The Russell family estate in northern Kent, four miles east of the village of Hexby, was in an uproar. Jane, the Marchioness of Rochester, was on the verge of strangling her second youngest child, one Linus Winston Russell. Despite her own knowledge that she had birthed that troublesome boy twenty-one years before, sometimes she swore he hadn't matured past the age of eight.

The young man in question was balanced precariously on a rickety ladder in the entryway of Rochester ...