The fire has burned low in the library, the Rioja is nearly gone, and the leather armchairs, carried over from the house where she grew up, still seem to hold a trace of her father’s pipe. The butler, hired that afternoon and not officially on duty until morning, is telling his new employer that Welsh has some forty words for rain. She asks for a few and gets them: rain that pelts, rain that comes and goes, rain in the mountains, and his favourite, the April rain that makes things grow. She prefers the storms that rattle the glass, so he gives her a word for those too. Then he banks the coals and checks his watch, and at midnight, by agreement, the conversation ends and the man becomes a servant again. Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas keeps returning to that boundary, and to two people who keep testing it.
A Romance Negotiated Like a Contract
Reina Martin is an economist in 1880 London, born out of wedlock to a Spanish dancer and the banker who kept her, with a law degree no Inn of Court will honour and a fortune made by reading markets better than the men around her. She is planning a bank for women in partnership with her mentor, a banker named William Farlow. Her butler, John Pembroke, has come to her house from the Second Chance Employment Agency claiming to be a ticket-of-leave man from Millbank. He is in fact a Manchester detective sent by Scotland Yard to watch her, and the novel tells readers so early.
What distinguishes Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas from most Victorian romances is that its heroine treats marriage as a legal instrument before she treats it as a feeling. Reina has worked as a solicitor’s clerk drawing up settlements, and her case against any husband, Farlow included, is that the law would hand him her house, her investments, her shoes and any children she bore. It is the doctrine that the Married Women’s Property Act 1882 would begin to dismantle two years after the story takes place, and Kleypas lets the date sit quietly behind every flirtation.
That gives the love story its distinctive shape. When John and Reina finally speak honestly, they talk about money, pride and the racism she would take on by marrying a Welshman whose dark skin has cost him jobs since boyhood. He refuses to be a kept man. She has already sketched trusts. It is argued rather than swooned, and the novel is better for it. Kleypas also plays one lovely structural joke: after John insists that a kiss on a dark staircase never happened, the following chapter is printed as a title page with nothing after it.
Below Stairs, the Novel Finds Its Pulse
The romance is accomplished, but the life of the book is in the kitchen. June Rummage, Reina’s childhood friend and cook, swears with a fluency the narrator clearly enjoys, takes evening classes at a cookery school and has no intention of falling for the giant coachman who calls himself Mad Dog. He is a foundling who named himself as a boy, and when John points out that the two halves of his name, said the Welsh way, become Maddock, he decides on the spot that he must have been Welsh all along. June teaches him his letters by having him trace them with a fingertip in a tray of baking sand, and the scene in which he refuses to learn K until she gives him a reason is the funniest and sweetest passage in Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas. At the cookery school, the supposed menace rolls up his sleeves and washes the dishes for an overworked kitchen girl, and the students go home calling him a gentleman.
Kleypas gives the women’s bank its best argument through the housemaid, Enid. She had saved for an operation on her tubercular hip, could not open an account in her own name and left the money with her employer, who lost it to a husband’s gambling. Enid took back what was hers and was arrested in the hospital. Nothing in the novel’s boardroom scenes makes the economic case half as well.
The most serious stretch of Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas belongs to the pregnant housekeeper, Tuppence, a rape survivor who will accept no male doctor. Her labour becomes an emergency, and the debate over her right to choose her own care is handled with real moral seriousness. These are among the strongest chapters Kleypas has written. The reservation is what the plot then asks of Tuppence: her suffering ends up serving other people’s growth, the heroine’s most of all, and some readers will notice the old pattern.
Queen of Lombard Street Runs Short on Ledger
The final third is where the book loses some of its discipline. Coincidences arrive in clusters, a hostile legal threat appears late and is dispatched almost as quickly, and the novel’s title plot, the business on Lombard Street itself, reaches its consequences largely through report rather than scene. A reader who has followed Reina’s banking ambitions for three hundred pages will want to see them tested in public. The epilogue’s sudden switch into the present tense will divide readers too. None of this sinks Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas, but it does keep a very good novel from feeling finished. Readers should also know that the book deals with sexual violence in backstory, obstetric crisis and maternal death, racism, the stigma of illegitimacy and a great deal of strong language, and that its love scenes are frank on the page and careful about consent.
Lombard Street, Lisa Kleypas and Five Quiet Years
This is the first new novel from Kleypas since Devil in Disguise, the most recent Ravenels book, in 2021, a gap of five years that she ended with a standalone rather than another family saga. Ravenels readers will still find old friends in supporting roles in Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas, the surgeon Garrett Gibson and her husband among them. Kleypas has changed course before: in 2007 she moved into contemporary romance with Sugar Daddy, which reached the New York Times bestseller list. She has also spoken about revising her approach to intimacy over the decades, building conversations about consent into her love scenes, and that conviction runs all through this book.
Her author’s note lists the real lives behind the fiction. Garrett Gibson has always been modelled on Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and John Pembroke owes something to John Kent, the first known Black police constable in the country, who served in Carlisle in the 1830s and 1840s.
Readers who finish wanting more Gilded Age money and nerve should try The Gilded Heiress by Joanna Shupe, which moves the drawing rooms to New York. Ladies in Hating by Alexandra Vasti offers rivals who argue their way into love with a darker, Gothic edge, and Courtney Milan’s The Duchess War has a working-class hero with the same appetite for argument.
Final Thoughts
Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas is a romance about terms: who owns what, who answers to whom, who gets to sit down. Its plot hurries where it should linger, and the bank it is named after deserved a scene of its own. But the novel’s real achievement is a household of people the world had written off, learning their letters and their trades and each other. Long after the courtship is settled, it is the kitchen table that stays in the memory, with a coachman bent over a tray of sand, refusing to learn K until someone kisses him.