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Malikov shrugged. “It is up to you to protect your own interests, of course, but in your shoes, I’d want the girl where I could keep a close watch on her.”

Clive got the hint. Malikov was putting him on his guard, offering him a way of dealing with the situation. His parents were hopeless. They would go on spending, without heeding the threat the girl posed and without making any provision to hold on to what George Fawkener’s death had won them all. His sisters and younger brother who had not yet felt the worst effects of the family’s spending habits would now suffer. Clive was the one who would have to do something. He would have to seek out this Jane Fawkener, discover her secrets, and make sure her father stayed dead.

Pamela gave a laugh of delight and leaned forward to receive a pile of chips. Clive promised himself that he would not let anything or anyone keep him from enjoying what he had won.

The Husband Hunter must be seen, and therefore, must take great care of her appearance. This attention to appearance is not vanity but an effort to present her best self wherever she goes. The first element of her appearance is color. The Husband Hunter needs to draw from a consistent color palette flattering to her complexion. The second element of her appearance is fashion. The Husband Hunter must take care neither to be in the vanguard of fashion, dressed in styles that will pass before the Season ends, nor in the arrears of fashion in clothes that suggest more her mother’s youth than her own. To this end a reliable dressmaker and a friend with a discerning eye are invaluable aids.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Five

Jane stood at the hotel window, the little blue book in her hands, trying to compose a suitably shriveling curse for a government functionary with an irritating sense of command. The world outside the glass was an uninspiring gray from the leaden clouds above to the damp cobbles below. She did not wish Hazelwood ill health or a tragic fate, but she could not shake the niggling feeling, like a grain of sand in one’s boot, that he was more than a protocol officer.

The point of a curse her father had taught her was to imagine vividly a host of indignities heaped upon one’s foe. It was a technique to quell fear, to remind a woman that whatever her enemy’s power over her, he was no grander or less mortal than she, and just as subject to misfortune and shifting circumstances. She and her father had vied to invent the perfect one.

Yesterday, Hazelwood had delivered her to the hotel and into the hands of two competent and helpful women—Mrs. Augusta Lowndes, Lady Violet’s former governess, and a young maid named Nell. In short order Jane had enjoyed a long bath, eaten a leek soup and roast chicken, and had her few possessions arranged in her suite. Then she had been left in solitude in a magnificent canopied bed to recover from her journey. She had no quarrel with the arrangements except their cost. Every penny spent now was a penny she would not have to mount a search for her father. Even London-bred Nell had been shocked at Mivart’s costs and had refused to give Jane’s private garments to the hotel for laundering when she learned what they charged per item.

The window rattled with a sharp gust of wind. Jane wondered if she’d lost the capacity to devise a curse now that she was so far from her old home. The previous day’s curse had had no effect on The Husband Hunter’s Guide. She had spent half the night reading the little book. It had not crumbled to dust as her candle burned to a stub, nor had it yielded any obvious clues to her father’s whereabouts. When she’d wakened from dozing over its pages, she felt no closer to him. The book was full of wry observations that made her smile, and advice she would never need. A book was not a father.

His annotations in the margins appeared throughout the book, more than a dozen pairs of letters on the left or right page of text. Her tired brain knew the letters were part of code, but she needed the other half of the code, which would be a map. But the only map in her book was of London, not of the East, where her father had likely disappeared along the branching lines of the old Silk Road. Besides her father’s notes, there were some in a hand she did not recognize, and she could make no sense of those markings at all. It all meant that she was precisely nowhere in her search.

Over the years Jane had come to understand that her father was not really a merchant. Rather he was a sort of geographer, one who mapped not rivers and mountains, but rather friends. He knew the family histories of dozens of small rulers back to the Battle of Kerbela, the intermarriages, the slights, the losses both avenged and unavenged that would be remembered when the time came to choose sides. He could find an English-friendly caliph or Bedouin chief and know to an exact degree how each man’s binding kinship connections and loyalties would tie him to England or send him over to the other side in a moment of crisis. And he believed that crisis was coming. Russian railways stretched farther and farther south to bring the Czar’s troops and supplies.

