After the Church of Dagon and the Dark Confederacy, I thought it was about time that I introduced some characters who might, with a considerable amount of generosity, be described as the good guys of Dracula’s America. Of course, good and evil are rather flexible concepts in a world ruled by Dracula, populated by the walking dead and littered with secret societies pursuing their own supernatural ambitions, so perhaps it is safer to say that the Salem Sisterhood are at least fighting on the right side most of the time. My new posse is built around the three witches required to form a Salem Coven, the Maiden, Mother and Crone, together with the Guardian who has sworn to protect them, and I wanted them to have an identity that distinguished them immediately from the rather more conventionally sinister inhabitants of my growing Dracula’s America collection.

That identity became The Crimson Coven of Salem. Rather than dressing the three witches in the traditional black so readily associated with witchcraft and mourning, I decided to paint them in a deep Khorne Red, and the colour quickly suggested a story of its own. Within the Coven, crimson is worn deliberately as a remembrance of the blood shed during the Salem persecutions and of those who suffered because accusation, fear and superstition proved more powerful than reason or justice. It is also a declaration that these witches have no intention of hiding themselves beneath the black robes expected of them, for Abigail Hawthorne, Mercy Blackwood and Temperance Crowe belong to a generation prepared to confront the supernatural horrors of Dracula’s America openly rather than disappear quietly into its shadows.

The three women who form the Crimson Coven could scarcely be more different, although that difference is central to what makes them effective together. Abigail Hawthorne, the Crone, carries the accumulated experience and caution of the Coven and has learned how to turn fortune against those who threaten it. Mercy Blackwood, the Mother, stands at its centre as protector and practical conscience, using her abilities to shield the others while attempting to restrain the more adventurous instincts of her younger companion. Temperance Crowe, the Maiden, represents curiosity and possibility, possessing considerably more enthusiasm for discovering the limits of witchcraft than either Abigail or Mercy considers entirely sensible. Each begins with only a small measure of supernatural knowledge, but together their different abilities and personalities make the Coven considerably more formidable than any one of them would be alone.

Standing beside them is Elias Ward, the Guardian, whose presence has nothing to do with enchantment or supernatural coercion. His family carries its own uncomfortable connection with the Salem persecutions, but Elias does not protect the witches because he believes himself personally responsible for the actions of a long dead ancestor. He does so because he believes in their cause and because the possibility that his own daughter may one day display supernatural abilities has made the struggle intensely personal. When danger threatens the Coven, Elias is therefore prepared to put himself between the Sisters and whatever is coming their way, whether that happens to be a charging monster, an enemy gunman or something considerably less easily explained.

Together they are The Crimson Coven of Salem, three witches and their Guardian travelling through an America in which the distinction between monster and hero has become increasingly difficult to identify. They may not always be good in the conventional sense, and their methods are unlikely to satisfy everyone they encounter, but compared with Dracula, the Dark Confederacy and the devotees of Dagon, they are at least making a respectable attempt.

The Salem Sisterhood are an ancient society of white witches whose presence in America dates back to the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers. Hidden among the early colonists was a coven of female Arcanists drawn from particular hereditary bloodlines. While the women wielded magic, trusted male relatives served as their Guardians, protecting the witches from both supernatural enemies and the persecution of ordinary people.

The Posse

Despite being feared and hunted as witches, the Sisterhood remained loyal to its original purpose: protecting humanity, preserving the natural balance of Arcane power and guarding dangerous relics that must never fall into the wrong hands. Of particular importance is something known only as Washington’s Secret, which generations of the Sisterhood have sworn to protect. The published material deliberately leaves the precise nature of this secret unexplained, making it an excellent basis for campaigns and individual posse histories.

By 1875, Dracula has seized control of the United States and declared himself President for life. His rule has disturbed the Arcane balance and encouraged vampires, cultists, necromancers and other occult powers to emerge throughout the country. The Sisterhood can no longer remain hidden. Small covens now travel into the American West and the Deep South, recovering forbidden relics, opposing those who misuse magic and preventing rival supernatural factions from gaining still greater power.

The Gunslingers

A Salem Sisterhood posse is centred upon three witches representing the traditional stages of womanhood:

• The Maiden, generally the youngest and most impulsive member of the coven
• The Mother, the mature guiding presence who holds the coven together
• The Crone, the eldest and most knowledgeable keeper of its secrets
• The Guardian, a trusted male relative sworn to defend the three witches

They are accompanied by ordinary gunfighters, retainers and family members who may know something of the Sisterhood’s true purpose, although they probably understand very little of its oldest mysteries. Individually the witches are vulnerable, but when the three work together their command of Arcane power increases enormously.

The Coven

In essence, the Salem Sisterhood are not servants of Dracula and they are not wicked witches seeking personal power. They are secretive protectors of humanity who believe that magic must remain balanced and that certain knowledge is too dangerous to be freely used. This naturally places them in opposition to Dracula’s Red Hand Coven, the necromancers of the Dark Confederacy and, particularly, the Church of Dagon, whose efforts to summon ancient powers threaten everything the Sisterhood has protected since colonial times.

The Guardian

They are a logical next choice especially given their close geographical proximity to the centre of the Church of Dagon’s power in Innsmouth.

There had been a time when the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment was a proud formation, its horses well fed, its uniforms respectable and its ranks filled with men who believed that the war would be decided long before either they or their mounts had worn out. Those days disappeared quickly. Campaign followed campaign, horses were killed or simply collapsed from exhaustion, uniforms became increasingly ragged, replacements became harder to find and the confident young volunteers who had first ridden beneath the regimental colours were gradually replaced by hardened veterans who had learned that cavalry warfare consisted as much of hunger, mud, exhaustion and sudden death as glorious charges across open fields.

Among the officers who came to define the regiment was Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair, a member of the old Virginia aristocracy whose family seat at Blackthorn Hall had produced generations of men accustomed to believing that leadership was both their duty and their natural right. Augustus possessed the pride expected of his class, but he also possessed considerable courage and a stubborn loyalty towards the men under his command. Whatever hardships the 27th endured, its colonel endured alongside it, and over the course of the war the relationship between Augustus and his surviving troopers became less that of an aristocratic officer commanding volunteers and more that of a veteran leading men who had followed him through too much bloodshed to consider serving under anyone else.

Always close behind the colonel rode Sergeant Elijah Pembroke, bearer of the regimental guidon. Pembroke had come to regard the colours as something almost sacred, not because of the cloth itself but because of everything it represented. Men looked towards the guidon when smoke and dust concealed their officers, rallied upon it when formations became confused and followed it into places that common sense suggested sensible men should avoid. Every tear and stain accumulated during the regiment’s campaigns became another part of its history, and Pembroke guarded the colours with the same determination with which another man might have protected his own family.

As the war turned against the Confederacy, the 27th suffered the same slow destruction experienced by so many other cavalry formations. Its strength dwindled, remounts became increasingly difficult to obtain and equipment that would once have been discarded was repaired repeatedly because there was nothing available to replace it. The surviving troopers became known as the Ragged Veterans, men whose appearance suggested that the war had already defeated them but whose continued willingness to fight demonstrated otherwise. They followed Augustus because he had never abandoned them, and because after years of campaigning the regiment had become as much their home as anywhere to which they might eventually return.

By the final months of the Confederacy, the 27th existed more in spirit than in numbers. Its scattered remnants continued operating wherever they were required, often with little support and fewer supplies, while Augustus stubbornly refused to accept that the cause was already lost. The end came when Union cavalry threatened the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee and Augustus found himself with only a handful of his remaining troopers immediately available. There was no time to gather the scattered survivors of the regiment and no guarantee that anyone else could intervene before the Federal horsemen reached their objective, so Augustus decided to do what he and the 27th had done throughout the war. He would attack.

Six men prepared to ride.

Sergeant Pembroke moved automatically into his accustomed place with the guidon, expecting to follow Augustus as he had followed him so many times before, but the colonel ordered him out of the line. Pembroke protested, arguing that if this was to be the final charge of the 27th then its colours belonged with the regiment, yet Augustus refused to reconsider. He understood what Pembroke perhaps could not accept at that moment. Men could be killed and a regiment destroyed, but if the colours survived then something of the regiment survived with them. Augustus therefore gave Pembroke what would become his final order of the war: preserve the guidon and ensure that it never fell into enemy hands.

Pembroke obeyed, and regretted his obedience for the rest of his life.

Augustus and five troopers charged the Union cavalry threatening Lee’s headquarters, striking them with such violence and determination that the Federal horsemen were driven back. For a few extraordinary minutes the handful of exhausted Virginians achieved what should have been impossible, and Pembroke watched from a distance as the enemy withdrew before the remnants of his regiment. Then Augustus made the decision that finally destroyed them. Carried forward by success, the Virginians pursued the retreating cavalry and rode directly into the path of a Union artillery battery.

The guns ended the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment.

Pembroke carried the guidon away as ordered, concealing it during the final collapse of the Confederacy and refusing afterwards to surrender it to anyone. He returned home with the banner carefully wrapped among his possessions and placed it inside a wooden chest where it remained hidden for years. To others it was a relic of a defeated cause and a war that had already consumed far too much, but to Pembroke it remained the last surviving piece of the regiment he had served. He had fulfilled Augustus’s final command perfectly, yet he regarded that obedience as his greatest failure because the colours of the 27th had not accompanied its colonel and troopers into their final battle.

