General Charles Lee was a strange and turbulent character, bizarre beyond even a novelist’s imagination. Born in Cheshire, the son of a British army officer, he was raised in an unhappy home and sent to school in Switzerland, where he broke out of the British mold. He never formed the manners of a gentleman or adopted the attitudes of his brother officers. He remained a loner, and rarely trusted others. Historian John Shy writes that “his sex life seems to have been of the transient kind.” His closest friends were the dogs that always surrounded him.26
