The Reverand Henry Harding, parson to the excellent living of Stoke Abbas, was a handsome and prepossessing man. Unfortunately, fate has seen fit to bless him with a family of extremely plain and unprepossessing children. Caroline was the least offensively plain according to Lady Lennox, but the entire Lennox family also admitted that Caroline was the most insignificant person in the county of Dorset. 

          Caroline, already 26, was bullied by her elder sister, was nervous in company, and had no prospects at all. She had one golden memory, of an admirer when she was 18, but Jogh Gates, nephew to the Lennox family, had gone to India and forgotten her. Or so she thought.

          When Lady Lennox summoned her and said that Johnny Gates had sent a proposal of marriage, Caroline at first declined. But in a few weeks, in October 1777, she set sails for India, to a new life, and a man she had not seen for eight years.