The Christmas Husband Hunt

Book 4: Husband Hunters

by Kate Moore

Genres: Regency Romance; Holiday Romance

Synopsis

When a husband is needed by Christmas, a trusted slender volume for ensuring a merry match is indeed a gift! In this Regency delight from beloved, award-winning author Kate Moore, a spirited governess joins a gentleman spy on a daring mission: finding a mate for a jilted debutante—while drawing dangerously close to each other . . .
 
Behind her seemingly dependent role as an unpaid caretaker—of both children and dogs—Harriet Swanley has in fact astutely avoided a forced marriage. But hers is not the only secret under wraps: Charles Davenham is working covertly to unmask a Russian agent—until the younger sister he’s always protected comes to him, recently rejected and clutching The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London. The little handbook would be a godsend—if only the distraught girl didn’t mangle all of its good advice! If Harriet can help Charles find a love match for his sibling, perhaps, in this season of good tidings, a long-buried attraction can set their own hearts aflame . . .
 
Praise for The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
  “Appealing protagonists and a slow simmering romance. An ideal choice for fans of traditional Regencies who enjoy the occasional dash of mystery.” –Library Journal

Release date: November 5, 2019

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

The advantages of the single state are best enjoyed by young men of fortune, birth, and personal attraction.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter 1

“Are we finished?” Charles Davenham asked, one dark brow raised. He stood in black evening wear before a cheval glass in his dressing room, enduring the satisfied scrutiny of his friend Peregrine Pilkington and a severe, brow-knitting frown from Oxley, his valet. Perry had added an alarming number of items to Charles’s ensemble and now considered the effect of an emerald stickpin in the flowing folds of Charles’s neckcloth.

The candles flickered in a slight draft, and Charles recalled the open window over the desk in his bedroom. Outside, the wind was rising for the first gale of the season. It would pour soon, and he preferred to get to his quarry before the skies opened.

“Perry, you are enjoying this too much.” It was Perry who had come up with the idea of the extravagant waistcoats as a disguise.

“Am I?” Perry asked.

A row of fobs and seals dangled from the rather exotic persimmon-colored waistcoat Perry had insisted Charles wear. “I’ll jingle like sleigh bells when I walk.”

“The point is, dear boy, to distract the marchioness with your finery—rings and farthingales and things.” Perry circled a fine, thin hand in the air. “Besides, it’s your fault we have to rely on sparklers. You’ve too much muscle on you. Can’t disguise your shoulders.”

“I asked you here for your help with the woman’s family tree. You’re the expert in aunts, uncles, and third cousins once-removed. I’m counting on you to spot any flaw in the lady’s credentials.”

Oxley, who had voiced no disapproval of Charles’s sartorial choices for nearly a decade, shuddered and turned away from the waistcoat with a tray of jewels Perry had earlier rejected.

Perry stopped him. “Rings. We need rings.”

With a sigh, Oxley held out the tray.

Charles groaned.

“You think the marchioness is the one the Foreign Office is after?” Perry asked, holding out two rings—a cabochon ruby and a square-cut diamond.

“Who else?” Charles slid the rings onto the fingers of his right hand. They had belonged to his father, but Charles had worn only the signet he inherited with the title, Viscount Wynford.

“Are you going to expose her at midnight? The way a masquerade ball ends when the hostess invites everyone to tear away his disguise?”

Charles shook his head. “I can’t act without proof. Look at her family tree again, Perry, and tell me whether there’s any chance the woman is who she claims to be.”

Perry picked up a piece of yellowing parchment from a side table. “The thing is in bleeding French. How am I supposed to tell one frog from another?”

“Tell me where the likely forgery is, and we’ll investigate further.” By we, Charles meant his fellow analysts working for the Foreign Office.

