The Baron Returns (The Wentworth Family Regency Saga Series)
Justin Wentworth is the young Anglo-French Baron of the Kergohan estate in Brittany, a region of post-Revolutionary France that still contains some royalist sentiment. Towards the beginning of this first novel in Graham Ley’s Wentworth Family Regency Saga series, he bids farewell fondly to his mother and sister Amelia, and rather more awkwardly to Arabella Wollaston, Amelia’s friend, to return to the Breton coast to provide British aid to the royalist rebels. As Justin contributes to the Battle of Quiberon, and reconnects with Babette—a stalwart servant on his manor to whom he was closer in his youth—and the young boy Gilles she is raising, Arabella, back in Devon, begins to suspect treachery, eventually confirming from some of the servants there that it is against Justin. The result is an attempt to combine a Regency-style romance with espionage.
Shifting between Devon and Brittany, Ley builds connections very slowly while also lingering over details that often built a scene so densely that the plot seems to stop in the middle before resuming. This two-track structure also leaves the romance less than convincing. While the scenes in Brittany are especially interesting in terms of description and the later plot, there are likely better novels for a taste of the social reality of post-Revolutionary France and Britain’s relationship to it.
