Regarding Penelope and Veronica, Penelope has changed little and is still engaging in various worthy projects such as campaigning against cruelty to horses, dogs, and other animals while rigorously keeping up her skills with the dueling sword. Veronica has been through 2 notoriously disastrous marriages, neither of which lasted very long, and three more auto accidents, and is battling with her ex-husbands over various properties while raising eyebrows in London, Paris, and New York with her riotous behavior and total lack of concern for same. She appears to have learned nothing from these experiences. As for Winston, he still holds court with his gentleman friends, a roguish lot of pompous wastrels who are no doubt tired of his self-promoting stories, but hopeful of his financial assistance in difficult times. He and Penelope seldom speak to one another and manage to live separate lives with little strain. Penelope rules Rutledge Mansion, while Winston rules the Vicar's Inn in Twillingsgate and his offices in London. Now and then he stops by the mansion to see if it is still there, but that's about it.

Oakley appears to have given up long ago on his romantic dreams of being Penelope's partner, and that's probably a good thing. He doesn't know how lucky he is that they never came to fruition! Anyway, he's not of the right class, so it was never worth considering, really.

Hector Ballsworthy, the British journalist who once wrote innumerable shocking tabloid articles about the secret occult connections Winston Wellington-JOnes had with "the Lizard people" and how they were planning to take over Penelope's pure Anglo-Saxon bloodline in order to control the UK and eventually all of the western world has embarked upon a popular podcast in which he investigates bizarre crimes, demonic gardening cults, and even more arcane tales such as the real story behind Batboy, a human-bat hybrid from the rural USA who once featured in several famous issues of the Weekly World News. He claims that Batboy is being held in an unnamed castle in Switzerland, and that it ties in with a plot to infiltrate all the cheese companies in Europe and introduce Bat genes into European populations. He has not been bothering the Rutledges lately, ever since the mysterious "poisoned arrows" and "dog pack" incident in Cornwall which almost proved fatal.

Other than that, things seem quite peaceful, almost like a quiet lull in what had been, for a time, a raging tempest.