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todayiamadaisyWeekly knitting update: This is the right yoke. It's pretty much just 40 rows of rib from here, so I should be finished this section by the time I get the second clue next Friday.
Amazon sent me a three dollar e-book credit a couple of weeks ago, which I ignored because why would they just send me a credit? Surely it must be a trap. Then they kept sending me reminders so I finally decided to spend it just to stop the emails. But what to spend it on? The newly minted Booker winner? Or something else? Something else, obviously. As if I'm not going to read something with a cover as marvellous as this:
Warned by a Ghost by Barbara Cartland
Well. This was a turn-up for the books. The plot made sense. The hero and heroine were not irredeemably stupid. It was all... coherent. I mean, it wasn't good. But it made sense. More or less.
Our heroine is Sedela Craven. I misread Sedela's name and spent half the book thinking she was only a couple of vowels off being a perforated crispbread. But that's my problem. Nothing to do with her. Anyway, Sedela has long blonde hair and big blue eyes, but I feel that goes without saying by now. On the other hand, what does need saying is that Sedela is not a complete idiot. She turns out to be a good judge of horses and also a competent event planner, which gives her at least one more skill than any previous Cartland heroine.
Sedela is a distant cousin of the Marquis of Windlesham, who has been away for years, first in the war against Napoleon and now in London being friends with the Prince Regent. While he's away, Sedela often pops into Windle Court to visit her old nanny, Nanny, who now lives there waiting for the Marquis to have children. Today, she is horrified when Nanny reads her a letter from Nanny's niece, Lucy, who is a lady's maid in London for Lady Esther Hasting. Lady Esther is a rather racy widow, and she has got her hooks into the Marquis. Oh no! Sedela and Nanny agree that Lady Esther would be a terrible Marchioness and hope that the Marquis comes to his senses. On the way back home, Sedela comes up with a plan...
Windle Court has a ghost, you see. Lady Constance appears to the Windlesham family when one of them is in danger. Sedela decides that next time the Marquis is home she will dress up as Lady Constance to warn him about Lady Esther.
As luck would have it, the Marquis comes home a couple of days later. He is rightly surprised when Lady Constance appears and jibber-jabbers at him about not trusting a certain woman in his life. Now, I have read another Cartland in which the heroine pretends to be a ghost to warn the hero about something, and he believed the ghost was real. But this Marquis, he is no fool. He clocks right away that Lady Constance is a real person, and after a bit of thought realises that Sedela is the only person in the vicinity who (a) knows about Lady Constance, (b) knows how to get in and out of Windle Court's secret passages and (c) is the right age and size to be the "ghost" he's just seen. Angry that Sedela is meddling in his life, he decides to go back to London immediately to propose to Lady Esther. So much for that plan, Sedela. (I initially thought that the scene depicted on the cover was Sedela pretending to be a the ghost and was very much looking forward to see how she made herself hover, but, alas, this is a different scene.)
Back in London, the Marquis decides to kill two birds with one stone. He will propose to Lady Esther at the same time as breaking into her house to prove to her an old argument that her household security is lacking.
"Now he thought he would put his apprehensions to the test. He would enter her bedroom from the Mews and kiss her into wakefulness. Then he would proudly put the ring on her finger. He was sure that she would find it exciting and very romantic to be woken in such a manner."
Oh, Marquis, no. That's a terrible idea. It's creepy and wrong.
Anyway, he scales Lady Esther's house and reaches her bedroom window, only to realise that she's not alone. She's with another man! And it's his friend, Sir Roger! This leads to a genuinely funny scene in which the Marquis thinks he'll just climb back down unseen, but then decides that would be cowardly, so he comes in through the window, says, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude," then goes out the door. Cool as a cucumber, that's the Marquis.
So the Marquis heads home to Windle Court to forget about Lady Esther. He tells Sedela he's back for good, and she helps him buy some horses, and he asks her to help him organise a celebratory knees-up for the village. She decides a circus is just what the people need. A circus with an elephant, a panther, and... a snake charmer!