Charles turned from the mirror to look over Perry’s shoulder at the document, a page torn from a Bible. It had just come into his hands, and he was eager to see whether it shed any light on the marchioness’s past. She might be who she claimed to be, a distant cousin of Charles’s late mother, now restored to her lands and titles in post-Napoleonic France. Or she could be, as he and two Foreign Office colleagues suspected, a Russian spy borrowing a lapsed identity to position herself in London society to receive and pass along the government’s secrets to the Russian agent Zovsky in Paris.

Ever since Napoleon’s fall, Russia and England had been circling like two pugilists in a ring, measuring each other’s reach and power. Each country had agents in the other’s capital. Russian agents, trained in deception, trolled the political and social waters of London in search of weak, indebted, or unprincipled members of fashionable society who could be persuaded to offer secrets to the Russians for a price.

In the spring, British counteragents had made a small crack in a ring of spies that had been operating in London for some time. With the arrest of the popular émigré Count Malikov and the death of his chief courier, Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe, they had slowed the flow of information to the Russians. No one in the Foreign Office, however, doubted the Russians would try again, and when Malikov died in prison under suspicious circumstances, and the French marchioness appeared claiming to be related to Charles, it had been natural for Lord Chartwell of the Foreign Office to approach Charles for the mission of exposing her. It would be his first mission in the field.

The timing was not ideal, as Charles knew he could count on Perry to remind him.

“So if you don’t expose the marchioness tonight, you won’t go home for Christmas,” Perry said, holding the document closer to the light.

“Can’t,” Charles insisted. “Not when we’re so close to cracking the spy ring.”

Perry frowned and lowered the parchment back to the table. The writing was small, the ink faint, and the document much amended with dates added for marriages and deaths.

Charles could see Perry’s eyes in rapid motion, a sign his friend’s nimble brain was at work. In Charles’s opinion, Perry’s parents had a great deal to answer for in the upbringing of their only son, starting with his christening. One did not name a boy Peregrine Pilkington and then send him at the tender age of eight to an English public school, no matter how ancient his pedigree or how fat his papa’s wallet. A brilliant student, Perry had refused to fight any of the aristocratic ruffians who had mocked him mercilessly. It was Charles who had developed a punishing left hook in the service of his friend’s honor. It was what he did. He protected. He couldn’t help it. He’d been protecting Octavia ever since he’d cradled her in his arms under a reeking pile of fishing nets on the French beach where rogue soldiers of the great nation had murdered their mother.

Charles’s sister, Octavia, now twenty, was the one reason he might be persuaded to postpone his pursuit of the marchioness. He never missed Christmas at home with his sister. It was a pact he’d made long ago and never broken. He and Octavia even had a name for their particular form of the annual holiday. In an unguarded moment, he’d confided as much to Perry.

Charles wasn’t sure exactly why Christmas always seemed so flat at Wynford Hall, but it did. Perhaps it was the vicar with his objection to merriment of any kind and specifically to mistletoe, which he tried to ban from all the neighboring houses as a druidical practice inconsistent with proper English worship.

Charles thought the absence this year of an elder brother might make Christmas easier for Octavia to endure. The family’s neighbors, the Greshams, whose son Horace had been a third party to many of Charles’s and Octavia’s Yuletide adventures, had extended their usual invitation to the season’s festivities.

Perry straightened and tapped a line of the marchioness’s family tree. “If there’s a weakness in the lady’s pedigree, I’d say it’s right here. According to this tree, your marchioness shares a great-grandparent with you. If the fourth earl’s daughter, who married into the Delatour family, had a son who lost his life in the Terror, then your marchioness is your second cousin. See this line here.”

Charles looked at the tiny notation of a row of siblings born some fifty years earlier in the French town of Saumur.

Perry tapped the page. “If Great Uncle Victor is legitimate, then the marchioness is indeed your cousin and the widow of the deceased Marquis de Tonnelier.” He paused. “But that’s the thing about a family tree. You can add an extra twig if no one’s alive to dispute the fiction.”

That was the rub. The revolution’s zeal to erase the past had led to the loss of many of the records families relied on to establish claims to their former estates.

