Annie Johnson is my favourite kind of heroine, and this book is my favourite in this series about heroines born on different days of the week. Even when we first meet her as a hungry nine year old, tagging along with her destitute father, as he seeks employment in London in 1813, we know outspoken Annie has plenty of spirit and a mind of her own. She needs these attributes plus the backbone required to make a go of it in a world where soldiers who served their country in France were left without pensions and penniless, begging their betters for employment. Annie and her mother followed Private Johnson into battle, so she is no delicate missy who balks at the sight of blood. Sadly, her mother did not survive.
As an adult and settled in the Brighton house her father has managed to buy, through honest hard work, Annie is content, until disaster strikes once again and she is left to make a living for herself. Something she does admirably well, despite setbacks, a nasty oaf intent on taking her for his own, and a conniving girl she believes to be a friend. When handsome gentleman Marcus Courtney enters her life while she is saving a starving girl from being arrested for stealing one of her pies, Annie is smitten. But Annie knows as well as he, that marrying a woman considered beneath his station in life is out of the question.