“Good day, Mr. Exeter.”

“Enjoy your party.”

These words he said with as much sarcasm as he could muster, and then he nodded to Lenox and left.

“It’s for the best anyway,” Lenox muttered to himself as he poured a glass of sherry at his side table. It was time to focus on politics, after all.

The dinner party that evening was at the house of Lady Emily Nevin, a rather mysterious Hungarian woman (said to be the daughter of some nobleman in her home country) who had married a romantic young baronet just before his death. She had inherited everything but his title, which had gone to an impoverished country cousin who could make no bread by it and still had to till his own earth. Still, people “went to see her,” as the phrase went-because the Prince of Wales, on whom Lady Nevin exerted all of her many charms, did.

It was Lady Nevin’s great conceit that wherever she went she kept a pet on a leash-a hedgehog. It was called Jezebel and waddled around with a surly look on its face, its well-groomed coat glistening with perfume and pomade. She had found it in the basement of her house; indeed, many people in London kept hedgehogs in their basements-the animals slept a great deal in whatever warm corner they could find and voraciously discovered and ate all of a house’s insects. Few, though, brought them upstairs as Lady Nevin had. She even took the creature to other people’s houses. It was considered either wickedly funny or profoundly tasteless, depending whom you spoke to. Lenox found it primarily silly, although he never entirely discounted the bond between a human and an animal because of a Labrador (Labbie, by name) that he had been given as a child and loved with all his heart.

Despite the hedgehog, Lenox was having no fun at the party. Held in a broad, overheated room with windows overlooking the Thames, it contained few people he knew and fewer of his friends. Lady Jane, with her inexhaustible acquaintance, moved easily among the small groups, but Lenox stood by the window, glumly eating a sherbet. They made a funny sort of couple on occasions like this.