And Only to Deceive introduces us to Emily, Lady Ashton a very
young, newly widowed resident of London in 1890. Given the usual
education suitable for future society matrons, Emily married a man she
barely knew to escape her overbearing mother. Six months after the
wedding, Lord Ashton dies in Africa on safari leaving Emily to the
ritualized two year Victorian mourning. This is made endurable because
she is now independent, wealthy and able to do what she wants, which is
read, protected by a household staff whose loyalty and competence most
of her real contemporaries could only envy. Shocked when she learns from
her husband’s best friend, Colin Hargreaves, that he was very much in
love with her, even to having a private pet name for her, that he was an
avid and knowledgeable collector of Greek antiquities, and that she is
now the owner of a villa on the Greek island of Santorini, Emily finds
herself falling in love with her now departed husband. Studying both
Homer and the Greek antiquities Lord Ashton had donated to the British
Museum, she soon realizes that there is something very wrong with the
Museum’s collections.
Fleeing to Paris to escape her mother’s interference, Emily begins
to make new friends, like a wealthy French widow, and an American
graduate of Bryn Mawr, also a classical scholar who helps her to
evaluate translations and Greek grammar, while encouraging independent
thought. As she attempts to discern just which of Lord Ashton’s old
friends she can trust with her suspicions, Emily experiences everything
from being followed in the street and having her hotel room ransacked to
being told that her husband has been found alive in the wilds of Africa.
As has become de rigueur in historical fiction, there are several
real people ranging from August Renoir and Gordon Bennett in Paris, to
A. S. Murray the actual keeper of Classical Antiquities at the British
Museum who are threaded through the story. Emily’s fondness for the
popular fiction of the era like “Lady Audley’s Secret”, which she reads
on her honeymoon, much to her husband’s amusement, also anchor the book
in the society of late Victorian England. The book has an interesting
format with entries from Lord Ashton’s diaries at the beginning of every
chapter, so that we eventually do know what he thinks of many of the
other principle characters.
This is a very entertaining debut novel for Tasha Alexander, and there
will be a second and third book in the series.
Molly Spore-Alhadef
