Well, first book's printing is almost done...it is quite a faff even on Amazon to get things sorted. The title is "In the King's Service: the forgotten victims of Empire and Revolution."
I'm now well into the sequel. 45,000 words, to be exact. Another true story of the same family, showing how the what would now be diagnosed as PTSD as a result of the Revolutionary war affected the subsequent generations.
The introductory chapter...
SARAH CARLYLE UPTON, STAFFORDSHIRE, 1880
I am old now, and tired of living since the death of my beloved. My dearest Uri, for whose love I fought for years against my father’s opposition.
I have long thought that my life has been like a rose that never quite found the chance to bloom in its fullness of summer, blighted as it has been since my childhood by my father’s youthful tragedies and subsequent infamies. Without my Uri, what would have become of me?
As the youngest, and the guardian of my father in his old age, I am in possession of many family papers and records, letters and diaries, the sorting and disposal of which have fallen to me to facilitate.
Before I destroy all these papers, it is, I feel, my duty to document the story of my family. I, the last living of the nine children of Thomas Fairfax Fearnley Carlyle and Mary Holmes. My father, an enigma. My mother, tolerant and understanding of the terrible and turbulent times of the American Revolution that shaped my father’s character and made him the complex and inexplicably natured man that he was. It is the least I can do to leave a legacy of understanding and compassion of how it came about that he took the life of a young man whose only fault was that he loved my older sister.
blahblahblahblah....20 pages on.....
And I? Sarah Carlyle, the cadet of the family, born at a time when our parents were entirely disenchanted with the notion of yet another child, with all the attendant worry and expense. Father had his sons, Mother had no spare time, with a number of daughters, not all of them docile and malleable. I was the afterthought, the end-of-line child who made no fuss, nor demanded anything. A girl-child with little of the storybook heroine about her. Straight, mousy hair that refused to take a curl, despite long hours spent in curling rags, pale complexion, slightly myopic eyes of an indiscriminate blue-grey, thin and gangling limbs. The sort of child that appeals to no-one.
But I had two assets, possessed by none of my sisters.
I was clever. And I won the faithful heart of Uri Upton.