Meanwhile, Lady Esther and Sir Roger are desperate for the Marquis to come back. They need him to marry Lady Esther so they can get his money. In order to find out what he's up to, Lady Esther steals Lucy's (her lady's maid, remember) mail and reads the local gossip from Nanny, which is all circus, circus, circus. Lady Esther and Sir Roger come up with a plan. (And it's a better plan than Sedela's ghost plan.)
The circus is a hit with the villagers. Afterwards, there is a dinner for the posh people. Surprise! Lady Esther turns up uninvited, so the Marquis has to let her in to save face. Meanwhile, Sir Roger has bribed a footman to lure Sedela away from the dinner to the grounds, where he locks her in a hut. Then he bribes the snake charmer from the circus to loose one of his cobras in the hut. Oh no! How will Sedela survive?
Well, here the Dame does a thing she likes to do. She overexplains it. She could just say that Sedela managed to find a hole in the ceiling so she could climb up into the roof cavity. But no. There is a lengthy story about how a groundskeeper built the hut for the Marquis when he was just a boy, and put an arrow on the roof because that's part of the coat of arms, but the arrow made a hole in the roof, so it had to be reinforced with two panels to stop the hut from flooding, and Sedela used to play in the hut, so she knew about the panel, so she climbs up onto it and waits. Okay then.
The dinner ends and everyone, including Lady Esther, leaves. The Marquis wonders why Sedela wasn't at dinner and decides she probably just went for a walk. Yes, that must be it. That's how interested he is. Then Nanny pops up and says she's just seen Lady Constance (that's the ghost, remember), so a family member must be trouble. That spurs the Marquis into action to go looking for Sedela. He finds the hut and she shouts that she's trapped in the roof cavity by a cobra. He goes back to the house and gets his duelling pistol, whereupon he shoots the cobra and catches Sedela as she jumps from the ceiling. And that's the exciting event depicted on the cover (you can see the cobra by his feet). Mind you, there's no way he's going to catch her in that position, is there? She's going to knock him over.
Anyway, that convinces the Marquis that he loves Sedela, so he asks her to marry him, and she accepts. The end.
The watch list
Orphaned heroine with unusual name: Sedela Craven, but she's not an orphan; her parents are temporarily out of the picture while visiting her mother's very ill sister in Leicestershire.
Who — speaks with — Shatner-esque pauses: Yes. "Oh, — please let's have — a circus!"
Who lives with her titled uncle: No, but her father is General Sir Alexander Craven.
And his unsympathetic wife: No, Mama is very nice (but not nice enough to warrant a name).
Absurdly named hero with aristocratic title: Ivan, which is not at all an absurd name, is the Marquis of Windlesham.
Female friends of heroine: None but Nanny, the elderly nanny of both Ivan and Sedela.
Male friends of hero who seem more pleasant than he does: None. He has a friend called Roger, Lord Bayford, who is a cad. A cad and a bounder.
Hero and heroine united in shared love of a dog: No, it's organising a circus this time.
Act of vengeance by a bitter former servant: No bitter servants, but Nanny accidentally reveals the circus plan to Ivan's bitter former paramour, Lady Esther Hasting, who gatecrashes the event after arranging for Roger to kidnap Sedela with the help of a snake charmer.
Heroine requires rescue from: Being kidnapped and locked in a hut in the dark with a cobra, although, to be fair, she manages to get herself to safety first by climbing into the ceiling.
Duels fought: None, but Ivan uses his duelling pistol to shoot the cobra.
Book ends with one of the pair recovering in bed: No, both are in rude good health.
What the heroine believes the hero's lips give her when they kiss at the end: To Sedela it was as if she had been taken from the darkness of Hell into the glory of Heaven.
Diamond-studded snuff boxes mentioned: None.
Heroine inwardly approves of the hero's champagne-coloured pantaloons: Sedela has no interest in pantaloons.
Sample stilted dialogue: "Good morning, Nanny," she began. "I have brought you some of the cream cheese we have just made. Papa had a luncheon party yesterday before leaving this morning with Mama. They are making a visit of a week or perhaps more to Mama's sister in Leicestershire, who is very ill. I know how much you enjoy this particular cheese."
