Marry in Secret

by Anne Gracie

July 30, 2019 · Berkley

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Marry in Secret is the third book in Anne Gracie’s Marriage of Convenience series. The series follows the Rutherford family, and this is the story of Rose, the eldest sister. This novel works as a standalone, but it’s definitely better read in context – Gracie writes lovely, complex webs of characters and families, and it’s a shame to miss out on that.

In the prior books, Rose has been characterised as beautiful, very headstrong, and fiercely loyal to her younger sister, Lily. When the Rutherfords first arrived in London, both Lily and George (their niece, who is of a similar age to the sisters) faced challenges fitting in, but not so Rose. She is poised, fashionable, and immediately popular and inundated with offers of marriage. As the novel begins, she has finally accepted one of these offers – from a duke, no less:

Lady Rose Rutherford was not a young lady who dithered and, having made up her mind, she generally stuck to it. It was, she had decided, high time she moved on.

She was not generally superstitious either, but after receiving twelve offers of marriage, the thirteenth… well, it was bound to make a girl think. Especially since it came from a duke.

Even if it was the most careless, most dispassionate offer of marriage that a girl could ever receive. “Oh, and by the way, if you want to put an end to all this nonsense…”

The truth was, she did.

It’s hard for me to explain what makes this such a masterful portrait of Rose without spoiling the story. Suffice it to say, I more or less skimmed over this the first time I read it. However, on a second reading, my awareness what Rose was feeling (or rather, carefully not feeling) at this point in time, made that opening really striking.

The wedding is interrupted by the arrival of Thomas Beresford, a Commander in His Majesty’s Navy, who was declared dead four years ago when his ship went down with all hands lost – just two weeks after his secret marriage to Lady Rose Rutherford. Rose can’t marry her duke, because she is married already. Or is she? She was underage at the time of her marriage to Thomas, and the elder members of the family are very keen for her to have the marriage annulled. Thomas has more reasons than the obvious to want to stay married to Rose – he has escaped a horrifying situation and left men behind whom he has promised to rescue, and Rose’s money is going to be very helpful in carrying out that rescue. But what does Rose want?

The first part of the story is about Rose. There has been a lot going on with Rose that we have been unaware of.

Rose has been dealing with her emotions by freezing them and putting them away in a corner of her mind where she doesn’t have to look at them. But Thomas’s appearance brings them all to the surface, and at first they overwhelm her. What is interesting, however, is that after the initial storm she settles into herself again very quickly, and knows exactly how she wants to proceed.

She was married to this tough-looking, enigmatic man with the eyes that burned, and if she could see nothing in him of the charming boy she’d married four long years ago, if he was gaunt and taciturn and somehow… hardened, what did it matter anyway? She wasn’t the same girl he’d married.

Rose is determined to keep Thomas, and she sticks to this determination throughout. She was in love with him when they married, and never really stopped loving him, even though she was unable to acknowledge this for so long, even to herself. She still wears his ring in a locket around her neck. And she takes the view that people change over time, and even if Thomas has changed almost beyond recognition, he is still the man she married and promised to love. It’s a view of love that is both pragmatic and romantic, but she commits to it, and in many ways, her character arc is resolved before we are even a third of the way through the book. As the story progresses, her feelings for Thomas deepen, and she has to figure out how to make her marriage work, but essentially, she makes her decision early, processes her emotions, and doesn’t need to develop very much from there. It’s Thomas who, almost as soon as Rose declares her intention to stay married to him, begins to have misgivings (and indeed spends a tiresomely long time trying to convince Rose to give him up for her own sake). And it’s Thomas whose emotions and conflicts will drive most of this book.

(Which, on reflection, is odd – Rose is far from a passive character, but structurally, her role after that first big decision is fairly passive.)

So let’s talk about Thomas. To do so, I think I have to feed you some mild spoilers, all of which are things you learn about him in the first third of the book.

