Page 59

The husband hunter who has guarded her heart and maintained her reserve until certain of an equal return of love may now, when all suspense is over, delight in an open exchange of those feelings and promises which are the sure foundation of her future happiness.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter 22

Harriet stood at the drawing room window of the Davenhams’ London townhouse, looking out on the Christmas Eve dusk. Light from the candles behind her made a pale white square on the walkway and caught a few glittering snowflakes in its glow as they fell. She smiled at her own shadow outlined in that square of light, like her old self outside in the darkness. She shivered a little at the cold from the window, but she did not mind it, not now when she had traded places with that other Harriet.

In the distance coming nearer she could hear the sound of a band of Waits, London’s rude minstrels with their rustic horns and drum, offering their carols to the neighborhood for a few coins. She tried to catch the tune but heard only the thump of the drum. Behind her Octavia and John Jowers matched wits playfully as they worked on some project Octavia said was necessary to the Christmas celebration. On a rug by the hearth, an unstirring Catapult looked most unworthy of his name. Only his ears twitched a little in his dreams. He still wore the sprig of holly in his collar. She did not know where Charles had got to, only that he had claimed he had things to do for Christmas and that he would be back.

In the two days since the confrontation with Sophia Dashkova, they had only been apart while Charles tended to the unpleasant business of Dashkova’s imprisonment and the happier matter of their future. Harriet had to admire his efficiency. Her days as a governess were over. Lady Luxborough had been notified by express of the change in her situation, and a return express had brought congratulations.

Charles had moved both Harriet and John Jowers’s Aunt Louisa into his house. His solicitors were at work negotiating settlements with Harriet’s brother over an inheritance he had long withheld from her. Charles had even called upon her mother, and there was hope of a reconciliation. In time Harriet would see her. Octavia had given Harriet the little blue Husband Hunter’s Guide to London book, and Harriet had passed the time of Charles’s absence in reading it, surprised to discover how much wisdom it contained. The passages about true happiness seemed to her the wisest of all. She wondered if it was possible to be drunk on happiness.

In return Harriet had given her copy of Emilie du Chatelet’s Discourses on Happiness to Octavia, a woman newly freed to be herself and find her own happiness.

Harriet and Charles had spent the two nights talking by the fire, Cat at their feet. It had been necessary to touch and kiss. Each had confessed the steps by which he or she had progressed from awareness to admiration to love. The stages had to be analyzed.

“I’m an analyst,” he told her. “It’s what I do.”

“It was the mistletoe that first alerted me to my altered feelings,” he admitted. “Seeing you under it was a constant temptation.”

“It was those waistcoats that misled me so much about your true character,” she revealed. “But they made me jealous, as well. I knew every time I saw you in persimmon or stripes or red or purple that you would be meeting her.”

He laughed a rueful laugh. “I confused the wrong woman,” he said. And she told him wordlessly how unconfused she now was.

Tonight they would be a houseful for Christmas Eve, Octavia and John Jowers, his Aunt Louisa and Perry, and Harriet and Charles. The holly man had come again, and boughs bedecked the mantel and sconces. Jasper’s mistletoe had been retrieved from the Luxboroughs’ second-best drawing room and hung from the chandelier in the entry.

The sound of the Waits came nearer. Harriet heard their familiar “Fa la la la la, la la la la.” The snow fell more thickly now. And there was Charles at the head of the band of four musicians, in motley coats, hats, and scarves. He spoke to their leader, a man in a round-crowned white hat with a big drum hanging from a strap round his neck. Then he glanced up at Harriet and waved. Harriet waved back, and the musicians began to play their oldest song, a song Harriet had rarely heard since her childhood with a refrain that came back to her at once—Past three o’clock, And a cold frosty morning, Past three a clock; Good morrow, masters all!

Cat stirred at the sound and came to her side. She gave his silky ears a rub. When the drawing room door opened, the dog slipped away, and Harriet smiled, knowing without turning round that Charles was there.

She heard the others greet him, and then his voice came low and close, “Harry, you’re cold, my love.”

His hands closed around her shoulders, and she leaned back against him with a smile. His cheek against hers was cold, and she trembled a little in his hold. They stood in that lightest of embraces, her shoulders against his chest, cheek-to-cheek, as the song ended. The drummer beat his drum again, and the Waits marched away.

“Come up to the roof,” Charles invited.

She turned to face him, laughing. “What a contradictory fellow you are. You said I was cold.”

“A good thing, too. For else I fear my gift to you would be to no purpose.” He gave her shoulders a squeeze and stepped back to reach for a package tied in brown paper and string. She glanced at him. He led her to an armchair, and when she sat, he settled the soft, light package in her lap. She pulled away the string and unfolded the paper, and her breath caught. There was the blue shawl she’d admired in the arcade.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I wanted you to have it,” he said simply. “At the time I could not have said why. Now I know.”

She lifted the shawl from the paper. It was as blue as she remembered, and softer than she had imagined. He helped her to her feet and arranged the thing around her shoulders. “I’ll wait to tell you how I hope to see you wear it one day.”

A flash of awareness coursed through her as hotly as any electric current. She felt her cheeks go up in flame.

“Now,” he said in a rasp of a voice, “the roof. There’s a constellation I want to show you.”

“There are no stars tonight,” she said, recovering a little.

“Are you sure?” He took her hand and pulled her along.

Octavia and John looked up at them. “Oh, are you going? You should see what we’ve done.” Octavia rose and stepped back from the table. There stood an oaken ark, three stories high with a hinged roof that lifted, and one side open with partitions for the animals. Octavia and John had arranged the painted pairs of carved animals in the stalls with giraffes on the top floor, and lions, cows, and camels on the bottom, sheep and elephants in the middle. Octavia had brightened the ark with sprigs of holly and berries.

“I brought it from home,” Octavia said. “It would not be Christmas if we did not put up the ark, Charles.”