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“A head covering always, the garment of a modest woman in the public places of Halab. And sometimes the chadri, my own personal blue tent with a mesh screen to peer through.”

He could imagine her veiled, only the dark eyes visible through the dark mesh of the headpiece, like the gleam of moonlight caught in a well. “Worried about being seen, are you?” He quirked a brow at her.

She shrugged.

“I assure you that no man in London will think of bleached bones in the desert when he sees you in this dress,” he said it solemnly as a kind of promise. Then to lighten the mood, he added, “You do know the gown is not finished.”

“Not finished?”

“It requires panniers, I believe.”

Madame stepped out from behind the curtain. “Panniers, certainly.”

“You mean what a donkey wears?”

Hazelwood tried not to laugh at the suspicion in her eyes. Clearly she was thinking of the woven baskets merchants strapped on donkeys to carry their wares.

“And I believe that there’s an overdress required as well with yards of ribbon.” He took his palms away from her arms and stepped back. Then he had to reach for her again. With the tips of his fingers he lifted her chin. “Have a little faith in Madame’s skill.”

When he next saw her, the white underdress appeared only as a thin column from her breasts to her toes, surrounded by pale pink silk ornamented with ribbons and lace and stretched on either side to cover the required panniers. Though they weren’t quite the same as the baskets donkeys wore, they did give a woman a wide profile. The curves and hollows he’d admired were lost in the overelaborate court gown.

“How am I to move dressed in this absurd way?” she asked.

“Carefully.” He kept a grin under control. “You won’t want to make any sudden turns. You’ll knock the king’s guard down like nine pins.”

“I’ll fall flat on my face.”

“As your protocol officer, Jane, it’s my duty to see that you don’t. We’ll have to practice. For hours.”

She slanted him a glance. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To spend hours ordering me about.”

He stepped back, giving her a quick sweeping gaze. “It’s my job, my duty for King and country. You’ll have to curtsy, kneel, stand, whatever I say.”

She shook her head. “I think I shall insist on something from you in return before I agree to be tutored by you.” She made a quarter turn to the right and sidestepped through Madame’s open curtain as if she’d been wearing court dress forever.

He swallowed. She did not understand how her words might be taken by a man like him, but he could think of a dozen somethings he might offer her in return for her agreement to do his bidding.

Some readers of this little volume may take exception to the term “Husband Hunter,” imagining that it suggests a degree of forwardness unbecoming in a young person entering society for the first time. While this guide does not recommend bold or presumptuous behavior, it does not condone coyness. Coyness is indeed a crime, as the poet would have it, in a world in which there must always be a surfeit of young ladies in relation to eligible partners. Therefore, I must insist on a young woman’s becoming a Husband Hunter, for no woman wishes to be mere “goods on a shelf” but an active seeker of her own happiness and well-being. Above all, a woman wishes to be in charge of her fate.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Seven

Jane stared at the door of her hotel suite and willed it to open. It was near nine. Her arms hung at her sides as dead as wilted as palm fronds in winter. Her empty stomach protested the long afternoon, sustained only by macaroons. Her busy brain contemplated what concession she wanted to wrest from Hazelwood—a true explanation of the episode with Slouch Hat in the park, an admission of whatever thing in his past had made him so disliked by her cousins, or a confession of how he had come to know Madame Celeste. Jane had insisted that the court dress remain at Madame’s until she needed it.

Behind her, Hazelwood and Mrs. Lowndes exchanged a few words, and behind them, she knew came three footmen bearing boxes of tissue-wrapped garments for her new wardrobe as a husband hunter. The resourceful Mrs. Lowndes had arranged for the milliner to send bonnets for Jane to try at her hotel room the following day.

Hazelwood reached around her for the door, which swung open on a distraught Nell, her hands clasped together against her breast. “Oh, Miss, I’m so sorry. Someone’s come to the rooms while I went to supper.”

A surge of quick alarm replaced Jane’s weariness. She reached out to the girl. “You’re unhurt, Nell?”

Nell nodded, and Jane went straight past her to the bedroom for her father’s letters, hidden in a red, Morocco-bound book, cleverly fitted out with a concealed hinge in the binding. She expected it to be missing, but it lay in a jumble of books scattered on the floor by her bed. She sank to her knees and took it up in shaking hands and slid the lock under the edge of the cover. The little box opened. The letters were still there, the blue ribbon in which she’d tied them undisturbed. She snapped the box shut.

Clearly, someone who knew she was staying at Mivart’s had passed that information along to an enemy, accidentally, or deliberately. Someone believed she possessed important information. Her heart pounded.

When she looked up, Hazelwood stood watching her from the doorway. “Nell has gone for refreshments. When you feel more the thing, you can identify what the thief or thieves might have taken.”

Jane nodded, grateful for the dim light of the room. Hazelwood’s words were neutral, but he was not a man to miss the details. She looked around as he lit additional candles. The drawers and doors of the walnut armoire hung open, its contents dumped on the floor. Shoes and chintz-covered pillows had been flung about violently. A shield-back chair lay overturned at the foot of the bed. A kid half-boot had apparently hit the drapery and dropped to the floor.