She was never the most beautiful woman in the room.

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Born into a family with more portraits than money and more history than sense, she understood early what was being asked of her. To be still. To be appropriate. To be the kind of woman that men of a certain standing required on their arm and nothing more. She listened to all of it very carefully, the way one listens to a language one has no intention of ever speaking, and then she went her own way entirely.

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Kitty’s began in a bedroom in Mayfair on a grey February morning that London has long since forgotten. She had not slept. There was champagne that nobody had finished and a fire that somebody had. There was lace on the floor, real lace, the kind that takes a woman in Honiton three weeks to make by hand, and pearls on the bedside table, and outside the window the whole of England was going about its business completely unaware that something had just been decided.

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She decided it the way she decided everything. No announcement. No proclamation. Simply the absolute and unshakeable certainty of a woman who has just understood something true about the world and intends to build her life around it.

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This is Kitty’s...