Set in Regency England, The Gentleman and His Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide is a queer historical fantasy of magic, murder, high heat and humour.

Lord Nicholas Monterris, the last remaining heir of a crumbling ducal house, must marry to save his family from complete decline. His father chooses Lady Leaf Serral, eldest daughter of his greatest rival, at which point Nic is sure it can’t get any worse. Until he learns the head negotiator is to be Dashiell sa Vare, an old flame he has neither forgiven nor forgotten, a man their rigid class structure forbids him to love.

Locked in the mouldering grandeur of Monterris Court (a house more haunting manifestation of dynastic ambition and ancestral guilt than home), the first dead body is troubling. The second, a warning that someone doesn’t want the contract to go ahead. But while Nic and his wife-to-be team up to banter their way through a secret murder investigation, it’s Dashiell he can’t stop thinking about. What would be worse? To love and have to let go, or to wholly deny the yearning of one’s heart forever?

Perfect for fans of Freya Marske and Alexis Hall, The Gentleman and His Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide is the perfect blend of gothic and romantic – including a locked room murder mystery, forbidden love and otherworldly automatons.

I just loved this book and I was rushing to finish my Advanced Reading Copy by New Year’s Eve, as it felt like such a deserving high to finish my reading year on (which is a wrap at 72 books of some widely varying lengths).

In their acknowledgements Rebecca Ide (who has also been published under the name Devin Madson) concludes with a tribute to

Especially mum for the early introduction to Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen and lots of murder mysteries. Really this book is your fault.

And indeed this book is a glorious synthesis of those two authors with a healthy dose of fantasy thrown into the mix, as we explore a country house mystery in an alternative regency England.

In Ide’s version of 1816:

• magic (or Brilliance) is predominantly the curse and preserve of the aristocracy,
• ancient feudal obligations and marital contracts are wreathed in layers of bureaucracy that need magic to vouchsafe (vowsmith?!) them, and
• gay love is understood and only frowned upon for its difficulty in securing an heir

In this context, Ide combines romance (of the forbidden variety), murder mystery and fantastic magical mayhem. A genre blend beyond Romantasy to perhaps Ro-murd-asy?! (Ok it’s a working genre title).

My kindle is speckled with so many notes of fine lines that I could surely fashion a 2000 word review just out of selected quotes. Ide’s prose has that sharp observational quality – the ability to catch the eye and draw a smile with a well-judged line – which echoes the fine writing of authors like Stark Holborn and Mark Lawrence.

For example, when the protagonist, Nic sees his former love

Dashiell’s lips twitched as he suppressed a smile—a familiar sight that pulled old memories across nine years of absence.

Or when Nic notices a doomed attraction from one character to an unattainable woman

The man was clearly smitten, and Nic’s heart twisted in sympathy. Too well did he know the feeling of love where no love ought to live.

Or that sort of moment, familiar to me and I’m sure many others, where an unexpected kindness draws out emotions that indifference or aggression could not.

The sudden softening of her manner pierced his defences as her teasing had not, and Nic found himself unable to immediately reply for the lump in his throat.

The character in question is the gloriously pragmatic, independently minded and fiercely aromantic Lady Leaf Serral – Nic’s betrothed. The wonderfully bantering comradeship between these two is one of the highlights of the book – an interaction that shows a platonic relationship can have just as much depth and texture as any great romance.

Leaf’s enjoyment of a good mystery, either reading one or living one, is reminiscent of Catherine Morland – protagonist of Northanger Abbey

“Leaf what are you doing here?”

“Checking on you of course,” she said, closing the door. “Also, Millie and Lisbeth are embroidering and talking about romances and I just don’t see the appeal in a book where no one gets murdered.”

 

Unlike Morland though, Leaf eschews thoughts of romance still less its more physical manifestations “I will never understand it. It all sounds just so…messy and uncomfortable.”

