In 1815 we head off on the Great North Road in this highly unusual historical romance. Dorothy and her brother Griff Philpot are about to learn HOW NOT TO CHAPERONE A LADY. Miss Charity Brookes is a soprano of great regard. While respectable families were advised “Don’t put your daughter on the stage,” according to the song, it was different when the stage was for opera in Covent Garden. Charity is going on tour to Yorkshire, and only the most severe of chaperonage will suffice.

From her normal restrictive haunts in Bloomsbury, Charity is glad to get away with her maid Lily, trunks full of stage costumes, and her two best friends. Dorothy is the chaperone and Griff, being a man, is supposedly in charge of arrangements. He’s an interesting character, full of ideas at twenty-three, and keen to build on the steam engine works getting underway. In Yorkshire, the steam locomotive inventor Stephenson is a good example. The Philpot & Son Manufacturing Company, based in Sheffield, makes Philpot steam pumps for coal mines, clearing water, debris and loads of coal from mineshafts. With the country’s workforce decimated by two decades of Napoleon’s wars, engines are the way forward. All this means that Griff, who finds Charity, once he looks at her for long enough, quite ravishing, doesn’t do an ideal job of chaperonage. In fact, we can easily see it’s likely she will be Ruined with a capital R.

What’s a lady to do? Keep performing, that’s what. Charity has to spend a lot of time exercising her voice, and gives impromptu free performances in the inns on the route even when she’s tired after a day of carriage travel. She is a genuinely strong heroine, well written as a passionate artiste making the most of the agency allowed to well-bred women. The reader wants the best for her.

Charity’s two older sisters are wed and happy, their stories having formed the earlier parts of The Talk of the Beau Monde trilogy. Virginia Heath appears to have researched some out-of-the-way topics for those historical romances, so I would be interested to pick them up as well. For sure, the soloist from The Marriage of Figaro demands an equally interesting backing chorus. HOW NOT TO CHAPERONE A LADY is great fun.