Not according to Heyer. According to this story, Lady Farquhar (interestingly, the story mostly refers to her as Sophia, as though disassociating her from even her husband’s name) is greatly at fault for even such declarations as “I am so unhappy! You never made me happy! You never tried! You never understood! You are cruel!” even though we can tell that she’s probably right, he never really did try, for all that he claims to have loved her once, that she was “inconstant,” that he was “never good enough.” There are two sides to every story, of course, but what we see very clearly from Henry is that he has indeed been so “cruel” to his wife as to actively seek out the company of a woman to whom he was attracted, enough that he grew to fall in love with this woman and offer to throw away everything, including his wife and her reputation, all for the illicit thrill of it.

It’s all very well to be all noble and “I will give you up to save your brother” about it, except you have a wife and it’s the eighteenth century and all these broken hearts are entirely your fault, Farquhar!

I am feeling very emotional about this story.

It’s all made worse, of course, because Henry is so very articulate and cutting and clever. He’s another Andover/Avon effort, a specialty of Heyer’s – The Talisman Ring’s Ludovic Lavenham, Cotillion’s Lord Legerwood, Frederica’s Lord Alverstoke, among so many others, have the gift – except not when he’s with Mary, there he’s all ardent schoolboy, as callow as brother Mathew defiantly declaring himself attached to Sophia. But have him contemplate his fate as a husband, newly invested in his marriage at his true love’s behest and confront the youngster who is the reason for his predicament, and he’s all icy looks and cool remarks and of course Sophia went looking for love in all the wrong places, you’re a passive aggressive asshole!

Wait, I’m supposed to feel sorry for him, right?

I don’t.

As far as I’m concerned, he deserves his fate.

Everyone here does.

THE SEARCH FOR “ON SUCH A NIGHT”

Here’s what I knew.

In 1935, Georgette Heyer sold a short story entitled “On Such a Night” to an Australian magazine.

And that’s pretty much it.

That’s all I knew.

That’s all anyone knew.

What the story was about, even what era it was set in, no one had any idea. The first I heard of it was a brief mention in my dear Jennifer Kloester’s seminal 2011 work, Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller, and I had been intrigued enough then to have checked out multiple microfilm recordings of some of the bigger women’s magazines of my nation from that time – the Australian Women’s Weekly, the Australian Woman’s Mirror, Australian Woman’s World – spending hours and hours and hours at the State Library of Victoria to see if I might stumble upon this lost gem, like Indiana Jones seeking the Holy Grail, but marginally less dusty.