Book Blurb:
"A rip-roaring tale, based on real characters and events, and introducing a fabulous dual heritage hero for our times." Saul David, author of Hart of Empire
West Indies, 1796.
Alexander Charteris - the mixed-race son of an aristocratic planter and a slave mother - is raised as a gentleman amidst the country houses and London drawing rooms of Georgian England. Tricked out of his inheritance by his cousin Pemberton - Chart is kidnapped and transported to the island of Grenada where he endures the hell of slavery on a sugar plantation.
When Pemberton arrives at the plantation, accompanied by Chart’s former lover, Lady Arabella, he orders Chart’s torture and execution.
A slave revolt ensues, before the order can be carried out. Chart initially joins the revolutionaries but is sentenced to death for refusing to take part in a massacre of British colonists. Aided by the beautiful daughter of the rebel general, Julian Fédon, Chart escapes.
He is recruited into a new British unit called the Loyal Black Rangers and promised freedom if he fights against the French.
Chart confronts conflicting loyalties as he leads his men in vicious bush-fighting. He rises through the ranks and plays a pivotal role in the bloody battle that crushes the rebellion.
But the soldier must confront one more enemy, that of his treacherous cousin, before he can find peace.
Timothy Ashby is the author of the Seth Armitage historical mystery series and Time Fall. He is also the author of the non-fiction titles Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby (1536-1593) and The Bear in the Back Yard: Moscow´s Caribbean Strategy. He lives in Mallorca.
Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/rangerstormofwar
Author Bio:
I explore the nuances of history through fiction and non-fiction. Visit my web site at www.timashbybooks.com.
I've always had a passion for history … and adventure. My formative years were spent on the Caribbean island of Grenada, where I rarely attended school, spending my days indulging in archaeology, sailing, diving and exploring. I spent my 21st birthday partying at the British Army’s Jungle Warfare Training camp – “Hummingbird Cottage” in Belize, and later I held a Top Secret security clearance while working throughout Latin America and the Caribbean on counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations with the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
To the surprise of family and friends (not to mention myself), I eventually added the alphabet soup of PhD, JD and MBA after my name, became a senior official in the US government, and spent the following years as an international lawyer and entrepreneur, during which time I rose early and spent weekends to indulge another passion - writing. During that time, I published four books and over 100 articles including scholarly pieces on Caribbean colonial history - “Fedon’s Rebellion” (Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 1984) [link] -and Scottish history - “Walsingham and the Witch: England´s Failed Attempt to Pacify King James VI” (History Scotland, August-September 2021) [link]. I also wrote for the Harvard International Review, The New York Times, US Naval Institute Proceedings and the RUSI Journal.
I'm now devoting 100 percent of my time to building my literary career. My narrative non-fiction biography, Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby (1536-1593) will be released in hardback on 30 March 2022 by Scotland Street Press, Edinburgh (www.scotlandstreetpress.com). I have just completed The King´s Black Ranger, an Action/Adventure novel set in the 18th century featuring a mixed-raced hero who overcomes overwhelming obstacles to succeed as a British military officer - think of a black "Sharpe" a la Bernard Cornwell´s famous series. The King's Back Ranger will be published in early 2022 by Sharpe Books (www.sharpebooks.com), along with re-issues of my Seth Armitage thrillers Devil´s Den and In Shadowland.
Editorial Review
'Ranger - Storm of War' by Timothy Ashby is an exciting and compelling read from start to finish. The book is packed full of incident and is crammed with characters and events from the last two decades of the eighteenth century and makes frequent reference to individuals and events of the time. This is a book that may be enjoyed equally before a roaring fire in midwinter or in the garden on a fine summer's day. It is pointless to single out any particular individual or event to illustrate this point and, equally, to present in a review a blow-by-blow account of the fast-moving events in the extremely troubled and complicated life and times of the hero of the book; an early life that is never dull or uneventful. It is a rare pleasure for any reviewer to announce that there is never a dull moment.
Alexander Maynell Charteris, or 'Chart' as he comes to be known, is the mixed-blood only child of Arthur Charteris, the son of a minor Leicestershire Baronet and a woman called Weju, a young slave of noble lineage and endowed with skills in healing and medicine and reputed to possess supernatural skills. He is born on the West Indian island of Grenada in 1774, where his father has gone to oversee and administer a sugar cane plantation, a possession of the family. His mother dies of a fever shortly after his birth. On her deathbed, Weju makes a prophecy and exacts a promise from Chart's father: ''He will have much pain and sorrow, but he will survive and become a great warrior like his grandfather. [Weju's father] Promise me you will raise him as a true son and place no others above him.'' The prophecy will come true and the promise is honoured.
