Very old fashioned in the telling but an interesting story. To pay his debts, Lady Matilda's father would sell her in marriage to a notorious lech old enough to be her father and then some. Matilda runs away with her maid and finds work as a cook in a coaching inn (because the kitchen was the only warm and friendly room in her childhood home, she had learned to cook from the family's French chef) and then with Major Robert Bruce, a one armed former soldier who has unexpectedly inherited a lairdship and castle in Scotland. A fun read but be aware it is not told in the modern sex drenched style.