What Actually Happens

The shape, before the details

A woman is told she has to marry a stranger to save the family business. Instead of accepting or refusing, she goes to investigate him under a false name. He is already investigating her under a false name. They spend the novel lying to each other in a series of increasingly enjoyable conversations, and the marriage happens anyway, in a temper, for reasons neither of them wanted.

Act one: an arrangement and two false names

p. 11 Cordelia’s father explains the situation without dressing it up. The family shipping line has been profitable and is not currently: “My finances are currently somewhat strained.” The repair is a merger with American industrialist Harold Sinclair, and the seal on it is Cordelia marrying Harold’s son Daniel.

He is careful to make it sound like a compliment first, telling her “You are, in truth, the most like myself of my children” and that a union with this family “will be in all our best interests.” Her mother’s contribution is “We thought you’d like the American part of it.” Cordelia’s own version is flatter and better:

Her brother Will, who might have carried some of this, is in India. Her father’s line about him is “Doing his part to improve his family’s lot.”

p. 27 Cordelia’s response is to go to the park at an hour when, as her target puts it, “only the most robust of London residents frequent the park at this time of day.” She approaches a strange man and begins asking about Mr. Sinclair. She gives her name as Miss Palmer, borrowing it from her cousin and paid companion Sarah.

It is not a chance encounter. The preview bundled at the back of the book five file shows this same stretch from Sarah’s side, and it is a stakeout. The two of them lie in wait in a carriage outside a park gate at what Sarah calls “an ungodly time of morning,” with Cordelia having explained the plan to her the previous evening. Cordelia watches the door of the house where her quarry lives, confident he has not eluded her. Sarah asks why they are “lying in wait like common criminals” and Cordelia objects only to the wording: “Common criminals would scarcely lie in wait in a carriage, especially a carriage as nice as this.” She is also annoyed that he is late, on the grounds that she dislikes “a man who is not prompt.”

He introduces himself as Mr. Lewis. He is amused by her, and not fooled: “He resisted the urge to laugh. She was so very earnest, he suspected she would see no humor in this at all. Of course, she had no idea she was speaking to the subject of her inquiry.”

Then he sets the terms of the entire novel out loud:

It is a fair offer and an outrageous one, since he is Mr. Sinclair and she is Lady Cordelia. Both of them accept. Neither corrects the other. That is the deal the book runs on.

p. 53 This is not a whim. Cordelia tells Sarah she has “compiled a list of specific questions I want answered about Mr. Sinclair” and admits the first attempt was sloppy: “I wasn’t as prepared yesterday as I should have been. Indeed for a cleverly conceived plan, it was not well executed. Today, however, I am prepared.”

Sarah, whose name is being spent without her consent, points out the risk to her own position: “If your parents knew you were meeting this man, I could be let go.” Cordelia’s answer is the sharpest character note in the early book. She tells Sarah she only took a paid position “because you didn’t like being completely dependent” and that if she left, the family would be miserable. It is affectionate, it is true, and it is also Cordelia getting exactly what she wants.

Act two: Brighton, and a name she keeps using

p. 87 The family decamps to Brighton with Cordelia’s three sisters and their sons. He follows, with a thin excuse: “you spoke so highly of Brighton I thought it was a place that I definitely needed to visit.” She notes that she does not believe she said much of anything about Brighton.

The important thing on this page is not the flirtation. It is that Cordelia has started thinking of him by his given name, Warren, and finds the name itself worth studying: “She’d always found the meaning of names, be they of people or places, to be both interesting and insightful.” And then this, which the book slips past you:

She has already heard the truth. She has filed it as a coincidence.

p. 125 The night expedition. Cordelia, twenty-five and still living under her parents’ roof, climbs out of the house after everyone is asleep. Her arranged escort is her nephew Henry, aged nearly twelve. Henry arrives having been caught, and brings Thomas, Edward and Philip with him, because as Thomas explains, “Friday belongs to all of us.”

Her assessment of her own competence is worth keeping: “If she didn’t get married perhaps she could have a successful career as a burglar or jewel thief.” She also notes the boys are “probably more skilled at this sort of thing than she was.”

p. 162 The book steps into Daniel’s side of the story, and it is better than the disguise plot. Daniel meets his father’s wife Daisy, who is close to his own age and entirely on his side. She tells him things about his own father he did not know.

Daniel has refused Harold’s help “financially and in every other way ever since you finished your studies,” living on a small inheritance from his mother’s family and building his own fortune buying small railroads with an eye toward consolidation. He assumed his father held this against him. Daisy tells him Harold is proud, that he thinks the railroad scheme is “nothing short of brilliant,” and that he has compared Daniel to Vanderbilt.

