Captain Ravenshaw, or the Maid of Cheapside

Some books are interesting. Some are amusing. In the best of them you can fall into a time and place you've never been, and in the very best of them you can have laugh-out-loud fun.

Here's roaring Captain Ravenshaw, an officer whose unit has been disbanded, set afoot to live by his wits in Elizabeth Regina's England. He falls in with a poor scholar, Holyday, after a dispute culminating in a flung capon in a tavern. Falling in with three other gents of quality they free a country fellow, in town without his wife's permission, from the watch after curfew. Then they come upon a Faire Maiden, being accosted on the street, have a little fun roaring at the accosters, and let her go scampering back to her father's house from which she's run away.

Now that's the setup. Ravenshaw's a bully boy with a foul reputation. Holyday's a poor, mostly meek scholar who's scared of women. The guys in the alley are a couple of hard gents getting ready for a sea voyage that'll maybe make them rich -- think Drake, Hawkins, Grenville -- unless they're lost at sea or eaten by natives or something. They're not above kidnapping cute girlies roaming the streets after dark. In fact, one of them, Jerningham, is fascinated by the girl and must have her, by hook or preferably crook, since he has no intention of offering matrimony to the daughter of a merchant.

Ravenshaw, being an actual gent rather than having merely been born to that station, is determined not to let that happen. Maid Millicent, who seems to be about seventeen or eighteen and is pretty as a portrait, ran away from home rather than go through with her engagement to Sir Peregrine Medway, who's, I'd guess, around seventy but trying to appear forty, or maybe even thirty. Ravenshaw's determined not to let that happen either.

The convolutions that follow are laugh-out-loud funny. You think you know who's going to get the girl in the end. Then you don't. Then you do. The only certainty is that Sir Peregrine's not going to spend any time lying between those comely young thighs.  I may not have ever read an adventure novel quite so adventurous, and given my love of Sabbatini that's saying a lot.