Thomas is putting on a reasonably good front (at least once he manages to get a bath and a haircut and clothes that don’t smell of the sea), but he is, understandably, pretty messed up about all of this. He feels betrayed by his family – to whom he had been quite close – and initially by Rose. He feels a lot of survivor guilt for having escaped when his men are still captive. He is angry with the Navy, who show no interest in getting his men back. And he feels a lot of personal shame and disgust at himself because of what was done to him and the scars and nightmares with which it has left him.

A big part of this book is about Thomas healing from his grief and trauma (and, actually, one could view Rose’s emotional arc as an early statement of that theme), but it doesn’t make him easy to live with. He spends a lot of time avoiding talking about anything that happened to him and hiding behind a polite facade, and he is obsessed with getting his men back to safety, even as it becomes increasingly clear that this is impractical and likely to get him sold back into slavery himself.

Thomas also spends a lot of time in the early part of the book pushing Rose away, which he tells himself is about protecting her, but again seems to be more about personal shame, and perhaps also a feeling that he doesn’t have the right to be happy when his men are still captive. One interesting thing, though, is that there does seem to be a pretty strong level of trust and acceptance between Rose and Thomas from quite early in the story. Perhaps because Rose claims Thomas so definitely so early on, that becomes a secure base for the rest? For me, at least, this fundamental trust and acceptance between them meant that no matter what else was going on, I never really doubted that Thomas would heal, or that the relationship would prosper. Even when Thomas is refusing to tell Rose about what has happened to him, and she knows it, she is both accepting of this, and quite firm that at some point, he really will have to tell her.

I enjoyed this book, but there were one or two flaws. For one thing, there was a LOT of plot. I’ve talked about the secret marriage, and Thomas’s emotions, and his captivity, and the conflict between his love of Rose and his need to go back and rescue his men, and you would think that this would be sufficient plot for one book, but basically, that’s just the first third of the story. There is a whole secondary mystery plot, not to mention sundry other plot twists and surprises, and particularly in the last third of the book, it’s pretty non-stop, to the point of being distracting.

One of Gracie’s great strengths as a writer is that she writes ensembles, not just duets. Her heroes and heroines are surrounded by and embedded in families or circles of friends, and these secondary characters are interesting in their own right. The downside of this is that at times they become more interesting than the main characters, and I found that this happened a lot here. George, for example, habitually steals every scene she wanders into (I am very much looking forward to watching her drive Everingham around the bend when her novel arrives), and as for Mr Wilmott, in a mere handful of pages he managed to distract my attention so completely that I wanted to abandon Thomas and Rose (by this stage in the book, I felt fairly satisfied that they could work things out without my help) and follow his adventures instead, because they sounded so fascinating.

I’m not sure how to grade Marry in Secret, to be honest. There were things I loved about it – the characterisation of Thomas, the relationships between the various secondary characters – and things I didn’t think worked. It’s a book that improves on re-reading; on my first read, the story felt out of balance and breathless, with too much going on and too many useful coincidences, and honestly, I didn’t like it very much. On a second, slower reading, when I had more awareness of where the characters were coming from, I felt that the story came together better, and I enjoyed it a lot more. I’ve now read it three times and like it very much. My gut feeling is that something in the pacing or the structure in the second half really is a bit off, but the characters and the emotions are enough to rescue the story.

I did like Rose and Thomas, and I found their romance convincing, and even if I wanted to whack Thomas with a broom on occasion, I can’t deny that he had good reasons for his tunnel vision. I loved the secondary characters (maybe a bit too much). And I thought the theme of recovery from grief and trauma was very well done – it felt emotionally true. On balance, then, I think this book ends up as a B. It’s not the festival of squee that denotes an A, or the ‘perfectly good but a bit meh’ that denotes a C. There are some wonderful things here, but also some flaws, and while Marry in Secret really rewarded re-reading, first impressions count for something, and it just didn’t work for me the first time through.