Daizell was ingenious, and Cassian was a duke, with all that entailed: wealth, power, authority. Between them, they’d come up with something, just as soon as Cassian admitted that he’d been lying to him from the moment they’d met. [p. 211]
The Duke of Severn is an unassuming young man with many names and titles. He goes by his favourite of those names, Cassian, when he's travelling the West Midlands incognito -- ostensibly because of a wager with his cousin Leo, that he couldn't survive for a month without the trappings of his title, but actually because, following an ill-judged liaison with a handsome young fellow at an inn, the Duke's ancestral ring (along with everything else he carried, including his clothes) was stolen. Cassian is still smarting from having been duped, and he's determined to find the man in the mulberry coat.
En route, he encounters Daizell Charnage, disgraced minor nobility now making a living as a shape-cutter. (Think silhouettes, but as per the author's afterword, 'the word silhouette was not used in English until around 1825... you can't find this more annoying than I did'. [p. 324]) There's a strong mutual attraction, but Cassian dare not reveal his true identity: or rather the identity he's trying to escape from. The novel also features a carriage accident, an eloping heiress, Cassian's other and much more likeable cousin Louisa, a kidnapping, and the dastardly Sir James Vier. And there are cameos from some of the characters from previous novels in the 'Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune' books (A Thief in the Night and The Gentle Art of Fortune-Hunting).
This was an absolute delight: I raced through it, reread the two earlier works and then read it again. There's something about the dialogue, or the ways in which even minor characters feel like glimpses of people with whole lives, or the ever-present class conflict, or the fleeting allusions to other novels by the author... whatever it is, it has me hooked. I especially enjoyed the contrast between 'Cassian' and 'the Duke', sometimes in a single scene: Cassian says at one point that 'I cannot be Severn all the time, only doing what Severn does and behaving as Severn must, with no life of my own ... I will die in there.’ There is an absolutely splendid shape-cutting metaphor for those two identities, which made me want to applaud. Daizell, too, is a likeable and complicated man with a great line in metaphor: and the scandalous events that overshadow his life may not be entirely insoluble, either.
A splendid read, with complex emotional stakes, lots of period detail, sex scenes that are thoroughly in character, and plenty of humour.
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