There is genuine pleasure in being noticed. However, the husband hunter does not want to purchase the inferior goods of being a mere distraction, of catching a man’s eye because of the feathers in her bonnet. Rather, she wants the true gratification of being recognized, of having a gentleman direct his eyes and indeed his footsteps her way, not because she has caught his eye with her plumage but because he seeks her company.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Harriet was spared a second encounter with Lord Wynford when his friend Perry brought Octavia to the Royal Institution the following Monday. With his interest in science, Perry was a regular attendee at the institution’s lectures and gatherings. His easy manners made him one of the few people from the world she’d left behind that she met with pleasure.
Since meeting Wynford and agreeing to help his sister, Harriet had thought better of her answer to his final question. Something in their conversation had stirred his memory, and she feared he might recall later how and where they’d met. She had not lied when she said she would remember a previous meeting between them, but she would, perhaps, have been wiser to suggest that they had met in some wholly unremarkable way in London.
In the foyer of the Royal Institution, Perry introduced Miss Davenham, giving an uncharacteristically muddled explanation for accompanying her in Wynford’s stead. Obviously, Wynford was occupied in the gentlemanly pursuits of a man of rank and means. Harriet performed her part by introducing the two eldest Luxborough girls, Anne and Camille, who welcomed Octavia warmly.
There was a strong resemblance between the sister and brother except in the stricken look in Octavia’s light brown eyes and the limpness of her posture, which suggested a fever victim rather than a girl eager to take on London.
Harriet knew what it was to live inside that lost look and what it took to overcome it, and she was glad to see the girl rally, opening the strings of her reticule and drawing out a small blue volume with gold filigree lettering. Harriet glanced at the title—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London.
“Cousin,” Octavia said, clutching the little book to her chest. “Charles tells me I must depend on you to set me on the path to a husband by Christmas, but I promise not to trouble you much. I have my book, you see.”
Harriet applauded Octavia’s instinct to be active but doubted that husband hunting would mend a broken heart. A suitor or two tossing lavish compliments her way might offer a balm to wounded pride, but something more was needed for true healing.
Harriet had been fortunate in her time of anguish to be given a consuming task and to find in that task a part of herself, both generous and strong-minded, she had not known she possessed. It had given her great confidence. She would have to think of some occupation that might suit Octavia as well. If the girl truly had a scientific bent, there would be something.
Around them, people poured into the institution with the usual buzz of gathering and greeting. Anne and Camille noted several young gentlemen and exchanged nods with friends. There was a momentary hush as Mr. Faraday himself passed through the crowd. He had instituted the lectures the year before.
“Must speak with Faraday,” Perry announced. With a brief bow, he hurried off.
“Faraday!” Octavia pivoted to look after him, then sighed and turned back to Harriet. “He’s a fine scientist, but not an eligible gentleman, is he?”
“No,” Harriet said gently. It was a little slip on the girl’s part, a brief show of excitement over seeing the great scientist, quickly quelled by whatever troubled the girl and made her clutch the little book like a lifeline. “He’s the director at the moment, and of course, the founder, just last year, of these lectures.”
“Of course,” said Octavia, tucking her book away. “But it’s eligible gentlemen I must seek. I’ve no time to waste, you see.”
The look in Octavia’s eye struck Harriet as grim determination. The girl had seized on the idea of hunting a husband as a rider on a runaway horse might mistakenly tighten her arms on the reins and lock her back, measures that only made it easier for the horse to throw her.
“Come along,” Harriet said to the three girls. They passed into the round lecture hall with its high ceilings, tall yellow columns, and ascending half-circle of seats and found a place on the cushioned benches about halfway up the chamber, looking down on a table set with glass and metal tubes, stoppered vials, and candles. Harriet loved the drama of the scene. The speaker would set before them some common mystery of the world in all its puzzling detail and unveil the scientific principles behind the seeming magic.
Once seated, Octavia retrieved the book from her reticule and held it in her lap, nodding politely as Anne and Camille pointed out the features of the room and named people around them.
“There are children here,” Octavia said to Harriet during a break in the other conversation, the statement more accusation than observation.
There were children, especially on the packed lower benches directly in front of the speaker’s table and instruments. It was Mr. Faraday’s intention to make science exciting to the young. “Yes,” she said, “but you may ignore them and concentrate on the eligible gentlemen if you like.”
“I must, mustn’t I?” Octavia said with sudden resolve. “Won’t they all be dreadfully old, like Charles?”
Harriet suppressed a laugh. “What do you consider the ideal age for a husband?”