Not every member of the regiment had been destroyed in that charge. Scattered survivors returned to ruined farms, impoverished families and communities transformed by war, carrying with them wounds and memories that proved considerably harder to discard than their uniforms. Some attempted to rebuild their lives, while others discovered that four years of violence had prepared them poorly for peace. The 27th ceased to exist as a military formation, but among its former members the regiment remained a powerful memory, and stories of Augustus Saint Clair and the final charge gradually became part of its legend.

For Augustus, however, death proved less permanent than anyone had expected.

Years later, at Blackthorn Hall, his cousin Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair began gathering the forces that would form his Dark Confederacy. Lucien required men capable of fighting the horrors that now stalked America, but he also possessed resources considerably darker than ordinary recruiting methods. The dead of the Saint Clair family had been resting beneath Virginia soil for generations, and Lucien saw little reason why death should prevent useful relatives from continuing to serve the family.

Among those he called back was Augustus.

The colonel who rose from the grave was no mindless corpse. Death had changed him, but it had not removed the qualities that had defined him in life, and foremost among these was his sense of duty towards the regiment he had commanded. Augustus had died with the 27th around him and, upon returning, discovered that fragments of that regiment still survived. Some of his former troopers had grown old, others had become hardened wanderers and gunmen, while still others could themselves be returned from graves that had seemed permanent. Slowly the remnants of the old cavalry regiment began to gather around Blackthorn Hall.

The Ragged Veterans answered first, drawn back towards the officer they had followed through the war and into its final disastrous months. They were no longer the young cavalrymen who had originally ridden beneath the regimental colours, but neither were they strangers to hardship, violence or causes that sensible men might have abandoned. Augustus offered them something that peace had never quite provided: the return of the regiment that had once given their lives purpose.

Yet something was missing.

The 27th Virginia Cavalry could have its colonel, its veterans and even some of its dead returned to service, but Augustus knew that without its colours the regiment remained incomplete. He remembered the order he had given before the final charge and knew that if Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had survived the war, then the guidon had survived with him.

Augustus went looking for both.

Pembroke had grown old while guarding the banner entrusted to him. For years he had kept it hidden inside the wooden chest, occasionally removing the fragile cloth to inspect it before carefully folding it away again. His family had learned not to question the ritual, although few understood that Pembroke still considered himself bound by an order issued on a battlefield many years before. Augustus had told him that the enemy must never possess the colours, and until someone released him from that duty he remained, at least in his own mind, the guidon bearer of the 27th Virginia Cavalry.

When the knock finally came at his door, Pembroke opened it to find his dead colonel standing on the porch.

Age had changed the sergeant and death had changed Augustus, but recognition was immediate. Pembroke saw the remnants of the uniform, the familiar bearing and the unmistakable authority of the man he had followed through years of war, while Augustus saw before him the soldier he had deliberately excluded from the final charge. Whatever explanations might have been offered were unnecessary. Pembroke straightened his ageing body and saluted his colonel, and after Augustus returned the gesture the old soldier walked to the chest he had guarded for so many years.

The battered guidon emerged faded, torn and fragile, but it had survived exactly as Augustus had commanded.

Pembroke had completed his duty.

More importantly, he now understood that his duty was not over.

The regiment had returned.

The 27th Virginia Cavalry that gathered at Blackthorn Hall was not the regiment that had first ridden to war. Its ranks were filled with ageing veterans, desperate gunmen and men who had already experienced death once and appeared remarkably willing to risk it again. At their head rode a colonel who had been killed by Union artillery years before, while behind him an old sergeant once again carried the battered colours he had protected for most of his life. They were an impossible remnant of another age, held together by loyalty, memory and the dark power that had reached beneath the Virginia soil and disturbed men who should have remained there.

When Augustus finally assembled his restored command in the grounds of Blackthorn Hall, Pembroke unfurled the old guidon and the names were called once more.

Behind them stood those members of the Saint Clair family whom Lucien had raised from their graves, Revenants from another generation who now found themselves serving beside the remnants of Augustus’s old command. They had never ridden with the 27th during the war, but blood, death and Lucien’s necromancy had made them part of the strange force gathering beneath its battered colours.

For Sergeant Elijah Pembroke, however, none of this seemed particularly complicated. The colonel was once again at the head of the column, the veterans were back in the ranks and the guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry was where it belonged.

Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair had returned.

The colours had returned.

And the 27th Virginia Cavalry was riding again.

Another project, which surprise surprise ended up going down several rabbit burrows, is now finished. “Forward Yo” to the next posse!

By the final months of the war, Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had carried the guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry through enough fighting to understand that a regimental banner was far more than a piece of cloth attached to a wooden staff. Men looked towards it when smoke and dust obscured their officers, rallied around it when formations began to break apart, and followed it when shouted orders could no longer be heard above musketry, artillery and the confusion of mounted combat. To Pembroke, the guidon had gradually become the physical embodiment of the regiment itself, carrying with it the memory of those who had ridden beneath it and the honour of those who had fallen defending it.

Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair understood its importance equally well. By this stage of the war the 27th had been reduced from the proud cavalry regiment that had first ridden into battle to a battered collection of exhausted veterans, many mounted on horses almost as worn down as their riders and carrying weapons that had been repaired and reused far beyond anything their makers had intended. The guidon, however, remained with them, faded by weather, torn by battle and stained by years of campaigning, but still visible whenever Augustus led what remained of his regiment into action. Close behind him rode Pembroke, holding the colours high and regarding their protection as the most important duty that could be entrusted to him.

That changed on the day of the regiment’s final charge, when Union cavalry threatened the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee and Augustus gathered the handful of men immediately available to him. There was neither time to seek reinforcements nor much opportunity to consider the likelihood of success, and Augustus decided that the only possible response was an immediate mounted attack. Pembroke moved automatically into his accustomed position behind the colonel, lowered the guidon into the position he had assumed so many times before and prepared to ride with the others.

Augustus ordered him out of the line.

For perhaps the only time during their years of service together, Pembroke openly challenged an order from his colonel, insisting that if the 27th Virginia Cavalry was going forward then its colours belonged at the head of the charge. Augustus refused to reconsider, telling him that the regiment might be destroyed in the coming fight but its banner would not be captured with it. Pembroke was ordered to withdraw with the guidon, preserve it whatever happened and ensure that no Federal soldier ever laid his hands upon the colours of the 27th Virginia Cavalry.

It was an order that Pembroke would spend the remainder of his life wishing he had disobeyed.

From a distance he watched Augustus and five of the regiment’s remaining cavalrymen charge the Union horsemen threatening Lee’s headquarters, their tiny formation disappearing momentarily amid dust, smoke and frightened horses before smashing into the Federal cavalry with enough violence to drive them back. Against every reasonable expectation the attack succeeded, and for a few glorious minutes Pembroke could almost imagine that the old 27th had returned, sweeping everything before it as it had done in better days. He gripped the guidon tightly as he watched his comrades pursue the retreating enemy, torn between obedience to his colonel’s final order and an almost overwhelming desire to ride after them.

Then came the artillery fire.

Augustus and his handful of Virginians, carried forward by the momentum of their success, had ridden directly into a Union battery. The guns opened at devastatingly close range and, when the smoke eventually drifted away, the men who had made the charge were gone and the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment had effectively ceased to exist. Pembroke remained where Augustus had ordered him to remain, still holding the colours of a regiment that no longer existed around him.

He obeyed the colonel’s final command with the same determination with which he had carried out every other order during the war. The guidon was carefully wrapped and concealed before Pembroke carried it away from the battlefield, keeping it hidden through the final collapse of the Confederacy and the confused months that followed. He refused every later suggestion that the banner should be surrendered, displayed or placed somewhere supposedly safer, because Augustus had entrusted it to him with a simple duty that Pembroke regarded as binding for as long as he lived. Whatever else happened to the Confederacy, no enemy soldier would ever possess the banner of the 27th.

Years passed, but obedience brought Pembroke little comfort because he could never forgive himself for surviving the regiment’s destruction. He understood perfectly why Augustus had excluded him from the charge and knew that protecting the colours had been an honour rather than an act of cowardice, yet reason did nothing to remove the shame he felt whenever he remembered those six riders disappearing into the smoke while he remained behind. He had been the guidon bearer of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, entrusted with carrying its colours wherever the regiment went, yet when his comrades made their final charge the banner that had accompanied them through so many battles had not ridden beside them.

The guidon remained hidden in Pembroke’s house, carefully folded inside a wooden chest that became almost a shrine to the regiment he had lost. Every few months he removed the banner, inspected the increasingly fragile cloth and carefully folded it again before returning it to its hiding place. To his family it gradually became an uncomfortable relic of a war that everyone else was trying to leave behind, but to Pembroke it remained something very different. As long as the guidon survived, some fragment of the 27th Virginia Cavalry survived with it, and in his own mind Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had never ceased to be its bearer.

Many years later, on an evening when the old soldier believed that both the regiment and its colonel belonged permanently to the past, a horse approached his house and stopped outside. Pembroke heard the rider dismount, followed by the slow tread of boots upon the porch, and when he opened the door he found Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair standing before him.

