Masterfully narrated by the acclaimed, award-winning actress Bahni Turpin, A Duke, The Lady, and a Baby is an engrossing, evocative, and highly original historical romance that is especially moving as an audiobook. The story grabs you from the start. Riley’s writing blends romance and real stakes, adventure and period politics alongside prose that sounds like poetry. Her characters are intriguing, fully formed, and well-matched. Both have enjoyed great privilege yet their lives are also marked by precariousness.
Patience Jordan is a displaced West Indian heiress, widow and mother driven to desperation after being separated from her son. Busick Strathmore is Patience’s late husband’s cousin and a wounded warrior recovering from a life-changing injury. An aristocrat determined to do right by his new ward while struggling with new limitations on what his body can do, he approaches the role of guardian with clueless zealousness and military precision.
Riley plunges the reader into the story at a moment of heightened danger— it begins the night that Strathmore, the rightful legal guardian storms the estate, seizing custody of the baby and the property from the man who banished Patience to a mental ward. One of my favorite scenes plays out just before the chaos starts, with Patience contemplating her options for escape after breaking in to feed her son and finding her usual means of egress closed off.
Three stories up. What to do?
Break the glass and be caught? Bedlam.
Stay here and be caught in the morning’s light? Bedlam.
Jump and be caught dead? The notion deserved Bedlam. Wait for the ghost of my dream or one of Hamlin Hall’s to come and float me down? Yes, Bedlam again.
This section captures the knife’s edge danger of her situation and Patience’s voice and intelligence as well. And then the paragraph just after clarifies the challenge even more, telling us who Patience really is, her state of mind, and who and what she’s up against. This is a young widow cast aside on distant shores who still longs for her parents’ support and comfort:
If my mother were alive, she’d put a root on Markham so that bad luck would be his and only his.
But West Indian magic nonsense was as bad as English ghost lore, and none of it could explain why Markham kept winning—he had my house, my son, my dignity.
Reading this, I immediately understood Patience’s motivation and her deception. She’s a mixed-race woman in England in 1814, a widow with little to no social standing or access to her rightful inheritance.
Of course Patience isn’t going to trust a new authority figure, after the first guardian threw her in Bedlam in the wake of her husband’s death, and after she’s experienced years of social rejection from her husband’s family and the Ton (British aristocracy). Those people were all too happy to benefit from her father’s money but loathe to condescend to accept Patience as anything near their social equal. This hypocritical duality of her status is found in history and also has precedent in the character of Miss Lambe in Jane Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon. It makes perfect sense for someone with as little choice and social capital as Patience to masquerade as her son’s new nanny. That’s the position white people in England expect her to occupy. And she is both tender and fierce in how she goes about her mission.
The writing is playful and precise, conveying action and interiority/character at the same time. For example, that suspenseful opening scene also indelibly establishes Patience’s love for her son:
Hand over hand, toehold after toehold, I lowered myself until one boot hit the ground and then the other. I drew my arms about me and made sure my heart was still inside my ribs.
But it wasn’t.
It was in a dingy crib, three stories up.
Vivid and urgent, with a poetic rhythm, this is also a good representation of what to expect throughout. We get Patience’s perspective in first person here, while other sections reveal Busick’s side of the story through third person omniscient narration. That shift can be an issue for some readers, but allows us to see Busick banter with his closest friend and command his troops, scenes that need to play out on their own without Patience. They could have been delivered in alternating first person, but the text delivers a strong sense of his inner thoughts nonetheless.
The novel also delivers a surprising amount of wit and wisdom about the state of the world. The subject matter is heavy but never weighs down the narrative. That’s a feat. Patience wants to find her trust papers, regain custody of her son, and also to find out more about the suspicious circumstances of her husband’s death and finances. That creates a great deal of suspense. Riley weaves together the mystery and the burgeoning relationship incredibly well. There are few circumstances more realistically designed to push two so different people together and at the same time keep them apart.
The result is a uniquely well-crafted and convincing closed-door romance steeped in the social history of the British Regency era. A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby brings into the foreground the ugly parts so many historical romance readers and authors work so hard to ignore. And yet it also tells a hopeful, witty and swoonworthy story of two people falling in love and learning to trust each other under extraordinary circumstances—a long marginalized woman coming into her own and a military man simultaneously falling in love with fatherhood and adjusting to a radically altered life in the aftermath of war. That’s not a typical combination for the genre. But it is a very compelling one. It should be especially attractive to fans of Beverly Jenkins, Alyssa Cole, or Courtney Milan. It’s a good choice in any format, but Turprin’s excellent audio performance elevates the material even more. The varying accents are perfectly on point and personalities distinctly delineated.
Author Bio
Dr. Carole V. Bell is a Jamaican-born writer, researcher, and media and political communication scholar whose work focuses on social change, public opinion and the politics of entertainment. An enthusiastic Tar Heel and die hard supporter of Team Jamaica in all things but especially the arts, Carole earned a Ph.D. in Political Communication from the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Media, a Masters in Television and Radio from Brooklyn College, and a B.A. in English and American literature from Harvard.