“My book says… “ Octavia idly turned the pages of the volume in her lap. “Well, I don’t remember precisely what the book says, but I think three and twenty the right age.”
“No older?”
“Not at all, for a man must be independent of his parents and must have some experience in managing his affairs, but he must not be hardened.”
“And a man of twenty-four is, in your opinion, hardened?”
“Terribly.”
Harriet resisted the impulse to give the girl’s hands a quick squeeze, as she would for Anne or Camille. She did not yet understand Octavia’s situation though she strongly suspected some recent heartache. There had been a time when Harriet, too, had thought four and twenty a most advanced age. She guessed that a young man wielding his wider experience of the world had wounded Octavia. From the way the girl clung to her book, Harriet suspected the wound was both deep and new.
A distraction at the entrance drew all eyes. A group of young men, Ned Luxborough among them, entered the hall, talking and laughing and exchanging playful whacks with their hats. Octavia sat up straight and put on a bright smile. One young man looked up and waved at Anne and Camille before he and his companions swarmed up the aisle and clambered over several benches into the upper reaches of the seats, passing Octavia without a glance her way.
Only one of them paused at the entrance to their row to apologize for his friends. He was a sturdy young man with a sweep of golden hair, ruddy cheeks, and deep blue eyes, soberly—almost clerically—dressed in charcoal gray. “Miss Swanley, isn’t it?” he asked Harriet.
She nodded.
“Thought so,” he said, his gaze on Octavia. “John Jowers, friend of Ned Luxborough from school. We’re all Wykehamists, you know.” He shrugged, as if the school affiliation explained their behavior, and cleared his throat. “Could you present me to your friend, Miss Swanley?”
Harriet nodded again, and made the introduction.
Octavia offered an artificial smile.
“Are you keen on science, Miss Davenham?” Mr. Jowers asked.
For a moment Harriet thought Octavia would acknowledge an interest, but some struggle seemed to occur. She clutched her reticule and, with an affected air of boredom, said, “Not really.”
“Oh,” he said. “You might change your mind, you know.”
He bowed and retreated up the benches.
A moment later Octavia lamented, “No one even looks at me.”
“Mr. Jowers looked at you,” Harriet said, offering a mild correction. She could hear the pain in the girl’s voice, a pain that no doubt made it impossible for Octavia to see clearly.
“I will have to change my appearance.” Octavia turned the pages of her book again.
“Shall we plan a shopping expedition?” Harriet asked.
“Oh yes,” said Octavia, “it says right here that ‘the husband hunter must be seen, and therefore, must take great care of her appearance.”
The clock struck the hour, and the lecture began. It was possibly the least attention Harriet had given to a lecture in a long time. Next to her, Octavia alternately slumped or straightened, occasionally letting the lecture capture her interest then retreating into her stance of bored indifference.
“What sort of cousin are you, Miss Swanley?” she asked at one point.
“A fourth cousin,” Harriet whispered. “We share a great-great-great-grandfather.”
At the end of the lecture, Ned Luxborough led the young gentlemen to join Anne and Camille in a laughing group, except for John Jowers. He stopped as Octavia and Harriet prepared to exit their row.
“Brilliant lecture, Miss Davenham. Did you like it?” he asked.
Octavia, her head held unnaturally high, said, “Hardly.”
“Well, perhaps you’ll like the next one better.” Mr. Jowers bowed and joined his friends.
“The next one?” Octavia looked at Harriet.
“There will be six,” Harriet said firmly. “All attended by young gentlemen.”
“Oh.” Octavia straightened her shoulders. “Then I must attend.”
“Perhaps you would prefer dancing. If your brother can spare you, would you like to join the Luxboroughs at a gathering tonight?”
“Dancing? Oh yes.” The girl cast a wistful glance at Anne and Camille and their friends.
“The guests will be closer in age to your ideal than your brother’s friends.”
“It’s sad, isn’t it?” Octavia said, as they descended the stairs. “I suppose Charles was quite handsome in his day.”
“His day?”
“When he was one and twenty and came into his title, I think there were ladies then who wanted to marry him. But now that he’s one and thirty, I don’t suppose he will ever marry.”
Harriet choked back a laugh. Octavia’s notion that her brother, surely one of the most eligible bachelors in London, had entered his dotage explained a lot. The girl was unlikely to confide in a brother she regarded as past hope of marrying.
They reached the street, and Harriet was beginning to wonder where Perry had got to and how she was to convey her guest home when Octavia said, “Look, there’s Charles.”