The figure was unmistakably Augustus, although death and whatever dark powers had subsequently returned him to the world had left their marks upon him. He wore the remnants of the uniform Pembroke remembered, carried himself with the same aristocratic confidence and regarded his former sergeant with the familiar expression of a commanding officer expecting his orders to be obeyed. Yet there was something cold and unnatural behind his eyes, and Pembroke knew without being told that the man standing before him had indeed ridden into the fire of that Union battery and had lain dead for years before Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, master of Blackthorn Hall, called him back.

Pembroke stared at his colonel for several moments before decades of age and regret seemed to fall away. He straightened as far as his old body permitted and raised his hand in the salute he had given Augustus countless times during the war. The risen colonel regarded him silently before returning it.

Nothing more needed to be said.

Pembroke walked to the wooden chest that had remained closed for so many years, lifted its lid and removed the carefully wrapped bundle within. Slowly he uncovered the battered guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, its cloth faded and scarred but still intact, before holding it out towards the officer who had ordered him to protect it all those years before.

“You ordered me to keep her safe, Colonel.”

For the first time since the regiment’s destruction, Pembroke understood that his duty had not ended on that battlefield. Augustus had ordered him to preserve the guidon because the colours represented the regiment, and now the colonel had returned to gather its remnants once again. The 27th Virginia Cavalry might consist of dead men, ageing veterans and whatever other desperate souls answered the call from Blackthorn Hall, but to Pembroke none of that mattered. His colonel had returned, the regiment was being summoned back to service, and its colours had been waiting for them.

The next time Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair rode to war, the battered guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry would once again fly behind him.

This time, Sergeant Elijah Pembroke would not be left behind.

Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair had been one of the more celebrated members of the Saint Clair family long before his cousin Lucien decided that death was an unnecessarily permanent retirement. A Virginia gentleman by birth and cavalryman by inclination, Augustus had grown up at Blackthorn Hall surrounded by horses, firearms and generations of family stories in which Saint Clairs invariably behaved bravely, even when the surviving evidence suggested that good judgement might occasionally have been the better option.

When war came, Augustus entered Confederate service and eventually rose to command elements of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, becoming known as an aggressive and highly capable cavalry officer who preferred movement, surprise and a sudden appearance on an exposed enemy flank to any prolonged exchange of fire. His men respected him because he rarely ordered them somewhere he was unwilling to ride himself, while his superiors occasionally found him rather less convenient because Augustus possessed the traditional Saint Clair belief that orders were best regarded as guidance when a more interesting opportunity presented itself.

He became particularly associated with his white charger Beauregard, a large and thoroughly bad tempered animal that tolerated Augustus, disliked almost everyone else and developed a reputation nearly equal to that of its rider. Horse and colonel became a familiar sight among the regiment, with Augustus usually somewhere near the front and Beauregard apparently sharing his owner’s conviction that obstacles existed primarily to be ridden through.

The final months of the Confederacy were less kind to either man or regiment. Losses mounted, supplies became scarce, and the once proud cavalry formations were increasingly reduced to scattered groups of exhausted veterans held together by little more than discipline, loyalty and a stubborn refusal to admit that the war was lost. Augustus was among those who refused to accept the inevitable, remaining in the saddle with the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry until almost the very end.

His final action became the stuff of regimental legend. With a Union cavalry regiment threatening the command post of General Robert E. Lee, Augustus gathered five of his remaining troopers and launched what should have been a suicidal charge. Against every reasonable expectation, the handful of Virginians crashed into the advancing Union horsemen with such violence that they broke and routed them, removing the immediate threat to Lee and his headquarters.

Victory, however, lasted only moments. Augustus and his five companions pursued the fleeing cavalry rather more enthusiastically than prudence might have suggested. Carried forward by the excitement of the charge, they suddenly found themselves almost on top of a Union artillery battery. At such close range there was little chance of escape. The guns opened fire and the six horsemen disappeared beneath a storm of shot and shell. When the smoke cleared, Augustus, his men and his beloved charger Beauregard lay dead upon the field.

It was a suitably dramatic end for a man who had never learned when to stop fighting. The Confederacy itself would soon follow him into history, but the story of Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair and his final charge remained within the Saint Clair family, along with the knowledge of where his body had eventually been laid to rest.

In accordance with his wishes, horse and rider were eventually returned to Blackthorn Hall and buried together in the Saint Clair family plot, beneath a monument that described Augustus in considerably more flattering terms than some of his former superior officers might have chosen.

There he remained until Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair began experimenting with the darker possibilities hidden within the family library.

Lucien had already achieved enough success with lesser subjects to believe that death could be reversed, but Augustus represented something altogether more ambitious. The scattered remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry still existed, some as ageing veterans and others as bitter men unable to find a place in the new order, and Lucien understood that money and necromancy alone would not turn them into a fighting force. They needed a commander whose name they remembered and, more importantly, one they would still follow.

For several nights strange lights burned among the Saint Clair graves, while servants at Blackthorn Hall heard horses moving in a stable that was supposedly empty. When morning finally came, Augustus’s grave had been opened from below and the neighbouring earth where Beauregard had been buried was similarly disturbed. Before sunrise, a mounted figure in the remains of a Confederate cavalry uniform was seen riding along the old plantation road.

Lucien had brought back both Colonel and charger.

Death has altered Augustus considerably, although not perhaps in the ways Lucien expected. His memories of the war remain remarkably strong, while his understanding of everything that happened afterwards is rather less reliable. He knows that the Confederacy suffered defeats and remembers comrades who fell, but he refuses to accept that the war itself truly ended, instead regarding the present situation as merely another stage in a conflict that has temporarily become confused.

This suits Lucien perfectly.

The remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry have begun gathering again at Blackthorn Hall, drawn by rumours that their old Colonel has returned. Some are surviving veterans, considerably older than the commander they remember, while others are descendants, drifters and men who have adopted the old regiment’s identity because it gives purpose to grievances accumulated since the war. There are also several riders whose presence is much harder to explain, particularly those recognised by veterans as comrades buried decades earlier.

Augustus asks remarkably few questions about this.

He has resumed command with the same confidence he possessed in life, inspecting weapons, criticising horsemanship and demanding standards that would have been difficult enough to meet when everyone involved still had a pulse. Those incapable of keeping up are dismissed with considerable contempt, although this presents complications when some of the men concerned are already dead and therefore technically incapable of becoming much more exhausted.

Lucien regards the resurrected Colonel as both family and weapon, allowing Augustus to command the military remnants of the Dark Confederacy while quietly pursuing his own darker ambitions. Augustus, for his part, regards Lucien’s occult practices with the same tolerance he once extended to eccentric artillery officers, accepting that they are strange but undeniably useful when properly directed.

Together they have given the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry something they had not possessed for years: a commander, a purpose and the unsettling possibility that casualties may no longer provide a particularly convincing excuse for leaving the regiment.

Thanks to “Chattie” for assistance with the banner and the “prints”.

Please note: The Harpers weekly style prints are totally fictitious these events and Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair and 27th Virginia Cavalry did not exist except in the fertile (futile?) mind of the author!

There were only four graves left that Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair considered worth opening.

His earlier visits to the old Saint Clair family burial ground at Blackthorn Hall had already produced a collection of ancestors and distant relations whose return to the world of the living had been rather less dignified than their original funerals. Some had answered his summons almost eagerly, others had required considerably more persuasion, and a few had emerged from the earth with little remaining beyond an instinctive loyalty to the blood of Saint Clair. Lucien had persisted because family, as he frequently observed, was family, even when several members of it had been dead for the better part of a century.

These final four were different. Their graves lay in the oldest part of the burial ground beneath weathered stones whose inscriptions were already disappearing beneath moss and Virginia soil. They belonged to an earlier generation of Saint Clairs, men whose lives had been violent enough that perhaps death had never entirely suited them. Lucien performed the rites one final time, and beneath the moonlight the earth began to move.

Ambrose Saint Clair

Ambrose Saint Clair had been a gambler, horse breeder and occasional gentleman of uncertain employment who died in 1829 after a disagreement over cards became a disagreement over pistols. Family tradition insisted that Ambrose had been cheated. The surviving account of his opponent insisted precisely the opposite. Since Ambrose had already been accused of cheating in Richmond, Charleston and New Orleans, the truth was probably best left buried alongside him.

Unfortunately, Lucien dug it up.

Ambrose returned wearing the rotting remains of what had once been an expensive coat, one hand still curled as though holding the pistol buried with him. Death had done little to improve his temperament. He remains suspicious of everyone around him and occasionally reaches towards his coat when another member of the posse looks at him for too long. Lucien considers this encouraging. A man prepared to fight over a card game while alive is unlikely to object to fighting Yankees, monsters or anyone else Lucien points him towards after death.

Nathaniel Saint Clair

Nathaniel Saint Clair had been the respectable one.

At least that was what the family records claimed.

A planter, magistrate and prominent member of local society during the early years of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel cultivated the image of a sober Virginia gentleman who believed deeply in order, property and the proper behaviour of everyone except himself. Behind closed doors he possessed a vicious temper and an enthusiasm for settling disputes personally when the law proved inconvenient. Several men who crossed Nathaniel subsequently discovered compelling reasons to leave the county.

He died peacefully in his bed in 1841, which disappointed a surprising number of people.

