This is a follow-on to Althea, which I loved. This isn’t quite so good, being a bit scattershot, but still a pretty good read.
Here’s the premise: country girl Jenny Prydd is unexpectedly invited to the wedding of relations of an old friend (the hero and heroine of the previous book). Setting off with a grumpy maid, she stops at a wayside inn for a break and some food. While there, a local doctor declares a quarantine because the innkeeper’s son has measles. Everyone inside the inn is required to stay put until all risk of infection is gone. I’m not totally convinced that Regency medicine bothered with full-blown quarantine, rather than simply keeping the infected person isolated, but never mind. Trapped with Jenny at the inn are Emily Pellering and Adrian Ratherscombe, an eloping couple, Peter and Domenic Teverley, an uncle and nephew, and a clergyman. When they realise what is going on, the rest of the inhabitants conspire to protect Emily from fortune hunter Ratherscombe.
The group spend three weeks (!) trapped at the inn, before setting off again for London, including Emily whose family have been notified of her location and send a carriage to rescue her. Jenny moves in with Emily to protect her, even though she has her own family to do that, and Jenny is supposed to be staying with her friend. But the plot needs her to be with Emily, so there we are. The Teveleys call regularly, since Domenic likes Emily, while she is drawn to the enigmatic Peter. The wrinkle in this particular tale is that Emily likes Peter, too, having been very taken by his romantic and heroic sorting out of the obnoxious Mr Ratherscombe by way of his fists.
In London, Jenny is allowed to enjoy herself hugely at a variety of social occasions, while also acting as wise mentor for Emily, who naturally doesn’t listen to a word she says. The real villain of the piece turns out to be Domenic’s mother, Lady Teeve, who is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, while pretending to be very kind to Jenny and Emily. She’s so ‘kind’, in fact, that she invites them to her country home for a week’s house party, where she settles down to some ritual humiliation of them both. This is where things go slightly off the rails for me. I found it hard to believe any mother who wanted to keep her precious son away from an unworthy female would invite said female to spend a week in the family’s bosom where they are bound to be thrown together, but there we are. It does make for a dramatic interlude.
The house party does throw up one absolute howler of a mistake on the author’s part: Jenny and Emily travel from London to Cumberland (a distance close to 300 miles, which takes the non-stop mail coach no less than 48 hours) in a single day, without even one stop, even to change horses. Magical horses, indeed!
But otherwise, there’s not much to complain about, the plot unravels reasonably smoothly, if you don’t apply too much logic to it, and the romantic denouement is lovely. Four stars.
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