‘CALL A CARDIOLOGIST!’ CRAIG BROWN’S REVIEW OF HER NOVEL
Her Heart For A Compass Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York Mills & Boon £14.99
The Duke of Buccleuch announces to his second daughter, the impetuous, flame-haired Lady Margaret: ‘Your mother and I have identified a suitable husband for you.’ Yes, he may be tall, lean and immaculately dressed, but, on the other hand, he is ‘austere, repressed and calculated’ and ‘a decidedly cold fish’.
When Lady Margaret protests, her mother, the Duchess, snaps: ‘You are not some foolish heroine in a melodrama.’ What neither of them can know is that this is, of course, exactly what she is, as they are both trapped inside a romantic novel written by the Duchess of York, published by Mills & Boon.
There is no mention of a co-author on the cover or in the blurb, but in tiny type on an inner page are the words ‘With Marguerite Kaye’.
A little investigation reveals that Marguerite Kaye is a veteran Mills & Boon author of some 55 previous novels, among them Bitten By Desire, His Rags-To-Riches Contessa, Rumours That Ruined A Lady, Unwed And Unrepentant, Outrageous Confessions Of Lady Deborah and How To Seduce A Sheikh. On her website, Ms Kaye boasts of knocking out 8,000 words a day, or the equivalent of War And Peace every ten weeks or so. Small wonder, then, that her next novel, The Earl Who Sees Her Beauty, is already scheduled for October, and the one after that, Regency Christmas Liaisons, for November.
In a note at the end, Fergie thanks Marguerite for being ‘a helping hand… the mentor who guided me along the peregrinations of this literary journey’. As the word ‘peregrination’ means a journey, that sentence doesn’t make much sense, but, then again, that’s probably why she needed a mentor.
But back to the flame-haired Lady Margaret. Faced with the prospect of marrying ‘a man she loathed and who, she was utterly convinced, didn’t give a damn about her’, she decides against. Accordingly, she escapes
from her swanky engagement party – ‘her heart was racing’ – and finds herself in the hurly-burly of the streets of Victorian London, where grubby, barefoot people say things like ‘Looking for business, my pretty?’ and ‘Ripe pears, eight a penny!’
She just has time to patronise a man who lost both legs in the recent Charge of the Light Brigade. After she has explained her position to him, he tells her she has her whole life ahead of her, and she tells him: ‘I shall take inspiration from you and show courage under enemy fire.’ At this point she is rescued from the filthy streets by a passing Scottish aristocrat, Donald Cameron MP, 24th Lochiel of Clan Cameron, who persuades her to return to the party, even though her dress is all muddy.
Donald drops her off with ‘a heavy heart’. Over the course of the book there are hearts aplenty: hearts that ache, or flutter, or beat fast, or race, or skip a beat.
At the family home, the servants greet her muddy reappearance with horror. ‘The stunned silence of the servants… told its own story. And as for Molly – the look of horror on her maid’s face made it clear that at the very least she thought Margaret had been ravished… Papa wouldn’t meet her eyes, fixing his gaze on the wall about a foot above her head.’
A press release accompanying the book says that the Duchess of York’s tale of Lady Margaret ‘draws upon her own unique life journey and experience’. Literary historians may wish to compare the stunned silence of Lady Margaret’s servants with the reaction at Balmoral to the newspapers’ photographs of the topless Duchess having her toes sucked by her financial adviser back in 1992, as recounted in the opening chapter – Rock Bottom – of Sarah Ferguson’s autobiography, My Story: ‘Eyes wide and mouths ajar, the adults were flipping through the Daily Mirror and the rest of the tabloids… The courtiers eyed me sneakily, discreetly. The butlers and footmen gaped, and I felt naked in their sight.’
But, unlike her creator, Lady Margaret picks herself up and, disguised as ‘plain Miss Scott’, takes up charity work among the poor. ‘I have not much to offer,’ she tells a handsome vicar called Sebastian, ‘but I am willing to learn.’ Together, she and the vicar decide that she should pursue her natural talent for telling stories to children. Bless!
