Some more books I have read

'You Can Heal Your Life' by Louise L. Hay

A re-reading of one of the self-help books I found useful in my twenties, along with Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway and one or two others. Hay’s book is wackier than Susan Jeffers’ (the gist of FtFaDIA is essentially "stop dithering and get on with it”) but I still think it has some merits.

You Can Heal Your Life was first published in 1984, and in the UK in 1988. It was an extension of an earlier self-published pamphlet called Heal Your Body. Hay’s philosophy is that we are each responsible for all of our experiences, and that our thoughts create our future. She takes this to rather an extreme IMO. But I still think there’s some value in this view if you don’t go overboard. Evidently, Hay was influenced by “New Thought”, as clearly were a number of other self-help authors that I read in the nineties (haven’t read many since then). Hay was a member of the Church of Religious Science – no idea what that is/was but it sounds suitably Californian.

The book is about the mental patterns that, Hay claims, cause disease (which she hyphenates as dis-ease). “We create every so-called “illness” in our body.” The most controversial thing, undoubtedly, is Hay’s claim that your own thoughts cause any disease you get, and that you equally can “think” yourself cured of any disease. More generally and usefully, Hay encourages readers to look at each of the problems in their lives and consider what kinds of thoughts they’re having that would create them.

A lot of it’s good. I do believe that we have choices about the thoughts we think, and it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me to accept that our subconscious mind might be affected by what we habitually think. Ideas that I have found useful include the notion that it’s counter-productive to criticise yourself, and the idea that it’s true if you believe it to be true: this can work both ways, in retaining negative beliefs that we’ve internalized ("Usually, what we believe is only someone else's opinion we have incorporated into our belief systems") and in implanting new, positive beliefs. I have found that there’s some value in positive affirmations, however cheesy they may appear.

I have found the ‘How to Change’ and ‘Daily Work’ chapters useful to refer back to (albeit that I don’t think I’m going to be singing affirmations any time soon). There’s some good stuff in the What Do We Do Now? Chapter about being willing to change. All the chapters in Part 2 ‘A Session with Louise’ contain exercises to work through, mainly in the form of questions to ask yourself; I didn’t bother working through these on this occasion but I think I did the first time I read the book.

Ideas I’m not so sure about, to put it mildly: the idea that we ‘decide’ to incarnate on this planet at a particular point in time and space in order to learn particular lessons. A less fringe idea, but one I also wasn’t totally sure about, is Hay's claim that any problem her clients come to her with can be reduced to needing to work on loving the self. I can imagine that as a client I might struggle a bit to get on board with that – though that’s not to say that she’s wrong. She repeats this idea a lot: “As I have said before, no matter what the problem, the main issue to work on is LOVING THE SELF.” “From the way I look at life, if there is any problem, then this [a lack of self-love] has to be true”. It’s rather difficult to reduce all of life’s problems to this. I dunno. Maybe. She seems to be acknowledging in the second statement that her conclusion that every problem is due to a lack of self-love is a fallout of the way she looks at life.

One chapter of the book, headed 'The List', is a list of conditions with what Hay claims are probable mental causes, plus new thought patterns that can be adopted to cure these conditions. This list apparently first appeared in Heal Your Body. This, and the preceding chapter 'The Body', seems the most “out there” section of the book – most of You Can Heal Your Life is focused on positive thinking to improve your life generally, rather than specifically on curing diseases; as such I assume it was a broadening of the scope of Heal Your Body. Such controversy as surrounded Louise Hay seems to have resulted from her message being interpreted as saying that sick people have brought it on themselves – victim-blaming, if you will – which I agree is a possible, but somewhat over-literal, interpretation. I’d see her approach as more about enabling people to take and feel some control over their circumstances. (Also, judging by her short bio at the end of the book, might her strategy have served to help her cope with what must have been the powerlessness of her early life and the abuse she suffered?)

If you don’t take 'The List' too seriously, it’s quite amusing. Baldness as due to a tense scalp? It also seems quite a claim that female baldness has increased since women entered the business world. Influenza due to a belief in statistics? If you suffer with the unpleasant-sounding Mucus Colon, it could be due to "wallowing in the gummed mire of the past". And here’s a tip to bear in mind during an attack of rabies: affirm “I am surrounded and indwelled with peace”. Worth a try, I guess.

