Book Review: Much Ado About Jack
/Much Ado About Jack
Geoffrey Beauchamp, Earl of Devonshire, had never fully accepted his wife, not even in his bed. Only once or twice had he bothered to have her before turning back to his whores. In spite of all that, she had loved him, perhaps not the man he truly was but the man she thought he was, the man she had fallen in love with when she was seventeen.
The Earl is dead when the book opens, and Angelique herself has changed dramatically from that love-struck girl. She's now notorious in high society as a woman who "travels where she pleases and sleeps with any man who catches her fancy," and who, indeed, finds herself rubbing up against a handsome stranger on the deck of a ship she owns, the Diane, before she's even learned his name (she "stood close to him, her cheek pressed against his chest, [and] she caught the scent of leather and spiced rum," and so forth). The stranger is Captain James Montgomery, the sultry cover-boy who's so rudely elbowed Angelique off the front of her own book, and the thrill he elicits makes Angelique briefly hopeful that her heart, scored both by her dead husband and by the highly unsatisfactory lovers she's taken since, might still be capable of some feeling. "All was not lost," she tells herself, "if she could still feel desire, even for a common sailor."The fact that in the actual, historical 1818, all would indeed be lost if a Countess ever found herself thinking such things (let alone acting on them, repeatedly and enthusiastically) isn't a fact we're meant to dwell on in Much Ado About Jack. Despite its modest store of historical details - the Prince Regent shows up, as you might expect he would - this novel is pretty clearly set, mentally if not materially, in the 21st Century, and English has decided not to care (it's impossible that the author of those Eleanor of Aquitaine novels could simply not know) that this is an impossible contrast. In 2014, a famous young woman of 18 can have multiple highly-publicized lovers and experience nothing more distressing than stardom as a result; in 1818, a woman behaving as Angelique behaves would be mocked, scorned, and cast out of society - that is, she'd be ruined, a word that has by now thankfully lost all its meaning but one that once meant everything.When Captain Jack's friend Lord Pembroke summarizes Angelique, it should spell her doom:
"I have it on good authority that she is a lovely woman. Intelligent, well-spoken, a woman who makes her own way in the world. But I would not recommend her to an adder."
But instead, it just intrigues our randy sea-dog:
"Why not?""Some women are complicated. Angelique is one of them.""Maybe I like complicated.""Since when?"
As Montgomery himself later confesses to Angelique:
"You are a woman to muddle a man's mind. But you are a woman who can't be conquered. If you were some lightskirt I met in a tavern, I wouldn't be here."
Of course, by that point in English's narrative, you're either, so to speak, on board with the spirited story she's telling or else you've already decamped for the familiar tomes of Georgette Heyer. English's remaining readers - and I suspect they'll be many, many - are treated to a tale that's one part anachronistically acrobatic sexual antics, one part saturated love of Shakespeare's comedies, and one part classic mismatched-lovers Regency stuff, as when Angelique finds herself appreciating her man-jack for the dozenth time:
He would never be known as a Corinthian, dressed as he was in clothes that would serve as well on a ship as they would on a hunt. His cravat was tied with flair, but she knew for a certainty that he did not keep a man, that he had tied it himself. Something about that simplicity refreshed her, the same way the Shropshire air did, bringing her back to herself in a way no other man ever had.
That's neatly put, and after some of the well-played dramatic complications you'd expect from a fan of Shakespeare, Much Ado About Jack finds its way to being both satisfying and, against all odds, heart-warming. And if this sort of thing is more fun for its author than writing the 189,000th novel about poor Queen Catherine of Aragon, well, who are we to begrudge it?
