The Willful Wife
“He is your husband, dear,” says gentle Lucinda MacDowell to her agitated cousin, young Lady Cassandra Amesbury Chase. “You might have known he'd come back some day.”

And that is Cassandra's problem. She had been a chit of seventeen two years before when her ambitious mother pulled off the coup-of the year by marrying her to Gervais Amesbury, Lord Chase. But to the diplomat nobleman, Cassandra was no more nor less  interesting than any other debutante; the marriage was solely to satisfy his grandmother's charge to produce an heir. When it fell out that his duties required his departure for France immediately after the ceremony, he went, leaving the marriage unconsummated and Cassandra with his formidable but delightful grandmamma in Bath.

Now he is back, and Cassandra is in a state of near panic. She hardly knows this man, and his cold, formal, and infrequent communications from the Continent have done nothing to reassure her that she can live happily -- or even comfortably -- with her husband. She determines to seek an annulment.

It soon develops that Chase has the same idea, although his reasons, as he gives them, are more altruistic. He has decided it was unfair to take this near-child as his wife when she did not know him, she should be free, he tells her, to find a husband she really loves.

Cassandra, a bit taken aback, seriously questions his motives when, on the heels of her husband's return to Bath, there appears at the watering place a glamorous and sophisticated Austrian countess, a widow, who seems to know Gervais very well indeed. With her dazzling handsome stepson, Captain Werner von Zeff, and many are the hearts set aflutter in the staid resort as a result -- among them Lucinda's.

The dowager Lady Chase, Gervais's grandmamma, will hear no talk of annulment, and sets in motion a variety of schemes calculated to pair off all the right individuals. The gossips, sometimes stuffy society of Bath in 1816 provides a colorful background for her plotting.


Hero: Gervais Amesbury, Lord Chase
Heroine: Cassandra Amesbury, Lady Chase