What Actually Happens

The shape, before the details

A woman fakes a head injury to get inside a man’s house, because a family curse says she has to marry into his line. She does not believe in the curse. She does it anyway. He does not believe in it either, and by the end he is the one who has to decide whether that belief is worth a life.

Act one: the plan, and the woman who hates it

p. 11 We meet Kathleen, called Kate, and her aunt Hannah, arguing about method. Hannah wants to help supernaturally: “I would be happy to mix up a potion. Concoct a charm or something of that nature. It would make all this easier.” Kate refuses flatly. “I think this situation is best left to more ordinary methods.”

The family history is sketched in the same scene. Kate’s grandmother and aunt “had dabbled in magic for as long as Kathleen could remember without any significant results as far as she could tell.” Kate has therefore appointed herself “the only practical, and therefore responsible, female member of the family.”

She will not even say the word. Hannah gets as far as “as you have finally come to your senses regarding the cu” before Kate cuts her off with “Don’t say it.” Her reasoning is genuinely interesting: saying a thing aloud as though it were certain is a bigger concession than privately half-believing it.

Hannah’s assessment of her niece is also the book’s warning label:

Kate laughs and concedes the point: “a forthright, honest approach will not work at all with an arrogant British lord.” The whole novel is a scrupulously honest woman running a dishonest scheme and disliking herself for it.

Act one, other side: the man who won

p. 33 Oliver Leighton, Earl of Norcroft, is having a bad afternoon. An unconscious woman has been delivered to his parlor and his butler is being insinuating about it.

The complaint he makes to Hollinger is the whole series in one sentence: “I know that you, and every other servant in the house, are firmly aligned with my mother in the shared goal of seeing me wed but you needn’t drag in half-dead women off the street.” His mother has been “relentless in badgering him about his failure to wed” ever since “the first man had fallen in the blasted tontine.”

He also notes, with some irritation, that it is “irritating as well for the man who had won the tontine to be made to feel by those around him as if he had somehow failed.” He won. Nobody is treating it as a win.

Then he looks at the woman on the sofa. Dark red hair, “the color of good mahogany,” fine features. He wonders what color her eyes will be and hopes for green, because “He’d always had a fondness for green-eyed redheads.”

The escort introduces herself as Lady Fitzgivens, a well-dressed woman about his mother’s age, and delivers an extremely long and extremely helpful account of having just come off the train from London, having arranged a carriage to Lord Darlington’s estate, and having seen this poor young woman trip and fall off the platform. She is chatty, specific, and entirely fictional. She is Aunt Hannah.

Act two: the charade leaks constantly

The fun of the middle is that Kate is bad at this in exactly the way a clever, honest person would be bad at it. She keeps knowing things.

p. 69 She recognizes Shakespeare, and Oliver goes off to interrogate his butler about it: “I know Shakespeare! Hollinger, do I strike you as a scholarly sort of man?” The butler hesitates, is pressed for an honest opinion, and gives it: “As you wish, my lord. Not especially scholarly, no sir.” Oliver goes for a very long walk.

The walk is worth reading for the house. Norcroft is Palladian, roughly two hundred years old, built by an ancestor “who fancied himself a bit of an architect.” There is a fragment of Roman wall in the garden that Oliver as a child thought was “a secret spot built and preserved by magic.” There are marble nymphs his grandmother installed “for no reason other than, as the story went, she liked them.” He climbs to a hilltop his father showed him as a boy, where “the world seemed to take on a proper perspective.”

p. 123 She does it again, offering “Queen Mary of Scotland played golf you know” and then having to explain her own knowledge to herself: “Apparently I do.” The narration notes she said it over her shoulder “to hide the fact that she wasn’t at all sure how to get from the library in the manor to the outdoors.”

They have also reached the stage of being honest about the dishonesty. She tells him she accepts that in his place she would “continue to harbor a certain amount of suspicion as to who I really am and what I might want.” He huffs that he thinks he has done “exceptionally well, given that I’ve never tried to ascertain someone’s identity before.”

The best line on the page is hers, and it is a threat dressed as flirtation. He warns her that Queen Mary “did not end well.” She answers: “I have no doubt, Oliver, that my own ending shall be much better.” The narration immediately undercuts it: she said it “with a confidence she didn’t quite feel.”

And then the observation that justifies the entire fake amnesia premise:

Playing a woman with no past forces her to watch her own reflexes as a stranger would. She is learning her character by being denied the use of it.

