How it opens
The Seatons had given a man to every quarrel Scotland ever exported, and the family portrait gallery was a history of Europe written in second sons.
Your father had died at Gibraltar, your mother the year after, and the three of you had been raised by Uncle Adam, a half-pay major with one eye, one acre of garden, and one opinion on every subject.
Major SeatonThere is money in Spain, they say, if a man lives to draw it. Prize money, prize horses, prize something. There has never yet been a war that ruined the Seatons, and I will not be the uncle of the first.
Choose
Take everything the sergeant lays out and learn each piece's name and duty.
Ask Maclean for the true account of what a first campaign is.
Ask instead after Charles, whom the sergeant has served beside.