To finish on a quote from Louise:

The anus is as beautiful as the ear.

That quote's not relevant to anything, but it always makes me snigger childishly.

'84K' by Claire North

Dystopian novel. Helen’s choice for our April Book Group read. It’s set in England and uses lots of familiar place names, notably place names along the Grand Union Canal. But it’s not the England we know. Society has broken down a bit. Actually a lot. Human rights have been abolished. People can be sent to the ‘patty line’, which is not a good place.

The central character is a man called Theo Miller, who works at the Criminal Audit Office working out the cost of crimes. People who’ve committed crimes have to pay an indemnity. Something called the Company is in charge – well, the government is still notionally in charge, but it’s become inextricably bound up with the Company.

Theo Miller’s name is not really Theo Miller. I think his real name is mentioned once in the book, but I’ve forgotten what it was and have no hope of finding the page again. The real Theo Miller was a fellow student at Oxford, who was killed in a ridiculous shootout with one Phillip Arnslade, now the government minister for fiscal efficiency. Arnslade’s best friend Simon Fardell seems to be de facto CEO of the Company.

Theo encounters an old flame, Dani Cumali, who asks him to trace a Lucy Cumali, now possibly known as Lucy Rainbow Princess, through his job at the Ministry. Later, Dani tells him that Lucy is his daughter. Later again, Dani is murdered, apparently a hit job, ordered because of something that Dani discovered while working at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. Theo becomes focused on avenging Dani’s murder and finding Lucy. He travels to his hometown of Shawford, which has fallen into decay since its sponsor Budgetfood pulled out. A young woman who knew Dani meets him there and gives him a memory stick contain incriminating information. He is beaten up by various people (this is a recurring theme throughout the book).

Theo suspects Arnslade of ordering mass murder and ruining the country. He travels to Arnslade’s family home and rescues his mother Helen, who has been drugged and kept captive after Phillip discovered she was secretly filming him and Fardell talking about wrong stuff they were doing. They go on the run, and reach Newton Bridge, where they meet Bess, the “queen of the patties” and various other outlaws. They publish the contents of the memory stick online, and broadcast video of Helen reading out the names of the believed victims of state murder.

A recurring theme throughout the book is a woman, Neila, who lives on a narrowboat called Hector and travels the canals. She takes Theo onto her boat after discovering him lying injured by the canal. This incident is never later returned to and it’s impossible to know at what point in the action it happened. A significant annoyance with 84K was the difficulty of keeping track of the order things happened in. It jumps about a lot – which isn’t so much a problem if it’s jumping about between different characters’ perspectives, or from e.g. a character in the present day to the same character’s childhood, but this jumps about between events that are presumably not all that far apart in time and that all centre the Theo Miller character. By two-thirds of the way through the book I’d given up on trying to keep track. At the beginning I had expected the Neila and narrowboat thread to anchor the book and be a constant through all the other events, but it didn’t end up doing this. These selected notes from my reading give a flavour of my general confusion over the order of events.

• p.264 I have no idea whether this is before or after he’s met Neila. 
• p.303 So annoying. Which city is burning FFS? 
• p.305 What was Newton Bridge? 
• p.306 Who is this man? 
• p.309 She better not have dropped his gun in the water.

There are some interesting ideas, but the whole thing is depressingly awful (dystopia is admittedly not my favourite) and there isn’t much of a ray of hope even at the end. The ending was a big disappointment, for me at least, as I had hoped that it would end with Neila and Theo going off on the narrowboat together. And I was sick of Lucy by the end. It was impossible to care about whether Theo found her or not. Theo betrays Bess, Bea, Corn and everyone at Newton Bridge – people who helped him and took risks for him – just for a girl he’s never met. Not even a girl, but the idea of a girl, as he doesn’t even know whether she’s still alive.

The rear of the cover drips with adjectives: “extraordinary”, “breathtaking”, absorbing and timely”, “captivating”. Hmm. Go figure. Ruth and I shared one copy of the book and found ourselves pushing the book onto each other in faux-selfless fashion "No, it's YOUR turn to read 84K", etc...

I was relieved to finish it and felt in the mood for a pleasurable palate-cleanser. Which leads me on to:

'The Notorious Lord' and 'One Night of Scandal' by Nicola Cornick

These are the first and second books in Nicola Cornick’s 'Bluestocking Brides' trilogy. I read and reviewed the last one, The Rake’s Mistress, here, not having realized it was the last part of a trilogy when I bought it. All three books are set in the early nineteenth century amid the threat of French invasion. The first two are set in the fictional ‘Midwinter’ villages of coastal Suffolk; the third is set partly in London and then back in Midwinter.

'The Notorious Lord'

Rachel Odell is 22 and has just moved to the Suffolk village of Midwinter Royal with her parents Sir Arthur and Lady Odell, a pair of renowned antiquarians. The Odells have taken a house there in order to spend the summer excavating an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. Also in Suffolk for the summer is Cory, Lord Newlyn, another antiquarian and a protégé of the Odells. Cory is ostensibly there to assist the Odells with the dig, but he has another motive, which is to help his friends the Kestrel brothers uncover the identity of a French spy who is believed to be working on the Suffolk coast.

The men’s attempt to discover the identity of a spy believed to be passing intelligence to the French forms a thread that runs through all three books. Justin Kestrel, the Duke, has been commissioned by the Foreign Office to uncover the spy. Evidence suggests that the Midwinter spy may be a woman, whose sex has helped her evade capture thus far. Given this, Lady Sally Saltire’s reading group, of which Rachel is a member, falls under their suspicion. Someone fires a shot at Cory as he is walking home one night; Cory fires back and injures his attacker. He and Richard Kestrel put in an appearance at the ladies’ reading group the following day – but two of the ladies have their arms bandaged. Who can it be?

The story of  The Notorious Lord centres on Cory and Rachel and their growing attraction to each other. They are both likeable young people with no obvious irritating qualities – a romance novel where both parties are quite likeable and reasonable people is pretty unusual so I quite appreciated this one. Rachel eventually realizes that she does like Cory as more than simply a friend, but doesn’t see how she can marry him when they want such different lifestyles: Cory is an explorer who is always off travelling in search of finds; Rachel, after a lifetime spent travelling abroad with her parents, wants nothing more than a quiet settled family life at home in England. Rachel is quite an appealing young woman and her reservations about marriage to Cory seem reasonable enough. After the usual declaration-of-passion-followed-by-declaration-that-it-can-never-work, the story ends with them both deciding that they can probably each compromise a bit for the other.

In all three books in the trilogy there’s an illicit night of passion between the two protagonists prior to marriage. Cory and Rachel’s occurs as a result of their both being stranded alone at her parents' house in a torrential rainstorm – both have gone down to the excavation site, worried about the site being flooded and the Odells’ work lost – and Rachel falls into a flooded barrow and is rescued by Cory. They make their way back to the house, get out of their wet clothes, and the inevitable happens.

By the end of the book, things aren’t much further on vis a vis identifying the French spy, beyond its being established that it’s not Rachel. But then this is only part 1 of 3.

 

Postscript: Lady Odell’s pregnancy? We already know that Sir Arthur Odell is in his fifties. Lavinia Odell is presented as a middle-aged woman, but presumably she must be a number of years younger than her husband – though presumably in her 40s given that she has a 20-something daughter. The pregnancy is clearly a device to explain the nomadic Odells’ otherwise surprising decision to stay on at Midwinter Royal. But still.

Postpostscript: The titles of these books are a bit random, and I’m guessing probably just assigned by the publisher. Cory is an affable chap and there’s nothing to suggest he’s particularly notorious. In a similar vein, Rebecca Raleigh is at no point Lucas Kestrel's mistress. Which leads us on to the middle book:

'One Night of Scandal'

Book 2 of the trilogy. It kicks off in September 1803, only three months after the start of the action in The Notorious Lord.

ONoS focuses on Deborah Stratton, a young widow who lives in the Midwinter villages with an older female companion. Deborah is the younger daughter of a Lord Walton of Bath. Deborah’s sister Olivia and her husband Ross, Viscount Marney, live at the nearby Midwinter Marney Hall. Deborah eloped with a Neil Stratton when she was 19, spent an unhappy five weeks with him before he went off on military duty and promptly died of a fever. We learn that the marriage was in fact bigamous, though Deborah was (obviously) not aware of this. Deborah’s father is putting pressure on her to return home to Bath; Deborah isn’t keen on this idea and is keen to stay living in Suffolk near her sister and well out of her father’s clutches. She comes up with the idea of advertising for a “biddable” gentleman to act as her temporary fiancé during a visit to her home in Bath for her brother’s upcoming wedding, with the idea that this will quieten her father’s attempts to pair her off.