When Lucien called him back, Nathaniel emerged slowly from the soil, straightened what remained of his clothing and stared at his descendant with an expression of profound disapproval. He has maintained that expression ever since. Nathaniel obeys Lucien, although there is something distinctly uncomfortable about the relationship. Lucien may command Blackthorn Hall, but Nathaniel behaves as though he merely allows him to do so.

Silas Saint Clair

Every respectable family possesses at least one relative whom everyone agrees not to discuss.

For the Saint Clairs, that man was Silas.

Born in 1778, Silas disappeared westward as a young man and spent much of his life drifting between frontier settlements, trading posts and places where respectable Virginians generally preferred not to admit they had relatives. Stories eventually returned concerning gambling, smuggling, stolen horses and at least one sheriff who had apparently developed a permanent dislike of the Saint Clair name. Silas returned to Blackthorn Hall many years later carrying scars, several pistols and enough money that nobody asked where it had come from.

He died in 1836 after being thrown from a horse, although one family account rather suspiciously mentions a bullet wound.

Silas has returned as perhaps the most animated of Lucien’s Revenants. There is still something of the old rogue behind the dead eyes, and he occasionally displays what might almost be amusement when violence approaches. Of all those Lucien has raised, Silas seems the least troubled by being dead. Indeed, given his previous existence, undeath may represent only a modest change in lifestyle.

Gideon Saint Clair

Gideon Saint Clair was already an old man when the War of 1812 began, but age did little to discourage him from involving himself. He organised local militia, supplied horses and weapons, and loudly complained that younger men lacked the determination of his generation. This opinion appears to have survived his death.

Gideon was remembered within the family as stubborn, argumentative and absolutely convinced that Saint Clairs were naturally qualified to command anyone unfortunate enough to stand nearby. He died in 1822 and was buried beneath one of the largest stones in the family burial ground, presumably because nobody wanted to risk him climbing out again.

Lucien should perhaps have taken the hint.

When Gideon rose, he did so violently, breaking through the weakened lid of his coffin and clawing his way through the earth before Lucien had completed the final words of the ritual. He now stands among the other Revenants with the posture of a man inspecting troops whose standards have disappointed him. Even in death he seems incapable of accepting that someone else is in charge.

The Family Gathering Is Complete

With Gideon’s return, Lucien finally closed the old family burial ground.

There would be no more midnight expeditions beneath the twisted trees, no more ancient coffins dragged open and no more increasingly irritated Saint Clair ancestors summoned back into a world they had probably been quite happy to leave. Lucien had exhausted the graves he considered useful, although the distinction between useful ancestor and best left buried had become increasingly difficult to identify.

The Revenants now form one of the strangest elements of the force gathering around Blackthorn Hall. They are not merely undead servants but fragments of the Saint Clair family itself, drawn from different generations and carrying into undeath the violence, pride, grudges and questionable judgement that marked so much of their mortal existence. Lucien has raised his ancestors because he needs soldiers he can trust, although whether resurrecting several generations of difficult Saint Clair men actually achieves that objective remains open to considerable debate.

For the moment, however, the cemetery is quiet.

Lucien has finished raising the family.

Probably.

Every so often a history book comes along that is clearly not intended to be treated with great solemnity. Olivia Swarthout’s Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times is certainly one of them. This is a book populated by murderous rabbits, peculiar saints, questionable medical advice, strange animals, unfortunate lovers and medieval artists who occasionally seem to have been working from descriptions supplied by someone who had heard about an elephant from a bloke in a tavern.

Swarthout is the creator of the Weird Medieval Guys social media accounts, where she has collected and shared some of the stranger images found in medieval manuscripts. The book develops that idea into something considerably more substantial than simply reproducing amusing pictures with captions. Published by Square Peg, the hardback runs to 208 pages and is lavishly illustrated throughout with medieval manuscript images.

The basic conceit is rather clever. Instead of presenting medieval history chronologically, Swarthout invites the reader to imagine actually living in the medieval world. The first major section, The Struggle: Surviving Life, Love and Death, works its way through the problems of existence, including where you might live, what work you might undertake, how you might find love and, inevitably, how you might die. Quizzes, diagrams, maps, flow charts and mock advice turn the whole exercise into something resembling a medieval survival manual.

There is plenty of silliness along the way, but rather more genuine history than the presentation initially suggests. Medieval attitudes towards courtship, marriage, occupations, religion, astrology, saints, death and the natural world all appear, although none receives anything approaching a conventional academic treatment. Swarthout instead slips the information in amongst the jokes. You can therefore discover something about medieval beliefs almost accidentally while trying to determine your medieval occupation or wondering whether your prospective romantic life is going to end particularly badly.

The second half of the book turns towards the medieval bestiary and, for me, this is where things become particularly entertaining. Medieval representations of animals can be wonderfully peculiar because the purpose of the illustrations was not necessarily the naturalistic representation we expect today. Animals carried religious, moral and symbolic meanings, while some artists were attempting to depict creatures that they had never actually seen. Swarthout works through beasts, birds, fish and serpents, drawing heavily upon surviving medieval bestiaries and manuscript illustrations.

The illustrations are consequently the real stars. Some are beautiful, others grotesque and quite a few leave you wondering exactly what the artist thought he was drawing. There are wolves, dragons, basilisks, strange birds, unlikely fish and assorted creatures that appear to have escaped from someone’s nightmare. The famous medieval tendency to depict rabbits behaving badly is also very much at home here. Anyone who has spent time looking through medieval marginalia will already know that monks and manuscript illustrators could produce material considerably stranger than many modern cartoonists.

Behind the jokes, however, lies something rather interesting. Books such as this remind us that medieval people were not simply the grim, mud covered inhabitants of the so called Dark Ages that popular culture sometimes makes them. They laughed, worried about relationships, complained about other people, feared death, told stories and found humour in the absurd. The manuscript illustrations are particularly useful because they provide glimpses into that mental world, even when those glimpses involve armed animals or creatures doing things that probably should not be described over breakfast.

There are limitations. Anyone approaching Weird Medieval Guys expecting a serious general history of medieval Europe is going to be disappointed. There is little sustained political, military, economic or social analysis, and complicated historical subjects are necessarily compressed to fit the humorous format. The geographical and chronological breadth covered by the term medieval also means that material produced centuries apart can sit together because it suits a particular theme. As a result, the reader should be cautious about treating the book as representing a single coherent medieval worldview.

Occasionally the modern humour also threatens to overwhelm the historical context. That is probably unavoidable given that the entire concept grew from social media, where an extraordinary manuscript image accompanied by a clever caption works extremely well. On the printed page I sometimes wanted another paragraph explaining why an image had been produced, who commissioned the manuscript, or what the symbolism meant. Some readers have made essentially the same criticism, arguing that the humour can leave them wanting considerably more historical context.

That criticism needs to be kept in perspective because Swarthout is not pretending to have written an academic history. The research behind the selection is considerable, and medieval literature scholar Madeleine Killacky has particularly noted the extent of Swarthout’s engagement with digitised manuscripts and scholarship. The book is trying to make medieval culture accessible and entertaining, and judged on those terms it succeeds extremely well.

Indeed, I suspect its greatest strength is that somebody with only a passing interest in medieval history could pick it up because of a picture of an homicidal rabbit and emerge two hours later knowing considerably more about medieval life, belief and manuscript culture than they did before. That is not a bad achievement for a book that frequently appears determined not to take itself seriously.

It is also an excellent book simply to browse. You do not need to sit down and read it from beginning to end. Open it almost anywhere and there will be an illustration, strange fact, quiz or piece of medieval advice demanding attention. It is the sort of book that can sit on the coffee table and repeatedly lure you back into reading another few pages.

So is Weird Medieval Guys really a history book? Sort of. It certainly is not a conventional one, nor should it replace a proper history of medieval society. I would describe it instead as an entertaining doorway into medieval history, particularly the strange and wonderful world preserved in illuminated manuscripts. There is genuine historical material underneath the jokes, but Swarthout is quite happy to let the weirdness lead the way.

And perhaps that is exactly the point. Medieval history does not always need another photograph of a castle followed by twenty pages explaining feudalism. Sometimes what is required is a rabbit armed with a sword.

Recommended, particularly for anyone interested in medieval history, manuscript art or the wonderfully bizarre ways in which people have represented their world. It is light, beautifully illustrated, genuinely funny and more informative than its deliberately ridiculous exterior initially suggests. Just do not buy it expecting a new interpretation of the Hundred Years War.

Rating: 4 out of 5 homicidal medieval rabbits.

The family burial ground behind Blackthorn Hall had already surrendered several of its occupants to Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, but the old plantation had been in the Saint Clair family for generations and there were considerably more names carved into its weathered stones. Some had died peacefully in their beds, others had fallen to disease or accident, while a few had been carried home during the war and buried beneath Virginia soil by families who believed they had finally earned their rest. Lucien regarded such sentiments as unnecessarily restrictive. With the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment gathering around Blackthorn Hall and his cousin Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair once more commanding the dead and living alike, three more graves were opened.

Captain Nathaniel Fairfax Saint Clair

Nathaniel Fairfax Saint Clair had been one of the more respectable members of the extended Saint Clair family, which probably explains why Lucien had never particularly liked him while he was alive. A prosperous landowner and militia officer before the war, Nathaniel joined the Confederate cavalry in 1861 and eventually received a captaincy. He was remembered as a calm and methodical officer who preferred careful reconnaissance and a well prepared attack to the dramatic charges favoured by some of his younger relatives.

