Frederica is one of my favourite Heyer novels. Not necessarily because of the eponymous Frederica and our hero, the Marquis of Alverstoke, but because of the secondary characters. Or, at least, one of the secondary characters.

Frederica contains one of my absolute favourite of Heyer’s secondary characters in the form of Frederica’s youngest brother, the twelve year old budding engineer Felix. His ability to twist the bored and cynical Marquis round his thumb never fails to delight – “But I’m not plaguing, I’m only asking!”.

Felix is not the only one of Frederica’s siblings. She is the eldest of five orphans, and has brought them to London to give her very beautiful sister Charis a Season, to try and make a suitable sort of match. Frederica herself is not thinking of marriage: she plans to be an aunt, when she’s done raising her younger brothers, the aforementioned Felix and sixteen year old aspiring vicar Jessamy. Eldest brother Harry is only just twenty-one, and content to leave his wards in his sister’s care.

Naturally, things do not go as planned. Charis falls violently in love with the Marquis’s cousin and heir, Endymion, a Life Guardsman of handsome mien but dull wits and relatively little money (although it’s later revealed he has “about two thousand a year” of his own, plus the allowance given him by the Marquis. Not as much as Mr Bingley, perhaps, but enough, I would have thought. Certainly Charis does). He also falls violently in love with Charis, fortunately, although Frederica does not view the match with favour and Charis becomes all sorts of vapourish, especially when out of Endymion’s sight. Very tedious and sentimental. You can tell Heyer doesn’t think much of this sort of behaviour: Charis is not the only such female to be found in the novels.

But the boys Felix and Jessamy (mainly, it must be admitted, Felix) manage adventures and high-jinks to make up for it, culminating in Felix stealing a ride in a hot-air balloon, of which Heyer wanted an image for the dust-jacket.

And the Marquis falls in love with Frederica, who doesn’t recognise what she’s feeling as love because she’s never been in love before, and she doesn’t feel at all like Charis when she falls in love, believing the object of affection to be some sort of god with no flaws. Only, says Frederica, “is it – feeling not quite comfortable when you’re not there?”

Thus the “passably good-looking” Frederica makes a considerably better match of it than the incomparably beautiful, but also birdwitted, Charis. Because of course the Marquis says yes.

Felix provides the last laugh by asking the Marquis if he can have a workshop at Alver Park, the Marquis’ country home, if he promises faithfully not to blow it up…

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