The Editor

Chapter 9

Suddenly the room felt stuffy. Perhaps the fire was burning too high. Sophia realised she had been sitting at her writing desk since breakfast idly shifting papers from one pile to another. She must not let thoughts like this reel in her head. She was accomplishing nothing. Nothing. She must get to work. But the more she read and the more she talked to people about Tom, the more overwhelmed she felt. It was like putting together a fractured picture, and sometimes she was in the shards and sometimes she was nowhere at all. …

… Bencoolen was just ‘a thorn in the side of the Dutch’ as Peter Auber had said. Bencoolen was nothing to the Company. Nothing. Four of her children and her brother were buried there. She and Tom had lost everything when their ship taking them back home caught fire and sank there. The Company used people as pawns in their political games. It did not care about the terrible personal sacrifices people made. That wives made.