Lord Peter Wimsey an unofficial attaché to the British Foreign Office. Harriet Vane contacts him about a problem she has been asked to investigate in her college at Oxford ("Gaudy Night"). At the end of their investigation, Vane finally accepts Wimsey's proposal of marriage. The couple marry on 8 October 1935, at St Cross Church, Oxford, as depicted in the opening collection of letters and diary entries in "Busman's Honeymoon". The Wimseys honeymoon at Talboys, a house in east Hertfordshire near Harriet's childhood home, which Peter has bought for her as a wedding present. There they find the body of the previous owner,
The King and the Beggar-maid telling Peter Wimsey, "You think you can sit up there all day, like King Cophetua being noble and generous and expecting people to be brought to your feet. Of course people will say, "look what he did for that woman – Isn't it marvellous of him!" Sayers also refers to the story in "The Five Red Herrings", where Mrs. Farren looks at Wimsey "like a distressed beggar-maid beginning to wonder whether Cophetua was not something of a trial in family life." In Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire novel "Framley Parsonage" (1861), Lucy Robarts likens her relationship with Lord Lufton, who has proposed