House of Cads by Elizabeth Kingston

Narrated by Nicholas Boulton

Elizabeth Kingston returns to the Regency world of A Fallen Lady to bring us House of Cads, a sequel to the earlier book which features as its heroine the lively, unconventional and somewhat scandalous Frenchwoman Marie-Anne de Vauteil, the dear friend of Helen, Lady Summerdale. The audiobook also marks the very welcome return of the fabulous Nicholas Boulton to the romance genre; needless to say, his performance is superb, and I found myself enjoying the story even more in audio than I did when I read it a couple of months back.

Helen’s recent marriage and move away from the cottage they shared in the small village of Bartle-on-the-Glen has left Marie-Anne feeling rather lonely. As the story opens, she is upset at the ending of her affair with the village shoemaker, who has broken up with her because he’s going to get married. She isn’t in love with him, and being honest, she admits she’s more disgruntled at the fact that he’s called a halt to their association rather than the other way around – which was always the case in the past. Fortified with baked goods, she opens a letter just arrived from London and is astonished to discover that it’s from Lady Shipley, the woman who had almost become her mother-in-law. Some years earlier, Marie-Anne had fallen deeply in love with the Shipley’s eldest son, Richard, and they were to have been married – but Richard fell ill and died just days before the wedding, leaving a devastated and pregnant Marie-Anne to the not-so-tender-mercies of his parents, who believed her to be nothing more than an opportunist whore. The shock of Richard’s death, together with the Shipleys’ cruelty in barring her from the funeral caused Marie-Anne to miscarry, and after that, she retired to the small village of Bartle where she met and befriended Helen.

The missive contains an invitation to stay with the Shipleys in London, couched in the most pleasant of terms and containing no mention whatsoever of Richard or the faintest hint of an apology for the way she and her husband treated Marie-Anne after his death. Marie-Anne is at a loss to explain Lady Shipley’s unexpected volte-face, until she finds another letter in the package, this one from Amy, the Shipley’s eldest daughter, begging Marie-Anne to come because her two younger sisters, Dahlia and Phyllida, have attached themselves to unsuitable gentlemen, which is threatening her own engagement to a very proper young clergyman.

The thought of what the younger ladies must be up to so as to cause their stuck-up, unpleasant mother to resort to offering Marie-Anne house-space is both amusing and intriguing – and she decides to accept the invitation, seeing it as the perfect antidote to the boredom she’s been experiencing since Helen’s departure.

From the moment the petite blonde appears with Lord and Lady Summerdale in a London ballroom, wealthy American businessman Spencer Mason is captivated; and after a few minutes flirtatious conversation with her, he’s a goner. The problem – well, one of the problems – is that Mason happens to be one of the unsuitable gentlemen Amy wrote about, and he doesn’t know how to go about disengaging himself from a fiancée he doesn’t want without upsetting the lady and damaging the business that has brought him to London. The intense mutual attraction he and Marie-Anne feel towards each other is an added complication – or perhaps not, given that she’s come to London with the intention of seeing what she can do to untangle the muddled love affairs of the Shipley sisters.

Listeners are aware from fairly early on in the story that Mason isn’t the wealthy businessman he claims to be, and that he actually makes his living as a satirical cartoonist. Given that both Helen and Marie-Anne have been the subject of gossip and have featured in the scandal sheets, it’s not surprising that Marie-Anne is dismayed to discover Mason’s true profession and his reasons for being in London, and it’s this dichotomy that provides the romantic conflict in the story. Marie-Anne can see that Mason is a truly gifted artist and can’t understand why he chooses to waste his incredible talent on scurrilous drawings, but Mason is full of self-doubt about his abilities and is unable to believe that he is capable of making a living as a ‘proper’ artist. His life hasn’t been easy; he’s known penury, he’s gone hungry and now he’s finally making a living of sorts, he’s reluctant to give up the life he knows for one that might well turn out to be a dead-end.

House of Cads is very different in tone to A Fallen Lady, and Marie-Anne is a refreshingly different sort of Regency-era heroine. She’s had lovers, she enjoys sex, she says what she thinks and refuses to be ashamed of her colourful past; she’s loyal, she’s funny and she lives up to her motto of vivez la vie pleinement (live life to the fullest). The downside to all that is that she’s such a forceful presence that she tends to overshadow the other characters, including her hero – which upsets the balance of the story somewhat. I also wasn’t wild about the way things between them are finally resolved. I prefer it when a hero and heroine are able to arrive at a solution to the issues between them without too much extraneous help, and the helping hand given them here smacks just a little of the deux ex machina.

Those criticisms apart though, the story is a very enjoyable one, a deft comedy of manners combined with a sensual romance, all of it adroitly handled by both author and narrator. It will come as no surprise when I say that Nicholas Boulton’s performance is sheer joy from start to finish; his characterisations are superb, his pacing is flawless and his ability to find exactly the right emotional note in every scene is unerring. Every character is skilfully delineated, principals and secondary cast alike, and having a French heroine and an American hero gives him the opportunity to demonstrate his facility with accents. Both are very well done and sound authentic; Mr. Boulton switches seamlessly between French, American and the secondary cast of upper-class Brits without putting a foot wrong. I honestly can’t think of a single negative thing to say about the narration in this; if you’ve listened to Mr. Boulton before, you won’t need any convincing to go out and beg, steal or borrow (well, not steal, obviously!) House of Cads. And if you haven’t yet got around to experiencing one of his narrations – why not?! I promise you, your ears will thank you forever and you’ll wonder how you’ve managed for so long without that gorgeous voice in your life.

Caz