The Husband Hunter's Guide to London by Kate Moore

Author:Kate Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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