This was a barrel of laughs, and although the hero and heroine get themselves into a rare old muddle through sheer stupidity, and some of the characters are a bit over the top, it’s all so funny that it doesn’t really matter.
Here’s the premise: Samantha Bright has been buried in the country her whole life, and has reached the ripe old age of twenty-six without finding a husband. Part of the problem is that she’s been in love with her neighbour Lord Monteith for years, even though he treats her with negligent familiarity, calling her his country flirt – when he’s even at home, that is, which isn’t often. One day Monteith will marry, he supposes, but not yet, and until then he’s enjoying himself thoroughly, while Sam is languishing into spinsterhood. But into this stasis comes Monteith’s uncle, Lord Howard, who returns home from India with a million pounds in his pocket, determined to marry and sets his sights on Sam. Which of course serves to focus Monteith’s attention properly on her for the first time.
From here on, the plot follows a fairly predictable path. There are some side distractions, like Mrs Armstrong, the retired courtesan that Howard wants to set up as his mistress, but she’s angling for marriage, and Clifford Sutton, the low-key friend and possible suitor of Monteith’s mother, who is herself a central character, constantly manipulating everyone around her in the most outrageous fashion. But Lord Howard is the character who dominates the stage in every scene, completely upstaging the two principals, who seem drab and spiritless by comparison.
I confess to being puzzled by the titles. It’s never mentioned what Monteith’s exact rank is, but since his uncle is Lord Howard, he can only be a duke or a marquess, and since nobody your-graces him, he must be a marquess. Which is pretty high up the pecking order, but no one ever refers to it, or treats the family with the sort of deference that a marquessate would usually engender. Nothing wrong with that, it just struck me as odd. There was one historical misstep – not impossible but something that would have been frowned upon. I don’t want to be too spoilerish, so I’ll just say – marriage to deceased wife’s sister.
This is not the book to read if you want deep character development or oodles of angst, with emotion spilt all over the page. It’s written in the classic tradition of Heyer-esque Regency romps, all froth and silliness, no unseemly lusting, and the headline romance is wrapped up on the last page with the hero sweeping the heroine into his manly arms for a thorough kissing. Although to be fair, there is a sort of an epilogue here.
It’s also not the book to read if you’re a stickler for period-accuracy language, and don’t get me started on the punctuation. If this book has ever seen a proofreader, he or she should be fired immediately. Much of it reads as if it was transcribed from a printed version by optical character recognition, and then simply published. Not good enough. But it’s very funny, and I can forgive a book a great deal if it makes me laugh. The conversations between Sam and Monty, especially in the beginning, before he gets all grumpy and jealous, are hilarious. But there are just too many misunderstandings, and too many errors to give it more than four stars.
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