Tremaine’s True Love

by Grace Burrowes

August 4, 2015 · Sourcebooks Casablanca

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Qualisign. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Historical category.

Here is Qualisign's review:

When I saw Grace Burrowes’ Tremaine’s True Love on the 2016 RITA review list, I grabbed it like a can of insect repellant in high bug season in the Northeast back-country. While I love a well written historical, until this review, I had never read anything by Burrowes. However, I had accidentally purchased a couple of her books a year ago when I was getting ready to write a 2015 RITA review of one of Tonya Burrows’ books. After realizing that the 2015 Burrows’ (no e) book dealt with SEALs and PTSD, I let the Burrowes’ (with an e) books sink down the list of my tbr e-pile, where they then faded into the ether. That was an error!

The basic premise of Tremaine’s True Love is that two self-sufficient, responsible, and highly competent people fall in love during a two or three-week period —the first two thirds of the book—but their self-imposed social obligations get in the way of an HEA/marriage. For the hero, Tremaine St. Michael, those obligations involved protecting the heroine, the heroine’s kin, and even the heroine’s brother’s herd of sheep from harm; and for the heroine, Lady Bernita Haddonfield, her self-imposed responsibility was to protect the entire town and surrounds from the local doctor, described by her as a “medical barbarian.” The barrier to their potential HEA was succinctly encapsulated in this interchange:

“I don’t fault your kindness, my lady, but I cannot abide the notion that you repeatedly put yourself and your loved ones at risk merely for the asking. You risk your life, Nita, for anybody who asks it of you. I offer you happiness and a husband’s rightful protection, and you disdain my suit.

“Are you rejecting my offer of marriage, Nita Haddonfield?”

“Are you rejecting my calling as a healer, Tremaine St. Michael?”

St. Michael gave a somewhat fuller synopsis to Lady Nita’s brother, Nicholas, Earl Bellefonte:

“St. Michael, Nita adores you, and she is not a woman prone to adoration. What happened?”

“I didn’t pay attention to what matters,” he said. “I know better. I paid attention to Nita’s sweet smiles, brandished my own version of same, made a few ringing pronouncements about guarding my wife’s welfare, and congratulated myself on being a shrewd, bold, lucky fellow. But the devil’s in the details, right? Except a woman’s passion is not a detail.”

Nick nudged the biscuit crock closer to his guest. “I am Oxford educated and a belted earl. If you speak slowly and try again, this time you might make sense.”

A biscuit went down to defeat at the hands of St. Michael’s limited vocabulary.

“Lady Nita’s passion is healing,” he said, dusting his palms. “I thought I was her passion, or marriage to me and a family of her own. I was wrong.”

Burrowes used food throughout the book as an ongoing metaphor of comfort, happiness and greed. Nita and St. Michael bonded over ginger biscuits and spiced cider. St. Michael offered food to Nita quite regularly, symbolically offering her the happiness and comfort that no one else seemed to recognize she needed. On several occasions Nita took food from the Haddonfield larder for the more impoverished of her clients, while the Vicar withheld food that should be given to those same people. The impoverished children of the local “soiled dove,” once a member of the gentry but abandoned by her parents and the family of her dead paramour, learned their letters “by visiting an imaginary pantry” where “—A is for apple, B is for butter, C is for cockles—“ all the way to W for “Welsh Rarebit”. The quack/doctor, whose outward appearance resembled Father Christmas, ate everything in front of him, including the food left on Lady Nita’s plate at the local pub. Edward Nash, an odious but handsome suitor of one of the sisters, was placated from an immediate display of domestic violence—to a degree—by his sister-in-law’s preparation of apple pies and other baked goods. The youngest sister, “an indiscretion” of her mother’s that had been forgiven by the deceased earl, was shown as the odd person out by offering lemon biscuits to St. Michael rather than the ginger biscuits favored by the rest of her siblings. In the excerpt above, the biscuit that “went down to defeat at the hands of St. Michael’s limited vocabulary” was consistent with the metaphors of broken and crumbled dreams of happiness found throughout.

Like rain in film noir pointing to sadness, cookies that fell apart signaled potential fissures or breaks in relationships. Boiled cabbage was the essential food and stench of poverty. Even the fodder given to Bellefonte’s and to St. Michael’s herds of sheep was carefully elaborated and was consistent with the nurturing demonstrated by both St. Michael and Nita for their respective flocks.

