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Netley Cottage, Biddington, Dorsetshire, 1818

You're not going to marry me?" Miss Talbot repeated, disbelievingly.

"Afraid not," Mr. Charles Linfield replied, his expression set in a kind of bracingly apologetic grimace-the sort one might wear when confessing you could no longer attend a friend's birthday party, rather than ending a two-year engagement.

Kitty stared at him, uncomprehending. Katherine Talbot-Kitty to her family and closest acquaintances-was not much used to incomprehension. In fact, she was well known among her family and Biddington at large for her quick mind and talent for practical problem-solving. Yet in this moment, Kitty felt quite at a loss. She and Charles were to be married. She had known it for years-and it was now not to be? What should one say, what should one feel, in the face of such news? Everything was changed. And yet Charles still looked the same, dressed in clothes she had seen him in a thousand times before, with that disheveled style only the wealthy could get away with: an intricately embroidered waistcoat that was badly misbuttoned, a garishly bright cravat that had been mangled rather than tied. He ought at least, Kitty thought, staring at that awful cravat with a rising sense of indignation, to have dressed for the occasion.

Some of this ire must have seeped through to her expression, because all at once Charles swapped his maddening air of apologetic condescension for that of a sulky schoolboy.

"Oh, you needn't look at me like that," he snapped. "It isn't as if we were ever officially promised to one another."

"Officially promised to one another?" Kitty's spirit returned to her in full force, and she discovered, in fact, that she felt quite furious. The irredeemable cad. "We've been speaking of marriage for the past two years. We were only delayed this long because of my mother's death and my father's sickness! You promised me-you promised me so many things."

"Just the talk of children," he protested, before adding mulishly, "and besides, it isn't as if I could call things off when your father was on death's door. Wouldn't have been at all the thing."

"Oh, and I suppose now that he's dead-not a month in the ground-you could finally jilt me?" she said wrathfully. "Is that really so much more 'the thing'?"

He ran a hand through his hair, his eyes flicking to the door.

"Listen, there's no point us discussing it when you're like this," he affected the tone of a severely tried man holding onto his patience. "Perhaps I should go."

"Go? You can't possibly drop news such as this, and not explain yourself. I saw you just last week and we were discussing marrying in May-not three months away."

"Perhaps I should have just written a letter," he said to himself, still staring longingly at the door. "Mary said this was the best way to do it, but I think a letter would have been simpler. I can't think properly with you shrieking at me."

Kitty cast aside her many irritations and, with the instincts of a true hunter, fixed only on the salient information.

"Mary?" she said sharply. "Mary Spencer? What, exactly, does Miss Spencer have to do with this? I had not realized she had returned to Biddington."

"Ah, yes, yes, well, she is, that is," Mr. Linfield stammered, beads of sweat appearing on his brow. "My mother invited her to stay with us, for a time. It being so good for my sisters to make other female...