Charles looked at the line of offspring Perry had pointed out, a generation of French nobles who had passed away before the Revolution. Their children and most of their children’s children had perished in the Terror. According to the marchioness, her late father-in-law had sent key documents to England for safekeeping when King Louis was first arrested. Now, she—Isabelle Delatour, Marchioness de Tonnelier—claimed to be the sole survivor of two ancient families.

“Thanks, Perry. We’ll look into Great Uncle Victor.” Charles straightened. His fobs jingled. It was time to face the marchioness. It surprised him how easily her claim to be a cousin, a remnant of his mother’s past, brought back that past, his summers in the vineyards of Saumur, and that last day in France.

As he tugged the appalling waistcoat into place and Oxley held out his hat and gloves, the door to his dressing room blew open, banging against the paneled wall. Shouts rose from the entry below.

“Someone’s opened the front door, my lord,” Oxley said.

“Sounds like your sister’s voice,” Perry said.

Charles heard it too, unmistakably Octavia’s voice, raised in distress. He strode for the stairs. His sister could not be in London. His sister never left Wynford Hall.

From the top of the stairs he looked down on an odd tableau: Octavia in a soaked and muddied cloak, clutching a small traveling case and confronting a London jarvey in a slouched hat and sopping greatcoat.

“Well, I won’t pay you that ridiculous sum. You’re trying to gammon me because you think I’m a flat. You’d never try such stuff on my brother.” His sister turned to look up the stairs. “Charles, come sort this jarvey.”

“Now, miss,” the man began, “I b’aint askin’ too much. Bein’ out in a storm, taking yer extra bags, comin’ clear ’cross Lunnon at this hour. Think of me poor ’orse, for pity’s sake.”

“Oh,” said Octavia, her shoulders slumping. “I never thought of the poor animal.” She struggled with the strings of her reticule. Then her head came up again. “Your horse is no excuse to keep my bags from me. You just think I’m good for more blunt. You’re a low, wretched, wretched...”

“Extortioner, I believe is the word you’re looking for, Octavia.” Charles reached the bottom of the stairs. The door remained open, a stiff breeze blowing rain across the black and white tiled floor. Pratt, Charles’s butler, appeared frozen in place.

“Charles!” Octavia turned and flung herself into his arms, a shaking bundle of wet wool. Over her head, Charles signaled Pratt to settle with the jarvey. The two men turned away.

Against his shoulder Octavia poured out a tale of a horrid journey by stage.

“The stage? Octavia, where’s Nurse? Who knows you left Wynford?”

Octavia stiffened in his arms. She pulled back. “Oh, I’m sorry. You’re going out, and I’ve made you...” Her eyes widened as she took in the persimmon waistcoat. “… all wet. Is that what gentlemen of fashion wear in London?”

“No. It’s what Perry made me wear. Only for tonight. But I won’t be going out.”

“Is it for a wager, then?”

“No. Why the stage, Octavia?”

She drew herself up. Her cheeks were pale, her nose red, and her eyes over-bright. If he didn’t know his sweet-eating sister as well as he did, he would say she’d lost half a stone.

“Don’t worry, Charles. I won’t be any trouble to you. I just need a place to stay while I find a husband.”

“A husband?” Charles and Perry spoke as one, and Charles realized his friend had come down to stand beside him.

Octavia nodded vigorously, sending water flying from her bonnet. “You must have a friend who needs a wife, Charles?”

Perry took a step back.

Octavia turned to Perry. “Oh, hello, Peregrine. Don’t worry. I didn’t mean you.”

“But Octavia,” Charles said, “right now I’m in the middle of—”

Perry nudged him. “He’s in the middle of the single life. That’s what he’s in the middle of, and that’s no place for a young lady.”

Octavia tilted her head to one side, regarding them both with suspicion. “I thought gentlemen sought young ladies to marry. My book says...” She lowered the case she was carrying to the floor.

“Octavia, surely you want a Season. In the spring, we can...” He cast a look of desperate appeal at Perry.

