I told Bartholomew to meet me at the public house in Cley and indulge himself in a well-earned ale, and I went to the brigadier's alone.

The rain had lightened a little. I could see across the farmland to the marshes that ran along the coast. Grasses bent in the wind, and all was as wet as could be.

I remembered the brigadier, though through the perspective of a boy. Brigadier Easton had been a martinet, like my father, but with a streak of fairness that my father had lacked. He lived in a brick house that was as tall and deep as it was wide, windows in even rows covering all three floors.

The butler who opened the door took my card, gave my damp clothes and muddy boots a disdainful look, but at least he let me wait inside, out of the rain. The brigadier must have recognized the Lacey name, because the butler quickly returned and bade me follow him upstairs.

I was shown into a long, narrow study whose windows looked north to another windmill. This windmill had been shut down and abandoned, its work done, its spindly arms still.

The brigadier was in his sixties, as my father would have been had he been alive. While my father had been a big man-the same six-foot, broad-shouldered build as myself-the brigadier was small and slight. He made up for his stature with a powerful voice, which had, before his retirement, bellowed orders to troops in India.

He came to me, hand extended. "Gabriel Lacey. The young hothead who eloped and raced away in the middle of the night?" He chuckled as I shook his hand. "I had wondered when you'd make your move and become a man. Captain now, eh? Commended for bravery at Talavera; you and all the Thirty-Fifth Light. Damned bloody battle, that."

It had been. I'd begun the morning a lieutenant and had been given captain that evening, both for my actions and because too many other captains had died. My father had died here in Norfolk that night, though I had not known until I'd received the letter weeks later.