Fall from the Frontier

A second son. A purchased commission. A war he was never meant to survive.

Yorkshire, 1812. Algernon Fairfax is the disappointment of Gilling Castle: the brother who did not carry the colours through the breach at Badajoz, the son whose father presses the family signet into his palm with a single instruction. Do not shame it. Four hundred and fifty pounds buys him a lieutenancy in His Majesty's 8th Regiment of Foot and a berth on a transport bound for Upper Canada.

He arrives knowing the drill manual by heart and nothing else that matters. Under his first fire he freezes solid, and it is Sergeant Thistle's shoulder that drives him into the mud and keeps him breathing. The account he posts home to his father says otherwise. He does not cross it out.

What follows is not the making of a hero. It is the slow, unglamorous education of a man discovering which parts of him the army built and which it only lent him: a winter of frostbite and short rations, a lake that very nearly takes him, and six weeks in a Shawnee camp where a woman named Lemateshe teaches him things no Horse Guards manual ever contained.

Then, on the morning of 27 April 1813, Chauncey's squadron stands in towards York and General Pike puts seventeen hundred men on the beach.

By half past one the Grand Magazine is gone, the fort is burning, and Algie is standing in the smoke with a choice his ancestors never once had the nerve to make. Return to the colours, or walk away and be hunted for the rest of his life.

Fall from the Frontier is the first novel in a series following Algernon Fairfax across the frontier wars.