In August of 1898 a young American woman who has been raised in France by an eccentric expatriate father heir to an encaustic tile firm in Massachusetts is visiting the “summer embassy” of the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James located that year in the Kent countryside. The victory over the Spanish in the Spanish-American War is announced to the household by telegram. The young woman, named Caroline Sanford, also receives a message from America: the will of her late father, which has proved difficult to decipher, is going to be probated much sooner than her half-brother and the other principal heir to her father’s fifteen million have indicated. Is her brother trying to cheat her out of her share, she involuntarily wonders aloud? And thus begins the latest installment in Mr. Vidal’s series of novels set at various key epochs in United States political history.

Caroline Sanford, an invented character, is surrounded by historical figures. At the summer embassy the notables are John Hay, the current ambassador, former secretary to Lincoln, and shortly to become Secretary of State under first McKinley, then Theodore Roosevelt; Henry Adams, Jr., descendant of two presidents and the future author of The Education of Henry Adams; and Henry James, the novelist, then living nearby, at Rye. When she travels to New York, and then on to Washington, she meets Hay and Adams again; as well as Mrs. Mary Astor, President McKinley, and William Randolph Hearst. In the course of