"Sold!" wept Mary Anne on her deathbed. "Sold for a bottle of rum!" "Love him," her mother had said. "Loving is not always easy. It will mean caring for him, cooking and cleaning for him -- and bearing his children. But it is a hard man indeed, who can resist consistent love for ever." It had all begun in peaceful Hertfordshire. But boredom, recklessness, his swashbuckling life in the army of the East India Company - had changed all that. Then had befallen a chance encounter in far away New South Wales - an enslavement to rum - and an overseer's words "The establishment looks more favourably on married men. More chance of a pardon. And possibly of a grant of land." Gentle Mary Anne becomes an unwitting player in this heart gripping story of life as it was in the penal colony of New South Wales in the mid nineteenth century. MARY ANNE - a compelling story with an imperative that drives the reader to the last page.