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The atmosphere in the room changed. Jane felt it at once. Though neither had moved on the little sofa, the distance between them had shrunk and become charged. In his hands the book looked small and feminine. He turned past the chapter she pointed out, flipping through the book to a page where her father’s annotations were plain in the margin, his thumb coming to rest next to her father’s notes. She held her breath.

“Do you want to tell me what you’re hiding in your bedroom?”

“No more than you wish to tell me who followed us today.”

“Ah, we’ve reached another impasse.”

She smiled cordially. “Except that we’ve agreed that I’m to continue my husband hunt.”

The teasing look was back in his eyes. He was not a man to push foolishly against a locked door. “Not a moment to waste. A woman must seek marriage while she’s young. Her great attraction, beauty, is entirely ephemeral.”

She twisted on the sofa to face him. Teasing talk was a game to him. “You claim a man’s attractions are more lasting than a woman’s?”

“Obviously. A man may always marry unless he’s poor. He may be a gout-ridden octogenarian, but if he has property, he’ll find a willing lady. Indeed, he may find himself more sought after the shorter his apparent lease on life.”

She pretended to consider it. “I had not thought of older gentlemen, but perhaps I should aim my efforts in that direction.”

“And where will you find these potential suitors?”

There was a note in his voice that she was beginning to recognize. It irked him when she appeared to be in earnest about her husband hunt.

His voice was a dangerous reminder of the intimacies of the day. One could dash through the rain and emerge to shake a few drops from one’s hair or coat, but she had stood in a downpour of Hazelwood. From their first meeting, their eyes and hands and voices had been free to meet in ways she had never imagined in Halab. She reminded herself that such touches and glances were commonplace to him. It occurred to her that he knew Madame Celeste because he had come to the shop before with a woman whose wardrobe he was buying not so that she could meet the monarch, but so that she could please Hazelwood.

Jane took the book in unsteady hands, and opened to a passage she remembered and read in an only slightly shaking voice. “The Husband Hunter prepares for her first appearance in society by calling upon those family members and acquaintances with the power to introduce her to willing partners in the ballroom.”

He tapped the page with his finger. “I thought your Walhouse cousins put you off your London family.”

“I don’t know them. I suppose I must give them a try.” As she said it, she recognized that the letters in the margin next to Hazelwood’s thumb were likely initials. The EF could be her father’s mother Lady Eliza Fawkener. TD could be her uncle, her mother’s brother, Thaddeus Drummond. Most of her father’s codes over the years had involved the names of his relations. She cast a glance at Hazelwood. He was chewing a bite of sandwich, giving no sign of having noticed her father’s marginalia.

Her father had always described his extended family as the cast of a farce. He had stressed that it was only possible to endure their company by seeing one at a time, and that a visit to any of them was a major exercise in diplomacy. Now it occurred to her that he might have been using such a characterization of their family to signal information about the rulers he met in his journeys across the near East.

She sat up a little straighter at the thought, and Hazelwood turned to her with a penetrating look. It was time to send her protocol officer away. She reached for the sandwich tray. He took hold of her wrist, arresting her movement. “Jane, what are you thinking?”

She offered him her blandest smile. “You know, I’d like to visit my grandmother tomorrow.”

“You felt such a warm, family-feeling from your cousins this morning that you wish to connect with the rest of your relations?”

“One must always seek family connections. My father’s mother is an invalid, I believe. My mother’s brother lives precariously by gaming, and my father has a pair of twin cousins who could not interrupt their schedule of social engagements to take me on. Are you shocked?”

“By a lack of family feeling among the aristocracy of Britain? Hardly. Only by your desire to visit your grandmother.”

“She may know an octogenarian widower or two.” She covered a yawn with one hand. Her relations might not have welcomed her to London, but they might be willing to help her find her father.

She looked up and found him watching her. “You must be tired, too, and eager for your bed.” She saw his half smile and knew that she’d blundered conversationally again. “What?”

“I’ll bid you goodnight then.” He stood and offered a hand. She took it and let him lift her from the sofa, but the foot she had tucked under her caught in her skirts and she fell forward. Putting out a hand to stop her fall, her palm flattened against his midriff.

“Steady,” he said. “Foot go to sleep?”

She nodded, looking at her hand pressed against the hard, flat surface of his middle, her senses trying to comprehend the unfamiliar message buzzing along her nerves from her fingertips to her toes.

He laughed. “No need to break my ribs. I’m going.”

She dropped her hand and recovered her sense.

With a brief bow he was gone, and she was left wondering what she’d felt, as if she’d had a brief glimpse through a door left ajar of some unexpected view and now could not say what she’d seen.

The Husband Hunter in London will soon observe that a gentleman in town unlike a gentleman in the country has a rival domestic arrangement to his home. By training, at school, in the army, or aboard the glorious ships of his majesty’s navy, gentlemen learn to live in wholly male societies. In his club the scale and color of the furnishings, the objects in view, the food and drink served, the rhythms of the day, and the very paintings on the walls are wholly male.