The Raven Prince by Elizabeth Hoyt

Anna Wren is a widow whose husband was unfaithful to her, and she still bears the uncertainty and lingering hurt inherent in that situation. But being widowed also meant a slow slide into poverty and extremely pinched circumstances. Luckily, her husband's mother stays in the house with her as a cook/housekeeper, and a girl named Fanny who is distantly related to Mrs. Wren acts as a girl of all tasks, but neither are very good at being servants.

Anna sees only one thing for it, and that is to become a servant herself, a governess or companion, seeing as she understands Latin and Greek (having been taught by her father), as well as how to write and do sums. But her talents are not suited to either job, until she runs into Hopple, the servant of the Earl of Swartingham, Edward de Raaf, who had nearly run Anna down in the road. The earl needs a secretary, but his ferocious temper has driven off all his former secretaries. Anna dazzles Hopple into offering the job, and the Earl, satisfied with Hopple saying he had engaged a secretary, goes off to London for a week to take care of business.

Anna works for the week, and makes the acqaintance of the Earl's nameless dog, who started following him after he freed and fed it once. When the Earl returns home, he is thunderstruck to discover his new secretary is female, but can't argue with her work, which is impeccable. But best of all, she isn't upset or given the vapors when he raises his voice to her or argues with her, and she's intelligent enough to follow along and ask questions about his agricultural research.

She soon begins to appreciate his finer qualities, and becomes quite attracted to him. But when she runs out of paper and finds a bill for a whorehouse named Aphrodite's grotto, she becomes upset to think of him loving another woman. Around this time, she finds a prostitute in a ditch on her way home from her job. The earl has lent her his carriage to ride in, and she persuades the groom to help the woman, even though it is clear that she is of fallen virtue. Doing so, however, makes her an outcast with some in the village, but she refuses to send the woman away to the local workhouse to be nursed and instead tends this woman, Pearl, with her own hands and in her own bed, even sending a message to her sister, Coral.

But opening her husband's writing box, she finds a locket jammed in there. She starts to throw it out, hating any reminder of him and his infidelity, but eventually decides to keep it, thinking that she needs to stop being tortured by reminders of him. But when the wife of the local squire, Felicity, sees the locket, she thinks that Anna knows the truth about Felicity and Anna's former husband, and their adulterous affair. Thinking that Anna means to blackmail her, she arranges to have Anna followed and her own secrets discovered so that she may do to Anna before Anna does to her.

Anna doesn't have any secrets, except burgeoning feelings for Edward, but when Edward leaves for London again, Anna doesn't want Edward going to a lady of loose virtue to relieve his sexual frustrations. She wants him for herself! So she asks Pearl's sister to get her into Aphrodite's Grotto as the woman who is waiting for the Earl of Swartingham, and Coral agrees, bringing her to London and arranging things for her so that she can spend several nights with the man she has come to love. But even though things go successfully for her, it doesn't make her happy, for she knows that the Earl is affianced to someone else.

But Felicity's spy manages to discover what Anna has done in the city, and Felicity uses it to keep Anna in line. She intimates to Edward about his assignation with someone they both know, and Felicity's friend starts to share his story about Anna, but the Earl leaps to her defense without hearing it and demands she be apologized to, on the threat of a beating delivered by the Earl.

But when the Earl discovers the truth about her little exploit, he feels used, and wonders if Anna does this with other men or if she did it because of his smallpox scars, which he feels make him ugly because his first wife said she couldn't stand looking at them before she died giving birth to his stillborn son. Then, when he realizes she did it out of her feelings for him, he is determined to marry her, but she feels she cannot take him from his fianceé.

But Felicity is still after Anna in an attempt to blackmail her former lover's widow into keeping silent about her adultery, and she has too many other lovers who want to further her aims. Can Edward keep Anna safe and win her heart, or has Anna been too damaged by her former husband's infidelity to ever be won?

I liked this book immensely, which contrasts Anna and Edward's story with that of the titular fairytale, the Raven Prince, a Beauty and the Beast-type story in which the heroine loses her love by her suspicion and the collusion of her beautiful but heartless sisters and must prove her constancy by tracking down her husband with the help of the four winds. The lyricism of the tale contrasts with the more realistic tone of the story about Edward and Anna, and yet echoes many of the same themes. And in the end, both stories end happily.

Anna comes off as a thoroughly modern heroine, with advanced ideas about a woman's place in society and shows this through her helping of Pearl, the prostitute, who she treats as she would any other respectable woman; a most unusual attitude for her time. And of course, she does it with no expectations of repayment despite the fact that she has little to begin with.

Edward de Raaf, though, is more than a match for her, though his attitudes are more in keeping with the time he is born to than Anna's are. Even though he has been married before, his uncertainty about his appearance due to some minor smallpox scars makes him less open to entering a romance than Anna, as he believes no woman would find him attractive.

I must confess to one thing I find far-fetched at the end of the story. That Anna, who believed herself to be barren, is with child (again) after five years of marriage. Why is it romance heroines only seem to get preganant with their one true love, when in the story they have usually been married before and now think themselves barren. I did think she would get pregnant after her little adventure in Aphrodite's Grotto, and I suspected the author was thinking of it. It just smacks of fantasy and wish fulfillment, and it offends my sense of an orderly world where a woman can have sex with a man she doesn't even like and become pregnant. It's like, fantasy contraception.

In any case, I will read future volumes in the series, if more come out. I really liked the characters, the series and the story, even part of it did annoy me. Thankfully, it was pushed to the epilogue instead of being a large part of the story itself. I would definitely recommend this book to someone else.