I started reading 1934's The Convenient Marriage to Tiny, at bedtime. M started listening in, and then insisted I keep reading. To him.
I think it was Pelham, brother to our stammering heroine Horatia, who caught M's interest. A scene where Pelham stumbles, drunk, into the villain's house at midnight and immediately assumes a card-party is in progress and that he should join in. The villain is less than amused. I'll be honest, I struggled to read it for laughter, and this was not the first time I'd read the book.
The Convenient Marriage is a Georgian romance, rather than Regency (although, technically, the Regency was also Georgian; but here I mean the Eighteenth Century). It follows seventeen-year-old Horatia, who marries the Earl of Rule (thirty-five if he's a day). Rule had originally offered for Horatia's beautiful elder sister Elizabeth, who has a prior attachment with a younger son currently serving in the army. Neither has the money to make it a particularly eligible match, hence the pressure to accept the obscenely wealthy Rule. Fortunately, Horatia, not a Beauty though she has the Family Nose, sacrifices herself to enable Elizabeth to marry her lieutenant (he's currently invalided home from Bunker's Hill), their middle sister, Charlotte, having declared that nothing could induce her to contemplate such a step, even to save Elizabeth.
The basic story is Horatia and Rule muddling their way to falling in love, naturally, with complications being caused by the aforementioned villain (has an old grudge to bear against Rule), Rule's spiteful cousin and heir-presumptive (cross that Rule didn't tell him himself about his marriage), and Rule's slighted mistress (thought she had a chance at being Rule's wife herself). It doesn't help that, at seventeen, Horatia marries before being officially Out in society, and has inherited, besides the Nose, her family's Fatal Tendency for Gambling. And her always-losing brother taught her how.
There are duels (neither of which are so public that the whole of London find out about them) and stolen jewels and highwaymen, and Rule is a Heyer-Hero "of the best kind", she wrote to her agent (quoted in Jennifer Kloester's biography of Heyer). Sleepy-eyed, but sees more than people think, with an athletic frame hidden by a veneer of fussing about his clothes. And Horatia is an incorrigible sort of heroine, very much enjoying being unleashed on society with lots of money.
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