The Spinster and the Colonel

Dorothea Haldane is twenty-nine, tall, ink-stained and in her fourth Season. She copies medieval charters for her father, stands by a potted palm at Almack's with perfect composure, and has long since stopped expecting to be asked to dance.

Then she meets Colonel Richard Blythe in the library of a house for wounded officers, learning to write with his left hand. His right arm was ruined at Waterloo. His name is being ruined in London. A rumour says that he left twenty-three wounded men to burn in a barn, and the Colonel, who will not say a word in his own defence, offers her nothing at all.

Dorothea accepts the nothing. Then she begins to read. A pencil that pressed too hard, a page that kept what was cut out of it, a charming Major who drinks, and a one-eyed gardener who has been silent for a year.

Some silences are kept out of honour and do more harm than any lie. Dorothea has a pen, her mother's magnifying glass, and the stubbornness of a woman who has spent her life copying what other people did. She means to set the record straight, whether the Colonel permits it or not.