Nathaniel was killed in 1863 when a Union skirmisher put a rifle ball through his chest during a reconnaissance patrol. His body was recovered and returned to Blackthorn Hall, where he was buried with his sword, boots and the silver spurs presented to him when he received his commission. His widow insisted that he should rest among his ancestors rather than in some distant military cemetery.

Lucien has now corrected that particular mistake.

Nathaniel returned from the earth remarkably well preserved by revenant standards, although the bullet wound that killed him remains clearly visible beneath his ruined coat. Something of the old officer survives within him. He rarely speaks, but when Augustus gives an order Nathaniel responds immediately and with an almost military precision. Among the ragged veterans there are whispered suggestions that Captain Saint Clair actually understands everything happening around him.

Nobody has been sufficiently brave to ask him.

Sergeant Elijah Mercer Whitcomb

Elijah Mercer Whitcomb was not a Saint Clair by blood, but he had earned a place in the family burial ground through decades of service to the household. Before the war he had worked as an overseer of horses and livestock on the Saint Clair estate, becoming particularly respected for his ability to judge a horse almost at a glance. When Virginia went to war, Whitcomb enlisted alongside several younger members of the family and eventually became a sergeant in the 27th Virginia Cavalry.

Whitcomb survived most of the war only to be mortally wounded during the regiment’s final months of campaigning. He was brought back to Blackthorn Hall in a wagon and died there several days later. Augustus himself had once promised that Whitcomb would always have a place among the Saint Clair dead, although neither man could possibly have imagined how literally Lucien would eventually interpret that promise.

Death has done little to improve Whitcomb’s appearance or disposition. His uniform hangs in tatters from a body that seems held together largely through supernatural stubbornness, and one side of his face bears the marks of the wound that eventually killed him. Yet he still displays flashes of his former habits. Horses become nervous when he approaches, but he will sometimes stand beside them for hours, running a dead hand slowly along a frightened animal’s neck as though remembering another life.

The living veterans avoid disturbing him when he does this.

Lieutenant Ambrose Carter Saint Clair

Ambrose Carter Saint Clair had been the troublesome one.

A distant cousin of Lucien and Augustus, Ambrose possessed all the confidence expected of a young Virginia gentleman and considerably less of the judgement. He gambled, drank, fought duels over imagined insults and accumulated debts with an enthusiasm that suggested he regarded creditors as merely another branch of the enemy forces. The outbreak of war provided him with exactly the sort of occupation for which he had apparently been preparing his entire life.

Ambrose proved to be a reckless but undeniably courageous cavalry officer. He volunteered for dangerous patrols, led charges that wiser men would have avoided and developed an alarming habit of appearing behind Union positions with no convincing explanation of how he had reached them. His luck finally failed during a confused cavalry action when he was shot from the saddle and trampled beneath the horses of both sides.

The remains returned to Blackthorn Hall were not entirely complete.

Lucien raised him anyway.

Ambrose is consequently one of the more disturbing revenants now wandering the grounds of Blackthorn Hall. His movements are occasionally awkward and his body bears unmistakable evidence of the violence of his death, but the old recklessness seems to have survived intact. When gunfire begins he advances towards it without hesitation, apparently delighted to discover that death has removed the principal disadvantage of his preferred method of warfare.

Augustus appears particularly pleased to have him back.

Whether Ambrose feels the same way remains uncertain.

The Muster Continues

Three more figures now stand among the gathering forces at Blackthorn Hall, their uniforms rotted, their weapons stained and their allegiance restored by considerably less conventional means than a recruiting sergeant and an oath. Nathaniel brings the cold discipline of the professional officer, Whitcomb the stubborn loyalty of an old cavalryman, while Ambrose contributes precisely the sort of reckless enthusiasm that got him killed the first time.

Lucien, naturally, considers the experiment a complete success.

There are still older graves beneath the trees beyond Blackthorn Hall, their stones leaning beneath moss and Virginia rain, and Lucien has begun spending rather too much time walking among them after sunset. Colonel Augustus has learned not to enquire what his cousin is planning. The Ragged Veterans have learned to keep the shovels close at hand.

It appears that the 27th Virginia Cavalry is still recruiting.

One question I am occasionally asked about my Australian Frontier Wars rules is why anyone would want to write or play rules dealing with such a difficult and confronting period of Australian history. My answer is that, when designed properly and supported by sound historical research, wargaming can do considerably more than provide an entertaining afternoon moving miniature figures around a tabletop. It can become both a history lesson and, just as importantly, a lesson about history itself.

That idea lies at the centre of the entire four-volume Australian Frontier Wars project. The rulebook, scenario book, campaign book and educators guide should not be regarded as four separate publications that happen to address the same subject. They are intended to be read and used as a coherent whole, with each volume performing a distinct function within the same historical and educational framework. The rulebook establishes the basic historical model. The scenario book applies that model to particular situations and, where possible, specific historical events. The campaign book connects those individual encounters over time and demonstrates how violence, resistance, retaliation, settlement and displacement developed across a broader historical landscape. The educators guide then draws these strands together by showing how the rules, scenarios and campaigns can be used to examine evidence, interpretation, uncertainty and the ways in which historical knowledge is constructed.

Seen in this way, none of the four volumes is truly complete without the others. The rulebook, without the scenarios, risks becoming an abstract collection of mechanics, while the scenarios, without the campaign framework, may reduce the Frontier Wars to isolated clashes that appear disconnected from the broader processes of colonisation and resistance. The campaign book provides that wider continuity, but without the educators guide there is a danger that players may experience the historical narrative without being encouraged to question how that narrative was constructed in the first place. The four volumes are therefore different parts of the same argument.

At the first level, they are intended to teach something about the Australian Frontier Wars themselves. They explore the importance of Country, movement, intelligence, livestock, firearms, water, settlement patterns, communication and the very different objectives pursued by the people involved. They also seek to demonstrate why the conflict was rarely symmetrical and why conventional wargaming assumptions about equal forces, decisive battles and casualty-based victory conditions are often inappropriate. At the second level, however, the four volumes are intended to teach something about history as a discipline. They encourage players and students to ask how we know what happened, what evidence survives, whose voices dominate the surviving record, what is missing, where uncertainty remains and how different interpretations can emerge from the same body of evidence. This second purpose is particularly important when studying the Australian Frontier Wars because the surviving documentary record is uneven and often overwhelmingly European in origin. Police reports, settler correspondence, government records, newspapers, station journals and later reminiscences can provide valuable evidence, but they also reflect the assumptions, interests and language of those who created them. Aboriginal perspectives may survive through oral traditions, cultural knowledge, later testimony, archaeology and careful reconstruction from colonial records, but the imbalance in the available evidence remains a fundamental historical problem.

The rulebook begins this process by translating historical interpretation into game mechanics. Movement distances, combat outcomes, morale, concealment, intelligence and victory conditions are not simply technical decisions. They represent judgments about what mattered historically and how those factors should interact. In that sense, every rule is an interpretation of the evidence, even when it appears to be nothing more than a number on a table. This is why the rules were never intended to produce a conventional encounter in which two roughly equal forces line up on opposite sides of the table and fight until one is destroyed. The Frontier Wars did not usually operate according to that model. European settlers, police, military detachments and other armed parties possessed different strengths and weaknesses from the Aboriginal groups opposing them, while both sides often pursued entirely different objectives.

Firearms could be decisive under particular circumstances, but they did not eliminate the problems of distance, poor intelligence, unfamiliar Country or opponents who could choose when and where to fight. Knowledge of Country, mobility, concealment, access to water, communication and surprise could be just as important as the nominal range of a musket. The rulebook therefore needs to encourage historically plausible behaviour rather than merely provide statistically balanced forces. The scenario book then places these general principles within historical situations. This is where abstract rules begin to acquire context, because the player is no longer simply commanding a generic force across a generic landscape. The scenario introduces particular objectives, geography and circumstances, while the supporting material explains why those factors matter. A raid on livestock, for example, should not be treated merely as an opportunity to score victory points by moving model cattle off the table. It can become a way of examining the growing importance of livestock to the pastoral economy, the disruption of Aboriginal access to traditional food sources and the strategic value attached to stock by both sides. A patrol searching for an Aboriginal group can similarly demonstrate the enormous difference between possessing firearms and actually being able to locate an opponent in Country that the patrol does not understand.

The scenario book also provides an opportunity to make historical uncertainty visible. Some events are well documented, while others are known only through fragmentary or contradictory accounts. Rather than concealing those gaps in order to produce a neat game, the scenario notes can identify what is known with reasonable confidence, what remains uncertain and what has had to be inferred in order to make the scenario playable. That process immediately turns the game into something more than a reconstruction, because players are being asked to consider the evidence upon which the reconstruction rests. The campaign book adds another essential layer by showing that these encounters did not occur in isolation. A clash that appears important when viewed as a single event may look very different when placed within months or years of settlement, resistance, retaliation and movement across Country. Decisions made in one incident can shape the conditions of the next, while seemingly small events can contribute to larger patterns of escalation. Campaign play can therefore demonstrate how historical processes develop over time. Livestock losses, casualties, displacement, increased policing, access to Country, changing levels of hostility and the movement of settlers can all influence later scenarios. A tactical victory may create strategic problems, while a force that appears to lose an encounter may nevertheless preserve its capacity to continue resistance.

