Dear Aunt Minerva won’t like it, of course, but Philip is independent of her. He, too, falls head over heels in love within days, but they can’t marry because… um, because… Nope, there isn’t a single obstacle. Philip is far too nice and non-threatening to play the villain, and insists on being solely the romantic hero. There are very brief mentions of certain ‘accidents’ that befell (or almost befell Torquil) for which he blamed Philip, but these are never substantiated, are set down as the products of an excitable imagination and eventually are forgotten about altogether. Philip handily accomplishes the first part in a matter of days, but resolutely refuses to play the part of apparent villain. In a proper Gothic suspense novel, he would make the heroine fall head over heels in love with him, and then make her suspect him of trying to off Torquil, who stands between him and the baronetcy. Into the midst of this spookiness drifts the Broome cousin and next heir, Philip, who seems to have wandered in from another story altogether. The average reader (by which I mean me) is saying: oh, come on, girl! Get a grip. And somehow Kate, who’s as bright as a button in other ways, never seems to notice how odd the household is, or if she does, she explains it away to herself or accepts whatever explanation she’s given. The doctor and the servants seem resolutely determined to convince Kate that everything’s wonderful. Torquil the beautiful adolescent son is oddly moody. Sir Timothy is an old dear obviously surrendering mastery to his dominant wife.

Lady Broome is suffocatingly kind, but somehow cold.

The first part of the book is all Gothic mysteriousness. Lady Broome showers Kate with kindness and gifts, but Kate suspects that she wants something in return and feels that all is not well at Staplewood… But Sarah, the nurse, secretly writes to Kate’s only known relative, Lady Broome, who descends at once and sweeps Kate off to her stately pile, Staplewood, where she lives with her elderly and frail baronet husband, her highly-strung son Torquil, and a resident doctor. When the son of the house shocks his family by proposing, she finds herself out on her ear and running back to her former nurse for shelter while she looks for another position. Here’s the premise: Kate Malvern is an impoverished orphan struggling to make her way as a governess. Having read droves of Heyers that were essentially light-hearted, if very elegant, fluff, this was quite a shock to the system. Cousin Kate is an odd mixture of light romance and Gothic suspense with very dark undertones which somehow fails on both counts.

I’ve reread almost all of Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels in the order she wrote them and, with the exception of the two with a war setting ( Spanish Bride and An Infamous Army), which I abandoned as not my thing, I’ve enjoyed them all.

Cousin kate by georgette heyer