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“What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“Tempting Queenie.” She showed him her palm with the dish of scraps. “She’s run off.”

He waited so long to answer that she thought he must not have understood.

“I didn’t think Queenie ever left Adam’s side.”

“A reproach meant for me, I think, Captain. You think I can’t leave Adam, but of course, I can and have. Often. For school and Sunday services in town.”

“And somehow Adam has survived? Astonishing.” He came to stand in the shadows beside her. In spite of the brief joke, his stance was wary and alert, like a soldier on sentry duty. She ventured a glance at his stern profile. She would like to see him laugh once, really laugh, be helpless with it.

He was not like Adam or Papa or the bench sitters, and it was more than the uniform that set him apart. Though he came from the world of her London friends and spoke with their accents, and though Margaret had mentioned him as charming in her letter, there was something unyielding about him that said he wasn’t entirely at home in London society either, a man who still wore a uniform. Probably, she reasoned, because he was not a man to bend, and certainly not to please a girl. He was about as comfortable as a sheathed sword, and his presence stirred her to vast impatience. “You are quite difficult,” she said.

“Am I? Here I thought I was helpful.” He continued to look out over the garden.

“You want me to turn my back on my friends.”

“I suggested that you go to your friends.”

“Not those friends. Adam,” she said. “He listens to me and laughs at my jokes, you know.”

“I thought that was a husband’s job.”

She laughed. “Is that what husbands do? I’ll have to consult my guide.”

“Wise, I’m sure, if you plan to hunt a husband in London.”

“I suppose I must, and there’s no putting it off.”

“Then you’ll go tomorrow?”

She laughed. He was that quick to take up the opening she’d left him. “Allow me to make some arrangements, please. And I must find the cat. Either she’s gone off mousing, or she’s more deeply offended than I thought.”

She turned to enter the kitchen, and he caught her by the arm, pulling her into the shadows. Her whole body waited, skin and nerves and breath, for what he might do next.

“I’m not worried about the cat,” he said.

He really was a most irksome person. “Is there anyone who can claim your loyalty, Captain? A fellow soldier? A friend? A brother?”

“Or a lover?” he asked, his breath warm against her ear.

She shivered at it. “Oh, pardon me. I should have thought.” She turned her face to his.

“There is no lover,” he said. This time his breath mingled with hers, his mouth inches from hers, unspoken intention hung in the frosty air. He released her arm, and she hurried into the kitchen.

The husband hunter might imagine that husbands can be found anywhere and that she might spare the expense of a trip to London for the Season. She might consider instead the delights of a fashionable watering hole to which the best of society now and then escapes. Or she might content herself with the gentlemen available in her own circle of four and twenty families. Surely among them are brothers and cousins enough to supply some choice and stir some excitement. Furthermore, she may feel that she can proceed more directly to the altar with a gentleman whose relations are known to her. Here, this writer must speak a word of caution, for such thinking sounds too much like settling, like putting up with inferior accommodations, enduring a smoking chimney, damp sheets, and a lumpy mattress when with a little effort one might have a perfect bed.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter 9

In the morning it was not Queenie who greeted Lucy from the kitchen, but Mrs. Vell. With a blue pinny covering her usual brown-and-white-checked gown, and her stout, well-muscled forearms bare, Mrs. Vell was rolling out dough on the big pine table in the center of the kitchen.

“Now, miss,” she said, applying her rolling pin vigorously to the lump of dough, “I’ve agreed to forget our differences and keep matters in hand here while you try your luck at finding a husband in London. Mind, you’ll want a gentleman that’s not too high, nor too low, neither. I’m sure the good captain can steer you right.” Mrs. Vell’s assistants, Delilah and Sampson, bobbed their heads in agreement.

The good captain? The good captain was going to determine her choice of a husband. Lucy would have a word with him directly. Apparently a red coat gave a man permission to arrange other persons’ lives.

As she passed Adam on his bench polishing a tea tray, Frank Blodget assured her he could handle the inn in her absence, and Hannah said, “Captain’s in ’is room if ye need ’im, miss.”