This makes the campaign book essential to the coherence of the whole project because it prevents the Australian Frontier Wars from being presented as a sequence of disconnected skirmishes. Instead, individual encounters become part of an evolving historical landscape.
The educators guide completes the structure by making explicit what is already implicit in the other three volumes. It encourages teachers, students and players to examine not only what happened during a game but also why the scenario was constructed in a particular way, what evidence supported the design and where alternative interpretations might be possible. Students can compare the outcome of a scenario with the historical record, identify differences and ask why they occurred. They can consider whether the victory conditions reflect the objectives of the historical participants, whether the rules privilege one interpretation over another and whether changing an assumption about numbers, terrain or motivation would alter the result.

This is where the four-volume structure becomes particularly valuable, because the same historical problem can be examined from several directions. The rulebook asks how the problem should be modelled. The scenario book asks how it operated in a particular event. The campaign book asks how it fitted into a longer process. The educators guide asks how we know any of this and how confidently we can claim to understand it.Used together, the four volumes therefore encourage a form of historical inquiry rather than passive consumption. Players are not simply told that a particular event occurred and asked to reproduce it. They are encouraged to think about evidence, causation, uncertainty, alternative decisions and consequences. That is especially important because history can sometimes appear inevitable when read backwards. We already know what happened, which can make historical actors appear either foolish for failing to predict the outcome or powerless to change it. A simulation reminds us that people made decisions without knowing the future and often with incomplete information, limited resources and conflicting assumptions about what was happening around them.

The Australian Frontier Wars also demand a particular degree of caution because they involved dispossession, killing, the destruction of communities and profound suffering. The four-volume series is therefore not intended to turn frontier violence into a colourful colonial adventure or to provide a convenient setting for another generic skirmish game. The historical context must remain central throughout. That is another reason the volumes need to be understood as a coherent whole. The scenario book provides context, the campaign book prevents incidents from being detached from broader processes, and the educators guide encourages critical reflection on the evidence and its interpretation. Together, they provide safeguards against reducing a complex and difficult history to nothing more than miniature combat.

The aim is not to claim that a tabletop game can reproduce the lived experience of the people involved, because it cannot. What it can do is create an environment in which players are encouraged to ask better questions about the past. Why was this particular place important? Why did one group choose to fight while another withdrew? Why were livestock targeted? Why did apparently superior armed parties struggle to locate their opponents? How did previous violence shape later decisions? Why did conflict develop differently across different districts? What evidence supports a particular account, and what happens when the sources disagree? These questions belong equally to the history of the Frontier Wars and to the study of history itself.

For me, that is the real purpose of the four-volume Australian Frontier Wars project. The rulebook, scenario book, campaign book and educators guide are not separate products but parts of a single historical framework. Each volume adds something that the others cannot provide on its own, and together they are intended to move the reader from mechanics, through events and broader historical processes, to questions about evidence, interpretation and historical knowledge. If the project works as intended, the player should finish with more than a better understanding of what happened on the Australian frontier. They should also understand something about how historians attempt to reconstruct what happened, why certainty is sometimes impossible, why sources need to be questioned and why interpretations of the past should never simply be accepted without examination.

The four volumes therefore form a single educational journey. They provide not only a history lesson but also a lesson about history. The coherence of the four volume sets the central thesis, rather than treating the extra books as supplements to the rules.

In my view, there are few episodes in Australian military history as difficult to contemplate as Sandakan. More than 2,400 Australian and British prisoners of war passed through the camp in British North Borneo, yet when the war finally ended only six were still alive, all Australians who had escaped. Everyone else was dead. They had died from starvation, disease, exhaustion and systematic brutality, on jungle tracks during the terrible marches to Ranau, or in camps where men who had survived years of captivity finally became too weak to survive another day. Behind every one of those deaths was a family waiting at home, clinging to the hope that a son, husband, brother or father might somehow return when the war was over. For almost all of them there would be no homecoming.

The Japanese authorities bear responsibility for the cruelty that destroyed these men, but I believe that is only part of what makes Sandakan so painful. Australian and Allied authorities possessed information about the prisoners and considered plans for their rescue, yet no rescue came. That is the terrible shadow hanging over Sandakan. These men were victims of Japanese brutality, but their tragedy was compounded by Allied failures of intelligence, command and decision making. The six who survived did so not because a great rescue finally reached them, but because they escaped. More than 2,400 men had entered captivity. Six came home.

Lynette Ramsay Silver’s Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence is an important, disturbing and deliberately provocative contribution to the history of Australian prisoners of war under the Japanese. First published in 1998 and subsequently revised and expanded through several editions, the copy considered here being the 2006 edition, the book examines the destruction of the Australian and British prisoner of war force held at Sandakan in British North Borneo and the marches to Ranau during the final months of the Second World War. Of the approximately 2,400 Australian and British prisoners held at Sandakan, only six survived, all Australians who escaped either during the marches or from Ranau.¹ The scale of the disaster makes Sandakan one of the most catastrophic episodes in Australian military history.

Silver, however, attempts considerably more than a narrative of imprisonment and death. Her central concern is contained in the subtitle. She asks not merely what happened to the prisoners, but what Allied authorities knew about their situation, whether they possessed the means to intervene, why proposed rescue operations failed to take place, and why so much of the story remained obscure after the war.² It is this investigative dimension that gives the book both its considerable power and some of its historiographical difficulties.

Sandakan and the Destruction of the Prisoners

The basic narrative is almost unbearably grim. Australian prisoners captured during the campaigns in Malaya and Singapore were transported to North Borneo from 1942, with further Australian and British prisoners arriving during 1943. They were employed principally on the construction of a military airfield at Sandakan. Conditions initially remained tolerable by the standards of Japanese captivity but deteriorated progressively as rations were reduced, violence increased and the strategic position of the Japanese in Borneo worsened.³

Silver reconstructs this deterioration in considerable detail. One of the strengths of the book is that Sandakan does not suddenly become a catastrophe in 1945. The reader instead watches conditions progressively worsen as the prisoners become weaker, Japanese logistics deteriorate and the possibility of survival steadily diminishes. This gradual destruction is important because it demonstrates that the deaths were not simply the accidental consequence of a single disastrous decision to march sick prisoners across Borneo. They resulted from an extended process involving malnutrition, disease, forced labour, brutality, inadequate medical treatment and, during the final period, deliberate killing.⁴

The marches from Sandakan to Ranau form the most horrifying section of the narrative. Prisoners already suffering from severe malnutrition and disease were forced through exceptionally difficult jungle country with inadequate food and virtually no medical assistance. Those unable to continue faced abandonment or execution. The first major movement began in January 1945, followed by further marches as the Japanese abandoned Sandakan and concentrated prisoners farther inland. Only a fraction of those who began the marches reached Ranau, and almost all who arrived there subsequently died.⁵

The figures are difficult to comprehend in purely statistical terms. Of the 2,428 Australian and British prisoners now generally recorded as having died at Sandakan, Ranau or during the marches, 1,787 were Australians and 641 were British. The six surviving prisoners were all Australians who escaped and received assistance from local people.⁶ The absence of British survivors and the survival of only six Australians created an enormous evidentiary problem for anyone attempting to reconstruct events after the war.

Silver handles this problem effectively because she generally avoids turning the prisoners into an anonymous mass. Individual men appear repeatedly throughout the narrative, allowing the reader to understand something of their friendships, loyalties, conflicts, endurance and attempts at survival. The technique is particularly important in a story in which the sheer number of deaths might otherwise overwhelm the experiences of individuals.

There is inevitably an emotional dimension to such an approach, but Silver generally avoids excessive sentimentality. The circumstances require little embellishment. The gradual physical destruction of the prisoners, combined with the knowledge that almost none will survive, provides sufficient emotional force without the need for dramatic invention.

Research and Reconstruction

Perhaps the greatest strength of Sandakan is the persistence underlying its research. Silver draws upon archival records, intelligence documentation, survivor accounts, Japanese evidence, postwar investigations, war crimes material, burial information and the testimony of local people. This broad evidentiary foundation is essential because the destruction of almost the entire prisoner population removed the principal body of witnesses who might otherwise have described what occurred.⁷

The result is frequently closer to historical investigation than conventional campaign history. Silver must reconstruct events from incomplete and sometimes contradictory evidence, following the movement of prisoners and guards while simultaneously examining what Allied intelligence organisations knew about conditions in northern Borneo.

This approach is particularly successful when dealing with individuals. Names, units, movements and deaths are carefully reconstructed. Silver’s detailed treatment also gives the book considerable value to family historians and descendants seeking to understand the circumstances surrounding relatives whose wartime records frequently contained little more than confirmation that they had died while prisoners of the Japanese.

The scarcity of survivor testimony makes the surviving evidence especially important. The Australian War Memorial’s collections include documentation associated with several of the six survivors as well as official records relating to B and E Forces, prisoner movements and postwar investigations. These records demonstrate both the scale of the investigative effort undertaken after liberation and the extraordinary difficulty of reconstructing events when virtually the entire prisoner population had disappeared.⁸

This is one reason Sandakan deserves to be regarded as more than another history of Japanese prisoner of war camps. Silver helped restore individual identities to men who might otherwise have remained components of an enormous casualty figure.

