“LITTLE BO PEEP. THAT’S TOO PERFECT FOR LIZ,” Penelope Hayes said, as she said nearly everything, with a quarter ounce of venom.

“Well, at least she didn’t forget her humble American origins while she was swanning about with the Frenchies,” her friend Isaac Phillips Buck replied. “And at least she didn’t go bland marquis et marquise like everybody else,” he added with a sniff.

Penelope gave a careless shrug. If he wanted to praise Elizabeth Holland, whom she had long ago singled out as her principal rival and thus her only possible best friend, and who was now circling the polo-field-size dance floor with that toad Percival Coddington, it was fine with her. She was feeling entirely better now that she had seen how very impressed everyone was by her family’s new house and hosting style. And, of course, by her.

There had been a dark moment earlier, when the messenger arrived with the note. She had just returned from the Hollands’, where she had gone to welcome Elizabeth back and chastise her for nearly missing the party. Her heart had clenched, reading the careless missive, and then she had flown into a rage that—she could admit this now—had not been especially fair to the maids attending to her before the party. It was not so much that she feared the writer of the note would not come to love her—how long could any boy hold out, really?—but that this particular boy might miss this particular party. After all, what better place for him to realize she was truly the center of the universe, and that keeping their relationship secret was a colossal waste?

Now, observing her family’s ballroom from the mezzanine, her torso cinched beneath her flamenco dancer’s red flounces to a perfect eighteen inches, she felt supremely confident that he would come. It was the evening of the Richmond Hayeses’ ball, the evening when they reached their apotheosis as a top-drawer family—there was simply no place else to be. She was certain he would arrive shortly. Well, almost certain. Penelope rested a confident hand on her hip even as she clenched and unclenched her fist around the note in her other hand.

“Would you look at Elizabeth, holding herself so high and mighty,” Penelope said. The dozens of delicate yellow-gold bangles lining her forearms jangled.

Isaac drew himself up to his full height and rested his hands on his rotund belly, which went undisguised by his jester outfit. “I think she is trying to keep out of the way of Percival’s breath.”

Then they laughed, as they always laughed: mouths closed and through their noses. Penelope and Elizabeth hadn’t really become friends until they shared a French tutor in their early teens. (Later Penelope had overheard that this arrangement had been thought up by Mr. Holland to perturb Mrs. Holland, and had never forgotten the slight.) He had been an adorable and lanky fellow whom Elizabeth used to enjoy making blush by asking him, for instance, to explain the difference between décolletage and décolleté. It was comical what lengths Elizabeth seemed to go to these days to prove what a proper little miss she was. Penelope never worried so much over anything, especially not whether she was perceived as a lady.

Which was all well and good, since Penelope was something less than a lady, at least from the point of view of members of the old Dutch families like Elizabeth’s mother, who nonetheless had been enjoying the lavishness of the Hayeses’ ballroom all evening. A ballroom, Penelope couldn’t help but thinking, far more vast and sparkling than the Holland ballroom. The Hollands lived in an old and really rather plain sort of mansion in Gramercy Park with a staid brown face and the rooms all in neat rows. And that wasn’t even a fashionable part of town anymore.

Penelope might have felt bad for Liz that she still lived in such a backwater while the Hayes family had moved on to Fifth Avenue uptown, with its strip of grand new residences, except that she knew very well Liz’s mother was always talking about the Hayeses and how they were a made-up family. Which was a rather harsh way of looking at it. It was true that the Hayes fortune had begun when Penelope’s grandfather, Ogden Hazmat Jr., gave up his modest tailoring business in Maryland and began selling cotton blankets to the Union army for the price of wool. But ever since Granddad had moved to New York, changed his name, and bought a Washington Square town house from a bankrupt branch of the Rhinelander family, the Hayes clan had been entrenched in New York society.

Now they’d left Washington Square behind forever, and resituated themselves in the only private home in New York with three elevator banks and a basement swimming pool. They had arrived, and they had the mansion to prove it. Or a palazzo, as her mother consistently and irritatingly referred to it.

