I don’t know why, but I felt like I’d read this book before. The grumpy heroine, the eccentric lord who courts her (sort of), the even more eccentric companion and the smuggling subplot – it all felt a bit familiar. But the tetchy arguments between hero and heroine (I won’t flatter them by calling them banter) and the not-quite-sure-what-he’s-up-to hero are classic Joan Smith, and it was all very enjoyable.
Here’s the premise: Miss Priscilla Denver, after a fairly impecunious childhood, has finally come into a sizeable inheritance, so she decides to uproot herself and move nearer to her only surviving relation, an aunt living on the south coast. She buys a neglected dower house from the aunt, and settles there contentedly with her middle-aged spinster companion, Miss Slack. But then her neighbour, the Duke of Clavering, turns up and it appears that he owns the land on which the dower house is built, and the leasehold only has a few more years to run. But not to worry, he’ll buy back the house at whatever Priscilla paid for it, or maybe even more, so she’ll be able to buy another house and everyone will be happy, won’t they?
Except Priscilla, of course, who quite likes this house, thank you very much, and she’s deeply suspicious of the duke’s motives for buying it from her. First he says he wants it for an elderly relative, then it’s to be a museum, since there’s a Roman fort underneath it. There are also some Roman remains in the middle of a field, which the duke is protecting by deploying mantraps around it, which Priscilla deplores. There are some strange noises emanating from the fireplace in the house, which the duke fails to satisfactorily explain. Is it ghosts? Or smugglers? Or simply someone banging about in the cellar? Priscilla is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, and the duke is equally determined to get her out of the house.
It’s an odd thing, but looking back on this, none of the various components worked particularly well. The heroine is, frankly, a termagant, often driven to do something just because she’s told she shouldn’t. The hero is almost as grumpy as she is, and as devious and slippery as an eel. It’s hard to believe a word he says. The romance consists of the two of them quarrelling (I don’t think there’s another word for it, and it certainly isn’t flirting). The hero pays more attention to the middle-aged companion than he does to the heroine, and we don’t see the slightest hint of affection in him until she is injured (doing something she’s been told not to do). The proposal is the same kind of quarrelling, only lightly modified.
And yet, somehow it all works. It’s not my favourite type of Regency (I like my hero and heroine to show some actual sign of emotion rather than well-I-suppose-I’ll-have-to-marry-you nonsense), but Joan Smith is such a stellar writer, and there are so many laugh-out-loud moments that I can see I’ll have to give it four stars.
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