Review: Lord of Secrets

Lord of Secrets by Erica Ridley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Miss Eleanora (Nora) Winfield has been summoned from her family's sheep farm in the West Midlands to act as a lady's companion to her (distant) cousin Lady Roundtree whilst that lady recovers from a fractured ankle. She's homesick and lonely, treated as a servant, invisible and overlooked she finds her employer catty and an incurable gossip but eight weeks work as a paid companion could help her brother and aged grandparents enormously, taking them from the brink of destitution to almost comfortable so she'll grit her teeth and get on with it.

At Lord Carlisle's ball Nora runs into a handsome gentleman by accident whilst carrying a glass of lemonade to her employer. The gentleman is the first person to actually 'see' Nora and she is struck by his good looks and his charming manners. Later in the evening the gentleman, Mr Heath Grenville, approaches her to ask her to dance and is horrified to discover that she is little better than a servant (and consequently far beneath the heir to a baronetcy).

Heath Grenville is the older brother of three sisters, two of whom have had their own books. He is very aware that his duty to his family and his future role is to marry a woman of impeccable lineage, one who will not bring any hint of scandal to the family. Yet he can't help but remember a young woman with red hair and a pink dress who acts as a companion to Lady Roundtree.

Nora sends drawings and caricatures of the people and places she sees in London back to her family, partly because she has difficulty reading and writing but partly to share her life with them. Unfortunately her brother shares some of the caricatures (anonymously) with a contact and the next thing she knows her sketch of Lord Wainwright, which she laughingly titled 'Lord of Pleasure' has been published in a London newspaper and is the talk of the ton. Not only that, the paper will pay her five pounds for every caricature she sends them - provided of course that they are of the ton. Nora is torn between wanting to earn money to help her family and horror at being exposed as the artist who dared to lampoon a member of the aristocracy - she knows if the artist's identity is discovered she will be sacked and bring censure down upon her cousin's family.

This was immediately gripping, I love a romance featuring a lowly lady's companion, especially one who draws vicious caricatures of the stupidity and ridiculousness of high society and throw in an untameable puppy and you've got me hooked. It would have got a higher rating if Heath hadn't come across as a leetle bit of a prig, so dismissive of all the eligible young ladies of the ton and so judgemental if they so much as smiled in his direction, despite his own mother's obsession with marrying off each of her offspring. I also felt that there was a lack of angst/ tension - whilst that was a twist to confound my expectations it also felt like the ending slightly puttered out.

Nevertheless, another fun read from Erica Ridley. I am SO stoked about the next book ... can't wait.

I received a free copy of this book from the author, via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews