{"id":5231,"date":"2024-01-24T23:06:36","date_gmt":"2024-01-24T23:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=5231"},"modified":"2024-01-24T23:06:36","modified_gmt":"2024-01-24T23:06:36","slug":"review-the-captains-old-love-by-mary-lancaster-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2024\/01\/24\/review-the-captains-old-love-by-mary-lancaster-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Captain’s Old Love by Mary Lancaster (2023)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"This was a whole heap of fun. A second chance romance between a couple who were thwarted ten years\u2019 earlier. He went off to sea and concentrated on his career. She instantly married someone else, had a son and was then widowed. Now they meet again, and the outcome is never in doubt. But there are still problems (of course).<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the premise: When Royal Navy man Julius Vale met Antonia Temple, it seemed like a match made in heaven. They were soon betrothed but were driven apart by circumstances that only gradually become clear. Now he\u2019s retired from the navy as Captain Sir Julius Vale, and has returned to his old Blackhaven home with a multitude of siblings in tow, not all of them legitimate. He\u2019s thirty-six and never got over the loss of Antonia, so he\u2019s reluctant to accompany the siblings to a ball. He plans to leave as soon as they\u2019re settled, walk home along the beach within sight of his beloved sea and have a quiet evening. But just as he\u2019s slipping outside, he sees the last person he expected – Antonia.<\/p>\n

Their early encounters are filled with anger and pain, but there\u2019s still something between them and they are inexorably drawn together. He discovers that her husband is dead, but that a poor marriage settlement has left her in difficulties, so she\u2019s taken a position as paid companion to a wealthy lady, who travels about with her brother, and is presently in Blackhaven to take the waters. And as they circle warily round each other, they discover the truth: that each of them thinks the other broke it off ten years before, and that they have been repeatedly lied to.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, they end up reigniting the same passion that drew them together in the first place, and this time there\u2019s nothing to stop them from marrying and being idyllically happy for the rest of their lives\u2026 or is there? Well, of course, things are never that simple, especially as they reach this stage at about the halfway point in the book. From there onwards, their enemies circle ever closer around them, trying to drive them apart, there\u2019s a subplot involving stolen horses and worse, and that marriage settlement is significant, too.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s great page-turning stuff, but I have to confess it\u2019s all wildly improbable. I had a particular problem with Antonia. Firstly, when the man she loves apparently jilts her without a word, what does she do but immediately go off and marry someone else. Who in their right mind does that? Even if you believe the web of lies being spun around you, why rush into marriage with another man? Marriage was literally a life sentence in those days. The only rational reason is because she was pregnant, and for a while I wondered about that, but it doesn\u2019t seem to have been an issue. Her parents told her to marry, so she did.<\/p>\n

And then, when her present happiness is about to be snatched away from her, again she does what she\u2019s told, and, what is worse, she jilts Julius without a word all over again. What kind of cruelty is that? To do all over again the thing that hurt him so badly the first time. And even though she comes round fairly quickly and starts thinking of ways out of her dilemma, I just can\u2019t forgive her for not telling him at once what was going on.<\/p>\n

Julius, on the other hand, is everything a hero should be. His huge family is intriguing (I\u2019m assuming that all the siblings will get their own story eventually, which I look forward to reading). For those who read through the very long original Blackhaven series, lots of the characters from that pop up here in cameo parts, but it\u2019s not necessary to remember them all (fortunately for me).<\/p>\n

I very much liked the way the whole plot, in all its disparate parts, came together at the end very elegantly. I didn\u2019t notice any historical errors, although I was a bit surprised that one character managed to \u2018pretend\u2019 to be a solicitor (and was more likely to be called an attorney in those days), and the guardianship of the child was airbrushed away at the end. However, I was very pleased to note that the author has discovered that Blackhaven would have been situated in the county of Cumberland in Regency times, not the modern invention of Cumbria. There\u2019s one sex scene, not particularly graphic, and a few references elsewhere. Just one other grumble – I would have liked a list of all the siblings with their ages. It was really hard to get them straight.<\/p>\n

If I were judging this book just on plausibility, it would probably rate three stars, but I enjoyed it so much, tearing through it in only two sessions, that it merits a good four stars, and I look forward to whatever comes next.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was a whole heap of fun. A second chance romance between a couple who were thwarted ten years\u2019 earlier. He went off to sea and concentrated on his career. She instantly married someone else, had a son and was then widowed. Now they meet again, and the outcome is never in doubt. But there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[149],"class_list":["post-5231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-lancaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5235,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5231\/revisions\/5235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}