“Good work tonight, Buck,” Penelope said, her full lips breaking into a smile of enormous pride. In parlor chatter, Penelope’s beauty was occasionally derided as being all lips, but the jabbering hens who said so were certainly in error: Penelope’s lips were no more striking than her eyes, which were wide and blue and capable of welling with innocence or scorn in equal measure.

“Only for you,” he replied in his nasally faux-British accent. Isaac had something of a case of Anglomania, and it had lately spread to his diction.

Since Isaac was only half-acknowledged by the Buck clan as one of their own, he was obliged to work for a living, and had made himself indispensable to hostesses like Mrs. Hayes. He always knew where to get the freshest flowers, and where to find handsome young men who were willing to dance and fun to dance with, even if they weren’t exactly marriageable. He knew how to shriek at the cooks so that the meats would come out just done enough. Isaac’s shriek was not pretty, but his parties always were.

“I have to say,” Isaac went on drolly, “everyone does look their best this evening. It wasn’t all in vain. I mean, the jewels alone. You could buy Manhattan with those jewels.”

“Yes,” Penelope agreed. “Though it never fails to shock me how people can dump a trainload of baubles over some piece of hide.”

“Oh, that’s just Agnes you’re talking about, and she barely has any baubles. Anyway, I think she’s supposed to be Annie Oakley, and I believe if you queried her dressmaker, he would say the getup was suede.”

“Hah. You know very well that Agnes doesn’t have a dressmaker, Buckie.” Penelope smirked. “And Amos Vreewold as a matador? Please.” She turned to her friend, one dark eyebrow high.

“Now, now. It’s not every man who can look dignified in tights.”

“Oh, look—there’s Teddy Cutting!” Penelope interrupted the survey of costumes. Teddy, with his blond hair and sparkly blue eyes and inherited shipping fortune, was just the sort of boy Penelope had been flirting with at balls since she’d come into society two years ago. Teddy had a crush on Elizabeth Holland, which was the real reason Penelope always made a point of dancing with him. She watched as the young women, with their great starched skirts and puffed sleeves, flocked to Teddy, who bowed gallantly and went about kissing each of their gloved hands.

“Teddy looks yummy.” Isaac let one hand float up to his chin. “He chose French courtier like everybody else, but he did do it well.”

“Well enough,” Penelope replied nonchalantly, for wherever Teddy went, there was usually a certain someone even better just behind. She snapped her fingers at one of the passing waiters, balled up the note she had received earlier in the day, and dropped it into her empty champagne glass. She placed her glass on his tray without meeting his eyes and then helped herself to two more flutes.

That was when Henry Schoonmaker strode through the arched entryway at the far end of the ballroom and the whole world seemed to faint just a little bit. Penelope kept herself upright, even as her heart began to beat triumphantly and her face tingle in anticipation. Even among the dashing and rich, Henry Schoonmaker stood out for being so beautiful and so slippery at once. He came to his friend Teddy’s side, and Penelope rolled her eyes as he began kissing the flurry of gloved hands as well.

Henry always looked in good humor and good health—which was due in part to his penchant for outdoor sports and in part to the drink that was his constant accessory—and even from across the largest private ballroom in New York City, the tanned perfection of his skin was evident. He had the shoulders of a general and the cheekbones of a born aristocrat, and his mouth was most often fixed in an expression of mild mockery. Like Elizabeth Holland, Henry was the descendant of one of New York’s great families, but he was much, much less concerned with being good.

“Those girls are embarrassing themselves,” Penelope remarked of her cousins and friends below. She ran her fingers over her slick dark hair, which was parted sharply along the middle of her scalp and drawn down to the nape of her neck, framing the perfect oval of her face. Intricate silver filigreed combs fanned out behind her head. “I think I’m going to go save our friend,” she added, as though the thought had just occurred to her.

