Richard Sharpe

The war had been, he was certain, simpler in its way. You knew who your enemies were, and where they'd be coming from. Peacetime was much more confusing, and it fed into a certain rejection of the society he found himself embedded in. A society that seemed to just want to move on and forget. Every time he saw some poor disabled veteran in the cities, and saw someone turn their head to not see their calls for charity - it set his blood to boiling. He was a Lieutenant-Colonel now, a gentleman, he was told - but he well remembered who he had been. Where he was from.

And now he found himself in the countryside, handling a local garrison and supposed to be making himself into a country gentleman. He would likely have been discarded too, save that Old Wellington remembered his friends and debts.

The 'estate' that he was seeking to establish was a nightmare. Learning about farming was harder than learning about making bloody siegeworks! But at least it was a chance to make some work for lads from the old regiment who'd fallen on hard times. Men who were often a bit rough 'round the edges - but you could trust them. Which was more than he could say for the local gentry and society.

Some appeared to like him. But his workers heard the other side of it - the gossip. Who liked you, who didn't, who considered you a threat to their demesne for whatever reason...it was a madness he didn't understand. Maybe this was why Old Boney had lost - when he was just a general all had fallen before him. The second he'd become political, a part of him had to dedicated to fighting the vipers, hadn't it?

And then, above all, there was the arrangement. He'd acquired, of all things, an uncle - not bad for a kid from the muck of London. Suddenly now he was the respectable Richard Sharpe, the war hero Richard Sharpe...he had family, history. And, if he couldn't prevent it, a betrothed.

His marriage to Theresa had been...a meeting of two fiery personalities in the crucible of war. He had only just come to terms with her death, and now he was supposed to warm to a woman of society? Someone he barely knew, had no measure of - and as a part of the system he couldn't help but judge her by his own views of the system...

Thus a 'casual' dinner at her parents' home - arranged by his uncle and her father. Grudgingly, he could admit he liked Mr. Bennet. And though he barely knew Elizabeth Bennet, he could at least credit that she'd turned down that blasted Collins, a man whose head seemed so full of air that you could ring it like a church bell. But he'd live outside society so long he didn't wan to marry someone who was an ordinary part of it.

That was the beginning and end of it, really. If he was going to re-marry, if he was going to have a true family life he could bring his daughter back home to - it would have to be someone exceptional.