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Jane shook her head. “No. He didn’t. He used your notes in the book to make a map to deceive Malikov. I have the real map, and I will return it to you when I marry Lord Hazelwood.”

“You really want to marry this man?”

“I do. Just as soon as you secure his release from prison and clear him of the charge of treason.” He was her father, and he loved her in his way, but he had loved his spying more for a very long time. Hazelwood, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, had tossed aside his spying when it was the only thing he had, just for her. “And, Papa,” she said, “you will arrange our marriage today like a good papa in Halab.”

The Husband Hunter’s wedding whether it is celebrated in the conventional way on a Sunday morning followed by a breakfast and cake, or in some way suitable to the parties themselves, either elaborate or simple among few or many guests, is merely the outward sign of an inward joy. The bride and her groom appear to be figures in a larger design. The world will note its surprise or its satisfaction in their union. The guests, and even the papers, will comment on her gown and his handsomeness, but the unveiling of their true selves, one to the other, will happen only when they come together as husband and wife in that extraordinarily private place, the marriage bed.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Twenty-six

Jane Fawkener married Edmund Dalby, Viscount Hazelwood, in her grandmother’s drawing room on a rainy afternoon as London began at last to thaw from its great freeze. She married him in the Halab way. Her father and the groom both signed the aqd, the marriage contract, and she and Hazelwood declared the free will of two partners to join in love.

The wedding did not take place quite as soon as Jane had wished. She had had to endure an endless day of interviews with Lord Chartwell over the map. To all questions she had stubbornly repeated that she would make a gift of the map to her husband when he was free to be her husband and when all charges against him had been dropped. She pointed out to Lord Chartwell that considering his unwillingness to help her in the matter of her father’s disappearance, she was being extraordinarily helpful to the government in its current dilemma.

While the matter remained unresolved, and while the government collected her possessions from her cousins and made a thorough search of them, she sent for the dress made for her for the investiture ceremony. The ceremony took place on the second day of Lord Hazelwood’s incarceration with her father receiving the silver cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in person. He and the king had exchanged a few words when the king saw him.

“Thought you was dead, Fawkener,” said the king.

“Clerical error, your majesty. Still very much alive and at your service,” her father replied.

On the third day of Hazelwood’s incarceration, while Jane’s newly knighted father worked to gain his release, Jane paid a visit to Lady Vange. It was a brief call, well within the limits prescribed for such visits. Jane merely went to acquaint the countess with her intention to marry Lord Hazelwood in the English way on the first Sunday morning after the banns were called. Across a few feet of rich carpet the countess’s green eyes were strikingly like her son’s but without the laughter that habitually lighted his. Jane refused to be daunted by her future mother-in-law’s grave elegance, but she thought it wise to refrain from praising her love to his mother just yet. The countess would see for herself in time the man Hazelwood had become if once Jane could bring them together. She thought she knew the perfect way.

What was a mother-in-law after all but a teta-in-waiting?

A small wedding party of Jane’s grandmother, her companion Margaret, Hazelwood’s friends Captain Clare, and Lord Blackstone and his lady, and Jane’s Uncle Thaddeus dined on tea and cake after the brief exchange of vows in the drawing room. After toasts and embraces all around, the newly married couple left for her Uncle Thaddeus’s cottage in Hampstead.

The bedroom on the upper floor of the cottage was as light and airy as the lower floor was dark and closed in. The roof sloped upward high above them. Two windows cut deep in its slant admitted light and offered a view of heath and sky. The rough white walls were bare, but the four-poster bed was covered in a blue quilt and a vase of early hyacinth sat on the mantel. A cheering fire burned on the grate with a bucket of water and a kettle at hand.

They stood and faced each other before the fire and listened to the whisper of the rain on the thatch and the rattle of it in a drainpipe while the steps of Uncle Thaddeus’s man retreated down the wooden steps to the floor below.

“Are you sure you want this?” her new husband asked. “Because I can think of a score of reasons why you should not marry me.” He set their two small bags on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“Such as?” she asked, looking around for a place to hang her damp cloak.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, disordering it, just as she longed to do. Today it reminded her of the dark gleam of coffee beans roasted in the Halab way. He squared his shoulders in a most un-Hazelwood way. She tried not to smile.

“The Season is just about to begin. Your father is recovered. You could be a proper husband hunter now. I have your book in my bag. You could begin again.”

“Hmm? And go to balls and routs and be seen in the park and at the theatre and wear those gowns we ordered together?”

“Precisely. And I can name ten men better than I”—he swallowed—“worthier than I to be your husband.”

Jane undid the ties at her throat and slipped out of her damp cloak. She wore the white gown from that day at Madame Celeste’s, without the panniers. He really was going to resist happiness all the way. But happiness had its ways, like sand from the desert, of slipping through the cracks of barred windows and doors. “Ten men? Hmm. I think it’s too late for that. I don’t want a better man than you. Do you have any other objections I should consider?” She tilted her head, considering the shade of green in his eyes. They were still shadowed.

He swallowed. “Your father does not like me. Did you know that he insisted on a clause in that contract that allows you to divorce me?”

“An esma it’s called. It allows a woman to divorce a man, a rare thing.” She folded her cloak over the back of a light chair under the nearest window and faced him again.

“What did you do to get him to agree to our marriage?”

“I told him what my wedding gift to you would be. Now, do you have any last objection to my decision to marry you?” She turned to the hearth and picked up the kettle. It was full, and she placed it on the hob.

“It’s a bad bargain for you. I come to you about as rich as Adam was when he got himself tossed out of Eden. I will not bore you with the details, but in failing my mission for Goldsworthy I end my brief spying career in considerable debt.”

“Had I been seeking a very wealthy husband or one at the center of London society, no doubt I would agree with you, but I always had a different set of criteria.”

“Did you?”