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By the time she heard Hazelwood’s voice giving orders and felt him settle beside her again, she had reviewed the events of the past few minutes right up to Hazelwood’s embrace.

He was angry. She sensed that anger in the deliberate care with which he adjusted the carriage rug over their knees. “Jane, I can’t see you.”

At a gentle tug on the brim of her bonnet she turned to meet his fierce green gaze.

“What hurts?” he asked.

“My arm. I suspect it’s bruised. But nothing’s broken,” she assured him. “May we return to the hotel now?”

He didn’t move. She regarded his gloved hands. Carefully, he secured the reins and turned to her. The soft leather tips of his fingers under her chin warmed her to her toes.

“You need a new a new bonnet, you know. If you’re going to be attacked, I want you to see your assailants coming.” He tilted her chin up and began undoing her bonnet strings, his fingers quick and clever against her throat.

She swallowed. “Wouldn’t a big stick be handier than a new bonnet?”

“Handier, perhaps, but less fashionable. Perhaps your attacker simply took offense at this disastrous bonnet. It certainly offends me.” He lifted her bonnet from her head and frowned at the thing, which now had a fist-sized dent in the crown.

She looked away, an unaccustomed warmth burning in her cheeks. She had not batted his hands aside, as a respectable woman of Halab would have done had a man outside of her family presumed to touch her in a public place. She knew that no one regarded them in the tangle of horses and vehicles, but she felt exposed with her head bare, her hair uncovered, her thoughts unruly.

Next to her Hazelwood turned the bonnet around in his hands, studying it as if it were a puzzle to be solved. “Of course, it might be my hat, to which our assailant objected. There are legions of men in London who object to a high-crowned beaver worn at a jaunty angle. Our assailant might have been trying to get to me through you.”

Our assailant. He made of the attack a shared adventure, willingly taking on her enemies as his. She considered telling him what she really believed about the attacks.

She stole a glance at his profile. In spite of his customary joking tone, his mouth had settled into a taut, implacable line. Without the deep-poked bonnet her glance could range as freely as his over their surroundings. He’d anticipated danger from the moment he’d seen the broken cart. Yesterday, he had made a game of danger and acted with a cheerful lack of hesitation in the face of it. He’d returned to the dress shop, his fashionable clothes soaked and torn, his face and arm scraped, indifferent to the damage. He had saved his most severe frown, his brow contracted in displeasure, for her poor bonnet.

What she’d been thinking, before he’d touched her and stalled her brain, was that the ferocity of the attack confirmed the value of the information her father had gathered. Her father knew something truly vital to this game between England and Russia. His enemies believed he had passed the information to her, and now they were here in London. In protecting her, Hazelwood protected her information. He was, after all, the government’s man, not hers.

She had, somewhere on her or with her, information for which her father had risked, and perhaps given his life. She could not give that information away until she knew for certain who had betrayed her father.

“Husband hunting in London is more dangerous than I supposed. I did not imagine it would lead to being tugged violently by opposing forces and dropped like a sack of lentils.”

He looked up from her damaged bonnet with an unreadable gaze. “Ah, sadly, husband hunting is not for the faint of heart. You’re not afraid to carry on, are you?”

She understood him. His answer told her it was a game they were playing, different from the one England and Russia played, and she did not yet know the moves. “Apparently, my situation raises doubts in some quarters about my sincerity as a husband hunter.”

“Then we must do our best to let it be widely known that the objective of your London visit is to bring a man to his knees in the most honorable way possible. An advertisement in the papers might do. Newly arrived from abroad, Miss Jane Fawkener seeks an eligible gentleman with whom to contract that lifelong partnership sanctioned by the church—the holy bond of matrimony. Only men of means need apply.”

“You are absurd. Are you never serious?”

His expression changed again, startled recognition sharpened his gaze, which caught and held hers. “No matter how many despicable cowards object to your bonnets, Jane, as your protocol officer I will defend you.”

She turned away. He spoke nonsense, but she thought that her hair might escape its pins and tumble down her shoulders from the look he gave her. With a self-mocking laugh, he sent the bonnet, its black strings fluttering, sailing out over the crowd of scavengers, and took up the reins.

The female visitor to London is right to regard the bonnet as an indispensable item of fashion. She notes with astonishment, and perhaps envy, confections of silk and ribbon adorning the heads of ladies of every station and condition. Her first impulse is to seek a known milliner with a reputation for elegance, and to purchase, at great cost, a bit of headwear that will secure her reputation as a woman of taste, forgetting the very reason for which bonnets were devised.

While she accepts the compliments of her friends, the sun beats down, mists rise off the Thames, winds howl, and rains descend. While she, with smug complacency, repeats the name of her clever hatmaker, a half a million chimneys spew into the air the smoke of sea coal, which settles as a fine soot on every street and dwelling and blackens the whitest stone. The Husband Hunter who would preserve her fair beauty wears a bonnet not to advertise her taste or fortune, but to protect her hair and face from the elements.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Ten

Hazelwood put down the book and looked up. He had not touched the girl since they’d returned to the hotel. While they were calling on her grandmother, three bonnets had arrived for her. He’d taken a seat as far from Jane Fawkener as the hotel sitting room permitted and occupied himself with reading aloud to her while she tried on the bonnets. The plan was to distract her, to keep her focused on husband hunting, not on England’s enemies or her agents. Instead he was the distracted one, worried that England’s enemies could get to her all too easily. The boldness of the attack bothered him.

She was neither a green girl nor the waif Goldsworthy described. She’d stood up to her grandmother and an assailant without flinching. If Hazelwood let her think, her busy brain would figure out more than he wanted her to understand about the attack and his response to it. He had gone far beyond the brief of any protocol officer.

Now he ventured a look at her. “Sensible advice. I’m inclined to revise my estimate of the usefulness of your little guide.”

She glanced at him from under a fetching blue velvet cap. “I’m sure the author would be gratified.”