Chapter One

Everyone ought to be forgiven at least one mistake.

I gave my nephews Harcourt and Hilton a sum of birthday money I figured couldn't possibly buy anything that might endanger a pair of fourteen-year-old mad scientists. Unfortunately, I hadn't counted on them squirreling away cash for months, because as soon as they ripped open their cards and found the modest gift, they jumped on the Internet and purchased a fetal pig.

When their gruesome investment arrived—in a large carton packed with dry ice and bubble wrap, and clearly marked BIOHAZARD—they rushed over to my house to set up their laboratory in my basement, where they began the pig's long and loving dissection.

"They're weird, Aunt Nora," said their sister, Lucy, already an astute judge of character at the age of six. She had wide blue eyes that saw the world clearly.

In complete agreement, I hugged Lucy and said, "Let's go to a party."

Like all Blackbird women, Lucy had a few eccentricities of her own. She asked, "Can I take my sword?"

I hadn't been able to wrestle it away from her yet, and I didn't feel up to a battle. "Why not?" I said.

Lucy waved the foil. "If we meet any bad guys, I'll give 'em lead poisoning."

When Lucy and I were suitably dressed and accessorized for an outdoorsy Saturday in April, we left the twins and their infant brother in the capable, if slightly distracted, custody of seventeen-year-old Rawlins, who was trying to teach himself Texas Hold 'Em from a book. Lucy and I tiptoed outside to the waiting car and hit the road. In the car, she shared her Hello Kitty lip gloss with me.

Life had thumped me with a few body blows in the last couple of months. A day with my niece felt like good medicine. Even if we were headed to a party celebrating death.

Eventually, we arrived at Eagle Glen, an estate owned by some elderly, eccentric cousins of ours and located in an expensively bucolic enclave outside Philadelphia where green pastures rolled from one exquisitely landscaped mansion to another. On the tallest hill, Eagle Glen commanded a river view. The neglected estate included a topiary garden with bushes as big as Macy's parade balloons and a green swimming pool full of three-legged frogs. The grass on the tennis court where Billie Jean King once beat the stuffing out of Richard Nixon looked like a wheat field.

Behind the tennis court lay the polo field, recently mowed for the parties. The lower lawn, however, was an ocean of April mud, the result of poorly maintained drainage. Surrounded by a profusion of forsythia and waves of naturalized daffodils, it was mud nevertheless. Hundreds of luxury cars were swamped in it. A couple hundred well-dressed Philadelphians had unpacked elaborate picnics suitable for the first annual Penny Devine Memorial Polo Match. It was a pageant to behold.

Each party had a different theme. As Lucy and I picked our way across the swampy grass in our Wellies, we saw a Chippendale table laid with fine linens and silver under one pretty striped tent. Next to it, another hostess had thrown long boards over sawhorses for a barbecue. Champagne cooled in crystal buckets that sparkled in the sunshine, while barrels of cold beer appealed to other guests. One well-known socialite was treating her guests to a circus, complete with cotton candy, a clown on stilts and an organ-grinder with a monkey that fascinated my niece. The scents of chateaubriand and expensive perfumes mingled in the air with the fragrance of freshly churned-up muck. The mud, in fact, seemed to be the only reason guests were sticking close to their vehicles. If the ground had made better footing, all the parties would have mingled into one spectacular bash.

Lucy pointed at a hired chef in a white coat and toque as he grilled shrimp over an applewood fire. "Look, Aunt Nora. Is that Emerald?"

"I don't think so, Luce."

At the next party, a violinist in tails entertained a party of blue bloods sitting in camp chairs beside a mud-spattered Bentley. Someone had wisely spread out a large blue plastic tarp on the wet ground, then laid a beautiful Persian rug on top of it. They raised their glasses to me and called my name.

Waving back, I thought that half of the city's so-called high society had decked themselves out in designer finery to come watch one another instead of polo.

The competition for Best Dressed was fierce. I spotted two women in Gaultier designs worth more than fifty thousand apiece. Lucy counted six gentlemen in ascots. And there was enough extravagant millinery to give the queen a migraine.

My own choice received a rave review.

"I like your hat best, Aunt Nora. The long feathers look like a fairy's tail."

I simply hoped the damn thing wasn't going to blow off and end up in a puddle. I had carefully unpacked the hat my grandmother wore in the Royal Enclosure the day Princess Diana stepped on her toe—presumably because Grandmama had outshone her.

"Hey, Sis!"

Copyright © Nancy Martin, 2007.