The Viscount Who Lived Down the Laneby Elizabeth BoyleAvon, 2014The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane is the fourth installment in Elizabeth Boyle's utterly delightful “Rhymes with Love” series, and it's the best kind of fourth installment: the kind that can be read easily on its own merits, without having read the earlier volumes, although there are dozens of smoothly-incorporated echoes and references to the previous books. Long-time readers of the series will feel amply rewarded, but newcomers won't feel excluded – and that's no small feat (would that all series-romance authors could manage it).Whimsy is this author's forte; these “Rhymes with Love” books are almost pure sunlight. Novels like 2012's Along Came a Duke and especially 2013's If Wishes Were Earls are full of fancy and repartee, and The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane keeps all these balloons floating up in the air by telling the story of twins Louisa and Lavinia Tempest, who come to Regency London from their leafy village of Kempton at the behest of their godmother Lady Charleton in order, finally, to have a London “season” and, Lavinia at least hopes, to find a husband.Louisa is far less keen on getting married; she's perfectly content to keep living in Kempton (a slightly unusual English country village, as readers of the whole series will recall with a smile), but she comes along with her sister and their crusty governess – and the other passenger in their London-bound carriage: Hannibal, Louisa's “one-eyed, half-an-ear-missing, mangy tabby of a tom.”It's horrible Hannibal who's the opening plot-catalyst here: just as the young ladies and their chaperone are entering the Mayfair neighborhood where their hostess lives, Hannibal escapes from the carriage, springs across the busy street, and streaks inside the gloomy fortress-like house next door. Impetuously, Louisa chases after her incorrigible pet, and as soon as she crosses the house's threshold, she's horrified: first by the shape the house is in, with dirt everywhere and dusty drapings over all the furniture, and then by the appearance of the gruff and angry owner of the house, Pierson Stratton, Viscount Wakefield, who's at first mystified and then infuriated by this double intrusion.A writer as gamesome as Boyle certainly isn't going to let a meeting-scene like this one pass without a little physical comedy, and the cat-owners among her readers (and surely this book is written for them? It's a shuddering thought, but some people do keep cats as pets) might see that comedy coming – or, in this case, hear it:
“You had best scratch him. Quickly,” the lady advised, nodding down at the beast that looked capable of taking a few fingers and a good part of the rest of his hand.“I never,” he told the beast.Not that it listened, for it proceeded to wind its way beneath Pierson's wrapper, rubbing against his legs, and then popping out again, only to start coughing.“Oh, no,” gasped the young lady.And then he saw why.The cat proceeded to cast up its accounts right in front of the viscount's bare toes.“I warned you,” the lady said ….
The angry viscount orders her out of his house, but Louisa, we're told, has “an air of management,” and she takes it into her head that this disheveled, slightly inhuman nobleman is in need of some neighborly help – a makeover, even. And Wakefield, his nerves shattered by his wartime experiences in Spain (and the fact he watched so many of his friends and colleagues die there), might almost agree, although when we first meet him, he'd certainly never admit it. When he's alone and looking around his hated townhouse, he can see as clearly as Louisa all that's missing:
Of what his life had been meant to be … A cozy home, decent meals, a bright, pretty face across the breakfast table from him. And yet the sunshine coming into the room had the opposite effect, for it illuminated the dusty corners, the faded furnishings, and all the other ways his life had gone astray.
A romp like The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane mustn't be cross-examined on its finer points, of course. Boyle shows not much more awareness of what a viscount actually is – what kinds of roles they may or may not play in English life, etc. - than any of the legions of other romance authors who plunk “viscount” into their books' titles, and, perhaps more importantly for this particular book, Boyle would probably be a bit shocked by the actual ways Regency England tended to treat cats (hint: Hannibal wouldn't have survived that funny little scene quoted above).Little cavils like these have no real place in responding to as fun a book as this one; it feels a bit odd that The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane comes to us at the doorstep of winter when it feels so much like a summer book. Maybe Boyle knows best; maybe her readers need it more now.