One thing leads to another, and before long Lady Margaret feels ‘the almost irresistible urge to close the distance’ between her and the vicar. Three pages later, the warmth of his smile makes her heart flutter, and after a further ten pages, ‘the memory of the giddy feeling, the rush of blood to her head, the soft pressure of Sebastian’s lips on hers made her want to swoon’. Not only that, but ‘her heart skipped a beat’. Might it be safer to snog a cardiologist?
Their next kiss proves even giddier. ‘His tongue touched hers and she broke away, breathless and utterly confused.’ Sadly, she won’t be able to go the whole hog and marry him, because her parents would never give their consent. ‘Her heart felt as if it was being squeezed.’ She lets him down gently. ‘It was wrong of me, to allow us both to dream. I love you, but in my heart I have always known that we had no future.’
Sure enough, her father sends her into exile in Ireland. Nice Lord Powerscourt welcomes her ‘to my own humble abode’, where he and his wife, Lady Powerscourt, are ‘inordinately accommodating’. The book is chock-a-block with such codVictorian blatherings. A typical chapter begins, ‘The day was considerably advanced…’, letters are called ‘missives’, the heroine doesn’t just smile, she ‘essays a smile’, and posh people send ‘heart-felt felicitations’ to each other. Are Fergie and her ‘helping hand’ being paid by the word?
Fergie’s second autobiography, Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey To Find Herself, was all about learning to love yourself. Like her creator, Lady Margaret learns to love herself big-time. ‘She was curvaceous rather than willowy, but she decided she preferred that… over the last few weeks, her cravings for cake and pudding had disappeared. She enjoyed her food but was content with an elegant sufficiency.’
She finds plenty of encouragement. For instance, her Irish maid compliments her on her smile. ‘I think it’s a lovely smile with just the right amount of teeth.’ Come again? A potential suitor, Lord Powerscourt’s youngest brother, shows her around Ireland – ‘Those are the Wicklow mountains you can see to the south’ – before advising her: ‘Be yourself, Margaret. You are different. Find a way to embrace that.’
Did people really talk in this way in the 19th Century? It seems doubtful. In 1869, Lady Margaret’s mother writes her a letter, in which she says: ‘I will update you on my own news separately.’ Yet the first recorded use of the verb ‘update’ was not for another 75 years, in 1944. Twenty pages later, Margaret says she wants to build ‘a safe space’ for children, a term that was first used in the 1960s, largely by the New York gay community.
From Ireland, Lady Margaret goes to America, where she is greeted – ‘Lady Margaret, this is a most unexpected surprise. How do you do?’ – by the famous Mrs Astor. She has a fling of sorts – ‘her heart fluttered as their eyes met’ – with successful young attorney Randolph Mueller. ‘She was unlikely to meet another man who seemed such a perfect match,’ she thinks. But he doesn’t really do it for her. ‘The kisses they shared were delightful, but they had never stirred her to the passionate heights of Donald’s kisses.’
She loses herself in good works, and is asked to write a column – A Peeress In New York – for Harper’s Bazaar. ‘Your name will gain you readers, but it is your writing that will keep them wanting more,’ she is told. Evidently, this was the sort of nonsense duchesses were happy to swallow. Plus ça change!
I won’t say how it ends, though I’m afraid I had guessed the lucky man by page 62, and then had to wade through hundreds more pages to have my suspicions sealed with a kiss, octopus-style: ‘They kissed. Deep, starving kisses, adult kisses, their tongues tangling, hands clutching and clinging.’
In an author’s note at the end, Fergie says she hopes Lady Margaret ‘inspires you, Dear Reader, to have the confidence to follow your heart as I have learned to do’.
To be honest, if I had really followed my heart, I would have given up on this book after a hundred pages or so. It’s not too bad, but at more than 500 pages it’s about twice as long as it needs to be, lacks suspense and, for a novel billed by its publishers as ‘a mesmerising debut of love and daring’, is unexpectedly heavy-going, causing my own heart not to ache, flutter or race, but to sink.