Amazon sent me a three dollar e-book credit a couple of weeks ago, which I ignored because why would they just send me a credit? Surely it must be a trap. Then they kept sending me reminders so I finally decided to spend it just to stop the emails. But what to spend it on? The newly minted Booker winner? Or something else? Something else, obviously. As if I'm not going to read something with a cover as marvellous as this:
Warned by a Ghost by Barbara Cartland
Well. This was a turn-up for the books. The plot made sense. The hero and heroine were not irredeemably stupid. It was all... coherent. I mean, it wasn't good. But it made sense. More or less.
Our heroine is Sedela Craven. I misread Sedela's name and spent half the book thinking she was only a couple of vowels off being a perforated crispbread. But that's my problem. Nothing to do with her. Anyway, Sedela has long blonde hair and big blue eyes, but I feel that goes without saying by now. On the other hand, what does need saying is that Sedela is not a complete idiot. She turns out to be a good judge of horses and also a competent event planner, which gives her at least one more skill than any previous Cartland heroine.
Sedela is a distant cousin of the Marquis of Windlesham, who has been away for years, first in the war against Napoleon and now in London being friends with the Prince Regent. While he's away, Sedela often pops into Windle Court to visit her old nanny, Nanny, who now lives there waiting for the Marquis to have children. Today, she is horrified when Nanny reads her a letter from Nanny's niece, Lucy, who is a lady's maid in London for Lady Esther Hasting. Lady Esther is a rather racy widow, and she has got her hooks into the Marquis. Oh no! Sedela and Nanny agree that Lady Esther would be a terrible Marchioness and hope that the Marquis comes to his senses. On the way back home, Sedela comes up with a plan...
Windle Court has a ghost, you see. Lady Constance appears to the Windlesham family when one of them is in danger. Sedela decides that next time the Marquis is home she will dress up as Lady Constance to warn him about Lady Esther.
As luck would have it, the Marquis comes home a couple of days later. He is rightly surprised when Lady Constance appears and jibber-jabbers at him about not trusting a certain woman in his life. Now, I have read another Cartland in which the heroine pretends to be a ghost to warn the hero about something, and he believed the ghost was real. But this Marquis, he is no fool. He clocks right away that Lady Constance is a real person, and after a bit of thought realises that Sedela is the only person in the vicinity who (a) knows about Lady Constance, (b) knows how to get in and out of Windle Court's secret passages and (c) is the right age and size to be the "ghost" he's just seen. Angry that Sedela is meddling in his life, he decides to go back to London immediately to propose to Lady Esther. So much for that plan, Sedela. (I initially thought that the scene depicted on the cover was Sedela pretending to be a the ghost and was very much looking forward to see how she made herself hover, but, alas, this is a different scene.)
Back in London, the Marquis decides to kill two birds with one stone. He will propose to Lady Esther at the same time as breaking into her house to prove to her an old argument that her household security is lacking.
"Now he thought he would put his apprehensions to the test. He would enter her bedroom from the Mews and kiss her into wakefulness. Then he would proudly put the ring on her finger. He was sure that she would find it exciting and very romantic to be woken in such a manner."
Oh, Marquis, no. That's a terrible idea. It's creepy and wrong.
Anyway, he scales Lady Esther's house and reaches her bedroom window, only to realise that she's not alone. She's with another man! And it's his friend, Sir Roger! This leads to a genuinely funny scene in which the Marquis thinks he'll just climb back down unseen, but then decides that would be cowardly, so he comes in through the window, says, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude," then goes out the door. Cool as a cucumber, that's the Marquis.
So the Marquis heads home to Windle Court to forget about Lady Esther. He tells Sedela he's back for good, and she helps him buy some horses, and he asks her to help him organise a celebratory knees-up for the village. She decides a circus is just what the people need. A circus with an elephant, a panther, and... a snake charmer!
