“It will give me confidence,” Flavia replied. “And that I am going to need in abundance tomorrow night.”
The servants were thinking that she was merely shy, which of course she was. At the same time she never for a moment forgot the reason why the party was being held – or the conniving of the two elderly courtiers who hoped they would kill ‘two birds with one stone’.
She was not surprised when a message came from her father.
It was to say that he would be so late for dinner that she was not to wait for him and he would doubtless have something to eat before he finally returned.
She guessed that, having gone to see the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, there had been a number of other Statesmen waiting to pounce on him – she supposed she was lucky that he had not been summoned
