England

He was just a boy of ten when the King's men executed his father.

It began on the 15th day of April, in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty-Six. Great Britain was at war, the classes were sorely divided and thousands took their leave on huge tall ships bound for the Colonies. Yet of these things ten-year-old Jonathan Samuel Rodes knew little. His was a life of wealth in an enormous three-story mansion north of Shrewsbury. His Mother was beautiful, his father was intelligent and his younger brother was not as bothersome as most five-year olds.

For as long as he could recall, Colleen Stuart, her widowed father and her little sister also lived in the mansion, and by the time she reached the age of eight, Colleen was more than his playmate, she was his best friend. She could do anything a boy could do; ride horses, spar with makeshift swords and skip rocks across the pond. Best of all, she could play jokes on the adults without getting caught. For that accomplishment alone, he held her in the highest esteem.

Indeed, Jonathan had not a care in the world save one - he feared Colleen's father would remarry and take her off to live with an evil stepmother on some inhospitable stretch of land. That night, the very night before the executions, it was of this he hoped to speak to his father at length. As was his custom, Jonathan stood just outside the open door to Colleen's bedchamber, answered a few of her five-year-old sister's endless questions, waited for them to fall asleep, and then hurried down a flight of highly polished stone steps to his father's study on the second floor.