On occasion the husband hunter may feel a great temptation from the warmth or distress of her feelings to express those feelings in speech or to ink them onto a page of hot pressed paper and drop a line in the post. Perhaps she feels the growing coolness of a suitor who has completely possessed her affections. Now more than anything she would like to understand how the gentleman’s feelings have changed.
In such a moment it is fatal both to her pride and her reputation to succumb to the desire to enter into an improper correspondence. Her anguish is no excuse for such a breach of sense and decorum. A much better expedient is to open her diary, and there un-bosom herself of all the torment and confusion she feels, blot the page, close the book, and leave the letter unsent.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
The following Monday, Charles received from the marchioness a note of regret that she was indisposed with a cold and must rest so that she would be able to fulfill her promise to take Octavia to Lady Hardwicke’s ball. He recognized the polite evasion and wondered what the woman was up to. Spying was making him quite suspicious of his fellow man. Only Harriet Swanley seemed to him open and honest.
With no obligation to the marchioness, Charles wasted no time in turning his attention to Captain Fanshaw. A few questions in his club had turned up the information that the captain was with the Horse Guards and had a reputation for idle charm. His father was a general with a substantial estate in Wiltshire. The younger Fanshaw was apparently a competent but unambitious soldier. Riding through the park and looking smart in his scarlet coat seemed to satisfy his desire for military action. No one knew any great ill of him, but no one thought him worth much. When Charles asked where Fanshaw might be found when he was not on duty, eyebrows went up. Apparently, he had a favorite brothel and a favorite club for practicing his sword work. Charles made up his mind to seek out the captain as soon as he reported to Goldsworthy.
* * * *
Harriet, aware that a necessary interval of several days must be got through between Octavia’s meeting with the dressmaker and the Hardwicke ball to which she was to wear her new dress, invited Octavia to the afternoon’s Royal Lecture. Anne and Camille were to go with their mother to a lying-in hospital of which Lady Luxborough was a sponsor to bring the mothers and new infants a box of those items most necessary to a baby’s care.
At the Royal Institute, the day’s topic included a brief digression from the planets to Ptolemy’s ancient methods for determining the relative brightness of the stars. For a moment Octavia forgot her woes to lean forward in fascination. Harriet found her own attention wandering. Her gaze shifted to every movement at the door of the theater, and she took herself to task for the idle hope that Wynford would join them. Really, she would see him soon enough to report her observations from the dressmaker’s.
John Jowers abandoned his male friends to sit with them and openly stared at the girl rather than the speaker. At the lecture’s end he told Octavia she must come to the Luxboroughs’ that evening.
“Why must I?” she replied with just that mulish tone Harriet was coming to recognize.
“So you can play Miss Swanley’s game,” John Jowers replied.
“More child’s play? Like ice skating?” Octavia asked, assuming her most worldly air.
“You thought ice skating was good sport, didn’t you?”
Harriet smiled to herself. Octavia refused to admit any such thing.
With surprising understanding of Octavia’s mood, John Jowers simply walked away.
“He thinks I’m just a schoolroom chit,” Octavia told Harriet. “What game?”
“Come tonight, and you’ll find out.” Harriet smiled, but refused to say more. Octavia’s curiosity was a sign of the girl’s forgetting her misery and looking outside herself.
* * * *
Charles sat blinking at Goldsworthy as Wilde poured coffee. The youth called it “cawfy,” the one word that betrayed his East London origins.
“Under no circumstances,” said the spymaster, “can I permit you to follow this man. Can’t have you jeopardizing the whole mission.”
Charles controlled a strong rush of rebellious feeling. A rich vapor rose from the cup in front of him. He picked it up and had a swallow. He would rely on reason. “I must disagree, sir,” he said. “Pursuing Fanshaw won’t hurt the mission. More likely his actions will shed light on the marchioness’s intentions, which have so far eluded us.”