When Chart is very young, the news of the death of his paternal grandfather in England causes his father to make the decision to leave his plantation and the island of Grenada and return home to his mother and to administer his inherited English estate. They travel with two slave servants, neither of whom will survive their experiences in England. Prior to their departure, Arthur contemplates his beloved son's future:
.....''He heard childish laughter on the lawn outside his office. Arthur saw Chart happily playing with slave children who were still too young to be put to work. He watched the five year old, skin the colour of fine Muscovado sugar highlighted by miniature white linen breeches and smock, curly black hair cascading to his shoulders like his Garifuna relatives. ''Already a handsome lad,'' he mused. ''What kind of life do I want for him? What would his future be here?'' The boy had a quick mind which deserved the type of civilised nurturing that could only be found in Europe.''
Dorothea, Chart's maternal grandmother, is both distressed by both his physical appearance [she refers to him as a 'blackamoor' and her 'little Midnight Shade''], but loves and dotes upon her little grandson with the striking blue eyes. He is family and he will be properly treated and given all the privileges and education as befits the son of a Baronet. Thus is his childhood and early youth shaped; a fine physical and intellectual education tinged with an innate prejudice provoked by his blood and lineage. Lady Dorothea has a constant concern and preoccupation. Arthur is single and in the eyes of polite society young Chart is both black and illegitimate. Lady Dorothea has a second son, William. He is a wastrel and a gambling-obsessed spendthrift. Her major fear is that if Arthur dies without a legitimate heir then the entire Estate - the Leicestershire family seat, the London townhouse and the sugar cane Plantation called' la Sagesse' - all would revert to the younger son and would be squandered within a year! And William has a legitimate son, Pemberton, commonly known to all as 'Pemb'.
Timothy Ashby has clearly scoured Central Casting for an Arch Villain and has spectacularly come up with his character Pemb! To describe him as a cad and a bounder is to show Pemb no respect. He is unalloyed evil and unpleasantness personified and he will dog his cousin's steps for the entire remainder of the book. There is no act of malice, viciousness and pure evil to which he will not stoop, as evinced by his subsequent behaviour. Think of a pantomime villain from the classics of English literature and you will have a broad image and idea of 'Pemb'. We first encounter him at Christmas 1797, when he has been invited to stay after his father's untimely demise in a duel. Wishing to care for his nephew, Arthur invites him to stay at Knossington Hall. Chart is thirteen and Pemb is fifteen. Shortly Chart will join his cousin at Westminster School. First impressions do of course tend to linger:
''His whey face was round and pimpled, brown eyes resentful, ginger hair tightly clubbed. Arthur noted that while one of the boy's shoulders was higher than the other, Pemb was not the hunchback tattled by Lady Dorothea. With pity, he saw that the young man's coat and waistcoat were shabby, the pleated white stock at his neck yellowish and his stockings raddled.....''
From the very start, Pemb reveals himself to be truly poisonous! He sneers at everything and roams the House making a mental inventory of the worth and value of every object. He is rude to the servants and has truly atrocious table manners. He invades Arthur's well-stocked library and is caught leafing through his diary and attempts to purloin a firearm. Unforgivably, he proves to be scared of horses. Chart, naturally enough, is a gifted rider and, following a fall, Arthur is horrified to overhear Pemb calling his son a 'f*** dirty blackamoor.'' The nadir of the boy's Christmas visit is when the family return from a festive visit they discover that he has violently raped a young maid. The rapist is summarily dismissed from the House in disgrace. This is a major cause of Lady Dorothea's decline and eventual death. The next encounter of the two cousins, whilst the intellectual and bookish Arthur immerses himself in radical politics and activity on behalf of the Abolitionist anti-slavery movement, is when they meet at Westminster School. Arthur is justifiably anxious for his son, who will attend school as a 'day boy' as opposed to a 'boarder' and will be with him at his London house in Chesterfield Street:
''While a comparatively large number of Black, Indian and mixed race persons lived in London, Arthur knew that prejudice was rife and that this would especially be the case at a Public School such as Westminster was so pervasive that even Scots and Irish were considered outsiders......Arthur fretted that there was no proper way to prepare his son; he hoped that he had the fortitude to rise above what was to come.....''
