What had Francis ever done to deserve it? For years, despite his father's help and encouragement, he had drifted, never really worked. He was in London still. He had become a merchant, but not a very successful one. William was fond of Francis, but he could not quite restrain the impatience of the successful man for an unsuccessful brother. He gave, without even knowing it, a tiny shrug when Francis's name was mentioned. So it seldom was. With the logic typical of the man who had made money, he reasoned that it was a waste of time to give it to someone who had not. Or, to put it more kindly, should his desire to keep the family name in the Forest cause him to dispossess the daughter he loved? No. Francis must fend for himself. Alice was the sole heiress.

It had come as rather a surprise to her that a few months before, when discussing in a general way the men she might marry, her father had mentioned one name with particular favour: John Lisle.

They had met him at a gathering of a number of local gentry families in the Buttons' fine house near Lymington. He was a few years older than she and recently a widower. He had children. He had struck her as a sensible, intelligent man, although perhaps a little too earnest. Her father had talked to him more than she had.

'But Father,' she had reminded him, 'his family ...'

'An ancient family.' The Lisles were indeed a family of some antiquity who had for a long time possessed lands on the Isle of Wight.

'Yes, but his father ...' The whole county knew about John Lisle's father. Inheriting a good estate, he had squandered both it and his reputation. His wife had left him; he had taken to drink; in the end, he had even been arrested for debt. 'Isn't there bad blood ...?'

Bad blood: that expression so beloved of the landed classes. A notorious brigand or two gave a certain patina to the ancestral furniture. But you had to be careful. Bad blood meant danger, uncertainty, unsoundness, blighted harvests, diseased trees. The gentry, who were still partly farmers, had their feet on the ground. Breeding people, after all, was no different from breeding livestock. Bad blood will out. It had to be avoided.

But to her surprise, her father only smiled. 'Ah,' he said, 'now let me advise you on that.' And giving her that look of his that announced, 'I speak with a lifetime of experience as a lawyer,' he proceeded: 'When a man has a father who has lost his substance there are two things he can do. He can accept a lowly condition, or he can fight back and make his fortune.'

'Isn't that what younger sons are meant to do?'