There being no clean paper to hand, William took from his pocket the last letter he had had from his wife Alice – a missive which had not pleased him, though he kept it near – and folded the pieces of hair into it. It was a sad and curious thing to consider that those same locks which had shone around a young man’s living face only hours before would now sit encased in gold and glass upon the breasts of three women. Though its weight was negligible – little more than a dab of sealing wax – the sorrow it brought would ever more weigh heavy upon them.

His work finished, William lifted Algie’s head in both his hands and laid it back gently. With his thumbs he closed the green-blue eyes which would never more open upon a morning, nor look upon a day.

William Gale, at nine-and-twenty, had not been in the expectation of finding himself on the field – or, rather, the rocky hillside – of battle. Yet here he was, some two thousand miles distant from his home. His father, like his own father before him, had after the purchase of a commission been for a number of years a soldier; but the family estate and other interests had drawn each away from a full military life. William and Algernon’s father had nevertheless fought bravely in the Peninsular and in the action at Albuera, where an injury to his foot saw an end to his service. It was expected that his sons would also, in due course, serve the 23rd Regiment of Foot. But Britain had been at peace since Waterloo in 1815 and no one in the Gale family had expected William’s time in the uniform of the Welsh Fusiliers to be spent away from home.