A Stranger in Mayfair

A Stranger in Mayfair (2010) Charles Finch

Set in England in ~1867.

The story begins with Charles and Lady Jane ending their Honeymoon on the continent, and returning to London where Charles will begin his political career and the two adjust to married life.

As with the previous book, my favorite parts were the historical bits.

The reason for the construction of the new Parliament was simple enough. A fire. Until the middle of the 1820s, sheriffs collecting taxes for the crown had used an archaic method of recordkeeping, the tally stick. Beginning in medieval England, when of course vellum was far scarcer than paper now, the most efficient way to record the payment of taxes had been to make a series of different-sized notches in long sticks. For payment of a thousand pounds, the sheriff cut a notch as wide as his palm in the tally stick, while the payment of a single shilling would be marked with a single nick. The thumb was a hundred pounds, while the payment of one pound was marked, obscurely, with the width of a “swollen piece of barleycorn.”

It was a system that in the eighteenth century was already antiquated, and by William the Fourth’s reign embarrassingly so. Thus it was in 1826 that the Exchequer— that branch of government that manages the empire’s funds— decided to change it. This left one problem, however: two massive cartloads of old tally sticks of which to dispose. The Clerk of Works (unfortunate soul) took it upon himself to burn them in two stoves in the basement that reached below the House of Lords. The next afternoon (October 16, 1834) visitors to the Lords complained of how hot the floor felt. Soon there was smoke.

Then came the fatal mistake. A caretaker of the place, Mrs. Wright, believed she had solved the problem when she turned off the furnaces. She left work. An hour later, the entire group of buildings was almost wholly in flames. The conflagration, even though citizens of London fought it valiantly, consumed almost all of the old Palace of Westminster.

I love bits like that.

A man in tremendously ornate garb appeared at the door of the chamber, and to Lenox’s shock a gentleman at the far end got up and slammed the door in his face.
…
“That’s the Lord Great Chamberlain,” he whispered. “It means the Queen has entered the building— through the Sovereign’s Entrance, of course, on the other side from ours— and taken on the Robes of State. We slam the door in his face to show we’re independent— that we don’t have to listen to a monarch.”

That’s another pretty marvelous bit.

And I admit that I appreciated that Charles and Jane had big adjustments ahead of them, getting used to being married and living with another person.

The mystery was just meh, and the bits about Charles political career (with the exception of that bit above) were, to be honest, somewhat boring.

Perhaps it’s because I’m currently jaded to politics, but I just didn’t care about all the blue books he had to read, and how he was trying to balance his “work” with Parliament.

I’m done with this series for now. Perhaps later I’ll be in a better mood for it.
Rating: 6/10

Published by Minotaur Books

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