Letitia, Lady Pomfrey
Felicity’s neighbor over the garden wall, and the woman Nigel is climbing out of a window to escape when this novel starts. Nothing in this book happens without her.
Letitia, Lady Pomfrey. CVM Sekai original art.
Lady Pomfrey never appears on the page in the chapters read, and she causes the entire novel. Nigel is leaving her bedchamber when her husband fires at him, which sends him over the garden wall into Felicity’s garden and up her trellis. Every event in this book is downstream of that.
She is also treated with a flatness the book does not extend to its other adulterers. The Viscount’s verdict on her is four words repeated for emphasis, and no one, including Nigel, offers a different reading. She is the one character in the novel whose reputation is stated rather than examined.
What the book does allow, quietly, is that her marriage is a bad joke everyone was in on. She was married at roughly half her husband’s age, and even the man calling her a tart says her husband deserves what he gets for arranging it.
The file
| Name | Letitia, Lady Pomfrey. Her first name is given at page 58 |
|---|---|
| Husband | Alfred, Lord Pomfrey |
| Age relative to him | Roughly half his. He is described as having married a woman half his age |
| Residence | The house next to the Melvilles’. A tall garden wall separates the two, and Nigel goes over it |
| Reputation | Long-standing and public. “There certainly were enough rumors about Lady Pomfrey’s, well, interests” |
| Relationship to Nigel | An assignation, ended after the shooting |
| On the page | Never directly, in the pages read. Seen once at a distance through a spyglass, arguing with her husband at a lit window |
| Status as of page 80 | Alive, married, still next door |
| Book and series | What a Lady Wants, Last Man Standing book 2, by Victoria Alexander |
The night the book starts
A burglar, no doubt. Caught in the act of robbing Lady Pomfrey’s jewels or the Pomfreys’ collection of art or something equally valuable.
Unless it wasn’t a burglar at all. There certainly were enough rumors about Lady Pomfrey’s, well, interests.
Felicity corrects herself within a sentence, which tells you how established the reputation is. A woman who has never met Lady Pomfrey socially knows enough to revise a burglary into an affair on the strength of neighborhood rumor.
She then focuses the spyglass on the window and sees the couple arguing, which is the only direct sighting of Lady Pomfrey in the pages read.
Since you probably are not a burglar, I assume you were… dallying with Lady Pomfrey.
Come now. You bear some culpability.
The verdict, and who delivers it
Alfred Pomfrey is a lecherous idiot and deserves what he gets for marrying a woman half his age. Letitia Pomfrey is a tart. She was a tart as a girl and a tart she remains.
Read the structure of that. The husband gets a reason: he is lecherous, he is an idiot, and he married a girl half his age, so this is the predictable result. The wife gets a label with no reason attached, applied to her as a girl and again now, as though it were a fixed property rather than anything she did.
The Viscount immediately follows it with the line that matters for his son, and it is the only fair thing anybody says about the situation.
You do understand, the failings of Lord and Lady Pomfrey in no way excuse your own behavior.
The marriage nobody defends
Both Pomfreys are unfaithful and the book says so. Nigel’s assumption that the scandal would stay quiet rests on it.
Lady Pomfrey certainly would not want her indiscretions exposed. And as Lord Pomfrey had returned home straight from the arms of an actress of considerable reputation that had nothing to do with her skills on the stage, he too would wish to avoid public exposure.
So the husband who fired a pistol over his wife’s infidelity had come home from his own. The novel places those two facts one sentence apart and lets the reader do the arithmetic.
Later the book notes that this was not an isolated night, and that her husband’s response to her infidelities reliably produces incidents of this kind. That sits past the current read and is recorded here as existing rather than summarized.
What Nigel says afterwards
“You have given up dallying with married women?” “I have given up Lady Pomfrey.”
Felicity asks the general question. He answers the narrow one, and the joke is that he is being scrupulously honest. He has given up exactly one woman.
And when he wants to needle his father about the coming six weeks, she is the threat he reaches for.
“I could even take up with Lady Pomfrey again,” Nigel threatened. The older man stifled a grin. “Well, perhaps not Lady Pomfrey.”
What the book withholds
Her voice. She does not speak in the pages read. Everything about her is reported by other people.
Her age. Given only as half her husband’s.
Her side of any of it. The novel gives her husband a motive and gives her a label.
Whether she and Felicity have ever met. They are neighbors separated by a garden wall and no encounter is shown.
Where she connects
Alfred, Lord Pomfrey
Her husband, the dueling pistol, and the man who came home from an actress.
CharacterThe Honorable Nigel Cavendish
Went out of her window and over the wall into the rest of the novel.
CharacterLady Felicity Melville
The neighbor with the spyglass.
CastAll characters
Everyone who speaks or is spoken to in this book.
The RaeRae take
Lady Pomfrey is the most efficiently disposed-of woman in this novel and she deserves the page precisely for that. She sets the entire plot in motion, she is discussed by five separate characters, and she is never once allowed to speak.
Compare her with Judith in book one. Both are women whose reputations run ahead of them. Judith gets a hundred and thirty pages of interior life explaining why hers exists and what it costs her. Lady Pomfrey gets “a tart as a girl and a tart she remains,” from a man the book otherwise presents as wise and fair, and nobody argues.
The book knows enough to make her husband ridiculous, to note that he was returning from his own affair when he fired at her lover, and to have the Viscount say that neither Pomfrey’s failings excuse Nigel. It simply does not extend her the same curiosity. That is worth writing down rather than smoothing over, because this shelf’s whole argument is that the minor characters are where a book shows what it actually thinks.
Sources
Primary source is the novel itself: What a Lady Wants by Victoria Alexander, Last Man Standing book 2, 389 pages, read front to back on Kindle and currently complete through page 80, with further page-numbered receipts gathered by in-book search on the term Pomfrey.
No secondary source, wiki, blurb or adaptation has been used. Where the book does not say something, this page says that it does not say it.