“Hm?” she said, turning, hand over the still-flat plane of her stomach.
Libba looked at it, a faint, fond smile working its way over her mouth. “What does ‘uxorious’ mean?”
Hattie blinked. “‘Devoted to one’s wife.’ Excessively so. To the point of submission, usually. The connotation is often mocking.”
“Ah,” said Libba, blinking right back. “Carry on.”
She turned and strode toward the entry of the house, muttering “uxorious” to herself several times under her breath.
What a perfectly ridiculous word.
How had Jasper come across it? Had he been getting his nose into books while she’d been gone? Had he been developing interests behind her back?
She’d have to ask Malcolm.
“I do not know what you are so fussed about, strange, little man,” Lem’s voice said, calm and rich from the hall. “But I must go.”
“Oh,mustyou? Murderer?” Rhys snapped back.
“I have killed no one,” Lem said firmly. “Yet.”
“Oh, no?” Rhys replied. “Ask me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”
Libba sighed, turning the corner just as a smile of realization was blossoming on Lem’s face, brilliant and white. “Aha!” he declared, turning to see Libba with a sparkle in his dark eyes. “So the banker convinced you, did he? And I am to play Tybalt?”
“Of course you are,” she replied impatiently.
“And this one…?” he said, turning thoughtfully back to Rhys. “Ah, but that is perfect, Liberty. He has the soul of Mercutio.”
“I know,” she said. “We are late. Come along.”
“This conversation isn’t over!” Rhys called after them, still gripping his leather-bound anthology of Shakespeare works. “It’s an unjust slaying and we’re going to depict it that way!”
“He is acting like he has never heard the story before,” Lem said, shaking his head. “Even I knew it, back in the orphanage.”
Libba didn’t reply.
But only because she was not entirely certain Rhys had ever listened during a single literature lesson in their childhood.
Not once.
So it was entirely possible that this was all extremely new to him and he was about to experience an internal collapse when he got to the end of the play.
Lem couldn’t understand that because he did nothingbutlisten. And besides, watching his progressing incredulity throughout this endeavor was bound to be entertaining.
“Ah, Miss Lennox,” said Mr. Harcourt, who hadn’t moved an inch in Libba’s absence, though Hattie was now seated opposite him on her favorite chaise. “I was just chatting with Lady Selwyn while we waited.”
“It is no matter,” Libba said. “Hattie can stay. She came up with the name, after all.”
“Oh, I didn’t comeupwith it,” she demurred with a frown. “I only assumed.”
“She gave me the name,” Lem said, nodding respectfully at Hattie. “Please stay, Baroness. You should be present to my becoming.”
Harcourt looked from one of them to the next and back again without commenting, though his pale eyes spoke multitudes. He cleared his throat, tapping his folio, and nodded at Lem as they took their seats.
“This is a bit of a strange case, I must confess,” he said. “It is not like Miss Lennox’s legal name change some years ago in London, which I have reviewed. The problem, Mr. Lemuel, is that you haven’t a legal name to begin with.”
“Lemon boy,” said Lem. “That is what the orphanage called me.”
