“THE GREATEST WEDDING OF THE NINETEENTH century,’” Penelope spat as she walked, at a slow, agitated gait, across the floor of her personal drawing room on the second story of the Hayes mansion. The afternoon was bright and bustling outside. She held Robber close to her chest and kissed his head. “A little bit of hyperbole, don’t you think?”

“Definitely a bit too much,” Buck put in, between drags of a small fuchsia cigarette. “And you know I am an arbiter of all things a-bit-too-much,” he added.

“Oh, please.” Penelope punctuated her dismissal of Buck’s commentary by rolling her large blue eyes. “The point is, it should be my name in the papers with Henry’s, not Liz’s. She is just so infuriating.”

Penelope stomped her foot once and then turned sharply and walked from the west-facing windows to the south-facing ones. Buck crossed one pudgy leg over the other and exhaled. “You know, I am acquainted with that Gallant fellow. Davis Barnard is his name; he’s my mother’s second cousin or something. Maybe we could—”

“But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not presently engaged to anyone, am I?” Penelope was feeling hot and itchy inside her black dress, and impatient with every little thing. Her instinct was to do some violence to the white-and-gold upholstery that decorated the room, but she had not so lost her head as to want to ruin good brocade. Not yet. She sighed, turned back to Buck, and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be short. It’s all so hard…. She more or less threatened me, you know.”

“Really.” Buck inhaled. “How?”

“She said that if I exposed her,” Penelope answered, her voice returning quickly to a near shriek, “it would only end up making me look bad. Me. As though I were the one acting like a whore in the carriage house!”

Buck lifted his light-colored, sculpted eyebrows. “She’s right,” he ventured cautiously. “It will be difficult for you to get Henry if you appear at all related to Elizabeth’s fall, or if you seem to benefit from it. Society does not like an opportunist,” he added with a slight wag of his finger.

Penelope emitted a wounded guttural noise and widened her eyes at her friend. “I am not an opportunist!” she wailed. Robber squirmed in her arms, but she held him firmly to her. She strode back toward Buck and threw herself down onto the couch beside him. A few moments of awkward, heated silence passed, and then Penelope went on as coolly as she could manage: “I couldn’t stand it if she got him. Do you understand? We need a plan—a perfect plan—to ensure that their engagement is broken immediately.”

“We’ll come up with one.” Buck reached out and scratched Robber’s head, and then petted Penelope’s slender fingers.

“She’s coming tomorrow morning,” Penelope huffed.

“How are we going to come up with a foolproof plan in less than twenty-four hours?”

“Penny, you know I’m very good with a plan—”

“She’s just so perfect at everything!” Penelope interrupted. She stood up and dropped Robber into Buck’s lap.

“Everyone thinks so,” she went on, pacing agitatedly across the black walnut. “And meanwhile, behind that act, she was…you know…with the help.” Penelope smiled faintly, as a thought occurred to her. “She probably thought she was doing the Christian thing, giving herself to someone who really, really needed it.”

Buck’s face broke into a sneering little laugh at that. “So, do you think she’ll come in the morning?”

“Of course. She must be scared out of her mind. I would be.” She chuckled mirthlessly as she crossed her arms across her chest and continued to move restlessly across the floor. “You should have seen her face, Buck. She was white as a ghost.”

Buck tipped the end of his cigarette into the ashtray that was held three feet off the ground by sculpted, gold-plated nymphs. He rested his chin on his palm contemplatively, and said, “Well…that’s a good start.”

Penelope’s jaw tightened and she balled her hands into little fists, which she began to shake in frustration. “Of course it’s a good start. It would be better if the next step were outing her as the slut she is. Then everyone would see plainly why she can’t be with Henry, and the world would return to its rightful order. But apparently that would make me look bad.” Penelope let out a little shriek, then collapsed onto the floor and pounded it once with her fist.

Buck stood and lifted her up by her armpits. He gave her a generous smile, his waxy cheeks rising with it, and then said, “You’re going to have to calm down. You’re never going to win if you can’t keep your nerves under control.”

“I know.” She tried to take a few breaths and remind herself how much was in her favor. She leaned heavily on Buck, as they moved to the windows that looked down on Fifth. The avenue’s afternoon parade of slow-moving carriages was on display, with passengers who pretended not to be watching one another, and who perhaps looked up now and then to see if they might catch a glimpse of the finest silhouette in the city. Penelope turned the dramatic curve of her back onto the street below. She hated that any one of those gawking masses below might perceive her as weak. “The idea,” she went on, “that they would move up the wedding just to thwart me—”

“Well, I’m sure it wasn’t just to thwart you.”

Penelope’s eyes flashed at this suggestion. “It is intolerable that I should lose out to Elizabeth!” she screamed. “That a twit from one of those old inbred families would appear to have stolen what everyone—everyone!—knew was mine.”

“Be calm, my dear,” Buck said, rubbing his friend’s shoulder. “We can’t keep going back and forth. We’ve got to come up with a plan for tomorrow morning. We have all the right cards. It’s just a matter of when we play them.

“And we will,” he told her in a sugared, reassuring voice.

Penelope turned her face into Buck’s lapel, and let her thoughts wander to the episode in Lord & Taylor, trying to pinpoint her rival’s weakness. Instead, she began fixating on Elizabeth’s face, with its trembling chin and its eyes all welled up with self-pity.

Penelope could not cool the rage spreading inside of her. She turned quickly away from Buck and took long strides back to the couch where Robber had been lounging. When she reached him she swept the Boston Terrier up into her arms. He let out a few sharp barks, but still she clung to him. “Whatever it takes, Buckie, we’ve got to find a way. I cannot bear to lose. I would rather see Elizabeth dead than married to my Henry.”