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“Long enough. Did you find a suitable octogenarian?”

“No. I did find a promising young baron.” She stepped closer to him.

“Much better. Is he coming to meet you here?”

She took hold of his coat and tugged. “Of course not. You warned me against such a rendezvous.”

“So I did. Yet, here you are, alone in the dark with…me, tugging at my coat. A man might misunderstand.”

“Well don’t. I’m here on a mission.”

“I know. To get a husband.” He leaned forward, his forehead touching hers.

She stilled at the contact. Their frosty breath mingled. She shivered. “At the moment I have a more immediate goal—to keep my protocol officer from being ejected from a select party by his host.”

He straightened away from her. “Ah, the duke is here.”

“He is, and he strongly objects to your presence, which has been noted by friends of your mother’s apparently.”

“It’s the way of things in London. I assure you I deserve their censure for my youthful indiscretions.”

“So you say. Nevertheless, I don’t wish to see my protocol officer publicly ejected from a party. Do you know another way out?”

He reached up and took her hands from his coat. “That’s one thing we pariahs always know. Come on.”

The danger of fairy tales we are told is that they mislead girls into dreams of marrying Prince Charming. We are to believe that unless we snatch from our girls’ hands the stories of Cinderella, Snow White, and Beauty, and insist on the reading of Fordyce’s Sermons, they will marry badly. And yet the heroines of these tales are as humble, cheerful, competent, and caring in the domestic sphere in which each lives, whether castle or cottage, that each must be considered a model of female virtue. If there is a danger in these familiar tales, it is surely that the tales ignore Prince Charming’s life. There is no requirement that the heroine understand him, know his past, know the work that he is called to do in the world. She is left to imagine that the story is entirely about her rescue, not his.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Twelve

Jane did not want the service to end. For an hour she had felt English, at home in her surroundings. The worn red psalter in her hands, the sober cadence of the worship of the season, the light slanting down into the chaste white interior of the chapel from its upper windows had transported her back to that long ago time when she and her father had come to services on Sundays to pray for Mama.

Until she’d entered the chapel with her Grandmother, she had remembered little of her London childhood. As she crossed from the dark porch into the church proper, memories rushed back in with the smell of candles and the stirring notes of the organ prelude. She heard Hazelwood whisper in her ear, “Any single man under forty in this lot is probably yours for the taking.” Then he vanished, after dogging her footsteps for days. She did not yet understand the pattern of his disappearances and wondered what on earth so alarmed him about a Sunday church service that he’d fled her company.

She and her grandmother parted with Margaret at the rear of the church. Margaret slipped into a pew in the very back on the right, squeezing in with three ladies and two gentlemen, who nodded to her as she entered.

A trim white-haired gentleman noted her grandmother’s arrival and came to offer his arm to assist her. As they passed up the aisle, Jane heard whispers in their wake. At the front of the church where Jane and her grandmother sat, the dark, straight-backed pews with their blue velvet cushions felt instantly familiar as if nine years had not intervened since Jane’s last Sunday service but only the usual interval of a week. The service passed in a measured succession of creeds and collects and prayers for the king, clergy, and people. Only her questions over Hazelwood’s abrupt departure interrupted her thoughts. Hazelwood had a way of doing that, occupying her mind when she meant not to think about him.

Now the worshippers in their pew stirred, taking hymnbooks into gloved hands. They were to stand for a benediction and the recessional hymn. Around her the onion-thin pages of the hymnbooks rustled and people cleared their throats. She helped her grandmother to stand. The unseen organist struck the opening chord of a hymn of praise. Just then a broad-shouldered gentleman in a blue coat jostled his way into the pew, forcing everyone to shift to the left. The congregation began to sing, and Jane found her voice. It was a stirring tune to rouse a martial spirit.

As the organ notes died away, a procession of elegant people filled the main aisle, those from the first pews leading the way. The business of helping her grandmother stand and step into the aisle occupied her attention for several minutes as the crowd passed. When at last they began to move, Jane’s attention was caught by an elegant woman in dove-gray silk, her chestnut hair streaked with white at the temples. The woman’s fellow churchgoers bowed and greeted her with apparently little expectation of a return greeting.

“The Countess of Vange,” her grandmother whispered in her ear. “She’s a great patron of this chapel and a regular at Sunday services. Your scapegrace friend, Hazelwood, is her son.”

As soon as her grandmother spoke, Jane saw the resemblance. What little Hazelwood had admitted about his family came back to her. And something else. Hazelwood was wrong if he thought his mother felt about him as his father did. The countess’s drawn face and her brittle hauteur were signs of a woman suffering from a great loss.

“Come, Margaret will be waiting of us with her Last Bench Lending Library group. We’d best get it over with.”

Margaret made the introductions. The others smiled and nodded at Jane and looked awed by her grandmother. Hazelwood’s words about husbands echoed in her head when Margaret introduced Captain Simon Mudge, a retired naval officer with a limp and brown military whiskers that curved from his ears along his fine square jaw, and Thomas Bickford, a tall, lean man of extraordinary pallor, a widowed barrister of the rank of King’s Counselor. The surprise was that her father’s indistinguishable twin sisters, Cassandra and Cordelia, in matching fox fur-trimmed pelisses and bonnets were part of the group, indeed its most elegant members. The final member was Lucy Holbrook, a young woman in a plain dark blue wool coat that could not limit her striking fair prettiness. Each of them clasped a book in hand.

“We are not Mudd’s Circulating Library, but we do keep books moving,” Cordelia confided, holding out her book for Jane’s inspection. “Have you read Mrs. Raby’s latest medieval romance?”

Jane shook her head.

“Hair raising stuff. I’ll lend you Volume One when Cassandra’s done with it. She’s the slowest reader of the bunch.”

“Yes, but, unlike Cordelia, I never forget what I’ve read. She’s the one who slows the group down by re-reading a book she read a month earlier.”