Now when her father needed rescuing, when he had done his best for England, the government refused to help him, and his daughter had missed some important clue. The sting of the government’s ingratitude, the lost weeks of her journey at sea made her feel desperate to begin, but desperation was pointless. Patience was needed and steady attention to detail. Somewhere there was a prison or a cave. There were guards and cooks, who had cousins and neighbors. There was a commander overseeing the prison. He, too, had a wife and servants and relations, and he reported to a ruler. In the ruler’s palace there was perhaps a servant holding a basket of apricots and nuts, hearing the talk of the palace, a servant who would, for the right favor, reveal what he heard. That was the way of the East.

Behind the thick clouds the sun rose, brightening the landscape almost imperceptibly, though there were no blue domes to sparkle in its light. Her world had stopped rocking, and in her borrowed gown, she had the appearance of an English gentlewoman. With Nell’s help she wore stays that did not cut off her breathing. There was no danger of fainting into a stranger’s arms. She picked up her bag and tucked the little blue book inside. One notation she thought she understood was the phrase Madame Celeste next to a passage about the number and style of gowns a serious husband hunter should have. The dressmaker’s shop would be the starting place of her search.

In the street below, an open black vehicle with a high-perched seat pulled up. A groom stepped forward to hold the horses’ heads, and Hazelwood leaped down. The perfect curse came to her.

May the cold wind toss your hat into the gutter. May your snowy cravat wilt like jasmine in the desert heat. May dirt find the folds of your silk waistcoat, and may the mud and muck of London streets mire your boots from tassel to toe.

At a knock on the suite door, she turned, and Nell, her maid, hastened to open the door. Making a hasty dip of her knees, she admitted not Hazelwood, but two strangers.

They were golden-haired and blue-eyed with long faces and such a strong similarity of appearance that Jane immediately knew they were brother and sister. They were as bright and colorful as a spice seller’s cart, the young woman in a fur-lined, rose silk bonnet, and the young man in a bottle-green coat over a bold green and gold striped waistcoat. Beside the lady’s beribboned hat, Jane’s bonnet sitting on the desk looked like an overdone loaf of brown bread.

“Cousin,” the gentleman said with a bow. “We’ve come to welcome you back to England.”

“Are we cousins?” Jane could not keep the note of disbelief from her voice.

The gentleman laughed. “Miss Fawkener, you must forgive our presumption. We certainly are related. Our fathers were cousins, and that makes us cousins, too.” He bowed again. “Clive Walhouse. May I present my sister, Allegra.”

Allegra’s sharp, measuring gaze roamed the crowded sitting room taking in the desk at the window, the blue velvet sofa, and the rose-striped chairs by the white marble hearth. She glanced through Nell as if the girl did not exist.

Clive’s smile never wavered from Jane’s face. “We’ve come to offer you a tour of the amusements of London, cousin.”

His sister added, “You must be dying for good company after living abroad so long.”

“Thank you.” Jane regarded the first family she’d seen in years. There were eight words in Arabic for first cousin and sixteen for second cousin, and none of them seemed to apply to these two. Jane had no idea what to do with them. In her father’s house in Halab she would invite them to sit on low, cushioned divans and offer them coffee, bread, and tomatoes. They did not look prepared to sit on cushions and eat tomatoes, however.

“Well,” said Allegra, “do you wish to join us? Clive has the barouche, so we’ll be quite comfortable.”

Jane looked from one to the other. Like Hazelwood, they wanted to take charge of her, and like him, they assumed she was helpless to do anything on her own. She supposed she would have to set them straight, and hoped she could do it without giving offense. Even if she could not hire a guide and a pair of donkeys, she was sure she could manage to get to a London dressmaker without special assistance.

Clive stepped forward. “Cousin, you look uncertain. I’m afraid we’ve surprised you, but Allegra and I want only to welcome you to the family and ease your way in London society.” Clive glanced at his sister as if for confirmation, but Allegra was adjusting the fall of her bonnet ribbons over her cloak.

Jane smiled the diplomatic smile her father had taught her. A polite refusal seemed best. “Thank you, but I must decline the invitation. You’ve caught me unexpectedly. I have a prior engagement this morning.”

Allegra expelled a huff of breath. “Where could you possibly be going? You haven’t any acquaintance in town, have you?”