The Foundling

The Foundling is a Regency romance novel written by Georgette Heyer and published by William Heinemann Ltd in 1948. It was also serialised in the Woman's Journal as "His Grace, the Duke of Sale", followed by a Book Club edition in 1949. Plot summary The Most Noble Adolphus Gillespie Vernon Ware, seventh Duke of Sale (and known to his friends as Gilly), is a formerly sickly child who has been raised by his uncle and guardian, Lord Lionel Ware, with the help of a team of devoted but overbearing servants. As he nears his 25th birthday and the reversion of the guardianship, the Duke has grown tired of his circumscribed existence and longs to lead the anonymous life of "Mr Dash of Nowhere in Particular". Now he is further unsettled after proposing at his uncle's suggestion to his childhood friend, Lady Harriet Presteigne, on the eve of her leaving for Bath to stay with her grandmother, Lady Ampleforth. Harriet's younger brother, Viscount Gaywood, an undergraduate at Oxford, confesses to Gilly that he is being blackmailed over indiscreet letters he has written to the beautiful foundling Belinda, who has now disappeared. Gilly decides that attempting to recover the letters presents the perfect opportunity to get away from his suffocating family circle and in this is encouraged by his cousin and close friend, Gideon Ware, a member of the Royal Horse Guards. The threats have come from Swithin Liversedge, who claims to be Belinda's guardian and the protector of her honour, presently living at The Bird in Hand, a country inn outside Baldock. Tavelling incognito under the name of Rufford so as to conceal his whereabouts from the rest of his family, Gilly sets off in a gig for the Hertfordshire town. On the way he encounters the teenage Tom Mamble, who had been running away from his tutor and had been violently waylaid by footpads along the road. From then on the scrapes the boy gets into become a continual hindrance and source of amusement to the Duke in their travels together. Gilly tracks down Liversedge, who underestimates his adversary and is knocked out, following which the Duke is appealed to by Belinda for protection. The sixteen-year-old girl is impulsive and far from bright. At Liversedge's suggestion, she had broken her apprenticeship articles with a seamstress in Bath but longs to go back and find again a nearby farmer there, Jasper Mudgley, who wished to marry her.