His Story
James Conquest Yarrow
Born to an old but fading Sussex family, James Yarrow left his country estate at eighteen to chase honour on distant battlefields. The years that followed would strip the romance from war and leave him walking home with more ghosts than glory.
James is the only son of Colonel Ambrose Yarrow, a retired officer of Napoleonic fame, and the late Elizabeth Yarrow (née Pomeroy). The Yarrows hold a modest estate in Sussex—land rich in memory, poorer in coin. At sixteen his father purchased him a commission, and the boy who once rode the downs for sport was turned toward soldiering in earnest.
He would serve in Britain's imperial campaigns in China and Afghanistan: the First Opium War and the First Anglo-Afghan War. In Canton and along the Chinese coast he saw trade dressed up as righteousness and cities shelled into obedience. In the passes of Afghanistan he watched columns freeze, starve, and fall under fire as command blundered and men paid the price.
By December 1843 James has returned to England on medical leave, his body worn by fever and his nerves by all that could not be carried home in a dispatch. He lodges in Bath, somewhere between convalescent and ghost, living on a modest officer's income, his father's expectations, and the fragile company of letters and memories that have followed him back from the edges of empire.
Threads That Bind Him
James's life is held together by a few thin, stubborn threads: his loyalty to fallen comrades, his complicated affection for Clara Everleigh—the London actress who once wrote to him at the front—and the memory of Liang Mei-lin, a Cantonese woman whose presence in Hong Kong carved a quiet, indelible place in his heart. Between these ghosts and his aging father's shadow, he tries to decide what a man is meant to be when the war is over but the war will not leave him.