Harriet followed Octavia’s gaze down Albemarle Street to a building she rarely considered. It was near enough to the Royal Institution that she’d passed it often. She had hardly given it much thought other than to sympathize with whoever was wishing for its completion. It was a neighborhood eyesore in a perpetual state of renovation with scaffolding and flapping canvas sheets across a portico that jutted out into the walkway. She just caught sight of Wynford as he ducked under the canvas.
Then Perry was there. “Sorry to desert you so long,” he said. With his perpetually youthful face he had the look of a guilty schoolboy. “Needed Faraday’s help.”
“Perry,” said Octavia. “What is Charles doing in that derelict old building?”
Perry glanced at the building Octavia indicated and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s some sort of club or other. I believe your brother is one of the...investors, trying to get the place going. How was the lecture?”
Harriet thought Wynford an unlikely investor in a club, but Perry had turned Octavia’s thoughts. She answered with a surprising grasp of what they had heard and talked unaffectedly to Perry while they waited for their carriage. Harriet took note of the girl’s natural, unconstrained manner with an old friend whom she did not regard as a potential husband, so different from her stilted conversation with John Jowers.
* * * *
The Marchioness de Tonnelier was not a woman to be overlooked in a crowd. The particular crowd in which Charles found her had assembled in the Duchess of Huntington’s long gallery for the unveiling of a new painting the duke had acquired.
More handsome than beautiful, with smoky dark eyes, red lips, and no attempt to disguise those imperfections of hair and face that mark a sexually confident woman, the marchioness had a distinctly French air about her. Nothing was wrong with her figure in a gown of rich ruby silk that bared her white shoulders. The one unanticipated aspect of her appearance was her size. The top of her head below the black plumes of her satin toque just reached the stickpin in his cravat. The contrast between the childlike body and cynical face was striking. Charles guessed her to be a few years older than his own thirty-one years.
Apparently, a spy did not need to blend in or seek the shadows. The boldness of her appearance, much as it repelled Charles, seemed calculated to draw men to her side. At such a gathering, many of the available men had ties to the government. He watched to see which man appeared to be her target.
As he stood contemplating his opening move in the game to unmask her, Perry strolled his way, a glass of wine in hand.
“Hello, you look...” Perry glanced at Charles’s striped green-and-gold waistcoat. “Vivid.”
“If I fail to expose the marchioness, I think I should ask Astley for a job in his circus.”
Perry nodded. “Should do the trick then. The marchioness will never suspect you of deep intellectual powers.”
“If she’s willing to talk to me at all in this getup. Did you find out anything more about her connections to my family?”
Perry shook his head. “Faraday suggested a chemical test of the paper and ink to see how old they are.”
Charles nodded. He kept an eye on the marchioness in conversation with two gentlemen—one of them, Edenhorn, a singularly dull MP with a post at the Exchequer and endless knowledge of the recent bullion crisis.
The duke’s footmen passed among the crowd, filling glasses, while the duke and duchess made their way to a small dais next to the painting, concealed behind a red velvet curtain. Charles stepped forward, until he stood at the marchioness’s elbow.
Someone tapped a glass, and the talk died down as all turned to the duke.
“As many of you know, England lost a great treasure some years ago when Walpole sold his collection to the Russians. At the time, I and others proposed in Parliament the establishment of a national gallery.” The stately, white-haired duke paused. He was known for the quizzing glass dangling from a pale blue ribbon around his neck as well as his withering condescension. “However, it was not to be, and until the nation demands such an institution, the people of England must rely on the private collector to preserve its treasures. My dear?” He turned to the duchess, who pulled a golden cord.
The velvet curtains parted on a painting by the French artist Poussin, a striking image of an angel descending to address a maiden in a vivid blue robe.
Charles watched the marchioness. She did not show the least sign of recognition of the painting, though Charles knew it had once hung in the Musee Napoleon in Paris, where most Parisians could have seen it.
He turned to his companion.
“It is a great shame, is it not,” he observed, “when nations cannot keep their own art.”
His comment drew a dry smile and an amused glance from the marchioness. “Have we met, monsieur?” she asked.
“I am Wynford,” he said. “Are we not family?”
Her expression changed. A quick calculation passed in her eyes. Whatever she had heard of him, she had not expected the vulgar excess of his waistcoat. “Ah, you are my cousin, are you not? The son of Charlotte.”
She knew his pedigree, and he heard no obvious flaws in her accent, which sounded pure Parisian.
“What draws you to London when you could be in Paris?” he asked.