Operation Kingfisher and the Conspiracy Argument

The most controversial element of the book is Silver’s argument concerning the failure to rescue the prisoners and the subsequent handling of the story. This is where Sandakan is strongest as investigative history but also most vulnerable as historical interpretation.

Central to this debate is Operation Kingfisher, a proposed attempt to rescue prisoners at Sandakan. The plan contemplated the use of airborne troops, while Allied intelligence organisations operating in Borneo attempted to gather information about Japanese forces and the location and condition of the prisoners. Evidence subsequently examined by historians indicates that intelligence personnel possessed significant information about the prisoners and their movement towards Ranau.⁹

Silver is justified in regarding this as a serious historical problem. The question of what Allied authorities knew, when they knew it and what operational possibilities existed deserves examination. The fact that intelligence was being collected while the prisoners were progressively destroyed inevitably raises questions about whether more could have been done.

There is nevertheless an important distinction between establishing that a rescue operation was proposed and demonstrating that such an operation was operationally practicable. Military and intelligence organisations routinely consider operations that never progress beyond preliminary planning. The existence of a plan therefore cannot itself establish that the prisoners could have been rescued successfully.

Any assessment of Kingfisher must consider the availability of aircraft, trained troops, intelligence regarding prisoner locations, communications, terrain, Japanese dispositions, logistical support and the rapidly changing strategic situation. The Australian War Memorial’s published examination of Allied covert operations in Borneo confirms that Kingfisher never received authority to proceed, despite intelligence concerning the movement of the prisoners being transmitted from the field. It also demonstrates that explanations for the failure of the operation remain contested.¹⁰

Silver is occasionally less cautious about this distinction than I would prefer. Her accumulation of evidence certainly raises uncomfortable questions about Allied decision making. It is difficult to finish the book believing that the fate of the Sandakan prisoners received all the attention it deserved. Yet hindsight creates its own dangers. We know that almost everyone died. Allied decision makers during the relevant period did not necessarily possess the same certainty about either the prisoners’ fate or the feasibility of rescuing them.

This does not excuse poor decisions. It does, however, complicate the allocation of responsibility.

The concept of a conspiracy of silence is therefore simultaneously one of the book’s greatest strengths and its most significant weakness. It forces the reader to examine an aspect of Sandakan that might otherwise remain secondary, particularly the relationship between intelligence, operational decision making and the subsequent public understanding of the disaster. At the same time, it creates an interpretive framework within which failures and omissions can too readily be interpreted as evidence of deliberate concealment.

Bureaucratic inertia, interservice disagreement, competing operational priorities, intelligence uncertainty and incompetence can produce outcomes that subsequently appear conspiratorial without necessarily requiring an organised conspiracy. The distinction is important because the historical standard required to demonstrate deliberate suppression should be considerably higher than that required to demonstrate administrative failure.

Responsibility and Hindsight

There is another difficulty inherent in Silver’s interpretation. Japanese responsibility for the treatment and deaths of the prisoners is clear. The prisoners were deprived of adequate food and medical treatment, subjected to brutal physical conditions, forced to march when many were incapable of sustained movement, and killed when they could no longer continue.¹¹

The question Silver introduces is different. Could Allied authorities have prevented some or all of those deaths?

That is a legitimate and necessary historical question, but it requires a different standard of evidence. Responsibility for failing to prevent an atrocity cannot automatically be equated with responsibility for committing it. The distinction becomes particularly important when considering military decisions made with incomplete intelligence under wartime conditions.

At times the emotional power of Silver’s narrative risks narrowing this distinction. Once readers have followed starving prisoners through the Borneo jungle, it becomes tempting to regard anyone who possessed information concerning their circumstances and failed to rescue them as culpable. Historical analysis must resist that temptation long enough to determine whether an effective rescue operation was actually possible at the relevant moment.

Silver provides substantial evidence from which the reader can consider that question, although I am not convinced that the evidence always supports the degree of certainty occasionally attached to her conclusions. Her strongest case concerns the existence of intelligence and the failure to translate concern for the prisoners into effective action. The argument becomes less certain when moving from institutional failure to the implication of deliberate conspiracy.

The Japanese Context

Another area in which the book might have gone further is the Japanese institutional and operational context. The destruction of the prisoners occurred while Japan’s military position in Borneo was deteriorating rapidly. Allied air and naval superiority increasingly disrupted communications and supply, while Japanese formations prepared for invasion and attempted to move personnel away from vulnerable coastal areas.¹²

This context does not excuse the treatment of prisoners. Rather, it helps explain the circumstances within which Japanese policy became increasingly lethal. The prisoners became a logistical burden to a military system already incapable of adequately supplying its own forces. Japanese decisions to move the prisoners inland therefore combined operational concerns with an institutional disregard for prisoner welfare.

A more systematic examination of Japanese command relationships, logistics and prisoner policy would have strengthened Silver’s analysis. It would have allowed the Sandakan catastrophe to be understood not only as a series of atrocities committed by particular guards and officers but as the product of a military system in which the survival of prisoners occupied an extremely low priority.

The same criticism can be applied to the Allied side. A fuller examination of command relationships between Australian authorities, MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area headquarters, intelligence organisations and operational commanders would have strengthened the analysis of Kingfisher. The issue was not simply whether somebody knew about the prisoners. The more difficult question concerns who possessed the authority, resources and operational freedom to act upon that knowledge.

Narrative and Style

As a piece of historical writing, Sandakan remains remarkably readable considering both the complexity and grimness of its subject. Silver moves between individual prisoners, Japanese authorities, Allied intelligence organisations and the broader strategic situation without entirely losing sight of the human tragedy at the centre of the narrative.

There is nevertheless a price for the enormous quantity of evidence assembled. Names, units, locations and movements can become overwhelming. The detail that makes the book valuable as a reference work occasionally interrupts its narrative momentum. Readers approaching Sandakan without some familiarity with the Pacific War may occasionally find themselves struggling to maintain a clear understanding of the broader operational picture.

There is also some repetition, particularly where Silver reinforces her arguments concerning missed opportunities and failures of responsibility. This is understandable because her case is cumulative, but the book occasionally presses conclusions after the evidence has already established the point sufficiently.

More importantly, the investigative character of the book sometimes dominates broader analysis. The Japanese command system, collapsing Japanese logistics, the wider Allied operational situation and the institutional culture of Allied intelligence could all have been incorporated more systematically. Doing so would not diminish the horror of Sandakan or excuse Allied failures. It would instead locate those failures more securely within the organisations and circumstances that produced them.

Sandakan and Australian Memory

One of Silver’s greatest achievements becomes apparent when the book is considered within the broader context of Australian remembrance of the Second World War.

Sandakan never achieved the place in Australian popular memory occupied by Gallipoli, Kokoda or even the Burma Thailand Railway. One obvious explanation is the almost complete absence of survivors. Survivor communities played an important role in shaping Australian understanding of Japanese captivity after 1945. Sandakan had virtually no comparable community because almost everyone who might have created it was dead.

The scale of this absence is difficult to overstate. When Allied investigators reached the region after the Japanese surrender they encountered burial sites, abandoned camps and evidence of mass death rather than a substantial population of prisoners awaiting repatriation. The task was therefore one of investigation and identification rather than rescue and recovery.¹³

This helps explain why Sandakan occupied an uncertain position in Australian wartime memory for decades. There were very few men able to provide public testimony, participate in veterans’ organisations or tell journalists and historians what had happened. Families often possessed limited information concerning the circumstances of individual deaths.

Silver’s work therefore performs a commemorative as well as historical function. She did not merely reconstruct a military disaster. She contributed substantially to restoring Sandakan to Australian public consciousness and to identifying the men behind the casualty statistics.

This achievement should not be underestimated. Historical writing is sometimes most important not because it provides the final interpretation of an event but because it forces that event back into historical discussion. Sandakan unquestionably achieved this.

Overall Assessment

Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence is an exceptional work of investigative military history, although it is not beyond criticism. Its greatest strengths are the depth of its research, its reconstruction of individual experiences and Silver’s determination to pursue uncomfortable questions concerning Allied knowledge and decision making.

Its principal weakness lies in the argument that also makes the book distinctive. Silver demonstrates convincingly that serious questions surround Allied decisions concerning the prisoners and the failure to implement a rescue operation. She also demonstrates how easily the experiences of the Sandakan prisoners might have disappeared from Australian historical consciousness. I am less convinced that every failure, omission and subsequent silence can safely be assembled beneath the stronger concept of conspiracy.

Institutional failure can arise from fragmented intelligence, poor communication, competing priorities, uncertainty and incompetence without requiring coordinated concealment. Indeed, the surviving documentation concerning Allied intelligence operations in Borneo supports the conclusion that information about the prisoners was available while simultaneously leaving considerable room for debate about why that intelligence failed to produce a rescue operation.¹⁴

That qualification does not substantially reduce the importance of the book. If anything, it makes Sandakan more valuable because Silver forces readers to confront questions that require continued investigation rather than passive acceptance.

The most impressive achievement of Sandakan is ultimately not the accusation contained within its subtitle. It is Silver’s reconstruction of what happened to men who had almost entirely lost the ability to tell their own story. With only six survivors from more than 2,400 prisoners, the historical record could easily have been dominated by Japanese documentation, bureaucratic reports and casualty lists. Silver painstakingly reconstructed the individuals behind those records and helped restore Sandakan to Australian historical memory.

