For a young gentleman who has only slept with one woman at the beginning of the story--a whore at Madame Clarice's brothel who has serviced him for the four years of his tenure at Oxford--Thorne suffers an inordinate number of problems with different women as he returns home to meet and marry his betrothed wife and take up his responsibilities on the family estate.
And the biggest problem is: the reader doesn't know which woman is *really* the heroine until the end of the book, when the other three women have left the picture for good. (Although I have to say, there are plenty of times when the author seems to indicate that a particular woman is eliminated, and then, voilà, she's back again.)
The women are: Katy, the whore who has fallen in love with him; Gwynneth, his betrothed wife, who really wants to be a nun and believes that sexual pleasure is sinful; Caroline, first a married woman and then a widow, who senses Thorne's attraction to her, and Elaine, a pregnant maid who was seduced by the stable boy. Frankly, not a single one of these women seems to be heroine material. . . and yet, I've been known to favor books that are not the usual fare.
Thorne is not really a rake at all. He was a virgin when he first came to the whorehouse, and he clung faithfully to Katy for four years. He knows she feels more for him than he does, and yet, he comes back to her repeatedly when things aren't going well with the other women in his life. But Thorne is all about duty, and he is willing to take on the responsibility of marrying his fiancée and starting a family, even though he is still very young.
Gwynneth is young and attractive, and if she seems a bit too religious, Thorne is very attracted to her, and, sensing her latent passion, believes that they will deal well with each other. Not being Catholic or even all that religious himself--and being very young and naive--he doesn't understand that she believes strongly that giving in to sexual passion will mean eternity in hell being assaulted by the devil. Well, not until after the wedding night, that is.
Caroline and Thorne are constantly aware of each other, long before her husband dies, and long before they finally consummate their passions. You can feel that there is more to their liaison than sex. And yet that seems to be the case with the other women as well. Frankly, sometimes I felt a roll of the dice could determine which of the women would end up being the heroine. . . and more than once I suspected that he would end up with none of them.
Elaine is a mystery woman. Actually, it wasn't hard at all to figure out her true identity, but the mystery was how and why she was there. I often suspected that she would end up being the heroine, but it seemed unlikely, since we don't really know much about her except that she's pregnant by the stable boy and Thorne feels the need to protect her. He never seemed to show any sexual interest in her, and since we had no access to her thinking or really, anything about her, it was hard to accept that she could be the heroine. At least, I don't recall ever reading a story where the heroine was a minor character.
In spite of all this, there is a satisfactory HEA. Not a GREAT one, though. Because one feels as though Thorne was equally attracted to all of the women at one point or another, and that it is the circumstances--the elimination of three of them by one means or another--that left him with the woman with whom he formed a family unit.
This ambivalence makes the story too long and unfocused, and as determined as I was to find out the resolution, I found myself skimming a lot of pages. Thorne, fresh out of university, couldn't have been more than 21 or 22--an age when most young men would be sowing their wild oats and not ready to settle down--but I felt that his actions often resembled those of man a decade or so older. The naďveté demonstrated by his automatic faith in people did seem age-appropriate, especially as he was stubbornly determined to follow this path in spite of the warnings of his elders.
In the end, I had to remove the two stars because it felt like the author was playing games with me, getting me to start thinking of one woman as the heroine, and then showing me how that couldn't possibly be, and then doing the same thing with the others. Repeatedly. Until I started to think maybe it didn't even matter which one came out the winner. I did like it, BUT. . . I'm left with a feeling of ambivalence too.
