It was like walking in a dream.

All around him, history paintings, landscapes, allegories, portraits hung one next to the other like puzzle pieces until every space, floor to ceiling, was covered.

Jack wandered through the exhibition room of the Royal Academy of Art, gazing at the incredible variety, the skill, the beauty of the works. He could not believe he was here.

His regiment had been called back to England a year ago. Napoleon had abdicated, and the army had no immediate need for his services. Jack, like most of the young officers who'd lived through the war, had risen in rank. He'd been promoted to lieutenant, which gave him a bit more money when he went on half-pay. This gave him the opportunity to do what he yearned to do, needed to do. To draw. To paint. To create beauty and forget death and destruction.

Jack had gone directly to Bath, to the home of his mother and sister, the town where his mentor, Sir Cecil Harper, also lived. Sir Cecil had fostered Jack's need to draw ever since he'd been a boy and he became Jack's tutor again. Somehow the war had not robbed Jack of the ability to paint. At Sir Cecil's insistence, he submitted his paintings to the Royal Academy for its summer exhibition. Miraculously the Royal Academy accepted two of them.

They now hung here on the walls of Somerset House, home of the Royal Academy, next to the likes of Lawrence and Fuseli and Turner, in a room crowded with spectators who had not yet left the city for the summer.

Crowds disquieted Jack. The rumble of voices sounded in his ears like distant cannonade and set off memories that threatened to propel him back into the nightmare of war.

A gentleman brushed against him, and Jack almost swu