Burlington House stood on Piccadilly, not far from Fortnum & Mason. Mercy and Mrs. Albion had used the same dressmaker and hairdresser; and a quick inspection had assured her that John was perfectly turned out in a similar manner to Albion. But as they entered the huge courtyard, glanced at the massive colonnades and saw the great sweep of steps to the doorway ahead of them, she couldn’t help feeling a trace of nervousness. The front facade of the Palladian mansion resembled nothing so much as a Roman palazzo. Flanking the impressive doorway were rows of liveried footmen. She heard her husband ask a very reasonable question.

“What’s this huge place used for—its daily business, I mean?”

“You do not understand, my friend.” Albion smiled. “This is a private residence.”

And then, for the first time, Mercy felt afraid.

She had never seen anything like it before. The great rooms and halls with their coffered ceilings were so large and so high that the biggest mansion in New York could have fitted into any one of them. Even the scale of a church like Trinity looked puny by comparison. America had nothing like this, imagined nothing like this, and would not have known what to do with it. How modest, how insignificant, how provincial even New York’s greatest mansions must look to the men who lived in such palaces. All over Europe, an entire class was accustomed to live in this way—a class of whose very existence, she suddenly realized, she was almost entirely ignorant.

“Such wealth,” she heard her husband remark to Albion, “must confer enormous power.”

“It does. The Duke of Northumberland, for instance—whose London house is bigger than this—comes from a feudal family who ruled like kings in the north for centuries. Today, the Duke has dozens of Members of Parliament who vote exactly as he tells them to. Other powerful magnates do the same thing.”

“We have no feudal families like that in the colonies.”

“The proprietors of Maryland and Pennsylvania still possess land grants which give them feudal powers,” Albion pointed out.

It was perfectly true that the seventeenth-century grants made to a few families like the Penns, and indeed the land grants of the great patroons up the Hudson River—grants given them to develop what was then empty territory—had left these magnates with almost feudal powers.

“They don’t build palaces, though,” John said.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Albion was whispering in Mercy’s ear.

“There’s the Duchess of Devonshire. They have another house like this just along the street. There’s Lord Granville. And oh my, there’s Lady Suffolk. You don’t often get the chance to see her.”

“Who’s Lady Suffolk?”

“Why, the king’s old mistress. A very kind lady, much respected. And look over there.” She indicated a handsome lady to whom everyone was bowing. “That’s Lady Yarmouth, the king’s present mistress. The most important lady at the court.”