Page 3
“Octavia, surely you want a Season. In the spring, we can...” He cast a look of desperate appeal at Perry.
“Harry Swanley,” Perry announced decisively.
Octavia beamed. “You see, Charles. Perry knows someone.”
Perry shook his head. “No, not that sort of Harry. Meant to say Lady Harriet. She’s a fourth cousin on your father’s side. She’s just the person to take Octavia to all the right dinners and balls.”
“Oh, no need.” Octavia dropped to her knees on the wet, muddied floor and began to rummage through her bag.
“Harriet Swanley?” Charles asked Perry. He knew Lionel Swanley, Lord Dunraven, and had a profound distaste for the man.
“Oh, she’s nothing like Dunraven,” said Perry. “Hasn’t lived with him for years. Lives with the Luxboroughs. Never married. You can call on her tomorrow. I’m sure she’d be glad to help Octavia.”
Octavia straightened from her case, holding up a small blue book with gold filigree lettering, The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London. “No need to call on Lady Harriet, Charles. I’ve read this book from cover to cover. I know just what to do to get a husband by Christmas.”
Charles looked at his sister’s thin, pale cheeks and over-bright eyes.
“Lady Harry.” Perry insisted.
“I’ll call on her in the morning.” Charles recognized that he needed help. The over-bright glitter in his sister’s eyes came not from a danger one could fight, but from something outside an older brother’s experience. The marchioness would have to wait to get an eyeful of his persimmon waistcoat.
It must be said that not every husband hunter will have that combination of sense, character, and good fortune that preserves her from unwise attachments until she meets a man she can both love and respect. Indeed, it falls to the lot of many a spirited young woman, while barely out of the schoolroom, to form a heady first attachment with a man who does not return her regard. The disappointed hopes she experiences when this gentleman turns his attentions elsewhere are among the bitterest a woman can feel. It is wise in such cases for the husband hunter to seek a change of situation. To remain among the scenes where the attachment was formed or among the company who saw it develop is to keep it alive in the memory in a way that is an obstacle to future happiness.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter 2
“Harry, are you going to take the dog out?” Priscilla Luxborough huffed a little from the effort of climbing the stairs to Harriet’s attic room. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Harriet Swanley looked up from her book at her young cousin. “Oh, is it time?”
Pris shrugged, digging her hands in her pockets. “Are you reading anything good?”
Harriet closed her book and put it aside. “Emilie du Chatelet’s Discourses on Happiness.”
Pris sighed. “Everyone’s so dull today.”
“That,” said Harriet, “is on account of the gale last night.” She knew Pris had missed her morning ride, as all of the Luxborough grooms were busy repairing damage to the stables from a fallen chimney.
Pris produced a card from the pocket she’d been digging in. “Oh, and you have a visitor.”
As a governess, Harriet was not in the habit of receiving callers in Luxborough House. She couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice. “Who’s calling on me?”
“Here’s his card.” Pris offered a cream square of paper from her pocket. “I put him in the yellow room.”
Harriet read the bold black lettering. Charles Davenham, Viscount Wynford. She jumped up, throwing off the burgundy shawl she’d wrapped around her shoulders for warmth. A night of wind blowing across the park and up Mount Street had cooled the house below the usual late November chill. “Pris, you didn’t put a viscount in the yellow room. He’s not a tradesman.”
Again, Pris shrugged. “He’s calling on you, not on the family. It must be about some business or other, and mother says business must always be conducted—”
“I know what your mother says, but viscounts do not belong in dingy backrooms. Did you send a footman to light a fire?”
Pris shook her head.
Harriet headed for the stairs. With any luck she’d reach Wynford before he froze solid.
Pris called after her, “Maybe the breakfast room is empty.”
Maybe, Harriet thought, I can become a paid governess in a house where my charges listen to me. Harriet was under no illusion about her position in the Luxborough household, and, on the whole, it suited her. Her cousins had offered refuge when her family cast her off. In return she had shepherded a younger generation of Luxboroughs through their awkward years. They were a fine family of five. Ned, the eldest, was twenty-one. Anne, twenty, Camille, eighteen, and Pris, thirteen, were the middle children, and Jasper, at eleven was the last of Harriet’s charges. The children, favored with their parents’ fair good looks and happy manners, made the fate of tending them far superior to the one her brother had wished on her. When her circumstances chafed, as they sometimes did, she reminded herself that no one owned her body and soul, that she was free to think her own thoughts.
