As he nears his 25th birthday and the reversion of the guardianship, the Duke has grown tired of his circumscribed existence and longs to lead the anonymous life of "Mr Dash of Nowhere in Particular".

Gilly decides that attempting to recover the letters presents the perfect opportunity to get away from his suffocating family circle and in this is encouraged by his cousin and close friend, Gideon Ware, a member of the Royal Horse Guards.

At Liversedge's suggestion, she had broken her apprenticeship articles with a seamstress in Bath but longs to go back and find again a nearby farmer there, Jasper Mudgley, who wished to marry her.

The discomforted Liversedge, having discovered the Duke's true identity, now persuades one of his criminal associates to kidnap Gilly and earn the gang a fortune by holding him to ransom in the cellar of The Bird in Hand.

In order to find a safe harbour for Belinda, Gilly asks Harriet to take her in while he goes in search of Mudgley, but he is hindered when Tom's father, a wealthy Kettering ironmonger, has the Duke arrested for kidnapping his son.

[4] In a letter to the author, Arnold Glyde, head of Heinemann's editorial department, noted that the sense of comedy, present in most of Heyer's novels, had here been "developed…into a really flowering success".