Soldier and secret agent during the latter part of the Napoleonic wars when Wellington and the British army were endeavouring to force the French back out of Spain. He was handsome, charming and lover of many women, but saddled with a wife he neither loved nor wanted. Nicholas de Bresancourt, Duc de Valenciennes, was a complex man of many talents, but also a tormented one. Memories of his horrific experiences as a small boy in France before he escaped from the Revolution continued to haunt him.
Book Five and Conclusion: England1816
He was still not totally healed from his injuries received at Waterloo, but he'd looked death in the face and miraculously survived. Bonaparte is no longer a threat so Nicky and the wider Granville family were looking forward to a happy and peaceful future. Except... Miles Ashcroft was worried. The spymaster knew Frederick Bernheim had also survived and was out there, somewhere, possibly now in England. Deranged and obsessed with revenge against Nicky, The Shadow, and the people who were responsible for his father's death twenty-five years before. A death, he claimed, that had changed the course of his life.
As Ashcroft had feared, a fiendish plot and trap was sprung and everyone was caught up in it. A terrifying, nightmarish scenario that could only have been conceived by someone as crazed as Bernheim. Even Ashcroft, Ricky Ambrose and Jack had been sucked in, and some of the family's retainers and servants, but they hadn't hesitated to help, even at risk of their own lives. Can the family survive? Will they all meet a grisly fate or can the rescue party save everyone in time? And if they do come out of it alive, at what cost will it be to all involved? Facing a pack of starving lions would traumatise most people, and when someone literally looks death in the face, it tends to make them reassess their life... their past and their future... but sometimes the trauma can have a much deeper impact...