Faro was a popular card-game in 18th-century England that originated in France in the 17th-century, while Faro’s Daughter refers to the spirited protagonist of this volume, one Miss Deborah Grantham.
Miss Grantham is 25 years old and should already be married (this novel is set during the time of Jane Austen). Instead she leads a full life helping her aunt manage a gaming house in the fashionable part of London.
This is not an entirely respectable venture, but one that happened upon Deborah’s Aunt Lizzie when, due to a combination of the sudden death of her husband and her own luck at the Faro table, she began holding card-playing evenings. These became so popular that she moved her family to a large house in St James’s Square, just off Pall Mall.
Unfortunately, Aunt Lizzie doesn’t have a head for business, and cannot keep track of the extra expenses that come with a larger establishment. And so, during this whole novel, the poor woman is beset with money worries.
But her niece may come to the rescue. The first thing that Miss Deborah might do is marry Lord Maplethorpe, a rich young gentleman who adores her. But Deborah is not tempted by his money, nor by the fact that she could exchange her rather sordid existence to become a Viscountess. In fact, she has no intention of marrying Maplethorpe until his blundering cousin Max Ravenscar dangles twenty thousand pounds in front of her to prevent that marriage from happening.
Most people, especially those in straightened financial circumstances, would grab the twenty thousand without further ado, as it was an enormous sum of money in the 1790s, when the novel is set. But Deborah is indignant and very angry at Max’s supposition that her working in a gaming house must mean that she has no morals whatsoever.
And so she decides to tease him, by telling him that she is definitely marrying Maplethorpe.
What follows in an opera buffa of disguises, assignations, kidnappings and misbehavior on the part of Miss Grantham and her admirer Miss Arabella Ravenscar, half-sister of Max.
The only flaw in this novel was that I wanted to spend more time with Arabella Ravenscar, as she was delightfully naughty. But that was not to be.
Five stars for another delightful novel from author Georgette Heyer, whose writing never fails to “make my day.”