“Harry Swanley,” Perry announced decisively.

Octavia beamed. “You see, Charles. Perry knows someone.”

Perry shook his head. “No, not that sort of Harry. Meant to say Lady Harriet. She’s a fourth cousin on your father’s side. She’s just the person to take Octavia to all the right dinners and balls.”

“Oh, no need.” Octavia dropped to her knees on the wet, muddied floor and began to rummage through her bag.

“Harriet Swanley?” Charles asked Perry. He knew Lionel Swanley, Lord Dunraven, and had a profound distaste for the man.

“Oh, she’s nothing like Dunraven,” said Perry. “Hasn’t lived with him for years. Lives with the Luxboroughs. Never married. You can call on her tomorrow. I’m sure she’d be glad to help Octavia.”

Octavia straightened from her case, holding up a small blue book with gold filigree lettering, The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London. “No need to call on Lady Harriet, Charles. I’ve read this book from cover to cover. I know just what to do to get a husband by Christmas.”

Charles looked at his sister’s thin, pale cheeks and over-bright eyes.

“Lady Harry.” Perry insisted.

“I’ll call on her in the morning.” Charles recognized that he needed help. The over-bright glitter in his sister’s eyes came not from a danger one could fight, but from something outside an older brother’s experience. The marchioness would have to wait to get an eyeful of his persimmon waistcoat.

It must be said that not every husband hunter will have that combination of sense, character, and good fortune that preserves her from unwise attachments until she meets a man she can both love and respect. Indeed, it falls to the lot of many a spirited young woman, while barely out of the schoolroom, to form a heady first attachment with a man who does not return her regard. The disappointed hopes she experiences when this gentleman turns his attentions elsewhere are among the bitterest a woman can feel. It is wise in such cases for the husband hunter to seek a change of situation. To remain among the scenes where the attachment was formed or among the company who saw it develop is to keep it alive in the memory in a way that is an obstacle to future happiness.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter 2

“Harry, are you going to take the dog out?” Priscilla Luxborough huffed a little from the effort of climbing the stairs to Harriet’s attic room. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

Harriet Swanley looked up from her book at her young cousin. “Oh, is it time?”

Pris shrugged, digging her hands in her pockets. “Are you reading anything good?”

Harriet closed her book and put it aside. “Emilie du Chatelet’s Discourses on Happiness.”

Pris sighed. “Everyone’s so dull today.”

“That,” said Harriet, “is on account of the gale last night.” She knew Pris had missed her morning ride, as all of the Luxborough grooms were busy repairing damage to the stables from a fallen chimney.

Pris produced a card from the pocket she’d been digging in. “Oh, and you have a visitor.”

As a governess, Harriet was not in the habit of receiving callers in Luxborough House. She couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice. “Who’s calling on me?”

“Here’s his card.” Pris offered a cream square of paper from her pocket. “I put him in the yellow room.”

Harriet read the bold black lettering. Charles Davenham, Viscount Wynford. She jumped up, throwing off the burgundy shawl she’d wrapped around her shoulders for warmth. A night of wind blowing across the park and up Mount Street had cooled the house below the usual late November chill. “Pris, you didn’t put a viscount in the yellow room. He’s not a tradesman.”

Again, Pris shrugged. “He’s calling on you, not on the family. It must be about some business or other, and mother says business must always be conducted—”

“I know what your mother says, but viscounts do not belong in dingy backrooms. Did you send a footman to light a fire?”

Pris shook her head.

Harriet headed for the stairs. With any luck she’d reach Wynford before he froze solid.

Pris called after her, “Maybe the breakfast room is empty.”

Maybe, Harriet thought, I can become a paid governess in a house where my charges listen to me. Harriet was under no illusion about her position in the Luxborough household, and, on the whole, it suited her. Her cousins had offered refuge when her family cast her off. In return she had shepherded a younger generation of Luxboroughs through their awk. . .