He had sold his commission and come home later to take up his responsibilities.

And now—in early May of 1813—the people of the Newburys were about to experience something far more joyful, far more splendid than a funeral. Neville Wyatt, the new Earl of Kilbourne, a young man of seven-and-twenty years, was to be married to his cousin by marriage, who had been brought up at the abbey with him and his sister, Lady Gwendoline. His father, the late earl, and Baron Galton, the bride's maternal grandfather, had planned the match many years before.

It was a popular match. There could be no more handsome couple, the villagers were generally agreed, than the Earl of Kilbourne and Miss Lauren Edgeworth. His lordship had gone away to the ware—much against his father's wishes, it had been rumored—as a tall, slender, blond, and handsome boy. He had returned six years later improved almost beyond recognition. He was broad where a man should be broad, slim where a man should be slim, and fit and strong and rugged. Even the scar of an old saber wound that slashed his face from right temple to chin, only narrowly missing both his eye and the corner of his mouth, seemed somehow to enhance rather than mar his good looks. As for Miss Edgeworth, she was tall and slim and elegant and as pretty as any picture with her dark shiny curls and eyes that some described as smoky and others as violet, though all were agreed that they were uncommonly lovely. And she had waited patiently for her earl to an almost dangerously advanced age—she was all of four-and-twenty.

It was all very proper and very romantic, everyone agreed.

For two days a steady stream of grand carriages had passed through the village and been duly gawked at by the more vulgar and peered at from behind parlor curtains by the more genteel. Half the quality of England was coming for the occasion, it was said, and more titled persons than some of them had known existed in all of England, Scotland, and Wales combined. Rumor had it—though it was surely more fact than rumor since it had come directly from the first cousin of the brother-in-law of the aunt of one of the kitchen maids at Newbury—that there was not a bedchamber at the abbey that was not to be filled with guests. And that was a prodigious number of rooms.