The interrogation

p. 177 Three younger women, Gen, Belle and Sophie, put it to her directly. Kate’s defense is good: “If I am deceiving Lady Norcroft and her son, to what end? What could I possibly gain by a charade like this?”

Gen shrugs and answers it. “Oliver. She wants Oliver.” Belle adds the part Kate has not admitted: “And Oliver apparently wants her.”

They then read the case aloud. Oliver is “extremely wealthy,” “quite handsome,” “an earl,” and “one of the most eligible bachelors in the country.” And Kate, per Gen, is “Old. And probably desperate.” Belle salvages it as “older. Than we are.” Kate’s teeth-clenched reply is the funniest thing she says in the book: “I suspect I would know if I were desperate.”

Act three: the memory returns on schedule

p. 249 A tall rugged graying man arrives and holds Kate in his arms, and Oliver’s face does something. She introduces him properly: “May I introduce my uncle, the Earl of Dumleavy, Malcolm Armstrong. Uncle, this is Oliver, Lord Norcroft, the Earl of Norcroft.”

Dumleavy’s opinion of the match, delivered directly to the man in question: “If that’s all he can say, lass, you’ve made a bad bargain of it.”

Oliver, narrowing his eyes, asks whether she remembers her uncle. She says she does. “Then your memory has returned?” Kate smiles. “It has.” The charade is over, and everything that made it charming is now something she has to answer for.

The curse, out loud, and a roof

p. 304 Oliver is leaving. He tells Hollinger he is not fleeing. Hollinger agrees that he would never think such a thing, and then describes the situation:

Oliver stares at him. “You’re very good, Hollinger.” “Yes sir.”

He walks outside with his man, Mr. Berkley, takes “a bare step away from the house,” and a slate shatters at his feet “missing him by mere inches.” Two more follow, “sounding remarkably like shots from a gun.”

What happens next is the book’s whole method in miniature. Oliver produces a mundane explanation: they had extensive roof repairs a few months ago, the stone-tackers left slates unsecured, rain washed them to the edge. Berkley, carefully, offers the other reading: “One might wonder, sir, if one believed in superstitious nonsense, which of course I don’t, if perhaps this wasn’t some sort of, well, of a sign that we should delay our departure.”

Oliver agrees that such a person might see it that way, notes firmly that neither of them is such a person, and then says “However, I have changed my mind” and hands Berkley his bag. Both explanations stay on the table. He acts on the one he says he does not believe.

The resolution

p. 348 Kathleen and her grandmother, a countess, walking in the garden. Grandmother takes the curse apart with pure argument.

The terms, as the family understands them: a marriage between the two families some two hundred years ago should have ended it. Grandmother points out that either the curse needed a marriage, in which case “it no doubt ended with the bastard son marrying the widowed daughter and you can safely marry Oliver,” or it needed something more.

And if it needed more, Kathleen has already paid it:

Kathleen, still the practical one, objects: “But we don’t know.” Grandmother’s answer is the thesis of the novel, and she delivers it holding her granddaughter’s chin the way she did when Kathleen was small:

Her official position on the metaphysics is a masterpiece of not committing: “Shall we simply say there was a curse and perhaps now there isn’t.”

The sign. The curse promised one, and the promise has been sitting there all book. Grandmother stops at an intersection of two paths, folds her parasol, and points. At the end of a hedge where the last blossoms of the season had been fading only days before, spring flowers are blooming in profusion, “blues and yellows and pinks, all the hues of spring.” In nearly autumn.

“Imagine that. Spring flowers blooming when it’s nearly autumn.” Grandmother nods approvingly. “A sign if ever I saw one.”

The last page, and four books of setup

p. 352 Kate walks Oliver through the same logic she was given: it is most unusual, there is no other rational explanation, therefore “the curse has indeed ended.”

He stares at her for a long moment. “Then there’s no longer any reason why you won’t marry me?” Her heart thuds. “None that I can think of.” He sweeps her up and asks if she is sure, and she says there is not a doubt in her mind. “Or in my heart.”

They say it plainly, which after four books of banter is the right call: “I love you, Kate.” “And I love you, Oliver.” He tells her he thinks he loved her “from the moment I first saw you lying unconscious in the manor,” which is very funny given that she was awake.

And then she answers with the line the entire series has been building to:

He narrows his eyes. “How did you know…” She grins. “I really must get a new cloak.”

Those are the tontine shillings. He won them by outlasting every friend he had, sat alone with them at a club table in the epilogue of book three, and then gave them away to a poorly dressed stranger out of what reads as fairly pure self-pity. She kept them. She came back. More on the device itself in the tontine 101.

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