Midnight Pleasures starts out with a rather cute plot about a woman who is in love with one man but engaged to another. Unfortunately, that plot fizzles out in about a hundred pages, leaving two hundred sixty pages of deliberate misunderstandings and depressing tedium. What a disappointment!

Lady Sophie York knows that she has a tendre for Patrick Foakes, but when she is caught kissing him and he proposes, she won’t accept. She spent years growing up in a household with a father who flaunted his affairs, and she knows Patrick is a rake, so he’ll have plenty of affairs. When Patrick’s friends Braddon proposes, she accepts him, even though he is also a rake. Her reasoning (I think) is that she doesn’t love Braddon so she won’t care if he is having affairs.

Patrick is furious that Sophie has spurned him, because he is overcome by lust whenever she is near. He’s pretty sure that Sophie is only marrying Braddon because he’s an earl. So when the opportunity arises, Patrick seduces Sophie, and before you know it they are engaged and then married.

Up until this point, the book isn’t great or anything, but it’s okay, and the characters are kind of fun. As soon as Patrick and Sophie are married, the lame, depressing misunderstandings begin. This isn’t a Big Misunderstanding book; it’s a Little Misunderstanding book. There are a lot of misunderstandings about little things, and they come across as contrived at best and silly or stupid at worst.

Misunderstanding #1: Sophie speaks seven languages, but she’s afraid to tell Patrick because her mother says men don’t like bluestockings. So Sophie hides her linguistic abilities. When it slips out that she speaks Welsh, Patrick is completely unfazed and even impressed. Still, Sophie refuses to tell him that she speaks other languages. I can well believe that women hide their intellectual abilities to attract men. It’s a time-honored, if unfortunate, practice that continues to this day. But it’s hard to respect a heroine who hides her intelligence, especially when the hero seems to like her intelligence.

Misunderstanding #2: Patrick tells Sophie that he will only allow her to have one child, and he is furious when she becomes pregnant. The reason for this behavior is that his beloved mother died in childbirth when he was seven, and he is terrified that Sophie could die too. Sophie spends her pregnancy thinking that Patrick hates children, pregnancy, and her. His refusal to tell Sophie about his fears is completely illogical; his only possible reason for withholding this information seems a bizarre wish to have a misunderstanding about it.

Misunderstanding #3: Sophie has always expected Patrick to have mistresses, so when he stays out late she is sure he is with a paramour. A young boy who is staying at their home thinks he sees Patrick with a tall, black-haired woman, and naturally he assumes that this is Patrick’s mistress, so he tells Sophie all about it. Sophie scans the society pages for months, sure she will see some mention of Patrick and his lover. Amazingly, in all this time it never occurs to her that the boy might have seen Patrick’s identical twin brother and his tall, black-haired wife (who is Sophie’s best friend). For someone who knows seven languages, Sophie is remarkably slow on the uptake.

Misunderstanding #4: Sophie doesn’t want to lose Patrick like her mother lost her father, and she decides that the best way to hold onto him is to never, ever show him that she is angry. Even though she is sure that he has a mistress and doesn’t want her to be pregnant, she never offers a word of complaint. Patrick assumes that Sophie’s studied nonchalance means that she doesn’t care.

Misunderstanding #5: Sophie’s former fiancé, Braddon, is in love with a horse-trainer’s daughter. He wants Sophie to tutor this girl and pass her off as a French aristocrat. Sophie agrees, but she doesn’t want to tell Patrick about it. Why? So they can have another misunderstanding, of course! Patrick thinks that Sophie is meeting Braddon for rides in the park, and he decides that she still loves Braddon.

I’ve read plenty of books with misunderstandings before. Some of them work, and some of them don’t. But for the sheer number of misunderstandings, Midnight Pleasures takes the cake. I have never seen such a pair for jumping to erroneous conclusions and refusing to talk to each other. Toward the end of the book, when both characters had descended into complete misery and were barely speaking to each other, I tried to remember what I had liked about them in the first place. I’m still thinking.