The Duke and I: what actually happens

Before the book starts

The prologue does the real damage

Simon Basset is born and his mother dies almost immediately. His father, the Duke of Hastings, is not grieving so much as relieved, because after years of trying he finally has an heir. That is the whole of the father’s interest in the child. An heir is a function, not a person.

Simon is slow to speak. When he does speak he stutters badly. His father, who had wanted a perfect vessel for the Hastings name, decides the boy is an idiot and unfit, and simply stops acknowledging him. Not cruelty in the shouting sense. Worse than that. He removes him from the record. Simon is raised at Clyvedon by his nurse, Mrs. Colson, and he works at the stutter with a ferocity no child should need, drilling sounds for years until he can pass as fluent.

Then he goes to his father to show him. And his father will not receive him. That refusal is the engine of the entire novel. Simon makes a vow in response, and it is not a vow to succeed or to prove anything. It is a vow that the Hastings line will die with him, that his father’s precious title will end, and that the last Duke of Hastings will be the son he threw away.

He grows up, goes to Eton and Oxford, becomes friends with Anthony Bridgerton, and leaves England for years. He returns in 1813 only because his father is dead.

Act one

The bargain

Daphne’s situation is specific and quietly humiliating. She is in her second season and she is popular in exactly the wrong way. Men enjoy her company enormously and propose to other women. Anthony, as head of the family, has been frightening off anyone who does show interest, and has got far enough into desperation that he was seriously entertaining Berbrooke.

Simon’s situation is the inverse. He is an unmarried duke and the marriage market has identified him as prey. So he proposes an arrangement. He will appear to court Daphne. The ton, which decides value by consensus rather than by looking, will suddenly find her fascinating because a duke does. And no mother will throw a daughter at a man who is visibly taken.

The arrangement works immediately and completely. Suitors appear. Daphne becomes, overnight, the woman everyone wanted all along. The satire here is sharp and the book knows exactly what it is saying about how desirability is manufactured. Lady Whistledown’s society papers narrate the whole ascent, which turns reputation into something you can watch move.

Act two

The garden, the duel, the marriage

They spend far more time together than the plan requires and both of them know it. The pretense stops being a pretense somewhere in the middle and neither says so.

Anthony demands a duel. Simon accepts, and here is the part that tells you how deep the vow goes: he intends to stand there and let Anthony shoot him. Marrying Daphne would mean heirs, and heirs would mean breaking the promise he made about his father’s line. He would rather die at dawn in a field than father a child. He is not being dramatic. He has arranged his whole adult life around this and he is entirely willing to finish it.

Daphne finds out and rides out to the field at dawn. She stops it. Then she offers to marry him herself, on the understanding she has been given, which is that there will be no children. She chooses him believing she is giving up motherhood to do it. That choice matters enormously later, because it is made honestly on her side and dishonestly on his.

They marry and go to Clyvedon.

Act three

The rupture

The marriage is, at first, happy. Then Daphne begins to notice a pattern in the bedroom, and eventually understands what it means. Simon is not incapable. He is withdrawing deliberately, every time, to make certain no child is conceived. The thing she agreed to give up was never a medical fact. It was a decision he made about his dead father and never told her she was party to.

Around the same time Mrs. Colson, who raised him, tells Daphne about the stutter and the father and the years of silence. Daphne finally has the whole shape of it, and she is furious in a way the book earns, because she gave up something real on the basis of something he allowed her to believe.

They separate. Not legally, but completely. Daphne goes back to London for a period and the marriage is, for a stretch of the novel, genuinely over in every way that matters.

Act four

The separation, and the letter that ends it

Simon does not forgive it. His stutter, which he spent his childhood drilling out of himself, comes back. He leaves her, and the instruction he gives on the way out is as cold as anything in the book: write to me only if you are pregnant.

Two months later she writes to say she is. It turns out to be a false alarm. He comes back anyway, and the reconciliation is not built on the vow being cleverly untangled. It is built on him admitting he missed her, and on Daphne saying she will love whatever child they do or do not have, without conditions. That is the actual resolution: the thing his father never offered him, offered plainly by someone else.

The late duke’s letters are in the book too, unopened for most of it, and they are worth reading for what they are not, which is an apology. But they are not the hinge. The hinge is the marriage.

By 1817 they have three daughters and then a son, David. A second epilogue, published separately years later, catches up with Daphne pregnant again at forty one.