The Hallmarked Man Ch 1-13 spoilers: Epigraphs and the client's family tree.

 More from the Books-a-Million preview.  (For my initial impressions, see here.)

If you are like me, all the relationships the new client was trying to explain got a bit confusing, so I put together a family tree that I think is correct. I also want to talk about the new epigraph sources we have. 

This should make it easier to see how people are related. Red lines indicate divorces. Rupert and Sacha are first cousins, since their parents are siblings and they share a set of grandparents. Charlotte and Sacha are half-siblings, with the same mother but different fathers. Charlotte was a step-sibling of Valentine (and Decima) because their father was once married to her mother. 

Looking at the family tree makes me wonder a bit more about the circumstances of Rupert's custody arrangement when orphaned. Aunt Anjelica seems to have a poor relationship with him now, and there is the matter of the missing trust funds. Also, Rupert was orphaned pre-EU, and Switzerland has never joined, anyway. Wouldn't it be more usual for British relatives to raise an orphaned British boy? As we can see, there was a wealthy and titled Uncle Lord Ned, who seems to have maintained a relationship with the lad, who should have had as good or better a claim for custody. Ned may well have been married to Tara at the time. Could she have said no to taking in the godson of the ex she hated? Or, could something about Anjelica's animosity towards Dino made her determined not to have Rupert raised by his ex? 

There is also a possibility that, given the Fleetwood and Longcaster families seemed to be close. that there could have been some adultery, with either Veronica Fleetwood or the first Mrs. Longcaster sleeping with her husband's best friend. If so, that could make Decima and Rupert half-siblings, and little Lion a product of incest. If either Dino or Valentine was aware of this, it could explain their opposition to the relationship, and Valentine's particular insistence that Decima not get pregnant. We've been told Rupert has type A blood, meaning at least one of his biological parents must be A or AB. If Peter and Veronica are types O or B, we have a problem.

Onto a more wholesome topic:  the epigraphs. Galbraith said on twitter that there were five epigraph sources for this book; earlier hints had given us John Oxenham, A. E. Housman and Robert Browning.  The first clue comes from Chapter 2, with anther poetry excerpt from Robert Browning, indicating that he will provide epigraphs not just for parts but for chapters. 

We get a fourth epigraph source from Chapter 3, the line "Too suddenly thou tellest such a loss," from Matthew Arnold's Merope: a Tragedy. The name Merope is of course familiar to Harry Potter fans as the name of Lord Voldemort's doomed mother, who, in very Dickensian style, turns up pregnant at the orphanage, gives birth to her son, gives him the name of Tom Marvolo Riddle and promptly dies. The Merope of Greek mythology is only marginally more fortunate; she is a queen forced to marry the murderer of her husband and son, who manages to secret her youngest son away. The boy eventually returns to avengee the murder and reclaim his throne. Arnold is a contemporary of Browning, and worked as a school supervisor prior to becoming a professor of poetry at Oxford.  So far, he has only been cited on one chapter, so we don't know yet if we will get selections from his other works, or only Merope. 

The fifth and final epigraph source is The Liturgy of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike, a poet and American Confederate General. Pike also lived in the 19th centery, like Browning and Arnold and is the only American included as an epigraph source in this book. For Chapter 8, the epigraph is taken from a second Pike Masonic book, The Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Given that he was a poet as well as a general and a Freemason, it will be interesting to see if any poetry is included, or if only Masonic texts will be cited.  So, this far, in Part 1 we have seen epigraphs from

• Oxenham's A Maid of the Silver Sea. (1, plus two from later in the book previewed on Twitter)
• Assorted poems of Housman (3)
• Assorted poems of Browning (5) 
• Arnold's Merope (1)
• Pike's Masonic writings (5)

Hopefully onto Part 2 by tomorrow!

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