That is the same move Alexander made with Nigel in What a Lady Wants: the biggest event in the man’s arc is a private correction to his own self-estimate, with nobody watching.

Act two and a half: the deceptions start colliding

p. 199 The real Sarah Palmer walks into a room where Daniel is standing. She goes directly into the arms of Viscount Creswell, who has been away and believed he had “a certain understanding” with her.

Daniel, who has spent weeks calling a different woman Miss Palmer, is left saying “I really don’t know her” to a room that is not listening. The narration is merciless: “Again he was ignored.” Creswell admits to being jealous. Sarah asks if he is. Nobody involves Daniel in any of it.

From this point Daniel has met the real Sarah Palmer, which means he knows the woman in the park is not her.

The turn

p. 245 Cordelia is waiting in Daniel’s front hall. Through a door left not quite closed, she hears the butler Gilliam answering questions: “Brown, sir. I can certainly tell blond from brown and Miss Palmer’s hair is definitely a dark brown.” Then “Green, sir. Definitely green. Quite unique, sir.”

She works out what the questions are for, and the realization is staged as an accelerating sequence: the real Sarah is blond with brown eyes, she is brown-haired with green eyes, and there is only one way he could know to ask.

Her next thought is not hurt. It is tactical: “The question now was how long had he known? And what was she going to do about it?”

And then the best decision in the novel. She does not confront him. She walks in, and:

From here the information is asymmetric in her favor. He knows who she is. She knows he knows. He does not know she knows. The book has been a two-hander of equal liars, and she has just taken the lead.

The thematic line lands on the same page, and it is doing more work than it looks: “Not only could the princess have everything she wanted, the princess would have everything she wanted. The commoner had turned out to be a prince after all. But there was a price to be paid for said transformation.”

Act three: a mask, a letter, and a wedding held in a temper

p. 304 A masked ball. They talk more honestly here, behind masks, than they have anywhere else, and both of them notice: “Or mask to mask.” She refuses to confirm her decision in advance, on the grounds that knowing the ending ruins it: “It would be like knowing the end of a play shortly after the curtain rises on the first act.”

She says she could never agree to marry a man she has not danced with. He calls her Lady Cordelia to her face, offers his arm, and tells her the waltz is his favorite dance. She observes that the waltz “was once considered quite scandalous.” It is the warmest scene in the book and nobody is lying in it.

p. 346 Then it collapses, and the cause is money. Cordelia learns Daniel needed the marriage in connection with an inheritance. The narration is careful not to say he was insincere, only that she cannot now separate the two: “she wasn’t at all sure his love didn’t go hand in hand with his need for the inheritance.”

Her family closes ranks in the least helpful way available. Amelia and Edwina agree Daniel seems “a good sort all in all” and is “certainly dashing enough with a wonderfully wicked smile.” Aunt Lavinia points out “money was not a bad reason to marry one’s first husband.” Her mother observes that at least Cordelia will be married “regardless of the circumstances of the marriage.” Will blames the whole disaster on her. Sarah offers a shoulder. Her father says nothing at all, which Cordelia notes he does wisely.

She marries him. The papers are signed and, as she puts it, “it’s best to get on with it.” The real Warren Lewis, whose name Daniel borrowed for the entire novel, stands beside him as best man.

The ceremony itself is four lines long and it is the best comic writing in the book:

The vicar, sensing the room, tries “Lady Cordelia?” She snaps “Yes, yes. I will, I do. Go on.” The vicar raises a brow and continues.

The epilogue, which is really about the series

p. 360 Three weeks later, and the point of view moves to a man named Oliver, alone at a club table with three empty chairs and four shillings in front of him.

The shillings and a bottle of cognac are the stake in a tontine the four of them entered on staying unmarried. Oliver has won by outlasting everybody. His own read on it is dry: “it wasn’t as if they were dead, and he shouldn’t behave as if they were. They were simply married.” He notes the cognac “was meant to be shared, not drunk alone.”

He gets up on the table and toasts them. “To Viscount Warton. Who found what he didn’t believe existed.” And “To Viscount Cavendish. Who discovered the prize is sometimes worth the sacrifice.” Cavendish is Nigel from book two, so the toasts are a reading order in disguise. The full accounting is on the series hub.

Read directly from the novel, Kindle edition, June 1854 setting, and described in our own words. Page numbers are the Kindle edition’s. · Book hub · Last Man Standing · The Library