Chapter 8

He hadseen the consequences of passion. He’d seen his parents’ marriage descend into squabbling and regret and resentment, the flames of youthful desire long quenched, the only joy remaining in drink and discontentment. His father and mother must have been happy once, he guessed: a lieutenant with prospects and a baronet’s second daughter who’d given him her heart. But then there’d been the injury at sea, and the bitterness, and the financial mismanagement, and the rum; there’d been the sequence of smaller and smaller rented rooms, and the turned and mended clothing, and the hungry mornings and nights, and the way Anthony’s younger sister Sarah had wept from cold in the winter…

There’d been more rum, and less money, and a grave, six years old now. Anthony, standing in sleeting rain while his mother and sister sobbed—from grief, from relief, from fear about the unknown fate in front of them—had known he’d need to protect them. All of them.