It was not an unfamiliar scenario, an evening like this. Nor was it even an unfamiliar song. Corporal Jones sang “Fair Rosamond” often. The ballad was a favorite among the men.

What was unfamiliar was the letter he’d just tossed down on his desk from the Duke of Birchwood’s steward. A letter summoning him home.

England.

Home.

Birchwood House.

He found himself glaring at the parchment as though he could will it into flame. Into a mound of smoldering ash.

Constantine had not thought of that place as home in a good many years. Home to him had been an army tent for over half his life. Hellfire. Even a muddy battlefield felt more like home to him than what he had left behind in England as a green lad. That green lad he had once been was gone.

The flap to his tent parted and his batman entered. “Whew.” Morris removed his cap and ran a hand through his hair. “Wind picking up. Storm coming from the east.”

A storm was indeed coming.

“Well, I’ll be heading decidedly west on the morrow.”

His batman looked up sharply as he sank down on his cot. “Did you get orders to move us west?”

“In a manner.” He glanced at the letter again. “I have received orders. You and the men will stay put.”

Morris followed his gaze to the rough-hewn desk with a frown. “I don’t follow your meaning.”

“I’ve been summoned home, Morris.”

“Home as in England?”

Constantine took a moment to react, too preoccupied with digesting this turn in his life. Eventually he nodded while gazing at the letter bearing the distantly familiar ducal seal as though it were a living, breathing thing that might rise up to snap its teeth at him. “The Duke of Birchwood has spoken.”

The grand nobleman was still etched solidly in Constantine’s memory with his bushy gray muttonchops and wintry blue stare that could cut straight through you. The duke was perhaps the most prominent of his childhood memories, rising above all like a stone edifice. He remembered his parents only vaguely, as snatches of water-colored images flashing through his mind.

They’d sickened from cholera and perished when he was but seven years. After the loss of his mother and father, he’d desperately wanted the love and approval of his father’s distant kinsman upon whose doorstep he was deposited.

His father had been a simple solicitor and his mother of even more humble origins—a shopgirl from the East End. Rough beginnings aside, Constantine still remembered the gentle way she would stroke his head and brush back his hair as she sang him to sleep.