The first two-thirds of the book established the difficulties of the new Earl of Bellefonte, Nicholas (“Nick”), as he tried to set the earldom back to rights, as he tried to deal with the youngest of his brothers who had an apparently “unfortunate” choice of flirting/kissing partners (written as an exceptionally handsome bi-sexual), as he tried to help his four sisters who he felt needed to be married, and as he tried to address a herd of rapidly reproducing and highly voracious merino sheep on his relatively impoverished grounds. Along with the Haddonfields present at the estate, Burrowes fleshed out at least half a dozen more characters in the local community to populate this fascinating interplay of Regency expectations, mores, and frailties. These issues were nicely addressed but very often with a 21st century twist garbed in Regency attire:

“Why the sigh?” Della asked. “You sound like one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines by page 287.”

“They aren’t heroines if they always need some fellow to get them out of scrapes,” Susannah said. Her own mother had pointed that out. A woman must seize her fate with both hands, else she’d end up a lonely old maid surrounded by books and cats.

I really enjoyed Burrowes’ writing. For example, when St. Michael received a note informing him that his own distant herd was failing in the cold weather, he became most agitated, which caused his accent to become more and more pronouncedly Scottish:

His accent had traveled farther north the longer he spoke, his r’s strewn along the Great North Road, his t’s sharpening into verbal weaponry as they crossed the River Tweed.

It was at this point that Lady Nita first, but only momentarily, recognized that both of their responsibilities were not necessarily borne singly:

Nita’s reactions to the note both pleased and disquieted her. Mr. St. Michael took the welfare of his flock seriously, and not out of simple duty or commercial concern. He cared for these smelly, wooly, bleating creatures. Their suffering mattered to him … Nita’s second reaction was more of an unwelcome possibility: Was this how Nita reacted to word that some child had fallen ill or some grandmother was at her last prayers? St. Michael’s sheep had shepherds as well as the sheep equivalent of stable boys, and yet he trusted no one to deal with the situation but himself.

Grandmothers had grandchildren. Children had mothers and fathers, yet never once had Nita questioned that she herself must hare off to attend any who summoned her.

The final third of the book resolved the HEA, not through compromise but through recognition of the other’s perspective.

In the final few chapters, Burrowes very cleverly and deftly tied up the many other story threads—Susannah’s potential engagement to the violent sot, Edward Nash, Nash’s sister-in-law’s need to raise her son well, George’s (“his Handsomeness”) unfortunate but only occasional proclivities and his future livelihood, the welfare of Bellefonte’s merino herd, the barbarian doctor, and the horrendous vicar. Whew!

Quibbles with the book (or perhaps, just misshapen biscuits):

• I did not like Nicholas, Earl of Bellefonte. I read the summary of his book, Nicholas, followed by a scattering of reviews and decided that I would NEVER read it. He was a pompous and clueless jerk more often than not.
• Although Burrowes did a spectacular job delivering significant depth to most of the characters, Nicholas’s countess, Leah, was so sketchily portrayed that it was like catching a glimpse of a ghost from the corner of one’s eye. In the several scenes in which she was a major player, I could not visualize her at all, which was quite off putting. I expect that was because Leah had been the heroine of Nicholas’ book, but still, having not read it, I was truly perplexed at who she was in this book.
• The decision by George, His Handsomeness, to marry came about mighty quickly. I am still not sure how to think about how he was portrayed. Burrowes did a fine job of bi-ing George, but marrying him off so expeditiously seemed a bit simple for the complexities that had been established throughout the book.
• Finally, the book began a bit slowly for me. Or maybe my problem was that it began with Earl Clueless pontificating—Mansplaining! (if pontificating to a male servant fits the requirements of an audience already aware of the tiresome explanation)—in  a way that made me want to sew his lips shut with a very heavy-duty needle and very hairy twine. Or worse, toss my Kindle. Thanks to the RITA review process, I made it past the first chapter.

So, while this is not an exciting review, it is an honest one. I am happy to have read this book, both times. Burrowes with an e will definitely be on the menu in the coming months as I glom down her backlist—that is, except for Nicholas.