Never Such Innocence

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‘You are an Askham and we Askhams are people with character who can endure all manner of things’. The year is 1898; the city is Cairo – light-hearted, cosmopolitan, prosperous and secure after years of enforced British rule. To Cairo comes the haughty Lady Askham, with her daughters Flora and Melanie, to inspect Harry Lighterman, a lieutenant in the Lancers and friend of her younger son Bosco. Harry has asked for Melanie’s hand in marriage. The Lightermans are not at all the kind of family the proud and wealthy Askhams are accustomed to marrying into, Harry’s father being a member of the ‘shopocracy’, the newly ennobled aristocracy whose fortunes are based on trade. However, Harry appears successfully to have overcome the disadvantages, in Askham eyes, of his origins. The marriage is approved and takes place hurriedly, as the Lancers are due to join the forces gathering at Omdurman, fifteen hundred miles further south and a two weeks’ journey away. But even before Omdurman, which heralds much of the misfortune that subsequently overtakes the Askham family, disaster strikes. Melanie is disenchanted with her new husband after a honeymoon on the Nile, and Lady Askham becomes the unwitting victim of blackmail because of her apparently innocent involvement with a young cavalry officer during an expedition to the desert. Lady Askham is forced to return to England to avoid disgrace, and her son Bosco, as he travels south to join the troops, vows vengeance. The way he achieves this revenge and the subsequent intrigues which follow the Askham family back to England and well into the next century form the nucleus of this engrossing novel which takes place in Egypt, the Sudan, the United States and England during the years 1898 to 1915.