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“To spare you any embarrassment.” He picked up his hat and gloves and moved toward the door. “You may find it quite difficult to manage the kneeling and bowing.”

Her expression shifted rapidly from exasperation to shrewdness. “I’ll manage. You didn’t answer my question.”

“Didn’t I?”

“About your mother?”

He shrugged. “She has washed her hands of such a son as I am. You know—hang, beg, starve, die in the streets.”

She watched his face closely. She doubted he understood how his mother felt about him at all. “It is a good thing, then, that you are reading my guidebook. Likely, it will help you as much as it helps me.”

“Help me?”

“Oh yes, because marrying well will be your best revenge on those who underestimate you.” She turned her head slowly from side to side. “I like this blue hat best. It lets me see the most.”

* * * *

Hazelwood walked back to the club from the hotel. Ordinarily, he would find a walk in the night air a good head-clearing exercise, but London was turning arctic and he hastened his steps. He went straight to Goldsworthy’s office, but found no sign of the big man. In the coffee room minutes later, Hazelwood shed his greatcoat and shouted for Wilde.

“Here, sir,” the youth called. He jumped up, looking abashed, from one of the sofas, leaving Miranda Kirby sitting next to the spot he’d left. “We’ve been reading your book, sir.”

Hazelwood halted, stripping off his great coat and handing it to the youth. He looked at the two faces turned his way and read the signs of a quarrel in progress. “Find the book helpful?” he asked.

“We’re in some disagreement about that, sir,” Wilde said grimly. “Coffee, sir?”

Hazelwood nodded. “I’ll hear your report in a minute.”

“Sir.” Wilde strode off.

Hazelwood turned to Miranda. The girl was striking, and he could see why Wilde was smitten. He wondered what made him immune. Age, he thought, or a distaste for petulant beauties like Miranda, with her pretty mouth drawn up in a pout. “Are you to hunt a husband, too, Miranda?”

“Doesn’t the book say I must?” Miranda stood and offered him the book with a brief curtsy and an irritated swish of kerseymere skirts.

“But you’ll have your father’s shop some day.” Hazelwood took the book to a reading table and opened it to one of the pages he remembered as marked.

Miranda followed him. “A shop’s no substitute for a husband, Lord Hazelwood.”

“Ah, so you want a man to be something more than a reliable source of revenue.”

“How you men talk as if marriage were a business. You sound as cold as Nate Wilde.”

“Then you must not take me seriously.” He found a pencil, and concentrated on filling in from memory the notations he’d seen on several pages of Jane’s book earlier. One thing was clear from the day’s events—Jane’s enemies rather desperately wanted the information she possessed. As Hazelwood saw it, that information was contained in the book her father had sent her through the most secure means at his disposal, his ever-so-discreet London bankers. Piece by piece he would extract her father’s notes from her copy of the book, but he also had to decode them, and he suspected that only Jane Fawkener herself possessed the key to understanding her father’s marginalia.

The enemy seemed to be ahead of them on that point. Their attention to the girl’s movements and the attempt to snatch her from his carriage made it clear they believed she knew something.

Wilde put a cup of steaming coffee at his elbow. Hazelwood took a swallow and let the rich liquid warm him. He finished inscribing the notes he remembered then turned to Wilde for his report.

“The stable sacked the fellow who followed you yesterday, sir, but I found the man in the Dog’s Head, drinking and complaining about horse thieves and bad luck. According to his story, a toff hired him to spy on you for a wager.”

“Did our luckless fellow remember anything else?”

“He said the toff told him there was a bet in his club on where you’d go first with your new…mistress, and he wanted to beat the other fellows out.”

Hazelwood nodded. It had been a clever ruse, and it explained why Slouch Hat had not taken great pains to conceal himself. “Did he remember what the man who hired him looked like?”

Wilde shook his head. “I pressed him, sir, but he just kept saying the fellow was a toff like every other toff. Said the fellow had a fine hat. Sorry, sir.”

“You did well, Wilde. We were attacked today, and I did no better at getting a look at the attacker.”