This book was first published in 1959, more than sixty years ago – a very different era. It’s wordy in places, there’s a fair amount of head-hopping (jumping from one character’s internal thoughts to another’s without a signal) and the plot veers between implausible and outright incredible, and yet I found it a whole heap of fun. I liked the two main characters, the difficulties between them were believable and the romance was low-key but rather sweet. For modern readers, it might be jarring but for anyone weaned on Georgette Heyer, this is a nice, light read.
Here’s the premise: Jane Spencer is travelling to London to take up a position as a companion after several years as a governess. Her stage coach is caught in snow, and the passengers are forced to walk up a hill to spare the horses. During the walk, Jane finds a man lying unconscious in a ditch, possibly set upon by highwaymen. Under his inert body, she finds a treasure the thieves missed – a valuable jewelled snuff box. The stage coach passengers and the injured man are forced to take shelter overnight at a small wayside inn, where Jane discovers that the man has lost his memory.
She looks after him, and they strike up an instant rapport. She rather fancies him, and he trusts her, so when the stagecoach sets off again, she takes him with her to London to meet her lawyer, who she hopes will help him find out who he is. But when she’s concluded her own business with the lawyer and goes to bring in the mysterious stranger, he’s disappeared. Jane’s very disappointed, and a closer look at the snuff box reveals a secret – a hidden letter, making an illicit assignation with a married woman. Now she’s seriously disappointed, and tries to set him out of her mind.
But there’s another shock when she takes up her new position – Celia, the countess she’s to work for, is a girl she knew at school as a bully and a thoroughly unpleasant person. She’s delighted to have the chance to make Jane’s life miserable all over again, and to make matters worse, her husband takes a creepily strong interest in Jane. And when Jane finally discovers the identity of her mystery man, not only has he forgotten her, but it’s Celia he’s been having an affair with…
Now, this is a fairly tangled situation, and it’s a short book, so not everything is resolved satisfactorily, to my mind. In particular, I’d like to know just how Celia’s comeuppance worked, legally. I don’t want to give too much away, but she was just air-brushed away in a page or two, and I’d have liked to know a bit more about it. I also wondered very much just why the earl married her, because he seemed like a sensible guy, much older than her and too smart and experienced to be taken in by Celia’s sickly-sweet public face. I just didn’t believe that he could be so much in love with her that he didn’t see what she was really like.
As I said at the beginning, there’s a lot of implausibility in the plot, particularly in the amnesia business. It’s a very common trope in the genre, and one I try to avoid as much as possible. I see the appeal in it, because what could be more delicious than a character who doesn’t know who he is? So much mystery to unravel, and so much tension – is he rich or poor, a grocer or a marquess? Although in this case, there’s an early discussion of our hero’s expensive clothes and shiny boots, so it’s obvious he’s a gentleman of means, at the very least. But it’s still hard to suspend disbelief. A simple bump on the head, everything’s forgotten, but later the memories will all come back and there’ll be no lasting ill effects. Nope, not believable. But I like to give a book it’s basic premise, however hard to swallow, so I went along with it, and then became thoroughly caught up in the plot.
The story is a bit uneven, and it became hard to remember sometimes just who knew what (or rather, who DIDN’T know what), but there’s one glorious scene in the middle between the earl, Celia, Jane, the hero and Celia’s maid, where everybody knows things are not what they seem, even though nobody quite knows everything, but they all just play along with the hastily improvising Celia as she tries to get them out of a huge mess. It could have been a deeply emotional moment, but the author basically plays it for laughs and it turns into the best part of the book.
As usual with Regencies of this era, the writing is literate and historically accurate, influenced very much by Georgette Heyer (although I rolled my eyes at every ‘pon rep!’). It’s not perfect, and it does require a shed-load of suspension of disbelief, and the ending is extremely abrupt (if you’re a fan of long, syrupy epilogues, this is not the book for you), but I really enjoyed it, quirks and all. Those implausibilities keep it to four stars.
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