THE FOUNDLING by Georgette Heyer is one of her wonderful Georgian Regency novels. Set in 1818, when George III had gone mad, Queen Charlotte was seriously ill, and the Prince Regent ruled England before becoming George IV, it has alll of the liveliness, nonsense and wonderful characters that you’d expect from this talented writer.
Needless to say, a young man has got into a scrape. Matt, the cousin of the Duke of Sale, is being sued for breach of contract after a series of impassioned letters that he wrote to a young miss have been picked up by an unscrupulous con artist, who reckons he can get £5,000 for the blackmail. The claim is that Matt dumped this young woman, and that therefore he can be sued.
Of course Matt does not have £5,000. But his cousin, the vastly rich Duke of Sale does, and so the frolic begins when Sale, a very young Duke (only 24 years old) decides to help Matt.
Along the way, we meet the object of Matt’s affections, the stunningly beautiful Belinda, the foundling of this tale. As a foundling, Belinda does not have parents or even a last name. She has been brought up in a orphanage so she can read and write and sew. But she is one of those people with champagne tastes and a beer budget.
I found Belinda to be an extremely interesting character for I had never met anyone like her before. She is like a moth that dances before a flame (usually the attentions of a young man) before darting off in some other direction. Belinda is not the brightest spark in the matchbox. She is hopeless at giving directions, remembering names, or even giving a coherent account of her life. And so, when the Duke of Sale puts her under his protection, he is led a merry dance trying to find a suitable husband for her.
Eventually, everything works out in a satsifactory manner. But what adventures the young duke of Sale has!. And what an eccentric entourage he attracts, including not only the beautiful Belinda, but Thomas Mamble, a teenage runaway, and Swithin Liversedge, the con artist who is trying to make a packet out of Matt’s indiscretion.
Ms. Heyer has quite the ear for dialect and this adds greatly to the texture of the prose. If you have never read Georgette Heyer before, you might want to start with this novel.
