IT took very little effort on Cassandra's part to learn of Lady Sheringford's ball. She simply looked about the fashionable area of Hyde Park until she saw a largish group of ladies – there were five of them in all – strolling along the footpath together and talking quite animatedly among themselves as they went. Cassandra led Alice toward them and then strolled along ahead of them and listened.

She learned a great deal she did not wish to know about what was most fashionable in bonnets this year and about who looked well in such hats and who looked so dreadful that it would really be a kindness to tell them if only one could summon up the courage. She learned about the endearing antics of their children – each one trying to outdo the others.

The antics were endearing, Cassandra suspected, only because their victims were nurses or governesses rather than the mothers themselves.

It sounded to her as if every single one of the children described was a spoiled brat of the first order.

But finally the tedious conversation yielded a harvest. Three of the ladies were planning to attend Lady Sheringford's ball tomorrow evening at the home of the Marquess of Claverbrook on Grosvenor Square. A surprising venue, that, one of them observed, since the elderly marquess had been a recluse for years and years before he had finally left his home again to attend the wedding of his grandson three years ago. He had not been seen since. Yet now there was to be a ball at his house.

Rumor had it, though, apparently, Cassandra learned without being at all interested, that he spent a great deal of his time in the country with his grandson and his great-grandchildren. And that his granddaughter-in-law, the countess, had learned how to coax him out of the sullens.