In the meantime, she keeps running into Richard Kestrel, the second of the Kestrel brothers of nearby Kestrel Court. Richard and Deborah had fallen out some time previously when he asked her to be his mistress. When Deborah puts a vaguely-worded ad in the Suffolk Chronicle for a gentleman’s “assistance”, Richard, predictably, responds to it, having guessed it was her and having, highly presumptuously, got the innkeeper to bin the other applications. Stuff happens, involving the two having spirited conversations and, intermittently, passionately kissing.

Richard and Deborah are less likeable than Cory and Rachel of The Notorious Lord. Richard is an arrogant and seemingly somewhat embittered man; Deborah is ditsy and irritatingly oblivious to (or careless of) the reputational trouble her behaviour could land her in. The 'night of scandal' of the title is a night that Richard and Deborah spend at a hunting lodge on the Kestrel estate. (And I realise romance novels tend to expect heroines to be “an untried innocent in the ways of love” but as DS has been married it’s not quite plausible that she is one such.)

Richard and Deborah’s bantering/bickering with each other is frankly tedious; their conversation on the beach where Richard tells her the detail around his naval discharge, and Deborah tells him about her marriage to Neil, was the first readable bit. The background conversations are more interesting: those between Deb and her companion Mrs Aintree, Deb and her sister Olivia, Richard and Ross, Richard and Justin, Ross and Olivia Marney. The Marneys are a more appealing couple than Richard and Deborah and the lotion mix up towards the end of the book, which results in them clearing the air and reconciling, is genuinely amusing.

Spy-related events in this book involve: Richard gives Deborah, as a gift, a book of seventeenth-century poetry. At Lady Sally’s reading group, where the same volume is being discussed, Deborah’s copy is accidentally switched for someone else’s. The switched copy is found to contain a sheet of paper with a coded message written on it. Richard initially angrily questions Deborah, but swiftly concludes that she is telling the truth when she says she has never seen it before (the cattier reader might be mildly surprised that Deborah is able to find the way out of her own house, never mind operate as an undercover agent). Examining the piece of paper later, the Kestrel brothers conclude that the spy is using a pictorial code. Later, at the Custom House auction in Woodbridge, Deborah accidentally bids for some engraved glasses, resulting in the long-suffering Ross Marney having to purchase them, to the annoyance of Sir John Norton, another local gentleman who was also bidding on them and seems particularly keen to acquire them. The glasses are engraved with the same symbols as were on the piece of paper in Deborah’s book. Shortly afterwards, Marney Hall is ransacked and the engraved glass vases are stolen. The book's absurd climax features the spies knocking Richard and Deborah over the head and tying them up, which gives Richard an opportunity to propose to Deborah.

Richard Kestrel’s history is quite interesting; he is a darker character than either Cory Newlyn or his younger brother Lucas, the heroes of the other two books in the trilogy. Richard’s father had him down for the priesthood; Richard didn’t like that idea and joined the Navy instead. He was injured and discharged from active naval service. During Richard’s invalided-out period his father had his naval commission cancelled and Richard fell into a dissolute life of drinking and women, until his elder brother Justin inherited the dukedom and threatened to cut Richard off unless he started leading a productive life. This led to Richard getting his naval commission back and taking up work for the Admiralty. This story thread led me to ponder more generally the limited work options open to younger brothers of the gentleman class: not having estates to manage, some light research suggests that the only career options open to them were to join either the armed forces or the priesthood, as by some sleight of hand these were not counted as regular employment. If you either didn’t fancy them or managed to mess them up, it’s not clear what you would have done – did you officially lose your status as a gentleman?

   

For a trilogy of romance novels these are remarkably engaging little books, probably because in addition to the standard romance stuff there’s the spy storyline that straddles all three, and quite a number of the characters appear in more than one of the trilogy. All three end with an Epilogue involving a conversation between the Duke of Kestrel and Lady Sally Saltire, old flames who have kept up a flirtatious friendship since the death of Sally’s husband. At the end of The Notorious Lord, Sally bets the Duke that Richard Kestrel and Deborah Stratton will be married within three months. This does happen, and at the close of One Night of Scandal Sally collects on her debt by asking Justin to attend a ball in honour of a watercolour calendar she is auctioning – which he was intending to do anyway. They enter another wager, that Justin’s other brother Lucas will be next to fall in love – which leads in to the action of The Rake’s Mistress. In the Epilogue to the final book, the two finally stop playing around and declare their feelings for each other.

