“THEY’VE ALL GROWN SO SMALL,” PENELOPE SCHOONMAKER announced, several hours after arriving at the party, but when no one had yet asked her to dance. She had always been said to have dramatic features, but her eyes were especially wide now, in disbelief. The feel of the flocked wallpaper at Miss Broad’s had become hatefully familiar to her; she had never been the kind of girl content to go unnoticed. Three months of convalescing were behind her and she was dying for a little fun, but she was finding that not so easy to come by as before. “Buck, don’t they look small?” she repeated insistently

“Not me,” replied her friend Isaac Phillips Buck with a little self-effacing laugh. His tone indicated he was joking, but what he had said was perfectly true, for Buck stood a full head taller than Penelope, and was several times her girth. Buck liked to give the impression of being from the august Buck clan, but this lineage was dubious at best, and his prestige was almost entirely based on his reputation for being indispensable when one was throwing a party. It was a reputation that had been fanned in no small part by the former Miss Hayes. But that he was not a small man was indeed true, although it was only one of the reasons his longtime patron found him irritating at that particular moment.

“They must be small-minded at least if they actually believe Carolina Broad is as fine as they pretend to think she is,” Penelope snapped. Fashion was vicious; it moved quickly, she knew, but she had not been in bed so long, and she was still better looking than any of them. She remembered when Carolina was just another disgruntled maid, let go by the Hollands—but that was before she had befriended the old bachelor Carey Lewis Longhorn and somehow or other persuaded him to leave her his vast fortune. She had been playing heiress at first, but now she really was one, and the evidence was above them in coffered ceilings as well as on the handsome façade that boasted her new address. It was stomach-turning how formal she had been with Penelope—who had done so much for her—and how quickly she had excused herself to chase after Leland Bouchard.

For Penelope, the agony of having stood so long in a room while being paid so little attention was far greater than any that could have resulted from a physical blow. She was dressed in eye-catching vermilion that enveloped her like plumage, and the lace that sheathed her arms and the suede that circled her waist revealed how dainty she had become since she last had been seen out. Her dark hair was up above her face like a cloud at midnight; her eyes looked acutely blue lined in black, as they were now.

“I never knew how unkind New York could be until today,” she concluded bitterly. For although it was not the kind of thing that was printed in society pages, the reason Penelope had been confined to her bedroom for so long was that she had lost what would have been her and Henry Schoonmaker’s first child. And to make it all the more pitiable, the whole unfortunate episode had occurred while her dashing husband was away at war.

Or not really at war, because Henry’s father, William, had arranged for him to be sent to Cuba, where the danger had mostly passed. And no baby had truly been lost, because she had never actually been with child. That had been a story she cooked up to bind Henry to her and punish the irritating girl he persisted in believing himself in love with. She could not really have been with child, because she and Henry did not really act like man and wife in that sense, except on one occasion, in Florida, when he had been very drunk. For a moment the muscles of Penelope’s face relaxed and her blood warmed at the thought of the summer when Henry and she had been intimate in every back corner of their families’ homes they could manage…but she stopped herself. She was in a room of people incapable of sympathy, but apparently quite capable of delighting in her downfall, and she could not afford to grow wistful.

“Look!” Buck was laboring for a cheerful tone.

After a stubborn pause, she did turn her gaze in the direction Buck had indicated. There, through the crowd of red-faced people shrieking in delight at whatever inanity, moving about the dance floor gracelessly—or, she supposed, with what had come to pass for grace in Mrs. Schoonmaker’s absence—stood a tall, broad fellow in shiny black garb with eyes almost as strikingly blue as her own. There was something wholesome, but also exotic, about his chestnut hair and the sparkle of his smile.

“At what exactly?” Penelope replied in the well-practiced voice that implied she was not impressed.

“It’s the prince of Bavaria.” Buck inclined himself toward his old friend and continued in a confidential tone: “He’s been touring the New World for some time. They say he is soon to be engaged to that little slip of a thing at his side—French, can’t be more than 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 sweating 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.”

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 her unseemly red gown with an air of European haughtiness, no doubt, but their expressions were irrelevant just then. As she waited, her confidence, as well as the excitement of being in the middle of a room, at the center of attention, of having done something slightly irregular, grew. Then the prince reached for her hand and planted his lips on the other side of the gaudy engagement ring that she had had to buy herself.

“Allow me the pleasure of being the first,” he replied in English just slightly inflected with a foreign sophistication.

Neither she nor the prince glanced at the Frenchwomen as he lifted his arm so that her hand could remain rested against his and aloft while he led her into the adjoining room. Several of Miss Broad’s guests were still dancing, but they parted for them with reverent interest. A hush fell over the couples. They were all watching her now, Penelope realized, and she smirked a little to think how easy it was to win their attention, even after everything.

The prince’s eyes darted once more to her hand before he circled her firmly with his other arm, and moved her backward into a waltz.

“What a pity you’re married,” he said, in a voice that implied a greater familiarity than could possibly have been justified by their few minutes of acquaintance. He was dancing very close to her, closer than an American boy would have—but then she was not shy of holding his gaze.

“Well, you see, my husband is at war,” she replied with a broad flash of smile. “In such situations, you never know who will be coming back, and who is gone forever, and a lady must always be hedging her bets.”

For a moment she feared that she had gone too far, that the prince would find her cavalier assessment of Henry’s soldiering and possible death unseemly and leave her standing alone on the dance floor. But then he tossed his head back and laughed heartily, until she too laughed, emitting a twinkling bell-like noise in the direction of the coffered ceiling. Then he moved closer and went on dancing her across the floor in a way that made all those people who had so recently snubbed her stop what they were doing and stare at her gape-mouthed. The prince of Bavaria was still laughing, a little smugly now, and this indicated to Penelope that he had a rather perverse sense of humor and also that, over the course of the evening, they were going to have a very good time.

The skirts of the women all around them brushed up against one another to form a solid wall of fine pastels; their mouths, and whatever they were whispering, disappeared behind their fans. Light twinkled from the jewels that sat on Penelope’s wrists and neck and waist and hair. The fearsome Mrs. Schoonmaker had been away for some months, but it had only taken a few hours, and not especially much of her patience, to once again captivate an entire room.