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“Excellent idea,” Frederick said sleepily. “The clue is in the library.”
“Not the library, the letters!” Daisy said.
His only response was a faint snore.
Daisy jumped up. “Come on, Livie. Time to go home and start reading.”
Livie looked up at her. Despite herself, her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, honey,” Daisy sighed, sitting down again and giving her a hug.
“He kissed me as if he loved me,” Livie explained, her voice wobbling. “I believed it, which was idiotic. No one falls in love at first sight.”
“No one except people with big hearts, like you and Romeo,” Daisy said, rocking her back and forth. “I am in awe of you, Livie. You still love your father, when—to be blunt—so many other women would have run away from home rather than read another of his windy reprimands.”
“He means well,” Livie said, blotting her eyes with the corner of her cloak.
Daisy’s expression suggested she didn’t agree. She got up again. “Where’s your mask?”
Livie pointed at the wardrobe. “Joshua didn’t even like me, let alone love me. Why did he consider marrying me? Why was I so stupid as to think it a good idea to marry a stranger?”
“He was very, very pretty,” Daisy pointed out. “I suppose he thought the same of you.”
“I feel so ashamed,” Livie admitted. “I asked him for help thinking that … thinking that he would somehow magically solve the problem. I thought he was a problem-solver.”
Daisy fished Livie’s mask from the depths of the wardrobe. “Male honor,” she said, sighing. “It’s all so relative, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Lord Devin would claim to have honor, wouldn’t he? But he went to the Rothingale masquerade to buy a woman with a coin or two.”
“Joshua was there too,” Livie said, scowling. “He said he didn’t mean to be there.”
“Lying, no doubt,” Daisy said.
“Just now he looked at me precisely the way my father does.”
“That’s the flip side of this honor business,” Daisy said. “A woman can’t look sideways at a man without being labeled a strumpet. She can’t ask a man for help without being accused of using her womanly wiles to seduce him into dishonoring himself—when he’d already have been dishonored, if the standard applied equally to both sexes!”
Livie looked around for her masquerade hat and plopped it on her head, twitching the veil. “Let’s go home.”
“Hopefully without encountering Regina … Just what did you do to her?”
“I behaved in a very unladylike fashion,” Livie confessed, thinking that the statement applied to her entire evening.
“Tell me everything!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Joshua didn’t sleep the whole night. Staring into the dark, he registered the hours bellowed by the night watchman; he listened as the night soil cart rumbled around to the back of the townhouse; he heard the milkman deposit clinking bottles at the kitchen door.
How had Livie imagined that he would respond to her request?
Livie. The name was still sweet to his tongue, like a dream he longed to fall into again—the dream of finding a woman who would make the dangers of war worth facing.
Until he remembered that she wanted him to obstruct the due process of law. To interfere with his father’s judicial duties.
That dream veiled the biggest betrayal of his life.