More books read recently

'A Favourite of the Gods' by Sybille Bedford

I had never heard of Sybille Bedford until Ruth picked up a biography of her a while back (Selina Hastings' An Appetite for Life) after reading a review of it. At around the same time, Mum’s book group read this novel as one of their book choices. Ruth recommends the biography, but as it doesn’t make much sense to me to read a biography of a writer without having read any of their books, I thought I would read this first. I seem to have written far too long and rambling a review of this moderately dull novel, but I can’t be bothered to edit any further so here it is.

The novel opens in the late 1920s. 15-year-old Flavia and her mother Constanza are on a train, travelling from Italy to Brussels. They have just crossed into France, where they are planning to change at Nice to pick up the express train, when Constanza discovers she has lost a ruby ring she was wearing. Seemingly most of the train’s staff get involved in looking for the ring, while Flavia and Constanza miss their stop at Nice (because Constanza refuses to get off the train without her ring) and carry on through various stops along the French coast. They eventually get off at a small unnamed coastal town where they book in to the local hotel. At Brussels, Constanza was to meet up with Lewis, the man she was due to marry, while Flavia was to carry on to England for educational purposes. However, the Prologue ends with Flavia noting that they stayed where they were for eleven years.

Part I is set in Rome and looks back over Flavia’s American grandmother Anna’s marriage to her father, a prince. It details, somewhat tediously, Anna’s wealth, beauty and abilities to charm anyone she comes across, and also relates how beautiful, spirited and clever her daughter Constanza was. Part I ends with Anna, having finally been told of her husband’s 20-year-long affair of which everyone else in Rome already knew, seeking legal advice and leaving Rome for London. She leaves her younger child Giorgio with his father, but takes Constanza with her, additionally setting up some legal thing that prevents Constanza’s father Rico from having any access to his daughter. Constanza has to say goodbye to her father, who has been a decent enough man to risk losing his daughter rather than use her as a bargaining chip. We feel sorry for Rico – at least, I did.

Part II is set in London, where Anna and Constanza have now settled. Constanza throws herself into London social life and has a good time. (We later learn that even Rico’s daughter knew about the affair of which her mother was oblivious.) In due course Constanza meets a young Englishman, Simon Herbert, who has lived in Rome and is acquainted with her father. World War I breaks out. After the end of the war, Simon asks Constanza for a divorce in order to marry his lover (Constanza has been taking lovers for a while now, but doesn’t seem about to request a divorce on the strength of that. Perhaps that was being Italian for you).

In Part III, Constanza flits about Europe. Anna continues taking a different house according to the season, before eventually settling back in Italy after the war ends. The story ends by joining up with the Prologue, with Constanza and Flavia living at the (possibly fictional) French fishing port of St-Jean-le-Sauveur. This section is pleasantly atmospheric, with talk of villas, sardines, red wine – and ends with Constanza meeting yet another new beau. (I admired Constanza’s distaste for being anyone’s wife, and unwillingness to be tied down – desires that, presumably, wealth would have made it much easier to indulge.)

I reasonably liked the book – in the sense that it’s well written, nothing wrong with it, etc – but it stops only just short of being quite boring. Bedford litters the novel with a number of Italian (and occasionally French) words that necessitated a pause while I asked Google to translate them. And even a few English words – while I consider myself to have a good vocabulary, I was stumped on “persiflage”.

I assume the title of the book refers to Constanza, the more-or-less heroine, though Constanza’s mother Anna also plays a significant part in the novel. Anna is the most atrocious person – she manipulates those around her by sulking, taking to her bed and refusing to eat whenever she is annoyed at something. She spitefully burns a letter from Rico seeking a brief audience with Constanza in London, threatening a court injunction to prevent him having access to his daughter, leaving Constanza to draw the conclusion that her father simply does not want to see her. After her death in the later stages of the novel, she delivers a coup de grâce by having hand-delivered to Constanza an envelope containing what turns out to be a revised version of her will leaving all of her considerable estate to Constanza’s feckless brother Giorgio as a last act of spite. I liked Constanza on the whole, though I wanted to shake her for some of her decision-making – she irritatingly agrees to be the Guilty Party in the divorce in order to save Simon’s fledgling parliamentary career when it is Simon who has requested the divorce and loses custody of Flavia to her mother as a result, and, more horrifically, when presented with Anna’s revised will after Anna’s death, considers that it is legal and she must abide by her mother’s wishes, even though it would have left her more or less destitute. Luckily, only Constanza and Flavia know about the revised will and, sensing her mother’s indecision, Flavia burns it and tells her mother it blew off the veranda into the sea. Thank God for Flavia.

