The Count and the Wedding Guest: A man courts a woman in mourning, but is everything as it seems?

William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him.

He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle's drugstore and gained a pharmacists' license in 1881.

A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change of climate woul...