“Lady Augusta, how lovely! And Lady Julia, always a pleasure,” Mary Berry said, arriving at the drawing room door, her dark eyes alight with welcome. Behind her, Agnes—a somewhat paler and shorter version of her sister—smiled her own greeting. They both curtsied.

Like us, Mary and Agnes were unmarried sisters in their forties, although they were not twins; Mary was one year older, and the more outgoing and famed of the two in the fashionable circles in which we all moved. Also like us, they were financially independent. However, where we had received our inheritance from our father, they had received an inheritance from Horace Walpole, the 4th Earl of Orford, although they were not related to him in any way. It was said Walpole had considered the Berry sisters some kind of family he had collected. An odd concept: a collected family. Mind you, such a family might be more congenial than one formed by the usual means, since it held more intent upon its membership.

“It is a larger circle tonight than usual,” Mary said, a twirl of her hand indicating the gathering as we followed her and Agnes into the drawing room. “By staying in London, His Highness has done us a great favor.”

She meant of course the number of politicians who sat or stood with drinks in hand among the poets and actors. Usually, Parliament would have retired and the lord politicians gone to their estates, but the war with America, alongside the war with Napoleon, had forced the Prince Regent to delay his usual sojourn to his beloved Brighton.

I spotted our new prime minister, Lord Liverpool, who already looked exhausted, and beside him a rather worried-looking Viscount Sidmouth, secretary of the Home Office, who had only come to the position in June. They were in animated conversation with Lord Milroy. I was sure he had seen me enter the room with Julia—a telltale flick of his eyes and pursing of thin lips—but he did not do me the honor of acknowledging my arrival. I was not overly distressed; I did not wish to speak to him either.

I counted only six other women in the room; Mary did not like to have too many of our sex at one of her drawing rooms. I once asked her why this was so and she said she did not want any gathering of hers to be thought of as a bastion of the bluestocking. She was, I thought, in great fear of being labeled blue and thus ridiculed. Perhaps this was why we were friendly but not great friends; to my mind, nothing would change if the rules made by men were not challenged by women.