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In the coffee room Hazelwood turned to Wilde. “I’m sure there’s a lesson in this for both of us. You told her about Hunt’s wager?”

“I did, sir.” His shoulders slumped. “She sees the idiot as some kind of hero. She needs a steadier hand than someone who’d do such a mad thing.”

“And you tried to explain that?”

“I did.” Wilde’s voice was a mumble.

“I’m not sure she’s worthy of you, but I’m on your side, Wilde.”

“I know, sir.”

“Let’s hope for a thaw. Now, I want your opinion on this code.”

If the Husband Hunter is to judge rightly the degree to which a gentleman’s attentions please her, there is a sense she must cultivate above the other, common senses. This new sense has, at present, no name in our language, yet it is as valuable to the Husband Hunter as the eye to the marksman, the ear to the musician, or the nose to the cook. It is a sense that begins to operate as soon as a gentleman enters her presence. It is chiefly through the skin and the movement of the blood through the body that the Husband Hunter observes this sense acting to inform her of her pleasure or disgust in the nearness of a particular gentleman. Much unhappiness in life may be averted by careful attention to the difference between a shiver and a shudder of awareness at a particular gentleman’s nearness. Perhaps in this modern age that looks forward to so many advances in knowledge, there will come a scientist whose study of the nature of love between women and men will lead her to name this sense for us.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Eleven

“You want me to do what?” A bead of sweat trickled down Jane’s back in short, ragged runs beneath the layers of her English clothes. It was not so much what he’d said, as the way he’d said it. The distinct note of satisfaction in his voice made her rebel.

And then abruptly he seemed to forget his own command, as if he were one of Tamerlane’s great astronomers seized by some sudden realization, the solution to a deep cosmic mystery. She waited for him to return to his peremptory self.

Most of the day he’d been angry, well not angry perhaps, but underneath all that charming civility, he’d been at least miffed. He didn’t like it that in the morning she’d accepted her cousins’ invitation to the musicale, and he’d taken it out on her in hours of ordering her about in the name of protocol as if he’d bought her in the slave market in Khiva, instead of being assigned by the government to help her through a hollow ceremony that would not bring her father back.

He thought to wear down her resistance by numbing her mind and making her limbs tremble with fatigue. He could order her about all he liked. She would not change her mind about her cousins’ party.

They had left the cold behind for an oasis of tropical warmth in the central courtyard of Hammersley House. He had let Mrs. Lowndes off to visit with her former charge, Lady Blackstone, and brought Jane here, where the servants were invisible. They could not be more alone if he had strapped her on a donkey and taken her to his desert tent. Tall, potted palms arched overhead. From somewhere came the splash of water in a fountain as if a spring gurgled up from underground. The black and white tiled floor underfoot was warm from some hidden heating source, and a glass ceiling far above them admitted wan winter light. Round, white-painted iron tables, each with a cluster of chairs, stood under the palms at the edge of the room, leaving the open center, where she and Hazelwood practiced for the investiture ceremony.

Jane felt flushed and heated. She breathed the fragrant air of the place and let her tired limbs rest a minute. Though she had heard her father’s stories of meeting lofty personages in distant palaces, she had not imagined how hard it was to move in such a controlled fashion, to bend her knees just so, while dipping her head, and holding her skirts in a way that was both courteous and prudent. Only once had she made it through the entire sequence of moves without stepping on the sheet tied about her waist. Now he wanted her to kneel again. Even if her spirit had been willing, which it wasn’t, her knees refused.

“Remind me how practicing for the investiture ceremony helps me to a husband.”

Hazelwood stepped forward to adjust the pillows and the Holland cloth he had tied about her waist to approximate the panniers she was to wear. “To be the daughter of Sir George Fawkener gives you a distinction you would otherwise lack.”

“People in London take such minor distinctions into account?”

“They do, and so much more. That’s why you need a protocol officer.”

It was easy for him to say. He was not the one sweating. He had removed his jacket, but he had not exerted himself more than to raise his voice or position her limbs. She should be used, by now, to his close-fitting English clothes, and to his habit of touching her, but she wasn’t. They were alone in their tropical garden, which had not seemed to matter while he instructed her to come forward, curtsy, take the handrail, kneel, wait, rise, wait, bow, and back away, always managing her skirts, until the separate steps of the process had begun to blur together in her mind.

Now that they’d stopped for a moment, her concentration shifted from her own limbs and movements to his. His least motion drew her eye to his person. Her fingers remembered being pressed to his flat middle.

He turned away and crossed to one of the tables where a footman had left a silver tray of tea and sandwiches. “Besides, you might need to know what to say to a fellow who leads you from a crowded ballroom to a conservatory, or a balcony, or a garden.”

“As you have done?”

“Just so,” he said without looking at her.

Jane studied his back as he poured the tea. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. He had the same number of limbs in the same arrangement as any other man. He was person-shaped. His hair could perhaps be called interesting, dark as the darkest black coffee beans roasted in the Halab way, but not striking, nothing like the golden hue of her cousin Clive’s curls. Though she stood perfectly straight, she could feel her whole inner being incline his way, like some leaning, earthquake-damaged tower.

Her inner leaning made no sense. She ought to thank him for his instruction and dismiss him. He might even be a social liability with his past scandals clinging to him. She could deal with her difficult, “un”familial relations and follow her guide to a husband without an interfering protocol officer.

He turned back to her, offering a cup of tea, and she had to admit that his eyes were not ordinary at all. The changeable green of them was sometimes like the first green of spring in the hills near the coast and sometimes like the dappled green under the leaves of a mulberry tree at noon in her father’s courtyard. At the moment she read in them some alteration in the nature of his attention.

“You were, what, fifteen when you left England?” he asked.

She nodded.