Manuscript assessed and copyedited by Lynk Manuscript Assessment Service

Following Joshua’s death at the Battle of Waterloo, Emily sought solace for herself and her children at the St Albans estate owned by her late husband’s father, Lord Joseph Samuels. However, life there was made most uncomfortable by his evil older brother, Jeremiah. As soon as his father died, he threw her out, and Emily was forced to rely upon Joshua’s twin sister, Isabel, to find safe lodgings. Thereafter, she struggled to secret herself away from an ever more dangerous Jeremiah while putting her sons, Jacob and Isaac, through school, thankful for the occasional respite to visit Joshua’s grave in Flanders offered by her cousin, Delphine de Marchienne.
After his long and difficult search for his father’s lost expedition to the South Pacific, Delphine’s only son, Anton, found it impossible to settle back into family affairs of their estates in Flanders, and returned to le Îles Loyauté, the Loyalty Islands, and his native wife, Chérie. There, he turned privateer to exploit the new trading opportunities. Setting aside her disappointment, Delphine arranged reconciliation for she and Emily with their ancestral family in Scotland. It came at a time of new settlement schemes for Australia, so the Raines brothers put Emily’s knowledge of the Colony to good use, including the promise future employment for her two boys. When her daughter, Miriam, married the future heir to part of the de Marchienne estate, and the Scottish Australian Shipping Company sent Jacob to Sydney Town to work under its representative, her old friend, Will Cullins, Emily at last felt secure. Unfortunately, her satisfaction was shortlived, for Jeremiah and his repugnant illegitimate son, Lester, finally discovered her Rotherhyte hideaway, and she was again forced to flee, this time to Scotland.
For years Jacob waited for the right time to utilise his late father’s land grant, enduring all that the colony could throw at him, and building friendships with the Cullins offspring Hugh, Walter and Ada. When he fell for Peggy McCulloch, the daughter of a new Scottish settler, Ada was affronted by Jacob’s ignorance of her affections, and turned sullen. Forgotten in the euphoria of their success in helping to pioneer settlement near the headwaters of the Condamine River inland from Brisbane Town, Ada’s broken heart became toxic.
As the fledgling colony in the Antipodes began to find its feet in 1836, the Scottish Australian Shipping Company sent twenty-one year old Isaac Samuels to Sydney Town, already romantically attached with fellow traveller, Lottie Bowers, daughter of a colonel of a regiment at foot. Letters of introduction soon lead to an appointment in the office of the incoming Governor Gipps, just as French settlers began to covert the remote parts of the Colony of New South Wales such as New Zealand. The English Parliament’s response was swift, despatching Captain Hobson in 1840 to consolidate British sovereignty by a treaty with the Māori. Assigned by Governor Gipps to Hobson’s clerical team, the newly married Isaac soon learnt that a token treaty ceremony at Waitangi might have deterred the French, but thereafter embroiled the fledgling colony in violent struggle between Māori desperate to cling to their traditional lands, settlers too eager to colonise and missionaries too eager to spread their faith. With little in the way of military assistance, war was inevitable.
Equally distracted by the daily harsh challenges of forging a new life on the land for his family, Jacob did not see Lester coming …