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“I noticed.”

“No doubt he intends to sell that painting. So are we stealing it tonight?”

Jane turned to him. “On my second night as a husband hunter?”

“In a hurry to get a husband, are you?”

“How many gentlemen should I consider, do you think, before I make my choice? Five or six or a score?”

“You sound as if you’re hiring for the position.”

“Could I? Would an ad in the papers be a more direct method of finding just the man I want?”

Jane smiled to herself as he turned the carriage at the end of the narrow lane. At least for the moment she’d made him forget about paintings and maps.

* * * *

It was dark by the time Hazelwood returned to the club and growing colder by the hour. He had sent Wilde off on an assignment earlier, and Miranda had taken over the youth’s duties temporarily, setting out a tray of sandwiches and coffee. He asked her to bring him what he called the club copy of The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London.

Drawing a chair close to the fire, he settled down to review the pages of the little book, thinking about what he’d learned from Jane’s uncle and what he still needed to know.

He had read dozens of George Fawkener’s letters, which had been copied by a man in the Foreign Office, but Hazelwood had read them, as a man indifferent to family connections, skipping over the chatty news of tea with aunts, walks with uncles, and visits to cousins. He had been searching for anything that might reveal the state of England’s friends in the East. He’d been wrong. He should, apparently, have been paying attention to the very thing he’d ignored, Fawkener’s accounts of visiting his relatives. That was the code.

He stretched his feet out and propped his boots on the brass fender. The question was—how well acquainted was Jane with her father’s code? This afternoon she’d given nothing away, neither in her face nor manner. Yet presumably, she knew her father’s code, and with the book, she had a sequence of points on a map. He wondered, whether she had the corresponding map in her possession, as well. Had the code and the map given her the certainty that her father was alive?

He flipped through the little book again. The coded pairs of letters appeared on the left or right pages, in the upper or lower corner to convey some element of Fawkener’s journey as yet undetermined. As he puzzled over the possibilities, a passage caught his eye, and he read:

The Husband Hunter’s first evening in society will be a success, if but one gentleman in the crowd takes note of her. However limited her beauty and accomplishments, the element of novelty in her appearance among the familiar faces of several seasons will assist her in drawing notice. Her youth and her eagerness to please and to be pleased in company will encourage gentlemen to stay by her side long enough to discover her charms of character as well as appearance. Young men will vie for her attention, and a prudent woman will not deny any an opportunity to make her better acquaintance until she discovers an irredeemable character flaw that requires her to dismiss a gentleman from her suitors.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

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. Her father had given her the job of watching a group of men arriving for a meeting and telling him, if she could, which of them were on his side and which were against him. If only it were as easy now.

She found the latch and slid the panel aside. A beam of light shot through the hole. The trick was not to touch the canvas itself. Behind her the concealed door opened. She lifted her hand to cover the spy hole.

It is necessary to cultivate the art of conversation. You must speak while dancing all but the most vigorous country dances and waltzes. But how is the Husband Hunter to learn the art of conversation? Practice, of course.

There is in every society a subject into which complete strangers enter readily and by which they signal their interest in continuing a conversation. In London that subject is the weather. Once you have established your partner’s willingness to converse, you may learn much through the weather. In talking about the incessant rain, or a severe frost, or the dry weather for harvest, the Husband Hunter may judge of the affability, the wit, and the balance of concern for others and self-concern her conversational partner possesses.

Inevitably, the topic of weather will exhaust itself, as surely as rain clouds move off. That is the moment in which the Husband Hunter must keep her wits about her. There are a number of topics on which she must never speak. Do not speak of anyone’s personal appearance, neither your rival’s, nor your own, nor that of the oddest looking person in the room. Furthermore, avoid speaking of yourself, your accomplishments, or your family. You may, on the other hand, always speak of principles and art and the beauties of the setting in which you find yourself.