Then she gathered up the yards of red crepe de chine covering her legs and began to glide toward the curving marble staircase.

“Buckie,” she called, a few steps down the stairway. She turned to meet his eyes with a look of particular intensity.

“That’s the man I’m going to marry.”

Isaac raised his champagne flute, and Penelope beamed with her declaration. How could she fail when she had somebody as wily as IPB on her side? Penelope turned back down the stairs and in a few moments she was standing on the main floor of her ballroom. A reverential hush settled on the room as the faces in the crowd turned toward her in a wave. Amongst all the white satin and powdered wigs, her red dress made her stand out even more than usual. She cut through the group of girls she had just pronounced fools and reached Henry Schoonmaker in a few breathless moments.

“Who let you in?” She greeted him without a smile. She placed her fist on her hip, causing the gold, gypsy-style bracelets to clatter down her wrist. “You’re not wearing a costume. And it said very clearly on your invitation that this was to be a costume ball.”

Henry turned to her with a face of casual amusement, not even bothering with a faux self-conscious examination of his black tails and trousers. “Have I done wrong, Miss Hayes? See, I don’t have time to read my mail anymore, but a little bird told me you would be having a party tonight….”

It was whispered among the women of New York that Henry always had the band paid off in advance, because they frequently struck up a waltz just precisely when he needed to end a conversation. The band began playing now, and Henry gave a gentle nod in Penelope’s direction. She could not stop the corner of her mouth from twitching, smile-like, for a moment. He kept his intense gaze fixed on her as he began walking her backward into the room until they were waltzing.

For a moment the crowd just watched, dazzled by the lightness of the couple moving across the floor. But Penelope was very good at arousing jealousy, and her cousins and friends were not very good at standing still when they were jealous. Soon other, less bright couples began dancing, too, so that the gleaming pattern of the marble floor was blotted out by the bright swinging skirts of the girls and the nimble black feet of their partners.

There were plenty of eyes still on the flamenco dancer and the dandy in tails; Penelope knew how much she was watched, so she spoke quietly as they moved. “Why did you send me that note?” she asked, tilting her head slightly as they turned.

“I like teasing you,” he answered. “This way, I knew you’d be especially grateful to see me.”

Penelope considered this for a moment, but there was something in his lively, deep brown eyes that told her he was lying, just a little bit. “You were someplace else before you came here, weren’t you?”

“Now, what would make you think a thing like that?” he replied with unwavering amusement. “I’ve been looking forward to this precise moment all day.”

“You lie very well,” she told him. “But I knew you wouldn’t stay away.”

Henry stared at her carelessly and did not answer. He just pressed his hand into her skirt, somewhat lower than the small of her back, and kept moving her through the crowd. She felt in that moment as though they were a known item, and that all those lesser girls were already crying into their hankies at the thought of Henry William Schoonmaker being married. The music seemed to be playing triumphantly and just for her. She could have gone on like this forever. She might have, too, had not the large, whiskery figure of Henry’s father appeared over his shoulder and pulled him out of the dance.

“Pardon me, Miss Hayes,” the elder Mr. Schoonmaker said in a voice that was level but devoid of apology. The rest of the dancers kept moving, but Penelope found herself horribly stalled in the center of everything, her great performance curtailed by this large, odious parental presence. She felt a fit coming on but somehow managed to contain it. The other dancers were pretending not to notice what was going on, but they were all terrible fakers. Penelope wondered if Elizabeth was out there watching. She had wanted to reveal her secret relationship to her friend with maximum drama, and this exchange wasn’t helping anything. “I am going to have to borrow Henry for the rest of the night. It’s quite urgent, and we must leave immediately, I’m afraid.”

Instinct made Penelope smile even through her misery, and she tipped her head. “Of course,” she answered. Then she watched, alone, from the middle of that epic room, as her future husband disappeared amongst all those ordinary bodies. Penelope knew, despite the still-dancing masses, that for her the party was over.