When the Marquess Needed Me (2025) by Lydia Lloyd
Beatrice Salisbury needs money now so she can financially support her family. She decides to become a courtesan because she understands this will be the fastest way to earn money. Thomas, Marquess of Leith, known for keeping a mistress for two weeks only, is considered a kind of taste maker with regard to the newest, in-demand courtesans. Because of this reputation, Beatrice decides she will try to become his next mistress. She has her cousin, and Thomas’s friend, Augustus Carrington, Earl of Montaigne, arrange a meeting.1
So, the first issue I had while reading this book is that no one, not her cousin – who is Thomas’s best friend, not his wife or her friends, NO ONE – not even Thomas himself, self-proclaimed rake – suggests Beatrice become acquainted with actual courtesans who can impart information about how to be a mistress to a wealthy man! I kept waiting for someone to tell Beatrice that she might actually benefit from connecting with one of Thomas’s former mistresses – and no one did. No one was even like, “Beatrice, there is more to being a mistress than sex. And, actually, companionship is a NOT-insignificant part of this work.”
This is something I notice often – and wrote about briefly in my post on His Lordship’s Mistress – it’s weird to isolate sex workers from their colleagues. His Lordship’s Mistress includes a scene with the main character, Jessica, reaching out to a woman who was an actress – and former mistress to wealthy men – to help her know what to expect. This scene is only a few paragraphs but it establishes that sex work was 1. not uncommon and 2. that women who have done this work help others.2
Thomas keeps mistresses for two weeks only because he is self-conscious about what he believes is his small penis (he compares his size to his friends’ size and once he overheard a former mistress lamenting his size and lack of skill). As luck would have it, Beatrice has a small pussy which perfectly matches Thomas’s size.3
This self-consciousness interferes with Thomas’s ability to be a thoughtful lover – he keeps his clothes on during sex and he doesn’t like a mess so sex is a quick affair. After they have sex for the first time, Beatrice is disappointed because she expected him to teach her sex tricks. Again, if she had a relationship with other courtesans, they could have explained to her that it is not uncommon to have underwhelming sex with a client, they could have given her tips on how to navigate the situation so no one feels embarrassed because (again) sex is not the only skill needed to be successful in sex work.
The problem of Thomas’s sexual performance is solved by swapping their roles: Beatrice becomes Thomas’s sex educator. I uh think I understand what Lloyd was doing with this but all it did was remind me of how much more sensitive Mary Balogh’s A Precious Jewel was at conveying how the hero, Gerald, was uncomfortable with being touched or naked during sex and how his self-consciousness was self sabotaging. The “bad sex” in Balogh’s book has emotional weight lacking in Lloyd’s. Priscilla, or Prissy, his love interest, is a sex worker Gerald met in a brothel. Balogh shows the emotional labor and the body labor of Prissy’s work – first as a brothel worker and later as Gerald’s mistress.
At the start of the book, Thomas’s friend, the earl of Montaigne, makes Thomas promise to not have sex with Beatrice, “You are not to bed the woman,” his best friend repeated. “she is young, she is vulnerable, and I am resolute that she should find some other remedy for her problems than selling her body to the syphilitic hounds of the aristocracy.”
Hoping to remain on good terms with his best friend (it is referenced that the friends had a falling out in a previous book), Thomas agrees to only give the appearance of taking Beatrice as a courtesan, promising to abstain from having sex with her.
When Beatrice learns of the agreement Thomas made with her cousin4, she insists he must have sex with her so she can learn how to fuck other aristocrats (whom she hopes to make her protectors after her two weeks with Thomas). If he refuses, Beatrice will tell her cousin that Thomas took liberties with her and forced her to do depraved sex acts:
“He will not need to find out. I certainly will not tell him. But if you do not bed me, Lord Leith, I will tell him that you have mistreated me dreadfully.”
He shifted in his armchair. “You are blackmailing me? Extorting me?”
“I believe extortion and blackmail involve real evidence of wrong doing. This, instead, is just good old-fashioned lying.”
and later:
“if you do not bed me and teach me what I need to know, I will tell Lord Montaigne that not only have you tried to tup me, but that you asked me to perform perverse acts in the bedchamber. Of a variety so disgusting to my country simplicity that I could not stay your mistress for even these two weeks.”
This is, and I cannot stress this enough, one of the most offensive and harmful plots I’ve read in a long while. I have sat on my feelings about this book for a few months, thinking these feelings would eventually be less sharp, less angry. But this anger – and sadness – at the ways in which a genre so often concerned with intimacy and labor can, in the name of sex positivity and feminism, indulge such cruel understandings of sex work and sex workers only multiplied.
Let me be clear: Violence against sex workers is a real issue – not something that sex workers make up, lie about, or exaggerate to get their way.5 According to Amnesty International’s Violence Against Sex Workers and Survivors of Trafficking:
The stigmatized and criminalized nature of sex work routinely forces sex workers to operate at the margins of society in clandestine and dangerous environments with little recourse to safety or state protection. As a result, sex workers face an increased risk of violence and abuse, and such crimes against them often go unreported, under-investigated and/or unpunished, offering perpetrators impunity.6
A few years ago, I read The Varlet and the Voyeur (2018) by L.H. Cosway, a contemporary sports romance. The premise of this story is that William Moore, American rugby player playing for an Irish team, had an (inaccurate) story leak to the tabloids about his sexual preferences and this resulted in him losing his position in his charity work. Sex workers were the ones who leaked the intimate details of William’s sex life – something I took issue with this because it should be widely understood that sex workers want to keep their jobs and avoid outing themselves (not to mention how dangerous it is to share details about high-profile clients) so THEY DO NOT GO TO MEDIA AND NAME NAMES. It is not a thing! This further stigmatizes an already vulnerable population. Also, William did not pay for the services provided by the sex workers responsible for leaking the story so this plot made sex workers out to be liars for hire.7
I don’t have a conclusion to offer other than sometimes shit is bad; I just needed a place to unload my thoughts so I can move on to more interesting parts of this project.
I’ll be back with a War & Peace update. I am brainstorming my Bliss and Dance post, and a post on gaps in romance scholarship.
- spoiler: we later find out they aren’t actually related, Beatrice made up the familial relation ↩︎
- off the top of my head, The Duke by Galen Foley, A Precious Jewel by Mary Balogh, Destiny’s Surrender by Beverly Jenkins, The Pingkang Li Mysteries by Jeannie Lin all include scenes of sex workers working with or knowing other sex workers. ↩︎
- romance authors be normal about genitals challenge! ↩︎
- every male character in this book was sexually possessive of the women in their family ↩︎
- English Collective of Prostitutes: Facts about Sex Work
No silence to violence: a report on violence against women in prostitution in the UK by the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement ↩︎ - https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/IOR4075842024ENGLISH.pdf ↩︎
- The Varlet and the Voyeur did have a few scenes discussing porn and how buying directly from porn performers (think cam sites or OnlyFans) can be more ethical. So the book does understand sex work is tied to labor – although this doesn’t make up for the lying sex workers plot. ↩︎
scarr 