Confidence

July 2028. Caleb Whitlock is twenty-six and the seventh Baron Whitlock of Wickford. He sits on the crossbenches two days a week and sells atlases three days a week in a map shop near Charter Hill, and every speech he has ever made has been about the Territory of Loreto. On the afternoon the book opens, the Valdez ministry is about to fall by a single vote, on the Territory, and for four hours that night somebody puts his name forward without telling him.

Confidence follows him through seven weeks of the Register's own present: the division, the dissolution, an election spent behind a shop counter while customers argue about him without knowing who he is, a telephone call on a Saturday, and a walk to Government House alone.