“Nevertheless, can’t have you spotted, Wynford. You’ll stick out badly, and you mustn’t tip your hand.” A prodigious frown darkened Goldsworthy’s brow. Even seated at his massive desk, Goldsworthy towered above visitors to his office. With his shaggy russet hair like a lion’s mane, and his broad person dressed in browns and greens, he reminded Charles of the famous Green Knight of legend who had come to King Arthur’s court with his huge axe and challenged the knights to a contest.
Wilde cleared his throat, and the big man’s stare shifted to the youth.
“I could go with him, sir, and with Kirby’s help, we could have his lordship looking like...the lowest scum of London.”
Charles looked at Wilde. “You mean I’d have to abandon my splendid waistcoats?”
Wilde grinned at him. “And your fine polished boots, white linen, and tailored coat.”
Charles grinned back at the youth. They both turned to Goldsworthy. The frown had not cleared from his brow, but his eyes darted rapidly back and forth, a sign that he was thinking furiously. He reached out absently, one of his huge hands swallowing the coffee cup in front of him. Charles waited.
“I’ve no doubt Kirby can turn you into a pauper, Wynford, but you’ll give yourself away the minute you open your mouth.”
“Then he’ll have to be a mute, sir,” suggested Wilde. “I’ll be his keeper.”
* * * *
In the end it was hard for Charles to decide what he missed most about his old self, or which of the petty discomforts of his disguise irked him more. The afternoon was raw, and his ragged coat was no defense against the cold of a keen wind off the river. He and Wilde traveled on foot at a quick pace, and the worn boots chafed his feet and admitted the damp of every ice-crusted puddle. He reeked with what Wilde explained was a mixture of stains Kirby had concocted from garments borrowed from butchers’ stalls and gin houses. Charles had thought the brilliant waistcoats a disguise, but he had not experienced the full meaning of disguise until he caught the looks of his fellow Londoners when they caught a whiff of him. Most people gave him a wide berth, but some offered insult as well. He had never questioned his right to walk the streets of London. To accept the sneers and slurs of ordinary citizens with no power of repaying them grated on his pride.
Fanshaw and his friend spent the morning sparring, not with Gentleman Jackson, but with a bruiser who ran a similar, if less polite, establishment in Covent Garden. The neighborhood bustled with rude life. But even the Waits, the rustic minstrels offering raucous Christmas carols, refused to go near Charles. By the time he and Wilde had followed Fanshaw and his friend to a posting house in the northwest corner of the city, Charles’s jaw ached from clenching it to keep from returning some measure of the insults he’d received.
In the taproom of the posting house, the tapster took immediate objection to Charles’s person, but Wilde produced coin and a story about taking his mute friend to a place that had work for him. Whether the story worked, or sufficient coin persuaded him, the tapster let them take a corner table away from other patrons, one of whom was the captain’s friend.
A fire warmed the room. Charles wrapped his hands around the pint pot Wilde shoved his way and lowered his head, hoping notice would soon shift away from them. He composed himself to listen. The posting house seemed a curious spot for the captain to visit.
Travelers came and went, grabbing a quick bite at a long common table before a waiter returning from serving one of the upstairs rooms drew Charles’s notice as he addressed the captain’s friend.
“High and mighty ways your friend’s lady has,” the waiter observed. Apparently Fanshaw occupied one of the private dining rooms with a lady.
“No doubt,” the friend replied, “but no concern of yours, fellow.”
The waiter muttered to himself as he turned away. “Foreigners.”
Charles and Wilde exchanged a look. In following Fanshaw, Charles had not expected to meet the marchioness, but suddenly it seemed possible that she was the arrogant foreigner to whom the waiter objected.
The afternoon dragged on with the tapster sending suspicious glances their way and Wilde buying more pints. The captain’s friend drank steadily and turned over a pack of cards until Fanshaw came whistling down the stairs with a handful of letters.
“Took you long enough,” his friend said.
“Letters to post,” said Fanshaw, slapping them on the table.
“She had to write them, I suppose. Are you now the marchioness’s French lapdog?”
Again Charles and Wilde exchanged a glance. The woman was upstairs. There was little chance they would encounter her, but Charles kept his head down just the same.