“Alas, I must look after some documents my late father-in-law sent to your country for safekeeping. It is tedious but necessary to establish one’s claims to lost property in France.”
“Which of Delatour lands do you hope to recover?” Charles thought it a mild challenge, a test to see whether she remembered those vineyards.
She did not blink. “The Saumur vineyards. Saumur was not so revolutionary-minded a place as some. Its people are practical where there is a profit to be made, and I hope the property will soon be restored to the Delatours.” She took a sip of wine.
“Ah,” he said, trying to check his suspicions and keep his head clear.
Her bare shoulders rose and fell in a quintessentially Gallic shrug. “Do you know the Saumur vineyards?”
“Only from summers as a boy.” He had been in Saumur for the harvest during a brief peace before the fatal trip with his mother and Octavia. He remembered a steep cobbled street of gabled houses below a great castle, grapes in deep purple clusters, and the sure rapidity of the pickers with their straw hats and gloved hands and small, curved knives.
“It is not perhaps the best time to be in London, as my new friends tell me that the town empties soon for you English to have your Christmas in the country. It is the custom, is it not? Are you not obliged to go home to your own lands to be with your sister?”
It was an easy lie and quite credible except for the mention of his sister. Octavia was unknown in London to all but Charles’s closest friends, like Perry, and Perry had not been talking to the marchioness. “Ah,” he said, “I’m an idle town fellow, and rarely feel obliged to do anything.” He swirled the wine in his glass. “Which of your vintages would you recommend?”
Before she could answer, there was a little stir in the room as Wellington entered and the crowd parted, everyone following his progress to the duke and duchess’s side. Ten years after Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon, eager hostesses considered his appearance at a gathering a social triumph. When the great man neared Charles and the marchioness, she turned away abruptly, extending her empty wine glass to a passing footman.
No one noticed except Charles. It was a small thing, perhaps unintended, meant to look spontaneous and flustered, but Charles doubted the marchioness ever gave way to impulse.
“Have you been introduced to our national hero?” Charles asked.
“Oh one meets him everywhere,” she said, turning back to Charles with an abstracted air, her face still averted from Wellington’s gaze. “What were we speaking of before?” She moved her fan gently in front of her face.
“It was nothing,” he said. “Perhaps another time you will tell me more about your wine.”
“Let it be soon.” She smiled a dismissive smile. “Pardon me.”
He bowed and stepped aside. He watched her stroll down the long gallery, unhurried, pausing to look at the art and speak with other guests. He could not say who had won this first skirmish. He had perhaps betrayed a weakness in his response to the mention of his sister. He had observed no flaw in the woman’s disguise, if it was a disguise, except perhaps her strange reaction to Wellington. The great duke, a notorious flirt, was known to be susceptible to handsome women, and of all the gentlemen in London, he possessed the influence to help a woman in need of recovering property in France. How interesting that the marchioness chose to avoid rather than seek the great duke.
* * * *
From a chair against the wall, Harriet watched as the full disaster of Octavia’s first London evening unfolded. Lady Luxborough, an accommodating parent, had arranged for the rugs in her drawing room to be rolled up and provided a piano player and a dancing master to instruct her children in preparation for a Twelfth Night ball when the family returned from the country.
Octavia had not consulted Harriet about what to wear, and the girl’s choice, a high-waisted gown of pale pink aflutter with rose-colored ribbons, looked distinctly out of place among the shining dark silks and lush velvets the other young ladies wore.
Octavia alternately beamed and scowled. There were enough guests, young friends of the Luxboroughs, to make seven couples, and every gentleman asked Octavia to dance once, but no gentleman looked at her again after fulfilling the obligation of politeness. At a break in the dancing only Mr. John Jowers, their acquaintance from the Royal Institution lecture, approached Octavia. He came bearing a cup of steaming punch.
Standing next to Harriet’s chair, Octavia appeared not to see him, her gaze focused on a lively group around Anne and Camille Luxborough. “They’re all just being polite, aren’t they?” she observed to no one in particular.
Mr. Jowers held out the cup for Octavia. “That’s because you bounce too much.”
“What?” she asked sharply, no longer ignoring him.
“You bounce, you know. The other girls glide. A fellow doesn’t like to get...” His glance dropped to the cup in his hand. “So distracted.”
Octavia frowned darkly. “And are you such a great dancer, Mr. Jowers?”
“At least I know the difference between a country reel and the quadrille.”
“Well you needn’t dance with me again if you don’t like my dancing.”
