Excerpt from A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Besides, you're now in a position to marry," the solicitor reminded him, "and a wife and household will draw on your resources far more than your current circumstances do." The solicitor then actually produced an illustration of annual average household costs for a husband, wife, two children and staff of four. Harry had so little sense of what anything cost that he could not tell if the figures were supposed to make him wince or offer a pleasant surprise, so he looked at them blankly, which the lawyer evidently took for risky sangfroid. Apologizing for his forwardness, and saying he was aware that Harry had no father or mother to advise him on such matters, he added that he assumed Harry naturally had little experience of such realities and warned him to be on his guard because he had now become what was vulgarly termed a catch.

Harry pondered this in the hours that followed, as he walked the length of Piccadilly and Knightsbridge to soothe his thoughts in a visit to the museums. The idea was so strange. It was not as though his actual worth were suddenly more visible; not even his own dear brother knew it. He knew there were guides to the peerage and the landed gentry; he had looked his mother's family up in the latter in an idle hour in the club library. Perhaps financial information was published somewhere as well, in a husband-hunting equivalent to one of Jack's beloved stud books, and even now some unscrupulous mother was poring over it and placing a little question mark beside his name with her ivory pencil?

He decided to be not secretive, exactly, but discreet with Jack. Jack was more in the world than he, and was naturally trusting and open, so would never suspect people's motives or think to hold things back from them if he thought they liked him. He was one of Nature's friends, not her privy counselors, and had always found the keeping of secrets an intolerable burden.

Harry resolved that ushering Jack through his training and seeing him somehow settled would, in any case, be his first priority. The fending off, or not, of potential mothers-in-law could come later. Even had it not been so important for Jack to concentrate on his studies, the observance of full mourning gave Harry a convenient year in which to remain socially aloof and take stock.

Jack was athletic and good-looking and, without being a peacock, took a natural pride in his appearance and a keen interest in what he wore. He chafed at having to don mourning all year and itched, Harry was sure, to cut a dash again in his rowing club blazer or a suit other than his black one. Harry, by contrast, found he relished the excuse mourning gave for withdrawal. His life had hardly been a social whirl before, but for twelve months he was spared even having to make idle conversation. Strangers and acquaintance alike now treated him with a welcome reserve. It reminded him of the legend he had read as a boy of Perseus granted invisibility by a magic cap. Other boys in the class had bragged of the mischief it would let them work, the people they would spy on or banks they would raid, but he had dreamed only of the way it would let him be entirely alone, unpestered, unprovoked. Ironically, he found himself observing other people in mourning, now that he was one of them, and noting the slight differences in their approaches to the discipline of dressing like a crow.

Excerpted from A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale. Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Gale. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.