Busman's Honeymoon with severe head injuries. A "busman's holiday" is a holiday spent by a bus driver travelling on a bus: it is no break from his usual routine. By analogy, anyone who spends his holiday doing his normal job is taking a "busman's holiday". After an engagement of some months following the events at the end of "Gaudy Night", Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane marry. They plan to spend their honeymoon at Talboys, an old farmhouse in Harriet's native Hertfordshire which Wimsey has bought for her, and they abscond from the wedding reception, evading the assembled reporters. Arriving late at
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