This was a whole heap of fun! I despise plots where the heroine disguises herself as a boy, but this one masquerades as a child, leading to all sorts of entertaining results, like being given warm milk to drink instead of wine, and being expected to play with skipping ropes and dolls! A very original story.
Here’s the premise: Grace Farnsworth, an orphaned lady come down in the world, has lost her job as a governess. Eking out her last pennies to get back to the safety of her former governess’s house, she disguises herself as a child to get a lower fare on the stage coach. She completely fools the coach driver and the two other passengers, a nosy matron and a well-to-do man whose own carriage has broken down. But when Grace arrives, she finds her friend has gone out of town, and she has no money and nowhere to go. Confiding in the sympathetic man from the stage, he makes her an offer: pose as his daughter for a couple of days to fool his elderly grandmother, and he’ll pay her a hundred pounds. Grace agrees, but it turns out to be more difficult than she’d thought.
Quite apart from the milk and dolls problem, there’s Grace’s very adult appetite to contend with, since grandma has very fixed ideas about what young girls should eat. But at least her benefactor, now revealed as an earl (because of course he is!), Lord Whewell (any ideas on pronunciation? No, me neither) is a bit of a charmer, who comes to her room every night and chats easily about this and that, in a perfectly avuncular manner that arouses no alarm in Grace or gentlemanly concern in him.
But gradually, and it really is very, very gradual, they both come to see each other in a different way. I really liked the way this is done, the first hint being the fact that he shaves before dinner on the second night, having discovered that grandma expects Grace to dutifully kiss her papa before bed each evening. That is such a small detail, but it completely sets up the whole process of falling in love. To be honest, I would have liked a little more awareness from him, since he’s not a callow youth but a previously married man, so he should have seen right from the start where his own feelings were heading. But the middle section of the book is very muddled about whether he’s falling in love or just likes her in a fatherly way. As for Grace, she sees him as old (he’s thirty-five to her twenty-two, which isn’t outrageous for the era), so it never occurs to her that he might have marriage in mind.
The second half of the book is a glorious string of improbable encounters with people who know one or other of the two in different ways, which call for some creative story-telling from our hero and heroine so as not to be rumbled, or to have something worse suspected. This is all deliciously funny, and if it takes the hero a couple of attempts to get his proposal right, everything works out fine in the end, naturally, with a resounding finale. Terrific fun. Five stars.
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