This was a complete riot. Two eloping couples meet on the way to Gretna Green, and as their journeys become more and more entwined, it becomes clear that the pairings are sadly mismatched. It’s a follow-on to A Lord For Miss Larkin, but there’s very little reference to that story, except that the hero here was the villain (of a sort) in the earlier book.
Here’s the premise: Jason, Lord Kilmore, is in desperate needs of funds to rescue him from penury. He tried in the previous book to elope with heiress Alison Larkin, but that came to nought. Now he’s eloping with heiress Henrietta White, who’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but pretty. And rich. Very, very rich. But when he arrives at Henrietta’s house in the dead of night, with a carriage awaiting them, the lady who drops into his arms, literally, from an upper window is not the delicate form of Henrietta, but the larger person of Penny Bryant. This scene is so redolent of Georgette Heyer’s The Corinthian, even to the name (Penelope) of the heroine that I was rather taken aback. However, it soon diverges as the two realise their mistake – they are both eloping, but not with each other. Jason has entered the wrong garden from the mews. Penny sets him right and they part amicably, Jason finds Henrietta, accompanied by her maid, a kitten and a mountain of luggage, and away they go.
Needless to say, the two couples, departing from the same spot and bound on the same journey, inevitably meet up several times on the road, and Jason and Penny are called upon to solve the many difficulties they encounter, many of them, it has to be said, created by Henrietta and her kitten (and who takes a kitten on an elopement?). Penny’s intended, the very Scottish Dr Angus Knox, is just as irritating as Henrietta in his way, especially when he descends into almost impenetrable dialect. I could have done with a lot less of the ‘dinnae ken’ and whatnot.
But our hero and heroine are lovely, and Jason redeems himself in spades for his behaviour in the previous book, when he was actually the villain of the piece, albeit a rather half-hearted one. And now we know why, because the author intended him to be the hero in this book. There’s a very nice ending, when Jason disposes in economical style of the villain of this book, and if it’s all very implausible, it’s also funny and oddly touching to see Jason the fortune-hunter rising to the occasion in magnificent style. A very enjoyable five stars.
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