I would consequently regard Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence as essential reading for anyone interested in Australian military history, Japanese prisoner of war policy, intelligence operations or the command problems of the final campaigns of the Pacific War. It should nevertheless be read critically, particularly when considering Operation Kingfisher and the extent of deliberate postwar suppression. Those controversies do not diminish the value of the book. They are an important part of its continuing significance.

More than a quarter of a century after its original publication, Silver’s fundamental achievement remains intact. She took one of the darkest and least understood Australian experiences of the Second World War and made it extremely difficult for Australian military history to overlook it again.

Footnotes

1. Lynette Ramsay Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence (Burra Creek, NSW: Sally Milner Publishing, 2006); Australian War Memorial, “Sandakan Memorial,” collection ART92680.
2. Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence.
3. Australian War Memorial, “Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War: Sandakan”; Australian War Memorial, “Australian Prisoners of War: Second World War: Prisoners of the Japanese, Borneo (Sandakan).”
4. Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence; Australian War Memorial, “Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War: Sandakan.”
5. Australian War Memorial, “Sandakan Memorial”; Department of Veterans’ Affairs, “Sandakan Memorial Park, Malaysia.”
6. Australian War Memorial, “National Sandakan Remembrance Day Commemorative Address 2024”; Australian War Memorial, “Sandakan Memorial.”
7. Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence.
8. Australian War Memorial, “Australian Prisoners of War: Second World War: Prisoners of the Japanese, Borneo (Sandakan)”; Australian War Memorial, “Rare Personal Documents from Sandakan Death March Donated to the Australian War Memorial,” 28 September 2016.
9. Ooi Keat Gin, “Prelude to Invasion: Covert Operations before the Re occupation of Northwest Borneo, 1944–45,” Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 37 (2002).
10. Ooi, “Prelude to Invasion.”
11. Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence; Australian War Memorial, “Sandakan Memorial.”
12. Ooi, “Prelude to Invasion”; Department of Veterans’ Affairs, “Sandakan Memorial Park, Malaysia.”
13. Australian War Memorial, “National Sandakan Remembrance Day Commemorative Address 2024.”
14. Ooi, “Prelude to Invasion”; Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence.

Bibliography

Australian War Memorial. “Australian Prisoners of War: Second World War: Prisoners of the Japanese, Borneo (Sandakan).” Canberra: Australian War Memorial.

Australian War Memorial. “National Sandakan Remembrance Day Commemorative Address 2024.” Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2024.

Australian War Memorial. “Rare Personal Documents from Sandakan Death March Donated to the Australian War Memorial.” 28 September 2016.

Australian War Memorial. “Sandakan Memorial.” Collection ART92680. Canberra: Australian War Memorial.

Australian War Memorial. “Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War: Sandakan.” Canberra: Australian War Memorial.

Department of Veterans’ Affairs. “Sandakan Memorial Park, Malaysia.” Canberra: Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Ooi, Keat Gin. “Prelude to Invasion: Covert Operations before the Re occupation of Northwest Borneo, 1944–45.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 37 (2002).

Silver, Lynette Ramsay. Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence. Burra Creek, NSW: Sally Milner Publishing, 2006.

The Saint Clair family cemetery lies beyond the eastern boundary of Blackthorn Hall, beneath ancient oaks that were already old when the first members of the family were laid beneath them. Generations of Saint Clairs rest there under weathered stones bearing names that once carried considerable influence throughout the county. Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair had known those names since childhood. They belonged to portraits hanging in the darker rooms of Blackthorn Hall, to stories repeated around the family table and to ancestors whose courage, wisdom and general magnificence seemed to increase considerably with every passing generation.

As the Dark Confederacy grew, Lucien found himself requiring followers who could be relied upon without demanding payment, questioning his orders or disappearing when matters became particularly unpleasant. The solution was conveniently located on his own property. After all, the Saint Clair family had always placed considerable importance upon duty to blood and family. Lucien merely decided that death was an inadequate excuse for avoiding it.

These were not common corpses dragged from some forgotten battlefield. They were Saint Clairs, and Lucien believed that family obligations did not necessarily end at the grave.

Major Ambrose Saint Clair

Major Ambrose Saint Clair had been Lucien’s great uncle, a stern and thoroughly unpleasant man who had spent much of his life insisting that the younger members of the family lacked discipline, courage and proper respect for their elders. He had served in the Mexican War before returning to Virginia, where he devoted himself to managing the family estates and quarrelling with almost everyone who disagreed with him. Family tradition maintained that Ambrose had never lost an argument, although this may have had something to do with his habit of carrying a pistol during most conversations.

He died several years before the Civil War and was buried with considerable ceremony in the Saint Clair family cemetery. Lucien remembered standing beside the grave as a boy while relatives solemnly described Ambrose as a pillar of the family. Lucien remembered him rather differently.

When Ambrose was raised, death had done remarkably little to improve his disposition. The old Major emerged from the earth still wearing the decayed remains of the coat in which he had been buried, one skeletal hand immediately reaching towards the place where his pistol had once hung.

Lucien regarded this as encouraging.

Ambrose now follows his great nephew with the same expression of permanent disapproval that he wore in life. Whether some fragment of the old man’s personality remains is uncertain, but Lucien occasionally catches the Revenant staring at him in a manner that strongly suggests Ambrose still believes the younger generation has made a complete mess of things.

Cousin Nathaniel Saint Clair

Nathaniel Saint Clair had been one of those unfortunate branches of the family tree that respectable Saint Clairs preferred not to discuss. A gambler, duellist and enthusiastic consumer of other people’s whiskey, Nathaniel possessed considerable charm and almost no judgement. He disappeared regularly for months at a time before returning to Blackthorn Hall with an impressive story, an empty purse and, more often than not, somebody looking for him.

His luck finally deserted him during a card game in Richmond when another gentleman accused him of cheating. Nathaniel indignantly denied the charge and demanded satisfaction. Unfortunately, the other gentleman proved considerably better with a pistol than Nathaniel had anticipated. His body was returned to Blackthorn Hall and quietly placed in the family cemetery, where everyone hoped that he had finally ceased causing embarrassment.

Lucien had always rather liked him.

Nathaniel proved surprisingly difficult to raise. When he finally clawed his way from the grave, several playing cards and a silver dollar were discovered amongst the remains of his burial clothes. Lucien took this as evidence that someone in the family had possessed a sense of humour.

The Revenant Nathaniel retains something of his former swagger. His movements are stiff and unnatural, but there remains an unmistakable arrogance in the way he carries himself. He sometimes turns towards the sound of cards being shuffled and has been known to stand silently beside games played by the Ragged Veterans.

Nobody has yet been foolish enough to deal him in.

Cousin Thaddeus Saint Clair

Thaddeus Saint Clair was Lucien’s second cousin and perhaps the strangest member of the family even before Lucien began raising the dead. He never married, rarely travelled beyond the boundaries of the family estates and spent most of his later years living alone in a small house on the edge of the Blackthorn property. He possessed an uncomfortable reputation for knowing things before they happened. Servants claimed that Thaddeus could predict storms, deaths and unexpected visitors, while several members of the family quietly recalled occasions when he had warned them against journeys that subsequently ended badly. The Saint Clairs publicly dismissed such stories as superstition, although few of them willingly remained alone with Thaddeus after dark.

Lucien was never quite so certain.

Thaddeus died shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War and was buried beneath a magnolia tree at the edge of the Saint Clair family cemetery. Unlike the graves surrounding it, his resting place seemed strangely untouched by the passing years. Weeds rarely grew across the mound, the earth remained dark and the inscription upon his stone was still clearly visible long after neighbouring memorials had begun to crumble.

When Lucien performed the ritual, Thaddeus did not claw his way from the earth with the other dead.

He was simply standing behind Lucien when he turned around.

That particular detail is rarely mentioned.

Thaddeus now accompanies the Dark Confederacy as one of Lucien’s Revenants, dressed in the decaying remains of the dark suit in which his family buried him. He rarely moves unless commanded and has never spoken since his return, yet there are moments when his behaviour suggests that something more than Lucien’s necromancy occupies the ruined body. On several occasions Thaddeus has turned towards approaching danger before any living member of the posse became aware of it, while at other times he simply stands staring into the darkness beyond the campfire as though watching something moving amongst the trees.

Even Lucien has become increasingly reluctant to turn his back on him.

Blood Remains Blood

Lucien considers the raising of his relatives entirely practical. Blackthorn Hall needs defenders, the Dark Confederacy needs soldiers and the Saint Clair family has always maintained that its members have obligations to their blood and their land. Lucien has merely extended those obligations somewhat beyond their traditional duration. Ambrose brings the discipline of an old soldier, Nathaniel whatever remains of the instincts of a gambler and gunfighter, while Thaddeus brings something altogether more difficult to explain.

The Ragged Veterans are considerably less comfortable with the arrangement. They will fight beside corpses raised from forgotten graves without much complaint, but there is something different about the three Saint Clair Revenants. Ambrose watches the men as though inspecting an exceptionally disappointing regiment, Nathaniel still seems interested whenever somebody produces a deck of cards and Thaddeus occasionally turns his head towards things nobody else can see.

Around the campfire the men have consequently developed a simple rule. Never insult the Saint Clair family in front of the dead Saint Clairs.

Nobody knows whether they can understand.

Nobody particularly wants to find out.