Lady Fortescue Steps Out
Series: The Poor Relation, Book 1
By: Marion Chesney / Narrated By: Davina Porter
Length: 4 hrs and 45 mins
A jolly good start to what is one o’ my favorite series!
Let’s start with Davina Porter as narrator…
Can the woman do any wrong?!? Oh, I think not. Certainly not whenst starting off this book, Lady Fortescue Steps Out, like she’s easing us, the listeners, into what will be a fairy tale, discussing the plight of poor relations, those of higher castes but who are, nonetheless, suffering genteel poverty.
Lady Fortescue opens the book. She’s just been kicked out of her nephew’s grand house after having been caught trying to steal a couple of silver candlesticks. The Duke of Rowcester is loaded, has never known hunger, but comes off as heartless, leaving Lady Fortescue to go back home to suffer the cold, suffer hunger in her large and empty house. As she’s contemplating her situation in the park one day, an elderly gentleman faints dead away with hunger. Colonel Sandhurst, he is. She offers him what food she has, and together they realize that if poor relations grouped together, pooled meager resources, they’d stand a better chance of survival. They search for such people.
They find Mrs. Budley, a widow who is being hounded by money collectors after her husband’s death revealed they owed money like craaazy. They find Harriet, an ex-debutante fallen on hard times after the deaths of her parents. They find Miss Tonks, a forty-ish years of age woman, always on her own, left penniless after parents left the inheritance to her sister and her sister not only took it all, but she took Miss Tonks’s beau as well. And they find the reprehensible and odoriferous scapegrace, Sir Philip, a rather ooold, not much of a gentleman, individual who comes up with the idea that Lady Fortescue’s large house, with Mrs. Budley’s remaining furniture, could actually be used to start a hotel serving the upper classes.
Yes, this smacks of the group going “into trade” ( >gasp< ), but they’re desperate, and maybe, juuust maybe, the shame of it all will be enough to shame their richer relatives into bribing them into shutting it down. Thus the hotel, The Poor Relation, is born.
And hijinks ensue. Especially after the Duke of Rowcester, incensed by his aunt’s obvious tumble into poor taste, takes it upon himself to move in, looking for ways to shut the place down. It’s his eye that finds that Sir Philip has been doing things like breaking and gently gluing back handles to china items—all in efforts for such items to break when guests use them, thus making sure that those items can be added to their bills. And when the Duke discovers the “chicken” served at dinner is actually just rabbit, it’s off to the kitchens where he discovers Harriet slaving away. Harriet, the debutante who once captured his heart during her first and only Season.
There’s romance in this book, and obviously there are loads and loads and loads of Sir Philip’s shenanigans, but there are also instances of sweet interactions between the poor relations and plenty of plots and plans hatched to keep the hotel afloat. They’re a rather calculating lot who will do some pretty dirty work to keep things going. So there’s plenty of crime and bamboozling going on at the same time.
Y’all know how I (most abashedly) like a clean romance, and Lady Fortescue Steps Out is almost entirely squeaky clean. Save for one scene where Harriet bucks the system and bathes (Doing this more than twice a year? UnHEARD of!), and the wedding night, MC Beaton keeps things rather low-key, and NATurally I appreciated the heck outta her for this.
A sweet, charming audiobook, with plenty of chuckles and laughs thrown in (And Davina Porter’s rock solid narration, especially humorous when describing Sir Philip’s scuttling and wheedling!), and you have the start to a light get away into Regency England. It shamelessly does NOT take itself seriously!
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