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this particular day, he pushed his horse hard for almost an hour, turning toward home only when the need for breakfast compelled him to do so.
    Despite Cole’s admittedly academic bent, he had always done his most serious thinking from the back of a horse. Today it was not working. Halfway through St. Pancras, with all of London now stirring about him, Cole still had no notion why he had agreed to his uncle’s mad, self-serving scheme. What had he been thinking? Just what did he hope to achieve?
    Oh, matters were a bit dull within the army just now, it was true. But there were things to do. His club in Albemarle Street, the two or three academic societies to which he still belonged, and an occasional trip to the War Office to chat up old friends. Reading his scientific journals, writing letters to inquire into the welfare of his former men, and every evening, a little drinking in the local public house, which was filled at night by an eclectic mix of actors, students, and poets, along with a great many men such as himself, old soldiers with too much time to spare.
    Well—!
The truth always slipped out in the end, did it not? The fact was, Cole was just dead bored with his life. After hobbling about Paris for three months, making minimal contributions to the peace effort, he had returned at last to London—how long ago? Seven months? He counted on his fingers. Yes, and damned dull months they had been, too.
    His splintered thigh was solid once again, and the few shards of metal which were destined to work their way out had long since done so. Cole knew he was fortunate to have broken the bone in a fall from his horse, and that the grapeshot had been glancing and secondary. Better men than he had lost a leg to amputation. Almost a year later, only a few scars and the occasional ache remained.
    And now, he no longer had any excuse to avoid going home. Home to Cambridgeshire. Home to Elmwood Manor, the estate he had not seen since leaving England before the war. As manor houses went, it was hardly a grand place. It appeared to be early Georgian, with two small but well-balanced wings, but from the rear gardens, one could see a goodly portion of the original Tudor structure. Long ago, perhaps in his great-great-grandfather’s day, Elmwood had been a vicarage. Indeed, it was still referred to as such by the villagers, because for a hundred years or better, even after the house itself had been sold by the church, someone within the walls of Elmwood had served them as vicar of Saint Ann’s. But no longer.
    That was yet another of life’s crossroads which Cole had managed to circumnavigate. For a time after leaving his position at Cambridge, he had acted as curate, with every good intention of stepping into the pulpit at some future date. But in the end, he had chosen muscular Christianity over the more pastoral sort, and had resolutely beaten his plowshare into a sword.
    Cole still was not perfectly sure why he had done it. He knew only that he had felt driven to join the army; driven toward war by an emotion he could not name. Patriotism, he had called it at the time. Certainly, he had not done it for financial gain. His officer’s commission had been expensive, and he had had a wife at home for whom to provide. And although Cole was far from being a rich man, his mother’s marriage settlements had provided him a steady income upon his twenty-fifth birthday and his father had left him Elmwood Manor.
    Elmwood consisted of a small home farm and five tenant properties, whose holders tilled the same land their fathers and grandfathers had before them. Since the war, Cole had taken the unheard-of step of leasing the whole of it, parceling the home acreage into fifths, and giving it over to his trusted tenants. The manor, for all practical purposes, now ran itself.
    Three months past, unable to reconcile himself to the thought of going home, he had sent along Moseby, his orderly, to look things over. All was well, according to