And, sure enough, poor Chart is about to be initiated into the full spectrum of deeply held English racism and prejudice - the very personification of which is Pemb and his cronies. Those who have read 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' by Thomas Hughes will already be well aware of the major tropes employed to describe unpleasantness within the English Public School System. It is fair to say that Timothy Ashby's Westminster is by far the more accurate description of the two and makes the Rugby School of Thomas Hughes look somewhat like a Holiday Camp! Chart is bullied, flogged, humiliated and generally abused from the very start, by the system in general and by Pemb [whose school fees are being paid by his Uncle] and his cronies in particular. He does make one good friend and ally who will stand him in good stead in years to come. This is 'the Head of House' , the very aristocratic Lord Hugh Drummond. At one point Chart is waylaid and savagely beaten and left for dead by Pemb and his gang. Upon his recovery, Drummond introduces him to an acquaintance of his, the American and former slave black pugilist, Bill Richmond, who teaches him how to fight. In a challenge to Pemb and his cronies, Chart fights and beats them all. Pemb is dismissed from the School for 'ungentlemanly conduct' [he throws pepper in Chart's eyes during his fight]. and Chart's father refuses to continue to pay his school fees. Pemb, in fact, will return further to blight Chart's life in a truly fiendish manner. Chart is encouraged to take part in his father's humane and rational intellectual pursuits and attend his drawing room gatherings; in the course of which he meets the Dowager Countess of Rochester, Augusta. At this juncture in the book there is an air of a 'Regency Romp' in the fine well-established mould of Henry Fielding's 'Tom Jones' of a few decades earlier as Chart furthers his education at the tender age of fifteen:
''The moment that the Countess set eyes on Chart she decided to seduce him. She thought he was a remarkably handsome young man. He had his father's refined and aquiline features, and the sapphire blue eyes seemed brighter in a face which had been darkened deeper by his rowing on the Thames...... Chart was reticent, trying to keep his eyes from straying to Augusta's low decolletage......like most boys of his age, he had fantasised about her, imagining the lush body beneath her gown whilst indulging in what the school Chaplain called the sin of Onan........When she judged that he was at the peak of excitement, and not wishing the pistol to be discharged too early, she rose, took him by the hand and led him into her bedchamber.....''
Chart concludes his unhappy education at Westminster and his father reluctantly fulfils the wish of his late mother Dorothea to secure a career for the boy in the less prejudiced East India Company and service in India. His interview is a resounding success, which he passes with flying colours and he receives a commission. To celebrate both this and his sixteenth birthday. Arthur calls upon the organisational skills and flair of Chart's lover and close friend Lady Augusta and it is on this fateful occasion that he first encounters the slightly younger and truly impoverished Honourable Arabella Sherrard. In this young and rather plain girl destined for a tragic future, in her wit and passion for horses, Chart finds his true love and, indeed, his eventual salvation. In the event, Chart's violent and blood-soaked career in India is brought to an abrupt halt when he receives tragic news from home. His beloved father has been murdered by footpads and he must return to order his affairs. It is this single event, and the re-emergence of the malicious Pemb, that changes Chart's life forever! Upon his return, he discovers that he has been disinherited of his entire estate and declared the runaway slave and property of Sir Pemberton Charteris and is promptly cast into one of the nastiest gaols that the eighteenth century [and the eighteenth century certainly proudly provided a fine and wide selection of these] can offer. He smuggles a letter to Augusta and the redoubtable Countess spirits him out and shelters him while he fights his case in the Courts and becomes a 'cause celebre'. To no avail, alas, for he loses his case and shortly after is captured by the villain of the piece. He ends up in chains, and bound for the slave plantation on the Charteris estate on Grenada. And it is here, and with his many toils and appalling suffering, that the remainder of this excellent book concerns itself.
Chart's experiences as a slave makes for grim reading. Here is a description typical of the fate of the average runaway slave upon recapture:
...''They were marched back to 'La Sagesse' [the plantation of the Charteris family] where each received thirty lashes from the mulatto drivers then put in the stocks - called 'bilboes - outside the boiling house. They were gagged, rubbed with molasses and exposed naked to the flies during daytime and the mosquitoes at night for twenty four hours. While they were in the bilboes each had an ear sliced off and their cheeks and shoulders branded 'LS' to show they were the property of the La Sagesse estate. After their release they were immediately sent back to work without recuperation....''
The slave owners had to constantly juggle and balance the need to punish and oppress against the loss of valuable livestock; an experience Chart experiences frequently, and his suffering increases when his arch nemesis arrives on the Estate, with a very ill and oppressed Arabella in tow. She is suffering from a life-shortening illness contracted from her philandering husband; there being, naturally, no foul deed of which he is not capable. Chart witnesses cruel and savage punishments, ending often in death. He has a daily mantra: ''Endure. Stay alive and be strong. My time will come.'' And, in the months ahead, this will prove to be the case, for the principles of the French Revolution arrive on the island of Grenada, and nothing will ever be the same again. This is a period of chaos, mass destruction and massacre. Chart is an increasingly prominent figure in subsequent events, first as an absconding slave and then, reunited with his friend from his schooldays, Lord Hugh Drummond, as a key player in events on an island that will be forever transformed by the experience.
''Ranger'' is an extraordinary book! The reader is presented with an exciting story of a youth inhabiting two worlds due to his mixed blood; the ultra-privileged High Society of the English Aristocracy and the oppressed and downtrodden life of a plantation slave. Intensely readable, it is not a first choice for the squeamish, but is a page-turning and thrilling epic adventure and packed with fascinating details, often casually referred to, of individuals and events. For the military buffs in the readership, there is also a wealth of military minutiae. Out of its pages there emerges a figure that is strongly in the mould of Bernard Cornwall's Sharpe, and there is no doubt that he will appear in further adventures.
*****
“Ranger: Storm of War” by Timothy Ashby receives five stars and the “Highly Recommended” award of excellence from the Historical Fiction Company.
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