…shire, South West England, 1775
The Reverend Tobias Whitmore was perplexed.
Not that this was a particularly unusual state of affairs for him, he mused, as his relatively short life seemed to be lived in a condition of relative confusion.
As the youngest son of a minor branch of a noble family with pretensions to faded gentility, he was always destined for the church from birth. This had nothing to do with his scholarly or religious inclinations, merely the state of his family’s finances. Bluntly, there was no money to afford any of the sons the leisurely life of a country gentleman, let alone for the last in line, so some sort of socially respectable means of livelihood was essential.
His oldest brother, Edward, would inherit the house and lands, and so spend his lifetime in a state
