Aaron Mew is a seventeen year-old apprentice blacksmith living in a small English village, in the late eighteenth century. His life is simple yet secure, until the day when he volunteers to take the place of his father on an errand for the squire. The country boy is wrenched from the environment in which he grew up and thrust into a world of ruffians, drunks, criminals and disgraced professionals - part of the army of George III. An army desperately...