A Favourite of the Gods was published in 1963. Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Germany, to wealthy parents, but seems to have lived most of her life elsewhere. This Spectator review of Hastings' biography calls it a soundtrack “to one version of the 20th century”, a reference to Bedford's privileged background and lifestyle. This novel’s moneyed heroines, who take houses and flats in whichever European city takes their fancy with no concern for the cost, seem to fit with that.

'Remarkable Creatures' by Tracy Chevalier

Enjoyable story based on the real-life fossil-hunting activities of Mary Anning in and around Lyme Regis in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chevalier outlines in a postscript which bits of the story are based on fact and where artistic licence was taken. The story focuses on the friendship between Anning and fellow fossil-hunter Elizabeth Philpot and is told from their alternating perspectives.

Elizabeth Philpot is one of three unmarried sisters living together in a cottage in Lyme Regis, funded by an allowance from their married brother John, a solicitor. The sisters have been obliged to leave London to live somewhere that will enable a reasonable standard of living; John is evidently under obligation to provide an annual allowance for them but this would not have stretched far in the capital. The younger Mary Anning is a working-class girl, the daughter of a cabinet-maker who dies prematurely leaving the family in poverty. Philpot first meets her outside Mary’s father’s workshop, tending a table of fossils to be sold as curiosities (“curies”). Despite their age and class difference, the two strike up a friendship based on their shared interest in fossils. Elizabeth focuses on collecting fossils of fish, to add to her personal collection; Mary, unable to indulge in such hobbies as collecting, looks for anything she might be able to sell to improve her family’s finances.

One day Mary finds what seems to be the skull of a much larger creature, an icthyosaurus (though Mary initially terms it a crocodile, and later an “ichie”), which attracts the attention of people beyond Lyme Regis. Much of the rest of the story focuses on Elizabeth’s attempts to ensure Mary gets fairly paid for her finds, which are by now enhancing others’ collections, and to get Mary recognition from the men-only world of fossil collecting and the scientific study of fossils; this culminates in Elizabeth stoutly travelling alone to London and trying to gain entry to a Geological Society meeting (women aren’t allowed in) in order to defend Mary against an accusation that she has faked a plesiosaurus skeleton by sticking together bits of two separate creatures.

It hadn't occurred to me that the question of what fossils represented might have raised thorny and controversial issues vis à vis Christian belief: if fossils were the bodies of creatures that no longer existed, did that mean that God could think better of some of his creations and allow them to die out? Her faith a bit shaken, Elizabeth consults the local vicar, who won’t have any truck with such notions and advises her that God placed the fossils in the rocks when he made them, in order to test people’s faith. Elizabeth leaves unconvinced, but with her faith in the vicar a bit shaken.

'The Rake's Mistress' by Nicola Cornick

A Mills & Boon Historical romance.

It’s 1803. Rebecca Raleigh is a glass engraver, living alone above her workshop in Clerkenwell. Rebecca learned her trade from her uncle, who ran the workshop and died a few months before the story opens. Since her uncle’s death, the business has lost custom and Rebecca has fallen on increasingly hard times. Her friend Nan gets her a lifeline in the form of a lucrative engraving commission from the Archangel Club, an exclusive London club for gentlemen of “exotic tastes”. After a meeting at the Archangel to discuss the commission, Rebecca is being driven home in one of the club’s coaches when she runs across Lord Stephen Kestrel, an upper-crust young man who has been the victim of a prank that has resulted in him being stranded in the street in a state of partial undress. Through this encounter with Stephen, Rebecca meets Stephen’s older brother Lucas, who initially wrongly assumes Rebecca to be a courtesan who has seduced his brother, leading to their having a fiery exchange within the carriage. Turning up at Rebecca’s workshop the next day to return the cloak she’d lent Stephen to cover himself, Lucas ends up placing an order for some engraved glass as a wedding present for another of his brothers. Lucas and Rebecca are increasingly overtaken by strong feelings for each other and, after rescuing Rebecca from a masked ball at which she has rejected the advances of the unpleasant Lord Fremantle, they spend a passionate night together.

