Cinderella's Twin

A soot-smudged drudge named Connie McGill polishes the Valentines’ silver while humming fugitive arias of escape; one afternoon the glint off a soup tureen flings her gaze across the ballroom where Prentice Blue—penniless, pedigreed—stands like an immaculate comma in a run-on sentence of nouveau-riche clamor. Nathaniel Flint, parvenu coal-baron, covets Blue’s threadbare title for his petulant daughter Helen, so he orders a cyclone of champagne and caviar designed to net the aristocrat in matrimony. Into that gaudy maelstrom slither the Du Geen syndicate—velvet-gloved pickpockets who scent diamonds under the chandeliers—and decide to weaponize coincidence itself. They dress Connie in stolen lamé, coach her in three counterfeit waltzes, and launch her, Cinderella-like, into the masque; at midnight she flees, leaving behind not glass but a shabby satin slipper that unknowingly houses Flint’s safe-key. By dawn the jewels have evaporated, Blue nurses an erotic fever for a nameless girl, and Connie must scrub her own dreams out of the carpet while police bloodhounds sniff the corridors.