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Are there subjects that arise about which you have very little knowledge, but which are of great interest to your partner? So much the better. His knowledge of cricket or the arrangements for the officers’ living aboard his majesty’s ships or the intricate points of tithing is an opportunity for you to exercise your curiosity. In encouraging him to speak, you are not so much learning a new subject, as observing the workings of his mind and determining his character.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Thirteen

“Jane, I know you’re in here. Are you hiding?” The door closed, and Jane’s youngest cousin Annabel pushed her way in among the cloaks and coats.

Jane released the breath she’d been holding. Her thirteen-year-old cousin was no threat. “I am scouting the terrain.”

“Mama won’t like it if you ruin your hair and dress.”

“Promise you won’t tell.”

Annabel offered her solemn promise. “What are you scouting in the dark?”

“There’s a spy hole over the grand staircase.” And perhaps a concealed map that will help me find my father.

“Really? A spy hole? Not mice and spiders? Where are you?”

Jane reached out and found Annabel’s arm. “Come stand on this box, but don’t touch the…wall.” She lifted her hand from the spy hole, admitting a ray of light that illuminated Annabel’s face.

Annabel stepped up on the box and pressed her eye to the tiny opening. “Oh, you can see the whole entrance stair with everybody coming up. How cunning! But won’t people see us?”

“They won’t if we are careful not to touch the canvas.” Her uncle’s painting concealed the tiny hole in the end of Nelson’s famous telescope from the Battle of Copenhagen. From below guests would see only the glint at the end of the telescope. Her father loved the joke.

Annabel moved back from the peephole. “I see what you’re about Jane. You want to see the eligible gentlemen. I think it’s a good plan.”

“Do you see anyone eligible?” Jane wanted to laugh at her thirteen-year-old cousin. Obviously, husband hunting started early in London.

“You mean anyone young?” Annabel returned to her position looking down on the arriving guests. “I only see old married men and ladies so far, but don’t worry. Mama’s parties are famous, and young men always come late. How did you find this spy hole? I never knew it was here.”

“My father showed it to me.” Her father believed in watching the way people arranged their faces as they arrived at a meeting or a party. There were a dozen small gestures through which one could read honesty or falseness.

“Finally.” Annabel sighed and stepped back from the peephole, and Jane leaned forward to take a look.

She saw a fashionable young man in black evening wear with cropped ginger hair, ruddy fair looks, and an utterly guileless manner. “Is he an eligible?”

“Oh, yes!” Annabel sighed again. “That’s Cecil Eversley. He has dogs. Allegra won’t talk to him because his fortune’s too small for her. If it were my season, I would talk to him, but it won’t be my season for three years, seven months, and three days.”

“An eternity.”

Annabel sighed again, and Jane watched a pair of girls in white gowns make their curtsies to cousin Phoebe and nods to Allegra.

“What do you see now?” Annabel tugged at Jane’s sleeve.

“Allegra’s rivals, I think. They look very English in their white gowns.”

“Let me see.” Annabel took Jane’s place. “Oh, Lady Rivers’s daughters. Their mother thinks they are great beauties, but you needn’t worry. You look very English tonight, too.”

“Do I?” She did not feel English. She should, she supposed, feel excited and on edge with anticipation about her second venture into London society. She felt instead as if she were going to a play, as if everything that would happen would happen to other people, and that she would sit in the darkness observing, moved briefly, perhaps by the players’ distress or joy, but still on the outside. And later she would tell Hazelwood about it.

At the peephole Annabel gave a giggle. She stepped away and spun in a quick whirl, setting the coats in motion and stirring the musty air.

“What is it?”

“Just what Mama’s party needs.” Annabel pushed Jane back into place behind the painting.

A crowd of late arrivals, all young men, jostled their way up the stairs, talking and laughing, and tossing coats and hats at the butler, Bolton, and his footmen. Among them Jane spotted Hazelwood, bold as brass, flinging a cloak on the pile in a footman’s arms. Hazelwood looked directly at the painting. From below, it seemed impossible to steal without ladders and accomplices, but if Jane told him about the panel in the closet, Hazelwood would steal it. The feeling of being at a play vanished. Instead she felt as if one of the actors had called her up from the audience to join him on stage.