However, although Lucas’ attraction to Rebecca is real enough, he has an additional motivation in pursuing an acquaintance with her. He and his brothers, led by their oldest brother Justin, Duke of Kestrel (yes, I know) are engaged in trying to crack a spy ring operating from the Suffolk ‘Midwinter’ villages, where the Kestrels’ home is. The spy ring communicates via a pictorial code and the code’s cipher is engraved on glass. Lucas has been doing the rounds of London’s glass engravers to try to identify the style of engraving that will match the examples of the code that the Kestrels have in their possession. In Rebecca’s workshop, he spots what he is pretty sure is the style of engraving they are looking for, on some pieces engraved by Rebecca’s late uncle George Provost. The Kestrels need to trace the identity of the person who placed those orders with the studio. Feeling guilty, and under pressure from the Duke to get more use out of Rebecca as she seems to be their only possible link to the spy ring, Lucas fesses up to Rebecca regarding his underlying motive to gain information from her. Rebecca is angry and lobs a good many fiery words at him. Lucas also declares that he wishes to marry her, and Rebecca tells him not to be so ridiculous. Lucas takes her by force to the Kestrels’ townhouse in Mayfair for a discussion with the Duke and the Kestrels’ friends Lord and Lady Newlyn. The outcome of these discussions is that Rebecca agrees to accompany the party to Suffolk, posing as a cousin of the Duke.

Lucas is convinced that Rebecca is telling the truth about her ignorance of anything to do with the spy ring, but senses that she is holding back information about her family background. Rebecca becomes agitated when questioned by Lucas about her brother Daniel, disclosing that Daniel is at sea but allowing Lucas to think that he is in the Navy when Lucas suspects this not to be the case. Additionally, both Lucas and Justin spot that Rebecca’s manner and level of assurance while in the Kestrels’ London home is not consistent with her being from a working background. In due course the Kestrel brothers find out that Rebecca’s family name is De Lancey, that her father was English gentry who married a French Huguenot girl and assumed her name as a way of sticking two fingers to his Parliamentarian father and that Rebecca's brother Daniel is a privateer and possible French spy. Lucas reacts badly to this and challenges Rebecca angrily, and they have another falling out.

The following day, while out in a nearby harbour town, Rebecca gets herself abducted by local gent Sir John Horton who is evidently aware of her true identity. Turns out John, plus local couple Lord and Lady Benedict, are the actual spies. They set sail in a yacht with Rebecca locked downstairs, but there’s heavy mist and the yacht runs aground. In a splendidly ridiculous sequence, Rebecca unscrews the glass of one of the portholes with her engraving scribe, climbs out, jumps into the water just as the yacht capsizes, and swims for it; as luck would have it, she is rescued by her brother’s ship which appears out of the mist in the nick of time and throws down a rope for her to climb up, which she manages to do despite presumably being weighed down by long skirts. Onboard, Daniel – who doesn’t spy for the French, he’s just an excitingly free-spirited outlaw – persuades Rebecca that Lucas is known to be an OK chap and that marrying him would probably be a good idea given that she’s poor and alone and all, and he (Daniel) is away at sea. On Rebecca's arrival back at Kestrel Court, Lucas declares his love for her and proposes again, and this time Rebecca agrees.

I enjoy the occasional romance novel and this isn’t a bad one. Lucas is a pretty attractive hero and the epilogue, in which Cornick additionally provides the austere Duke with a bit of romance, is a nice touch. TRM was apparently the third book in the ‘Bluestocking Brides’ series, the earlier two being The Notorious Lord (about Cory Newlyn) and One Night of Scandal (about the second Kestrel brother, Richard). (We learn on page thirteen of The Rake’s Mistress that Stephen Kestrel has two sisters in addition to his three brothers, but the sisters do not appear in the novel at any point. Maybe they do in the others. Or maybe I shouldn’t be too exacting towards a M&B). A close friend of mine may have just ordered both from the Amazon Marketplace. Well, these winter evenings are long and dark.