success, but the breakup of the family in which she had lived these eighteen or twenty years. The Husband Hunter must be prepared, indeed, to defend her love.

  —The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  Chapter Twenty-five

  For once on the morning of her father’s return Jane did not mind the overheated drawing room in her grandmother’s house. An unexpected shudder shook her body now and then, rattling her cup against the saucer, as she and her father drank coffee together. Margaret had found a faded blue wool gown for Jane to wear until her clothes could be retrieved from her cousins. Her father wore a coat of his from before their time in Halab. It made a striking contrast—the old-fashioned English coat and the full beard and swarthy looks of a man of Halab. She could not stop looking at him.

  “You look very English,” he told her, putting down his cup. It was a signal to begin the real talk they had not yet had.

  “How long have you been in London?” she asked him. He had brought her pistachios and almonds. Margaret put them in a dish on the little table that held the coffee tray.

  “I arrived just days after your own arrival. I had to remain dead until we could find out for certain who was betraying our people in the East.”

  “Clive?”

  “Clive and others who have been passing secrets to Malikov. We suspected him, but were never able to prove anything.”

  “We?”

  “Goldsworthy and I.”

  She put down her cup as well. “Why?” She wanted him to tel
l the story, to explain why he’d let her think him dead, and why she’d been shipped to London, and told she must become someone she was not.

  The question seemed to stump him. He stood and walked away to the window, looking out into the street. She did not know whether he found London familiar or unfamiliar.

  “I’d been compromised. Our friends were in danger. One of them died getting me that map. I knew I could no longer do the work I’d been doing. I knew I had to get you out of Halab before anyone decided to use you against me. And I had to find out who had compromised our network. It had to be someone in London.”

  “But you could not tell me any of this, any of your plans? You had to let me imagine you captured or dead?” Jane’s throat ached. He was explaining the spy’s reasons for doing what he’d done. Not the father’s reasons. “I did not mind, you know, that we lived in Halab surrounded by families, by markets full of tetas and ammis and kaitis. We were only two, but I was Rana, and you were Abu Rana, Rana’s father. It was enough for me. I did not miss family, but when you were no more, what was I to feel?”

  He turned back to her from the window, his expression changed. “Ah, I see you are ahead of me. It wasn’t until I went to Barker, the English Consul, to arrange your return to England, that I saw the error of my ways as a father.”

  He came back to the sofa and sat facing her, his clasped hands hanging between his knees, his head down. She waited for him to go on.

  “Barker gave me a piece of his mind when he realized how we had been living. He made me understand that I’d deprived you of the English life you were meant to have, of all the things I had taken for granted because I had had them as a boy and because they no longer mattered to me when your mother died. You were supposed to be an English girl.”

  “And you thought giving me a book would make me an English girl?” She said it gently, but she could not help but think of that black moment in the bank when the Hammersleys had first put the book in her hands, and she had cursed it.

  He looked up then, his eyes bleak with loss. “It was your mother’s book. I thought… I wanted you to have it no matter what happened to me. Can you forgive me?”

  “Oh, Papa, I forgive you. How could I not?” Jane crossed the room and knelt and took his clasped hands in hers, searching his face. How could she blame him when she had failed to recognize the love behind his gift. “I thought I’d lost you when you were the only family I had.” Then she stood, pulling him up with her and offering him a grin she knew was every bit as cheeky as a Hazelwood grin. “But I have to get my book back, Papa, and there’s only one way.”

  Her Papa held her hands and looked into her face, the bleakness in his eyes replaced by a wary questioning look. “You don’t have the book?”

  She shook her head. That was the spy in him still. “It’s quite safe.”

  “Who has it?”

  “Lord Hazelwood.” Her papa looked shocked. “You see, Papa, I did become a husband hunter, and I’ve found the husband I want.”

  He freed his hands from hers abruptly, looking shocked. “You can’t be serious. Not Hazelwood? Do you know that man’s past, his history, his—” He bit off further details.

  Jane smiled. Her father’s objections were just what she expected. “I’m going to marry him just as soon as you get him out of jail. Today, would be good.”

  “I can’t do that. He gave the map to Malikov.”

  Jane shook her head. “No. He didn’t. He used your notes in the book to make a map to deceive Malikov. I have the real map, and I will return it to you when I marry Lord Hazelwood.”

  “You really want to marry this man?”

  “I do. Just as soon as you secure his release from prison and clear him of the charge of treason.” He was her father, and he loved her in his way, but he had loved his spying more for a very long time. Hazelwood, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, had tossed aside his spying when it was the only thing he had, just for her. “And, Papa,” she said, “you will arrange our marriage today like a good papa in Halab.”

