The Just Steward

In Alexandria under Diocletian, the Roman official Philoremus Fabius confesses himself a Christian and leaves his small son, with the vineyards of Kir Saba that are the boy's inheritance, in the care of Hazaël, a Jewish merchant of Joppa. Eighteen centuries later Hazaël's descendant John Hazel is still keeping the accounts, and in wartime England he brings the old parchments to Katharine Forbis, whose brother Julian, a Catholic chaplain, has been reported killed at Gallipoli. Richard Dehan was the pen name of Clotilde Graves, whose Boer War novel The Dop Doctor had been one of the great bestsellers of 1910; in a prefatory note she says that only one character here is real, the prison-camp commandant Hamid Bey. Fifty-nine plates of Victorian and Edwardian painting, among them Dublin street scenes by Walter Osborne and portraits by John Evan Hodgson, echo the novel's passage from the Levant to wartime Britain.