A man who stole another's name must now risk everything to keep the woman who knows him by it.
Lieutenant Jonathan Brent has come home at last. With a letter from Admiral Timmons buttoned beneath his coat that promises him a posting of his own choosing, he steps ashore at the London docks. He has one thought in his head: Emily Flowers, the Cheapside bookseller who has waited two years for him through every silence the service could impose.
He finds her shop in ruin. A great storm has torn the roof from it, ruined her trade, and driven Emily into the country to her uncle, Admiral Flowers. By the time Brent presents himself at the great house off St James's, she is already gone further still. She has sailed for Jamaica, three thousand miles of ocean away, to begin a new life with her cousin near Kingston. She has left him a letter. The letter ends, My love for you is forever.
So begins a chase across the Atlantic that will test Brent more cruelly than the four years of slavery he has already survived. A captain who does not want him aboard. A French thirty-six lying in wait north of Anegada. The Sargasso weed. A holed hull, a captured deck, and a desperate retaking in the tail of a storm. A foundering frigate, an open boat, and a tropic sun that does not forgive. Through it all, the steady purpose of a man who has set his course for one harbour and one woman, and who means to make it or die in the trying.
Behind him lies a secret he has carried since the streets of London sold him to the King's service as a boy. Ahead lies the chance, if he can but reach it, to lay that secret down at last in the keeping of the only person to whom it matters.
The sea has taken much from Jonathan Brent. It is not yet done with him. And he is not yet done with it.