Octavia walked off leaving him holding the cup of punch, its little curl of steam dissipating in the air while he looked for some way to rid himself of the evidence of his dismissal.
Harriet said, “I’ll take the punch if you like, Mr. Jowers.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.” He handed the cup to Harriet and turned back to stare at the others. “Someone has to tell her, you know. She doesn’t know how to get on in London.”
“Yes,” Harriet agreed.
“And she wants partners, doesn’t she?”
“Very much.” Harriet understood his confusion. Whatever hurt had driven Octavia to London was making her blind to John Jowers’s notice.
“I didn’t say anything about her dress. She looks like a Maypole in that gown.”
“Very wrong for this occasion.”
“So...” He turned to Harriet directly. “Why wouldn’t she listen to friendly advice?” In his voice Harriet heard the baffled lament of a young man newly come from school, where one was rewarded for being right without the necessity of being tactful as well.
“Ah,” said Harriet. “She is, as you say, new to London, and feeling unsure of herself. She may not be ready to hear her errors proclaimed so directly.”
He made no reply. The musician returned to his instrument, and the dancing master summoned his pupils. Mr. Jowers sighed. “Will you take her to another of the Royal Institution lectures?”
“I will,” Harriet assured him. He bowed and returned to the crowd of young people arranging themselves in two lines for another set.
Harriet smiled to herself. If John Jowers meant to pursue his interest in Octavia, there was time for the girl to recover from whatever misery made her unseeing at present. She might be weeping, or more likely, gritting her teeth and resolving to gain the notice of her new friends by some reformation of her appearance, but she had made a conquest. One she might despise, but one that would do her no harm and might even steer her toward more comfort in London society.
John Jowers’s directness had no doubt pricked the girl’s pride, but Jowers saw only the easily corrected flaws. His words would prompt Octavia to change her dress and her steps. The bigger project, as Harriet saw it, belonged to her, to help the girl think of others rather than only of herself. Someone had made her feel flawed, and she had lost the confidence to be her natural self.
Harriet rose to go in search of her charge and came face to face with Wynford. He wore a striped green-and-gold waistcoat that halted her in her tracks.
He bowed, surveying the room with a searching gaze. “Where’s Octavia?” he asked, the sharpness of his tone at odds with the pleasant scene of innocent enjoyment.
“Hello,” she said. “I’ll fetch her. She needed a moment to collect herself.”
“She’s quite safe?” he asked.
Harriet frowned, puzzled by his anxiety, which seemed out of place in such comfortable domestic surroundings. “In Lady Luxborough’s drawing room? It is only that Octavia made some mistakes such as young ladies are apt to make their first time in company.”
“You didn’t stop her?”
“I didn’t. She must be permitted to make a few missteps if she is to learn how to get on in London.”
He glanced at the dancers, and she let him take in their utterly harmless appearance.
“Has Octavia had a recent disappointment in love?” she asked.
“In love?” He turned back to Harriet with a baffled look.
“Yes, you know,” she said, endeavoring to lift her gaze from the eye-popping waistcoat, “that state of mind in which people fancy themselves deeply attached to another.”
“Octavia’s never fancied herself in love. She and our neighbor Horace Gresham have been intended for one another since childhood.”
He spoke as if he’d never questioned the prospect. “By whom? Their parents? You?”
“No, entirely by their own inclinations. They’ve been inseparable companions since they rode their first ponies together.”
“Really? How old is this neighbor now?”
“Four and twenty, I think. Does it matter?”
Harriet thought it mattered a great deal. “Don’t you find it odd that your sister should come to London declaring her intention of finding a husband by Christmas if she already has a fixed attachment?”
It was a moment before he answered. She sensed that he was thinking for the first time about the suddenness of Octavia’s desire for a husband. A waltz tune appeared to catch his attention. “You must think me quite oblivious.”
“Distracted, perhaps.”
“Charitable of you to put it that way,” he said stiffly. “Has she confided in you?”
Harriet shook her head. She knew the patience required to win a young person’s confidence. Until Octavia did confide in someone, there was no way of knowing whether something had changed between her and Horace Gresham, or whether her brother had misread their relationship all along. “You did say she had an interest in science?”
“Astronomy, actually. She’s a habitual stargazer and quite a fanatic about the moon. She’s been recording her observations of the moon in her sketchbook for years.”
Harriet nodded, more certain than ever that Octavia had suffered a loss of affection that made her wish to reject every aspect of her true self in favor of affecting the airs of a fashionable London miss. “Let me find her. She may need the comfort of your presence.”