April Lady

April Lady is a Regency romance by the English writer Georgette Heyer, published in 1957 by Heinemann in Britain and by Putnam in the United States. It had already appeared in Woman's Journal as a serial under the title My Lady Cardross, and its events take place in 1813.

Helen Irvine, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Earl of Pevensey, has recently married Giles Merrion, Earl of Cardross, who is considerably older than his bride. Both of them are in love with the other and neither can say so: Helen believes her husband married her to rescue her from her family's debts, and Cardross cannot work out whether his wife's interest in clothes, parties and the money she keeps needing is thoughtlessness or something worse. The misunderstanding is compounded by Helen's brother Dysart, whose gambling is the reason the money keeps disappearing, and by the debts she is trying to settle without telling her husband. Heyer keeps the comedy running on the gap between what the two of them know and what they say.

This was Heyer's forty-fourth book and her fifteenth Regency novel, written when the form she had largely invented was at its most comfortable in her hands.