Cecilia Grant's A Gentleman Undone

Rating: B+

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Grant:

As I read your novel A Gentleman Undone I brooded over words from one my favorite 18th century wordsmiths, the great Alexander Pope: “Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.” Here Pope asserts honor and shame are products of  behavior rather than experience or birth. He pledges if we act honorably, we then have honor irrespective of what has happened in our lives. This is the premise of A Gentleman Undone. Both the hero and the heroine of your brilliantly written novel are consumed with shame; both, at times during your tale, act in ways they themselves define as dishonorable. And yet, by the story’s end, both are defined by their honor rather than their shame. It’s an interesting character trajectory, one that—like that in your first novel A Woman Awakened—takes tropes tried and true in historical romance and presents them in an utterly unique way.

It’s summer of 1815, the Waterloo Campaign is a deathtrap for a quarter of its soldiers, and Will Blackshear has made a medical misjudgment. He has carried fellow soldier and friend George Talbot, horribly wounded on the blood soaked grass of Belgium’s Quatre Bras, to a makeshift hospital in order to save him. Instead, by moving Talbot, he has damaged his spine. The man is now paralyzed, in great pain, and of no interest to any army surgeon Will takes him to. Will knows there’s nothing he can do to save his friend, but he can’t keep himself from lying and trying.

“I’m going to take you out of here.” The man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth tightened and he managed a sort of nod. “The wounded are too many and they can’t spare a surgeon or even opium. There’s no purpose in your staying.” There’s no hope. What good would he do the man by saying that aloud? “Another of the hospitals might be better appointed, and we might find you some gin, at the least.”

Gin. Not likely. Unless he proposed to start pillaging corpses in search of a flask. Of course that might come to sound reasonable, between now and when Talbot’s last breath left him.

Will gathered his dreadful limp form from the pew and nearly staggered, not under the weight of the man but under the weight of the man’s misguided trust.

A little less than a year later, Will, now in London, is still trying to atone for his sin. He is determined to provide for Talbot’s widow and child, who are now stuck living on the cruel whims of Talbot’s married sister, and to make enough money to invest in a shipping venture run by a severely burned fellow veteran. He’s promised the latter three thousand pounds in a little more than a month—Will has less than a thousand and much of that must go to his living expenses. Will decided his only chance is at the tables—despite the fact he’s not a stellar player. It is at the mediocre gambling establishment Beecham’s he first glimpses Lydia Slaughter.

She, along with a few other courtesans, is playing cards near the table where he is desperately trying to win at vingt-et-un. Will notices her—she’s no traditional beauty but she draws and holds his attention. She, however, is already taken. She’s the mistress of a fellow player, the square-jawed Roanoke. Will listens as Roanoke and his friend coarsely discuss Lydia.

“I should never have bet on you keeping her this long. Not half so comely as the one you were squiring about last summer. Pretty winsome thing, she was.”

A small compression of Square-jaw’s mouth was the only sign he took offense at the questioning of his choice. “That one gifted me with a bastard child.” Green-jeweled cufflinks glinted in the candlelight as he reached out to gather in the cards. “This one can’t.”

“Or so she tells you, I’m sure,” was the first gentleman’s rejoinder, his undertone abandoned to more generally air his wit.

“She can’t.” With the patience of a crown prince accustomed to dull-witted minions he made this correction. “Something’s gone wrong with her insides. No monthly courses.”

….Where did you come by her?”

“Plucked her out of Mrs. Parrish’s establishment.” Roanoke took his time squaring the edges of all the used cards before putting the stack faceup at the bottom of the deck. “And you may believe they trained her up proper. If there’s a thing she won’t do in bed, I have yet to discover it.”

An hour later, Will, who has slunk away to the library to think bleak thoughts, finds his privacy interrupted by Lydia and Roanoke who have come to couple in between hands. Initially, the two don’t realize Will is hidden away in the corner of the room, and he, after giving them a moment to shove up against a wall, rises, prepared to abandon them to their carnal encounter.

Slowly he eased up from the chair, angling round the bookshelf for a furtive glance to assure himself they wouldn’t notice him.

He stopped, half-risen.

He’d been prepared for something sordid, a brute coupling between an importunate boor and a harlot who’d learned her trade at Mrs. Parrish’s. And of course it was sordid by its very nature, this retreat to the library, and Square-jaw himself was everything sordid, with his mouth at the juncture of her neck and shoulder and his hands groping here and there.

She, though. She was … Confound him if he could even begin to find the right word. He only knew sordid wasn’t anywhere close.

She stood with her back to the drapery, eyes closed, chin lifted, whole person swaying with pleasure.

Lydia opens her eyes and sees Will watching her revel in her paramour’s attentions.

She said nothing. She didn’t jump away from her lover, or yank up the bodice he’d tugged down, or cross her arms modestly before her. Only her eyes, widened and showing an excess of white, betrayed her consciousness of exposure. And that, for only a second or two, though the interval was sufficient to make him feel like a thoroughgoing cad.

The bookshelf’s edge bit hard into his hand. He couldn’t seem to look away, let alone make an apologetic bow and hasten from the room. He stood, frozen, as she regained her composure and her face hardened into the unmistakable lines of defiance: Judge me if you dare. Then that expression too subsided and only her falcon-like blankness remained. She looked through him, and past him, and altogether away.

Will leaves, his desire for her now a thing of hunger. Later, the two come down, having missed dinner, and Roanoke again picks up his cards. This time, however, Lydia sits in his lap, and as Roanoke dozes, Lydia takes up his cards and plays in his stead. At first, she seems a mediocre player, but, by evening’s end, she’s won four hundred and eighty pounds, one hundred and eighty of which have come from William. Lydia scoops her winnings from the table and puts three hundred pounds in her lover’s pocket. The other hundred and eighty—Will knows exactly how much it is—she puts in her bodice.

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