What Actually Happens

The shape, before the details

A wife whose marriage has gone silent announces to her husband that she intends to take a lover. She has no intention of taking one. She invents the affair, blackmails her brother-in-law into supplying the evidence, and waits to see whether her husband will fight for her. He does, by impersonating his own identical twin. She recognized him immediately and let him carry on.

Act one: the diagnosis

p. 10 The book opens on a marriage in perfectly good working order and completely dead. Lady Amelia, eldest daughter of the Earl of Marsham, is married to Robert, a charming and highly respected London solicitor whose cousin’s death has made him heir to an elderly uncle’s property and title. He plans to take the uncle’s seat in Parliament. He intends, eventually, to be prime minister.

The problem is stated precisely, and it is not neglect or cruelty. It is the absence of anything at all:

Amelia’s own hopeful reading of the evening ahead: “Perhaps they’d have an argument this evening. That would be rather nice.” A woman looking forward to a fight because a fight would be contact.

Robert is described with real fairness. He has “a natural reserve” and has “never been overly demonstrative, nor did he freely express his feelings.” He also has “a great deal of ambition and passion. Passion for the law, for politics, and once, for her.” The word doing the work in that sentence is once.

The book is also refreshingly direct about what Amelia is missing. She “enjoyed the intimate aspects of marriage far more than any proper, respectable lady should” and privately suspects she “must be something of a tart.” Her defense is unanswerable: “if God had not intended for relations between men and women to be pleasurable, he would not have made them quite so, well, pleasurable.”

The cause: a bracelet, and a conclusion

The entire estrangement rests on one object. Robert picked up a bracelet on his brother’s behalf. Amelia found it, and concluded he had a mistress. She never asked.

Later, at page 103, Robert’s own summary is bleak and funny at once: “That blasted bracelet had nearly cost him his wife.”

And Amelia, at page 90, admits the part that is harder to say. She preferred the mistress theory:

Act one, other side: Robert asks his brother for help

p. 22 Robert and his identical twin Harry. Amelia has told Robert she is taking a lover and has named Harry as a candidate, which Harry finds appalling.

Harry refuses on principle and the refusal is genuinely firm: “I never have, nor do I foresee a situation in which I ever would, seduce the wife of a friend, and definitely not the wife of my brother.” Robert observes drily that “It’s good to know you have some moral standards.”

The advice Harry gives instead is the plot: “Court her, Robert. Flirt with her. Win her heart all over again. You did it once, you can do it again.”

Robert’s objection is the detail that sets up everything: “I had your help then.” In their youth the brothers were “not above impersonating each other in pursuit of whatever lady had caught their eye” and, tellingly, “A lady who, as often as not, ultimately preferred Harry.”

Robert rules the swap out. “No, you pretending to be me wouldn’t work at all now. She knows me too well. Court her, you say.” Remember that he says this. He is going to do it anyway.

There is also a brief, very funny argument about how many times Harry has impersonated him. Robert says “Four?” Harry offers “It might have been three.” and then “I really don’t remember.”

Act two: the declaration

p. 41 The best scene in the novella and one of the best in the series. Amelia and Robert, brandy, and a completely civil conversation about the end of their marriage.

She has already told him she is taking a lover. He wants to know how far it has gone. He searches for the right words and lands on “Interviewing applicants.”

He counters that she mentioned advertising in the Times that morning. She says he was paying no notice to what she was saying. He says “And yet I did notice that.” She raises her glass. “Very good. I’m impressed.”

That is a woman congratulating her husband for hearing one sentence, and it is devastating.

The narration on her state going in: “The man was remarkably collected given the topic they were about to embark upon. But then, oddly enough, so was she. This must be how a warrior felt before going into battle. Cool, calm, and determined.”

Then he drops the humor entirely: “How did we come to this, Amelia?” She takes a breath and starts with “When I discovered you had a mistress” and he corrects her: “When you jumped to the erroneous conclusion that I had a mistress.” She ignores him and continues: “I was, needless to say, upset, hurt, and angry. Not unexpectedly, I might add.”