“Nothing of the sort.” Fanshaw called for a pint from the tapster and seated himself. “Your trouble, Digby, is that you have no gallantry. You could be the one helping a defenseless woman alone in a strange country.”
“You trust her?”
Fanshaw grinned and shook his head. “Of course not. Merely doing a small favor in exchange for meeting some heiress or other.”
“Have a care what you’re about.”
“Meeting an heiress? No harm in it. The marchioness simply wants me to do what I do best—woo a woman.” Fanshaw raised his glass in a toast to his surly friend.
Charles found it impossible not to stare at the two men, fixing their faces in his mind. But the men didn’t matter. The letters did. The marchioness had gone to great trouble to conceal her correspondence. In the ordinary course of a visit to a reputable London hotel, a visitor would simply leave letters with the host, who would see them posted. Charles should try to see those letters and not let the ugly suspicion that Octavia was the target of Fanshaw’s intended wooing cloud his judgment. But the prospect troubled him. Fanshaw had the careless, golden good looks and easy manner that women found attractive. He doubted Octavia would recognize the falseness in the man’s charm.
He rose slowly, his battered feet protesting contact with the stiff, wet leather of his boots, and shuffled forward. Feigning unsteadiness, he leaned a hand on the edge of Fanshaw’s table. The letters lay facedown. Charles jerked his hand up, intending to sweep them from the table.
Fanshaw slammed his drink down, sloshing ale and pinning the letters in place. “You reeking pile of rags, what are you about?”
Wilde leapt to his feet and tugged Charles’s arm. “Never ye mind ’im, sir. He’s a poor mute. Doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time.”
“You’d best keep him from interfering with his betters, then, hadn’t you, boy?” Fanshaw raised his drink again and drained it.
The tapster hustled out from behind his bar. “I’ll toss ’em for yer, sir. Not our sort of customer.” He signaled to the waiter to join him.
“No need fer tossin’,” Wilde said. “We’ll be on our way.”
“Be quick about it, then,” said the tapster, turning to Charles. Charles lifted his head and gave them a look that made the two men halt.
Fanshaw stood. “What? You’re afraid of this reeking shambles?” He grabbed Charles by the shoulder and spun him round.
Charles’s left fist shot out, smashing into Fanshaw’s nose with a satisfying crack. Fanshaw staggered backward, knocking the table over, his nostrils spurting blood. The letters slid to the floor. Digby jumped up, shouting as ale sloshed over his coat and breeches.
Wilde scooped the letters up from the floor and gave them a quick glance. “I told ya,” Wilde said, “he’s mute, not deaf. Best not to upset him.”
Digby drew out a handkerchief, dabbing at the ale on his person. The tapster helped a cursing Fanshaw into a chair. Fanshaw snatched the man’s bar cloth and pressed it to his gushing nose.
“Call the constables,” Fanshaw cried.
“No need,” said Wilde. He dropped the letters in Fanshaw’s lap and dragged Charles past the staring patrons.
Out in the cold, Charles and Wilde slipped into the crowd around a stagecoach disembarking passengers and baggage. They circled the neighborhood and returned to a shadowed corner from which to watch the inn. Charles clamped his jaw shut against the cold.
A few minutes later Fanshaw, handkerchief to his nose, and his friend Digby rattled off in a hackney.
The day went dark rapidly. Wilde related the names he had seen on the letters—an M. Merville in Paris, Edenhorn the MP from the Exchequer, and Horace Gresham.
“Horace Gresham?” The name startled Charles. Gresham was his sister’s childhood companion, the young man the neighbors assumed she would marry, the man for whom she had such an attachment of long standing that her appearance in London declaring that she had to find a husband by Christmas made no sense.
“What’s strange, sir,” said Wilde, “is that the letters were not all written by the same person. The letter to Gresham was in a different hand.”
“Different how?” Charles asked.
“Smaller lettering, good copperplate style,” said Wilde. “Sort of schoolgirlish, I’d say, the way my Miranda writes.”
