1948 Regency romance. Gilly, or Adolphus Gillespie Vernon Ware the
Duke of Sale, was a sickly child, and has been brought up in luxury
but thoroughly insulated from the world. About to come of age, and
feeling his arranged marriage locking him further into other people's
expectations, he determines to live just for a little while as an
ordinary person.
His cousin's embroilment in a possible breach of promise case
provides the final motivating factor, and he sets off as "Mr Rufford"
(one of his secondary titles) to recover the incriminating letters,
ideally without paying through the nose. In the course of this he
acquires two protégés: Tom Mamble, an ironmaster's son who's given his
tutor the slip and is determined to get into all the trouble that it's
possible for a young lad to involve himself in, and Belinda, the
titular Foundling, a young woman of transcendent beauty but very
little brain. Clearly they can't be turned away to get into trouble on
their own, even if "Mr Rufford's" reputation will suffer.
But this all takes longer than expected: meanwhile, Gilly's vanished
from London, and his other cousin and heir-presumptive Gideon is too
amused by the idea that he might have murdered Gilly to make more than
a perfunctory denial. Various people set off to look for Gilly, while
he makes haste to Bath to lodge Belinda with his fiancée at least
until some safe haven can be found for her.
As I reread Heyer in order of publication, I'm struck by the contrast
with her previous book The Reluctant Widow. Both books are about
adventure more than romance, but where Widow made the romance an
almost perfunctory addition to the final scenes, Foundling manages
to bring Harriet, Gilly's intended, back in at about the
three-quarters mark, and if she's not as involved in the adventure as
Gilly, the extent to which she is involved develops the love story
too. Each of them has been warned by well-meaning elders that they
must not look for romance or passion in marriage (and it's tacitly
assumed they will find it elsewhere), and to all appearances Gilly is
brazenly lodging his mistress with his fiancée; but the outrageousness
of the situation demands that they talk with each other beyond the
polite forms, and in talking they discover something of their true
feelings.
I haven't even mentioned the secondary characters, including a fine
plausible and shameless rogue. But while the narrative sticks to the
thread that Gilly's adventures, and need to fend for himself, have
been the making of him, I think there's a significant secondary strand
in that he doesn't simply ruin Belinda and then cast her aside once
he's bored with her, as everyone clearly expects him to if they don't
assume he's in the process of doing it already. He's not constrained
here by the expectations of society or upbringing; he falls back on
his own moral code.
Which is more than one might reasonably expect from a fluffy romantic
adventure.