The turn: Amelia is the one with the plan

p. 64 This is where the novella stops being a story about a woman looking for a lover and becomes a story about a woman running an operation.

Six years earlier, Harry impersonated Robert and kissed Amelia. She knew, at the time, that it was not her husband. She wrote it in her journal:

She never told him. Harry asks why not, and every reason she gives is a kindness done at her own expense. Telling him “would have revealed that I knew of your deception all along. Which no doubt would have made Robert feel like a fool, and I didn’t want that.” She doubted Harry’s liberties were what Robert had intended. And it “might have created a rift between the two of you.”

Her closing reason is the one that hurts: “I am too close to my own sisters to ever want to do that to anyone and his brother.”

Harry says, simply, “Thank you.”

And then she spends it.

His eyes narrow. “This is blackmail.” She agrees brightly: “I know. It’s quite invigorating.”

What she extracts: flowers. Sent to her. Anonymously. “I shall have flowers delivered later today.” / “Anonymously of course.” Plus his absolute silence.

There is no lover. There was never going to be one. The rival is a prop, built by the wife, to find out whether her husband still has a fight in him.

Harry’s parting shot as he reaches the door is very good: “Just out of my own sense of importance and curiosity, was there ever a moment when you considered choosing a different brother?” Amelia’s answer is “Do you wish me to be honest?” and the book, wisely, moves on.

The carriage

p. 90 A dark carriage. Amelia thanks the man opposite her for seeing her home and calls him Harry. It is Robert.

Harry has told him Amelia was upset and wished to leave, and suggested it would be wise if Robert escorted her instead. The narration is honest about the opportunism: “This wasn’t exactly what Robert had in mind when he’d planned to take his brother’s place at some point, but when one was handed a fortuitous opportunity, one should take advantage of it.”

So Robert, in the dark, lets his wife believe he is his brother, and she tells “Harry” what she cannot tell Robert. That she was wrong about the mistress. That he should have believed her husband, and that she should have believed him. And then this:

She can fight a rival. There is no rival. There is only a room with nobody in it, and no technique exists for that.

The ending

p. 103 The bracelet is explained. She concedes she should have trusted him. He concedes he earned the doubt: “Although admittedly I deserved your doubt.”

Then she takes the entire structure of the book apart in about eight lines.

First, the carriage: “You should know, though, it was your kiss that ultimately revealed your identity.” He points out, reasonably, that she slapped him anyway. She asks whether it was a slap he did nothing to warrant. He begins “Well, perhaps, there might have been” and gives up.

Then she says he is “dreadful at being Harry.” He protests. And she delivers the line that detonates six years:

Robert catches it. “Harry hasn’t pretended to be me for a very long time.” Amelia, calmly: “Six years, I should say.”

“You knew?” / “Of course I knew.”

He asks how, given how good the two of them used to be at playing each other. Her answer is the last thing the novella needs to say:

Two identical men, a lifetime of swapping, and she has never once been fooled. Not at nineteen, not six years ago, not in a dark carriage.

The coda, which belongs to the series

p. 113 The novella closes somewhere else entirely: Oliver and Sinclair at the club, both still unmarried, drinking.

Sinclair is defiant and, in hindsight, doomed: “in spite of my suspicion that by forming this tontine we have shaken our fists at whatever gods rule these things and may well have brought a curse down upon our heads, I am not, by any means, surrendering. I shall fight to my last dying breath.” He promises to toast Oliver at his wedding, “With my cognac of course.”

The narration notes that “those least likely to marry were now happily wed” and that Oliver “needn’t concern himself with the prospect of marriage. At least not yet.” Oliver’s last line is the closest this series comes to a wink: “However, if I were you, I certainly wouldn’t wager on it.”

Note the word curse, arriving here, two books before the curse plot of Seduction of a Proper Gentleman. And note that both men are unmarried, which is why this novella belongs between books two and three rather than at the end. Full argument on the series hub.

Read directly from the novella, Kindle edition, and described in our own words. Page numbers are the Kindle edition’s. · Book hub · Last Man Standing · The Library