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Chapter One

Of all the gentlemen in London, the attractive rogue poses the greatest danger to the husband hunter’s happiness.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Lady Emily Radstock accepted a greeting from her sister’s butler, Gittings, and handed him her coat, gloves, and bonnet. She dispensed with Gittings’s attempt to precede her up the stairs to the drawing room. He mumbled something as she bounded past him with her package under her arm. She assured him she did not need to be announced. Gittings was sixty if he was a day, and Emily was in a hurry.

As she threw open the drawing room door, her younger sister Rosalind, sitting at her needlework, her stocking feet on a blue velvet ottoman, looked up with a start.

“Where is she?” Emily demanded. The door closed behind her.

“Hello, Em. Where is who?” Rosalind held up a delicate white gown no bigger than a tea towel.

“Mother,” said Emily. She strode across the room to stand before her sister, looking down. Rosalind, six years younger than Emily, and rosy and round with her first pregnancy, made a strikingly domestic appearance.

“Oh, Mother’s gone to Grandmama’s.”

Emily sank onto the sofa opposite her sister. “Of all the cowardly dodges. She knows she’s safe from me there.”

“What’s she done?” Rosalind asked, lowering the white garment to her lap.

“This!” said Emily, tossing the package she carried onto the small gateleg table next to Rosalind. The package made a satisfying slap against the polished wood.

Rosalind regarded it warily. “She’s offended you with a brown paper package tied up in string.”

“No. Yes. Come to think of it, I am offended by the brown paper and the string, her idea of being discreet before the servants.”

“Em, you must enlighten me. I’m growing more confused by the minute.”

“Sorry, Roz. Were you napping?” Emily realized that half the drapery over the tall windows had been drawn to shadow the far end of the room, where Rosalind had stationed the spectacular camel-backed sofa their mother had given her. Upholstered in a deep green and peony-patterned damask, the large sofa had been turned to face away from the delicate blues and golds of the room’s main seating arrangement.

“No, I drew the drapery because—”

“How are you?” Emily leaned forward, looking closely at her sister.

“Quite well really. A great many of the discomforts have passed, and the terrible fatigue. That’s why Mother thought she could go to Grandmama, who really does need her more than I do at the moment. And I have Philip,” she said brightly.

“Is Phil much help?” Emily asked. “I didn’t know husbands were.”

“He is.” Rosalind smiled in what Emily thought was a rather dreamy way for a married woman about to bear a child. “But you came to tell me what’s upset you.”

“Husbands. Or rather my lack of one and what mother chose to do about it. As if it were her problem. Open the package, Roz, you’ll see.”

“You know what’s inside, Em?”

“I do. Open it.”

Rosalind put aside her needlework and took up the little package, untying the string and pulling off the paper. She glanced at Emily and read the title on a small blue volume. “The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London?”

“You see,” said Emily, “wrapped up as if it were a gift and left for Alice to bring up with my chocolate this morning while Mama has gone off to avoid me.”

“It’s not a gift?” asked Rosalind, turning the pages of the little blue book, her gaze skimming over them.

“A gift?” Emily bounced a little on the sofa. “It’s a notice to vacate. It’s a shove out of the nest. It’s a lit fuse on a bomb.”

Rosalind looked up. “Surely, Mama means nothing of the kind.”

“Doesn’t she? It’s my birthday in three weeks. I’ll be twenty-nine. She considers me past hope, past praying for. Now she’s given me a book for a schoolroom chit.”