The events of Francis’s double life at the start of the French Revolution, and two decades later during the final years of the interminable war with Bonaparte, along with the exploits of Nicholas de Bresancourt, the penniless French orphan adopted by Francis’s relations when they fled France, had repercussions on their entire family that no one could possibly foresee.
Nicholas de Bresancourt was an aristocratic but penniless refugee of the bloody French Revolution from which he’d escaped as a four-year-old orphan, thanks to Francis Granville and his friends. Nicky had lost everything – family, estates and fortune – and hated those responsible in France for ending countless innocent lives on the guillotine… and then Bonaparte, whose megalomania had put his country through so much further upheaval and war. With no other means to support himself or earn a living, and his pride refusing to allow him to accept the charity of his wealthy adoptive family, Nicky joined the British army, keen to serve and help end the interminable war in Europe.
With Francis as a mentor, Nicky has grown to become a charismatic, able man and a capable fighter, as well as a lover of many women. He is also trilingual, thanks to growing up and being educated in England with a Spanish step-mother and French step-father. He is therefore ideal material to work undercover and put his talents to use on behalf of his adopted country. First, as an agent liaising with the Spanish rebels and guerrillas as the British endeavoured to drive the French out of Spain during the Peninsular War, and then as a full-blown spy for an anonymous Whitehall Department and Wellington, on the trail of a dangerous and ruthless French agent operating in both Spain and France: a man with a long-standing personal vendetta against The Shadow, the man he suspected had caused the death of his father.
Nicky becomes his nemesis, thwarting his nefarious plans twice, and inadvertently becoming the catalyst for a monumental confrontation after the Battle of Waterloo between the psychopathic Frenchman and all those involved in the escape from Revolutionary France twenty-five years previously.
Some 200 years later in the twenty-first century, Francis and Nicky’s descendants and their close friends also have their secrets, adventures and turbulent love lives. Their experiences and exploits strangely and uncannily provide modern day parallels to some of the events that occurred in the time of their ancestors, of which they know nothing. But as the saying goes, history has a habit of repeating itself….
Start reading their stories in Soldier Banker, all about Marcus Forsyth, Francis Granville’s many times over great-grandson.