Charles stood stunned. Octavia wrote just that way. If the letter Wilde saw had come from her, she had violated propriety, discretion, and family loyalty in a shocking way. She had put the marchioness in a position to embarrass them both. He could not imagine her doing it, going behind his back and trusting the marchioness to keep her secret. He needed to know the truth of the matter.
An icy drop of water from an overhanging eave hit the back of his neck, setting his body shaking.
“Do we report to Goldsworthy, sir?” Wilde asked.
Charles shook his head. “Let’s wait to see where the marchioness goes.”
Within half an hour lamplighters were at work, and the woman emerged from the inn, showing no signs of the illness she’d feigned in her letter to Charles but getting deferential treatment from the landlord.
She thanked the man and offered him a handful of coins. He thanked her, but, glancing at the coins, he offered a couple back to her. She hesitated a moment, then held out her hand.
“Happy to take these golden boys my lady, but not any of this foreign lot. Got no use for such as them here.” The landlord dropped two clinking coins in her hand. “Ye see, my lady, ye’ve got to know your Georges. George the Third, that’s your sovereign coin. George the Fourth,” he hefted the coin in his hand, “that’s yer two pounder. Ye’ll know by the weight, if ye catch me drift.”
She laughed. “Would that all men were so honest,” she said, accepting the landlord’s help into the coach. The landlord directed the coachman to the marchioness’s hotel, and Charles and Wilde turned back toward the club.
* * * *
At the club Wilde showed Charles to the room formerly occupied by Lord Blackstone. A warm fire, a hot bath, and the attentions of the club’s valet, Twickler, restored him more or less to himself, except for a flame-colored silk waistcoat and a sense of betrayal. His own valet, Oxley, would have fainted had he seen Charles in the disguise he’d worn in pursuit of Fanshaw. What he needed was to get his mind in order. He decided to report all the facts to Goldsworthy but one. At least until he looked at a sample of his sister’s handwriting and had a chance to speak with her. How to approach the subject with her was another dilemma. He could not represent the evils of trusting the marchioness until he knew the truth about her.
An hour later Goldsworthy shook his head at their report. “I don’t like it, lads. The woman’s pointed interest in you, Wynford, makes little sense. There has to be more to it than your supposed connection through your mother’s French grandfather.”
“I agree,” said Charles. “There are official channels for pursuing any property claims she may have through our family. And, if she’s innocent, why the subterfuge of sending her letters through Fanshaw from a posting inn? Why not send them direct from Mivart’s Hotel?”
“And this Gresham fellow is your neighbor, you say? Is she acquainted with the man?”
“Our nearest neighbor.” Charles kept his gaze steady in the face of Goldsworthy’s scrutiny. “I don’t know yet what the connection is.”
“The Frenchwoman’s made you a target, but why? No one knows your role here. No one even knows you’re an analyst for the Foreign Office.”
Charles said nothing. Someone knew more about Charles than he realized. He had no particular reputation in London. He was a single man of good but not extraordinary fortune. He had not called attention to himself by any of the exploits of sporting or betting men. He had friends, but except for Perry, he kept them at a distance. He had not raised expectations among matchmaking mamas as a man looking for a wife. In short, he had called as little notice to himself as a man could, until he began to wear the waistcoats provided him by the club. His work as an analyst had satisfied his mind’s need for activity in the way that sparring and riding satisfied his body. So how had someone discovered that he might be other than he seemed?
“Yes, yes,” Goldsworthy continued. “I know the Foreign Office leaks like an old tub, but I doubt even Chartwell understands what you do, lad.” He shook his great head. “This fellow from the Exchequer doesn’t know anything, I’m sure.”
“I have to agree on that point, sir. I’ve never known Edenhorn to take an interest in foreign affairs.”
Goldsworthy began to move the papers around on the great desk. “Did the marchioness see you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good. Did Fanshaw recognize you?”
“No.” Charles had a question of his own. “Do you know who Merville is?”
Goldsworthy shuffled the papers on his desk. “Inquiries will be made.”