The Dop Doctor

Owen Saxham is a gifted London surgeon who refuses what a man named Bough demands of him. Bough’s wife dies anyway, and the evidence handed to the police points at Saxham. The jury says not guilty; London ruins him regardless, and his own brother marries the woman he had meant to marry. He sails for the Cape and drinks until the town renames him for his poison, dop being the cheapest and most villainous of Cape brandies. Then the Boers close on Gueldersdorp, Clotilde Graves’s barely veiled Mafeking, besieged from October 1899 to May 1900, and the wreck of a doctor is handed something worth doing. Lynette Mildare, the Mother-Superior’s adopted daughter, carries the book’s other half, and Bough is not finished with either of them.