The Christmas Husband Hunt Read online

  The Christmas Husband Hunt

  Books by Kate Moore

  The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  A Lady’s Guide to Passion and Property

  A Spy’s Guide to Seduction

  The Christmas Husband Hunt

  Table of Contents

  Books by Kate Moore

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  The Christmas Husband Hunt

  Kate Moore

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Lyrical Press books are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Kate Moore

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

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  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  LYRICAL PRESS Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  Lyrical Press and the L logo are trademarks of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  First Electronic Edition: November 2019

  eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0999-9

  eISBN-10: 1-5161-0999-6

  First Print Edition: November 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-1000-1

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-1000-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To my siblings and fellow stocking-hangers—Ned, Nancy, Joan, Sarah, and Kim—may Christmas always bring you joy!

  “A governess is almost shut out of society; not choosing to associate with servants, and not being treated as an equal by the heads of the house or their visitors, she must possess some fortitude and strength of mind to render herself tranquil or happy...”

  —Nelly Weeton, Letter to Mrs. Dodson, 18 August 1821

  from Hall, E. (ed) 1936 Miss Weeton:

  Journal of a Governess 1811-1825 (London)

  Author’s Note

  The common view holds that Christmas was not much celebrated in England before Prince Albert introduced the Christmas tree and Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. Yet the letters of Jane Austen and her family, her novels, and the diaries of obscure country parsons tell of the gatherings, games, and feasts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From King Arthur’s time to Shakespeare’s the Twelve Days of Christmas were kept with song and dance, green boughs, and cakes with hidden treasures in them.

  Christmas in Austen’s time was in fact much anticipated and prepared for—not with Black Friday sales, but with fattening of the animals that would make the feast and a day set aside for making the pudding. There were masquerades and acts of charity. Children received Christmas boxes of coins. On St. Stephen’s Day (when King Wenceslas looked out, as the carol says), or Boxing Day as it’s now called, people went for a hike or a walk. Rustic musicians called Waits, once officially sanctioned and later banned, took their carols to the streets of London. Vendors drove holly carts through the city. There was a Yule log and a Yule candle, and of course, there was mistletoe, though not in some churches, where it was shunned as a practice of the Druids.

  So as you read The Christmas Husband Hunt, I hope it brings the ancient spirit of Christmas alive again in your heart.

  Now Christmas is come,

  Let us beat up the drum

  And call all our neighbors together;

  And when they appear,

  Let us make them such cheer,

  As will keep out the wind and the weather.

  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 p
roof. 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?”

  Octa
via 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.”