It is the late spring of 1978 in a world in which the American Revolution failed in 1776 after George Washington was killed and the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island. The rumbling aftershocks of the Empire Day atrocities which reverberated through the pages of Two Hundred Lost Years are threatening to come to the boil. While in Philadelphia the politics become ever more fractious in Spain the Royal Alcazar is a citadel besieged in a country which might as well still be stuck in the nineteenth century. Preparations for war hamstrung by colonial politics begin to gather pace in New England in a climate where the Governor in his mansion and the government back in England continues to tiptoe around provocations in the Caribbean and the Borderlands of the South. In Spain, Melody Danson and Henrietta De L'Isle have performed their role as distractions, adornments to a diplomatic mission whose only purpose is to delay the moment when the truth about the Empire Day attacks finally emerge. Because, when that day comes the road to war will suddenly confront the great European powers. The Peace of Paris, the basis of the post-Great War of 1857-66 settlement, threatened by Anglo-German-Russia tensions is now hostage to the machinations of a Spanish Empire in its death throes and the failing health of Old Spain, 'the sick man of Europe'. Brothers Abe and Alex Fielding find themselves making ready for war. Melody and Henrietta discover unlikely friends in the Mountains of Madrid. Journalist Albert Stanton of the Manhattan Globe unwittingly stumbles into a war zone. The Governor of the Commonwealth of New England and his political masters in England wrestle with a crisis they saw coming years ago but can do little or nothing to avert. The World in which England's Georgian colonies in the Americas became the keystone of the British Empire - upon which it seemed the Sun could never set - is about to fray around the edges and our heroes and heroines are going to find themselves directly in the firing line! Author's note: the books of the New England series are written as episodes in a contiguous narrative arc. This book concludes not so much with overt cliff-hangers but with deliberate 'unfinished business' which will be picked up in Book 4 - REMEMBER BRAVE ACHILLES.