The Decline of Miss Marchbank: A Cozy Regency Fantasy Romance (The Air at Fairleigh Book 1)

Miss Cecily Marchbank has been dying since November, and she has never done it better. The straw is down on the drive, the knocker is tied, and she has a cough, a broth she doesn't drink, and a faint voice in three registers. It is all for Fairleigh. The house becomes hers in October, and until then an invalid on a sofa cannot be packed off to Bath by her aunt. Then the new physician takes her pulse. Dr. Daniel Askew has a gift that can read a heartbeat with two fingers, and hers is steady, sturdy, and entirely unsuitable. He tells her aunt nothing. He prescribes a daily walk, in sight of the house, and asks whether she practices the cough. But Daniel's father sold miracle charms at country fairs, and Daniel has spent his whole life making sure nobody could call him a liar. Now the rector wants a signed account of Miss Marchbank's decline to read from the pulpit on Easter Sunday. Soon a lady poet wants that account at the head of her new volume, which needs a dying girl by October. The old charms in Fairleigh's walls will fail at Michaelmas unless every room is emptied, hers included. And the whole town wants to know who was seen at the doctor's door at dawn. Cecily can make a whole parish believe she is dying. She cannot make her pulse behave when Daniel Askew holds her wrist. A witty Regency comedy of manners, with a little magic in the drawing room, for readers who love Georgette Heyer. Standalone · Faked illness · Secret-keeping hero · Small-town gossip · Slow burn · Clean & closed-door · HEA Each Air at Fairleigh novel is a complete standalone romance with its own couple and its own happy ending.