With shades of Jane Eyre Ide gives us a (slightly) mad woman in an attic – well actually a wing of the crumbling house – in this case it is Nic’s  mother the Duchess caught in the throws of some dementia and admitted into company only occasionally with her devoted maid Silla in attendance.  It is the duchess that Ide gifts with one of the most contemporarily resonant passages rebuking those whom fortune has placed at the top of the social and political tree.

“Luck is all that can bless our existence with meaning. How fortunate are those who sit on high, who cannot see that pains wash about their feet like scum thundering upon sand. Perhaps it is they we should pity, those empty, lifeless men so alone on their thrones, feeling regal, right, important, the truth all the more pitiful for their delusion. Because they cannot bear happiness, they fear contentment, dread any satisfaction that might steal the fire that drives them on to ever greater heights, dragging with them a belief that they are fuelled by indelible wisdom rather than fear. But fear—” She leaned forward, her gaze piercing his skin. “Fear is all any of you have.”

Empty, lifeless men, alone on their thrones, fearing contentment and driven by fear?  Remind you of anyone <cough> Musk/Trump <cough>?

The Regency world is a fairly well-established template on which to overlay some fantastic elements – one might mention Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, or Snowspelled. However, Ide weaves the threads of their worldbuilding back in time to Charles II and the establishment of the Dukedom of Vale and further back to 1541 where an alternative Henry VIII brought in the legislation that made magically gifted aristocrats – those with brilliance – the property of the head of their houses, to be disposed of by marriage or other means, entirely at the whim of their fathers (or grandfathers).

It is the world that binds Nic in an obligation to uphold and extend the family line. Magical talent – or Brilliance – can be expressed in different forms and skills. We are used to the idea of artificers who create magical items, and Nic has some talent in that regard as well as an ability to conjure entertaining visions of sound and light. However, Ide’s innovation of Vowsmithing is novel and forms an intriguing foundation for the plot with Vowsmiths being a kind of magical lawyer. Their task is to weave unbreakable contracts – born out of labyrinthine negotiations – that are far more final and binding than any subsequent marriage service or consummation. The constraint that all Brilliant family members must remain within the estate boundaries during the week or so of negotiations – on pain of massive fines – creates the perfect locked country house mystery, with a finite setting, cast and even a deadline to work to (oops no pun intended). And the dead bodies soon start to arrive.

There is a risk with the limited cast that if enough people die then the murderer will be an easy pick from a reduced set of survivors. However, Ide creates such compelling characters and such an intricate plot, that one fears for whether ones favourites might become victims or still worse turn out to be the murderer. And alongside the plot of who is dying and why, runs the equally compelling romance between Nic and Dashiell.

Ide’s sympathetic portrayal of ‘gay love’ as just… well… love echoes Teresa Frohock’s depiction of her two protagonists in Los Nefilim. They catch their physical attraction for each other in myriad subtle details of gesture and expression, refreshing in how they avoid invoking any of the stereotypes of lantern-jawed masculinity.

When it comes – inevitably – to the sex, Ide’s passages of passion are delivered with a firm and realistic hand, investing the lovers’ exchanges with convincing depth, sincerity, and a sureness of touch that reminded me of Gawaine and Hwyfar in Natania Barron’s Queen of Fury.

While it may be the last element in my catchy new neologism of Ro-murd-asy, The Gentleman and His Vowsmith is absolutely a work of fantasy fiction. Magic haunts the rooms and passages of the rambling Monterris Court with ghosts, illusions and automata. While Ide does not subject the reader to a detailed manual of the arcane, they sprinkle convincing details through the text of a magic based on sigils that can be spoken, or sung, or written and whose arrangement at times needs deciphering like some intricate multi-line formula buried in a cell of an excel spreadsheet (You all get that analogy right? No? just me?!). Ide’s is a delightfully immersive approach to the magic system sufficient to convince the reader they understand it, without making them bold enough to want to sit a test in it.

The Gentleman and His Vowsmith is a beautifully written story that brings to its regency setting a full and fantastic tale of compelling characters and exquisite prose.  This was a glorious book to end my 2024 reading year with!

The Gentleman and His Vowsmith is due for publication 24th April from Pan Macmillan. You can pre-order your copy HERE