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sixteen—but her mama, the countess, was made nervous by all his roving, and has followed along in his footsteps.” Penelope had to press up on the toes of her satin heels, which were adorned with pearls, and crane her neck to glimpse this creature. Through the crush of evening garb and sweat ing faces she caught sight of not one Frenchwoman but two, neither particularly tall. The elder fanned herself indifferently, and the younger, who wore a pearl-and-diamond choker, gazed up at the fine shoulders of her escort in dewy adoration. There was something about her untouched skin and wide dark eyes that put Diana Holland back in Penelope’s head, along with a twist of rage.
    “He was in Florida when we were there, but I never saw him.”
    “You can tell how beautiful the countess once was.”
    “Yes,” Penelope agreed, but only after privately noting that lady’s sunken cheeks and rather overdone makeup. The prince was smiling at some sycophant or other with an air of patient disdain, which Penelope recognized from her own repertoire of facial expressions. She felt a touch of sympathy toward him for being so obviously, so painfully superior to those around him, just as she always was. Then he glanced up so that his eyes settled on her and caught the light. She had become tough in the previous months, but she softened at the sight of a man who was clearly of her caliber.
    “Oh…Mrs. Schoonmaker.”
    Penelope turned, distracted, in the direction of her name, and saw Adelaide Newbold, whose maiden name had been Wetmore. The new bride smiled tightly as she passed, and then swept onward in an insignificant wave of mauve.
    “What was that?” Penelope managed to keep her voice quiet, but was unable to wring it of the fury she felt. The ignominy of being cut by a girl who had married at a more advanced age than she, to a man of far less means than Penelope’s husband, was almost too outrageous to believe.
    “It is perverse how they all think Miss Broad is so high and fine, all the while giving me nasty faces.
    Does that make any kind of sense to you?”
    Buck’s silence continued as she turned her gaze, slowly, in his direction.
    “Does it?”
    “Perhaps…” Buck pressed his fat lips together. The plentiful flesh of his cheeks threatened to obscure his eyes. “Perhaps it is that they think—erroneously, of course—that you are out a little soon after your…
    illness. When your husband is away, that is, and in harm’s way.” A collection of words have never been more carefully strung together, and yet they could not have sounded more cloddish, stupid, ill-informed to Penelope’s ears. “I’m thirsty,” she snapped. “Get me a drink.”
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    She did not watch Buck go. Already she was crossing the large parlor on the second floor of Carolina Broad’s new house with proud purpose. The panels of her red silk dress caught the chandelier light, as the lace of the underskirt frothed up around her feet. The elegant people all around her must have suddenly come into some reserves of reason, for they moved aside for her with a suggestion of deference. She stalked to the middle of the room where the girl with the petite stature and Holland-esque face was standing, and promptly looked away from her.
    “Would you believe that no one has asked me to dance all night?” she demanded of the prince of Bavaria, allowing the absurdity of the statement to bear up in her voice, along with the flat American vowels.
    The prince—he was unusually tall, she realized when she was beside him, and his skin had the glow of all things very rare and expensive to maintain—assessed her with amused, appreciative eyes. His jaw shifted. “No,” he said after a minute.
    Penelope cocked an eyebrow and let her chin rise just a little, the better to display the long, pale symmetry of her neck. The countess and her daughter were watching this American girl in