I find this a really difficult book to review. On the one hand, it’s well-written, with few errors and a pretty good portrayal of the Regency. On the other hand, it depends on a couple of huge misunderstandings at the very start (obviously; it’s in the title) which the heroine deliberately continues, a massive coincidence towards the end and a frankly unbelievable resolution. I also found the relationships between the characters wildly confusing. I felt as if I’d missed a chapter or two early on which explained everything, and I never really worked out who some of them were.
Here’s the premise: Beth Culpepper is a lady’s maid who’s been turned off without a character for helping her headstrong young mistress on her clandestine adventures. She hopes to find work at an inn, but soon realises that there are some pretty dodgy customers there. While she’s wondering what to do, she’s spotted by a kindly marquis, who assumes from her clothes (her mistress’s castoffs) that she’s gently born, and has run away from school. His sister (who’s a princess!) coincidentally recognises her from one of those clandestine outings to Vauxhall Gardens, and thinks she’s her mistress, Sophy Ludgate. Feeling sorry for Beth, they sweep her up and carry her off to London to stay at their house there, and await the return of… well, someone (some of those hazily-connected characters I mentioned). Beth feels unable to confess the truth and manages to play the part of a lady well enough to convince them.
So already there’s plenty of plot-fudging going on, and it continues for most of the book, with Beth’s reasons for not revealing herself and the marquis’s for keeping her under their roof falling into the plot-convenience category. I never believed for one minute that a maid, no matter how good an actress, could pretend to be a lady for a whole week without arousing suspicions. I was also somewhat suspicious of Beth’s predilection for books. That she could read, I accept, but to spend her days curled up in the library reading up on Greek mythology seemed a stretch too far, although to be fair, the author shows her struggling with the pronunciation.
Having said all that, the slowly developing romance is delightful. The marquis is an unusual character for a Regency hero, being a thoroughly nice chap, who just needs to lighten up a little. The teasing banter between the three principals is charming, and often very funny. He’s so used to being the target of ambitious young ladies with a yen to become a marchioness that he falls instantly under the spell of Beth, who has no expectations at all in that direction and so treats him a bit like an older brother.
Beth is an even more unusual heroine, and I liked that the author addressed the issue of Beth’s lowly status head on. Having been a servant herself, she ‘sees’ the servants in the marquis’s house in ways that the marquis and his sister never do. They don’t even know the names of half of them. The sister seems uninterested, but the marquis, to his credit, is very willing to have his eyes opened, and Beth’s gentle but sure-handed reorganisation of the whole household is one of the delights of the book.
There’s one other unusual feature of this book. Most Regencies focus fairly closely on the hero and heroine, and everything is seen through their eyes. Here, though, we get to see the cause of Beth’s difficulties, in the shape of Miss Sophy Ludgate. Sophy’s a fascinating character, who continually gets herself into trouble in the most exuberant way, and somehow always manages to make it seem like the most reasonable thing in the world. She’s not wicked, just rather thoughtless and self-absorbed (but she’s not alone in that), but she is very, very plausible and it’s easy to see how Beth was drawn in to helping her. There’s a neat resolution to her problems that I very much liked.
Unfortunately, the resolution of the romance wasn’t quite so successful, to my mind. There was always going to be a clash of epic proportions when the marquis discovered that the love of his life is a humble maid, and although it’s obvious that there will be a happy ending, I didn’t find it particularly plausible. Some rank disparities are just too great to be bridged, no matter how ingeniously they’re covered up.
However, that’s just me, and for those who can suspend disbelief a bit more than I can, this is a well-written and charming story. I can’t give this one more than three stars, but I’m impressed enough with the author to want to try another of her books.