Meanwhile, Lady Esther and Sir Roger are desperate for the Marquis to come back. They need him to marry Lady Esther so they can get his money. In order to find out what he's up to, Lady Esther steals Lucy's (her lady's maid, remember) mail and reads the local gossip from Nanny, which is all circus, circus, circus. Lady Esther and Sir Roger come up with a plan. (And it's a better plan than Sedela's ghost plan.)
The circus is a hit with the villagers. Afterwards, there is a dinner for the posh people. Surprise! Lady Esther turns up uninvited, so the Marquis has to let her in to save face. Meanwhile, Sir Roger has bribed a footman to lure Sedela away from the dinner to the grounds, where he locks her in a hut. Then he bribes the snake charmer from the circus to loose one of his cobras in the hut. Oh no! How will Sedela survive?
Well, here the Dame does a thing she likes to do. She overexplains it. She could just say that Sedela managed to find a hole in the ceiling so she could climb up into the roof cavity. But no. There is a lengthy story about how a groundskeeper built the hut for the Marquis when he was just a boy, and put an arrow on the roof because that's part of the coat of arms, but the arrow made a hole in the roof, so it had to be reinforced with two panels to stop the hut from flooding, and Sedela used to play in the hut, so she knew about the panel, so she climbs up onto it and waits. Okay then.
The dinner ends and everyone, including Lady Esther, leaves. The Marquis wonders why Sedela wasn't at dinner and decides she probably just went for a walk. Yes, that must be it. That's how interested he is. Then Nanny pops up and says she's just seen Lady Constance (that's the ghost, remember), so a family member must be trouble. That spurs the Marquis into action to go looking for Sedela. He finds the hut and she shouts that she's trapped in the roof cavity by a cobra. He goes back to the house and gets his duelling pistol, whereupon he shoots the cobra and catches Sedela as she jumps from the ceiling. And that's the exciting event depicted on the cover (you can see the cobra by his feet). Mind you, there's no way he's going to catch her in that position, is there? She's going to knock him over.
Anyway, that convinces the Marquis that he loves Sedela, so he asks her to marry him, and she accepts. The end.
The watch list
Orphaned heroine with unusual name: Sedela Craven, but she's not an orphan; her parents are temporarily out of the picture while visiting her mother's very ill sister in Leicestershire.
Who — speaks with — Shatner-esque pauses: Yes. "Oh, — please let's have — a circus!"
Who lives with her titled uncle: No, but her father is General Sir Alexander Craven.
And his unsympathetic wife: No, Mama is very nice (but not nice enough to warrant a name).
Absurdly named hero with aristocratic title: Ivan, which is not at all an absurd name, is the Marquis of Windlesham.
Female friends of heroine: None but Nanny, the elderly nanny of both Ivan and Sedela.
Male friends of hero who seem more pleasant than he does: None. He has a friend called Roger, Lord Bayford, who is a cad. A cad and a bounder.
Hero and heroine united in shared love of a dog: No, it's organising a circus this time.
Act of vengeance by a bitter former servant: No bitter servants, but Nanny accidentally reveals the circus plan to Ivan's bitter former paramour, Lady Esther Hasting, who gatecrashes the event after arranging for Roger to kidnap Sedela with the help of a snake charmer.
Heroine requires rescue from: Being kidnapped and locked in a hut in the dark with a cobra, although, to be fair, she manages to get herself to safety first by climbing into the ceiling.
Duels fought: None, but Ivan uses his duelling pistol to shoot the cobra.
Book ends with one of the pair recovering in bed: No, both are in rude good health.
What the heroine believes the hero's lips give her when they kiss at the end: To Sedela it was as if she had been taken from the darkness of Hell into the glory of Heaven.
Diamond-studded snuff boxes mentioned: None.
Heroine inwardly approves of the hero's champagne-coloured pantaloons: Sedela has no interest in pantaloons.
Sample stilted dialogue: "Good morning, Nanny," she began. "I have brought you some of the cream cheese we have just made. Papa had a luncheon party yesterday before leaving this morning with Mama. They are making a visit of a week or perhaps more to Mama's sister in Leicestershire, who is very ill. I know how much you enjoy this particular cheese."