A Regency-era romantic comedy with a deliciously feminist and queer twist, from the New York Times bestselling author of Gwen & Art Are Not in Love.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lex Croucher’s Trouble, which releases on March 5th 2024.
There’s a new governess at Fairmont House, and she’s going to be nothing but trouble.
Emily Laurence is a liar. She is not polite, she’s not polished, and she has never taught a child in her life. This position was meant to be her sister’s––brilliant, kind Amy, who isn’t perpetually angry, dangerously reckless, and who does (inexplicably) like children.
But Amy is unwell and needs a doctor, and their father is gone and their mother is useless, so here Emily is, pretending to be something she’s not.
If she can get away with her deception for long enough to earn a few month’s wages and slip some expensive trinkets into her pockets along the way, perhaps they’ll be all right.
That is, as long as she doesn’t get involved with the Edwards family’s dramas. Emily refuses to care about her charges – Grace, who talks too much and loves too hard, and Aster, who is frankly terrifying but might just be the wittiest sixteen-year-old Emily has ever met – or the servants, who insist on acting as if they’re each other’s family. And she certainly hasn’t noticed her employer, the brooding, taciturn Captain Edwards, no matter how good he might look without a shirt on . . .
As Fairmont House draws her in, Emily’s lies start to come undone. Can she fix her mistakes before it’s too late?
“We must get you back to the house. Where are your things? Joseph will take them. Don’t mind his face, it always looks like that. Joe, could you please see to Miss Laurence’s . . . Oh, he’s already doing it.” Joe was apparently the brawny, red-faced older gentleman. “Is that your trunk, Miss Laurence? Excellent. I suppose we’ll just—”
“I shall take her,” said the man who wasn’t Joe. He had rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows and was standing with impeccable posture. “I need to return to the horses, anyway.” He was the groom, then—and if Amy had been corresponding with her, Miss Bhandari must have been the housekeeper.
One of Mrs. Sandler’s small children suddenly fell face-first to the ground, and everybody else rallied around to make noises of consternation and offer advice.
“Right,” said Miss Bhandari, lingering for a moment before going to join the fray. “Very good.”
At this point Emily realized that she had managed to overlook the presence of an additional horse. Said horse had been standing out of sight behind the carriage; now the sharp-faced groom who was apparently to “take” her went to fetch it. He didn’t do anything so polite as ask if she minded clambering on to a horse with him. He just bent and cupped his hands so that she might use him as a human ladder.
“I’m very muddy,” she warned him. He just glanced down at himself, wet through and similarly dirtied, and then raised his eyebrows at her. “Well. I did warn you.”
Emily hadn’t ridden a horse since childhood, and she wasn’t entirely sure how to arrange herself: both legs astride seemed sensible, although difficult to achieve with a dress. She wriggled into position and then discovered that doing so had hitched her skirts up so high that quite a large portion of stockinged calf was visible.
The groom glanced at her legs and then looked pointedly away and cleared his throat.
“Sidesaddle is traditional,” he said, his voice slightly strained; Emily thought he might be holding back laughter, and immediately resolved to hate him.
“I was . . . injured, in the crash,” she lied, her head held high. “Sidesaddle would not be comfortable.”
The groom caught her eye, and she saw a flash of something softly puzzled in his expression before he nodded curtly.
“As you wish.”
Luckily, he did not press further on the issue of an invented injury that necessitated one’s legs being open; he simply got up behind her and took the reins.
It really was a very short ride to the house, but Emily spent every second of it preoccupied with the disconcerting feeling of a strange man at her back. She couldn’t remember the last time someone who wasn’t her sister had been this close to her. Her mother had probably hugged her at some point in the past year, and Emily might have suffered it momentarily before leaping from her grip like a sliver of soap, but that was all.
There had been the men at the textile mill, but even they hadn’t dared to put more than a single hand on her, usually in the realm from elbow to shoulder blade—a decision they had quickly regretted.
This man did, at least, seem to be trying to touch her as little as possible.
They cantered along the lane and down the gentle slope that had indeed hidden the house from view; once she saw it, it was impossible for Emily to look at anything else, mostly because there was nothing else to look at. The landscape was nigh on featureless in all directions: just a few trees and then fields, fields and more fields, ending abruptly in cliffs to her left.
The house was very rectangular and symmetrical, made of red brick that was noticeably faded on the side that faced the sea, the windows and doors framed in pale neoclassical trim. It looked quite silly in the middle of all this waterlogged land, as if it had been picked up from somewhere more sensible and dropped here by accident. The late summer sun was still an hour or two from setting, but the thick cloud cast such a blanket of gloom over everything that candles had already been lit in the downstairs rooms; the little squares of light seemed rather pathetic, unable to keep all that dreary, sea-swept isolation at bay. The grounds looked surprisingly ill-kept, the hedges running wild, a large tree at the end of the drive glumly cradling a broken limb.
Although it was somewhat diminished by the landscape, the house was actually very large. Large enough to house hundreds of people, probably. Far too vast for just one family and their servants. Emily thought of the bed she shared with her sister and felt momentarily overcome with murderous intent.
There were a few outbuildings clustered to the right of the house as they approached, and the groom pulled the horse to a dramatic stop and then dismounted, offering her his hand in a perfunctory manner and removing it immediately once she was on solid ground.
He looked slightly alarmed when he realized she was staring at him, awaiting further instruction.
“One of the horses is unwell,” he said.
“Oh,” said Emily.
“So I’ll . . .” He nodded toward the stables, taking the horse by the reins to lead it away.
“What’s it like here?” she blurted out, putting off the moment she had to enter the house for just a little longer. “Are they dreadful? I suppose they must be, with a house like this.”
He stopped and looked back at her, impassive, and she realized with a sinking feeling that he was one of those sorts of employees: ones who refused to hear a word against their masters, as if they owed them real loyalty because they provided meager pay and a lightly chewed attic room to sleep in.
“You don’t have to pretend for my sake,” Emily tried again. “I’ve encountered naval officers before. I know them to be deeply self-important. Is Captain Edwards a classic of the genre?”
Another of those minute, inscrutable expressions passed over his face. Emily couldn’t place it. Surprise? Amusement? Barely repressed horror?
“Yes,” he said neutrally, after a beat. “I suppose he is.”
“Damn,” said Emily. “I mean . . . Ah, well. That’s a shame.”
He stared at her for a moment longer, but didn’t say anything further, and then he abruptly turned and walked away with the horse, leaving her standing there, wet and apprehensive.
From Trouble, by Lex Croucher. Copyright ©2024 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