  The Husband Hunter’s wedding whether it is celebrated in the conventional way on a Sunday morning followed by a breakfast and cake, or in some way suitable to the parties themselves, either elaborate or simple among few or many guests, is merely the outward sign of an inward joy. The bride and her groom appear to be figures in a larger design. The world will note its surprise or its satisfaction in their union. The guests, and even the papers, will comment on her gown and his handsomeness, but the unveiling of their true selves, one to the other, will happen only when they come together as husband and wife in that extraordinarily private place, the marriage bed.

  —The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Jane Fawkener married Edmund Dalby, Viscount Hazelwood, in her grandmother’s drawing room on a rainy afternoon as London began at last to thaw from its great freeze. She married him in the Halab way. Her father and the groom both signed the aqd, the marriage contract, and she and Hazelwood declared the free will of two partners to join in love.

  The wedding did not take place quite as soon as Jane had wished. She had had to endure an endless day of interviews with Lord Chartwell over the map. To all questions she had stubbornly repeated that she would make a gift of the map to her husband when he was free to be her husband and when all charges against him had been dropped. She pointed out to Lord Chartwell that considering his unwillingness to help her in the matter of her father’s disappearance, she was being extraordinarily helpful to the government in its current dilemma.

  While the matter remained unresolved, and while the government collected her possessions from her cousins and made a thorough search of them, she sent for the dress made for her for the investiture ceremony. The ceremony took place on the second day of Lord Hazelwood’s incarceration with her father receiving the silver cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in person. He and the king had exchanged a few words when the king saw him.

  “Thought you was dead, Fawkener,” said the king.

  “Clerical error, your majesty. Still very much alive and at your service,” her father replied.

  On the third day of Hazelwood’s incarceration, while Jane’s newly knighted father worked to gain his release, Jane paid a visit to Lady Vange. It was a brief call, well within the limits prescribed for such visits. Jane merely went to acquaint the countess with her intention to marry Lord Hazelwood in the English way on the first Sunday morning after the banns were called. Across a few feet of rich carpet the countess’s green eyes were strikingly like her son’s but without the laughter that habitually lighted his. Jane refused to be daunted by her future mother-in-law’s grave elegance, but she thought it wise to refrain from praising her love to his mother just yet. The countess would see for herself in time the man Hazelwood had become if once Jane could bring them together. She thought she knew the perfect way.

  What was a mother-in-law after all but a teta-in-waiting?

  A small wedding party of Jane’s grandmother, her companion Margaret, Hazelwood’s friends Captain Clare, and Lord Blackstone and his lady, and Jane’s Uncle Thaddeus dined on tea and cake after the brief exchange of vows in the drawing room. After toasts and embraces all around, the newly married couple left for her Uncle Thaddeus’s cottage in Hampstead.

  The bedroom on the upper floor of the cottage was as light and airy as the lower floor was dark and closed in. The roof sloped upward high above them. Two windows cut deep in its slant admitted light and offered a view of heath and sky. The rough white walls were bare, but the four-poster bed was covered in a blue quilt and a vase of early hyacinth sat on the mantel. A cheering fire burned on the grate with a bucket of water and a kettle at hand.

  They stood and faced each other before the fire and listened to the whisper of the rain on the thatch and the rattle of it in a drainpipe while the steps of Uncle Thaddeus�
��s man retreated down the wooden steps to the floor below.

  “Are you sure you want this?” her new husband asked. “Because I can think of a score of reasons why you should not marry me.” He set their two small bags on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  “Such as?” she asked, looking around for a place to hang her damp cloak.

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, disordering it, just as she longed to do. Today it reminded her of the dark gleam of coffee beans roasted in the Halab way. He squared his shoulders in a most un-Hazelwood way. She tried not to smile.

  “The Season is just about to begin. Your father is recovered. You could be a proper husband hunter now. I have your book in my bag. You could begin again.”

  “Hmm? And go to balls and routs and be seen in the park and at the theatre and wear those gowns we ordered together?”

  “Precisely. And I can name ten men better than I”—he swallowed—“worthier than I to be your husband.”

  Jane undid the ties at her throat and slipped out of her damp cloak. She wore the white gown from that day at Madame Celeste’s, without the panniers. He really was going to resist happiness all the way. But happiness had its ways, like sand from the desert, of slipping through the cracks of barred windows and doors. “Ten men? Hmm. I think it’s too late for that. I don’t want a better man than you. Do you have any other objections I should consider?” She tilted her head, considering the shade of green in his eyes. They were still shadowed.

  He swallowed. “Your father does not like me. Did you know that he insisted on a clause in that contract that allows you to divorce me?”

  “An esma it’s called. It allows a woman to divorce a man, a rare thing.” She folded her cloak over the back of a light chair under the nearest window and faced him again.