Chapter Two
Jasper Townsend found the only open spot at the bar was next to Baron Selwyn himself, upright and still a little stiff and staring skeptically down at a pint of translucent, greenish liquid with no bubbling to speak of.
“The Devil is that?” Jasper asked, wedging in next to the man and wrinkling up his nose as he peered into the glass and caught a whiff of vinegar. “Don’t drink it.”
“I don’t intend to,” Elias Selwyn answered, glancing up at him with a tick at the corners of his lips.
“It is for my wife. Pregnant women evidently crave the strangest things, and I have discovered this evening that mine has been dabbling in the trade of pickle brine with the barman here for the last several weeks. That’s what this is. ”
Jasper pulled a face. “And she’s going to drink it?”
“It is her third glass,” Elias replied with a sigh. “And then I think I’ll be taking her home.”
“Aye,” said Jasper, baffled, “before she wants a pint of floor polish next?”
“Indeed,” said the other man with a tired chuckle, taking up the glass and turning back toward the table. “Indeed,” he muttered again as he strode away.
“Pickle brine?” Jasper demanded, as soon as the barman had reappeared.
He looked exhausted. “For you too?” he asked, resigned.
“God, no. I’m just horrified and making note of it. Standard ale, please. A pitcher. Nothing more.”
“Right-o,” said the barman with a relieved, little sigh that still managed to sound put-upon. “Let me just retrieve and wash a pitcher, then.”
Jasper nodded, leaning back against the scuffed wood of the bar end and surveyed the crowd.
Opposite the Starling brood was a gaggle of Irish Travellers who summered on the shore every year.
They’d attended the show as well, at Libba’s invitation, and were currently playing some sort of drinking game that involved flicking coins at glasses that had been stacked in a diamond shape.
It appeared that the current frontrunners were a man who must have been pushing ninety and a girl who looked suspiciously like she had not yet crested twelve.
Jasper shook his head, impressed.
Next to him, a new man sidled into the spot Elias had left behind, looking strangely familiar, for all that he was unknown to Jasper. It took him a few moments of staring before he put it together.
“The sculptor!” he exclaimed. “From the show tonight! Egads, man, I thought you were in your fifties!”
The actor, a man who couldn’t have been more than halfway through his second decade, turned and flashed a bright smile. “Oh,” he said with a flutter of his golden lashes, still a little dusted with the talcum that had transformed him into an elder. “A fan. Aren’t you a colorful thing?”
Jasper blinked.
“Garret,” came Libba’s voice, her body following like it had materialized from the cloud of ale scent in the vicinity rather than coming on foot. “No.”
The actor turned and frowned at her. “Why not?”
“No,” she said again. “Go play with one of the men who brought you flowers.”
“Oh, but that’s so easy.” The actor pouted but slunk off, anyway, without even ordering a drink.
Jasper watched him go, his bafflement growing with each additional minute that passed this evening. He stared for what must have been quite a while, because when the barman slapped the empty pitcher down on the bar next to his elbow, he startled so badly, he almost lost his balance.
He wheeled around to Libba, jerking his thumb over his shoulder and demanded to know, “That’s the man you were canoodling on stage an hour ago?! That one?!”
“That one,” she said mildly. “Likely my Romeo, if we follow Mal’s plan.”
“But he … But you …” Jasper sputtered, looking at her and then back at Garret, who was now indeed surrounded by three male admirers bearing blossoms.
“Acting,” she said slowly. “Do you know the word?”
“I’ll teach you some of the words I know,” he muttered, flushing in embarrassment for reasons he couldn’t even articulate. “That new baroness of yours is drinking pickle juice, you know.”
“Ugh, I know,” Libba said, wrinkling up her nose in exactly the same way he had. “Worse, a few of the others have now tried it and enjoyed it too. I fear it might now be a permanent pantry item at Starling’s Rest.”
“I can’t believe you’re all living there again,” he said, accepting the pitcher and sliding two coins across the bar in thanks. “It was odd enough to have either of you come back here from London in the first place, and then to do so together, and then to stay. It’s been an odd summer.”
“It has at that,” she agreed, sighing. “Is that why Mal is acting so … so …?”
“No,” said Jasper, and she winced. “I offended him before you got here. Turned down a job at his new shipping company.”
“Did you?” She narrowed her eyes at him, her voice kicking up an octave, like he’d surprised her. “Why would you do such a fool thing?”
“Several reasons,” he snapped, testier than he ought to have been, as it wasn’t Libba who’d dug into him about it some hours ago.
“You two went off to London to start anew, but I’ve been here the whole time, you know.
I’ve had my own plans in the works for years, my own aspirations.
That doesn’t change just because you were forced to come home. ”
“All right,” she said, raising her brows and holding up her hands in apology. “I simply thought you’d want to work with your best mate and make more coin besides.”
“It’s not about either of those things,” he said. “And Mal might wait out his year and go back to London, anyhow, mightn’t he? You might too. Even the new baron and baroness might scuttle off once the provision of spending a year in Brighton is met and the inheritances are permanent.”
“Oh, well, I hadn’t really thought …” she said, frowning.
“No, I don’t suppose you have,” he answered before she could continue. “Either way, I have to plan for myself, Lib. You know that. Mal knows it too, on the odd occasions where he stops admiring his own genius to consider reality. And I told him so.”
“Well, in his defense,” Libba said wryly, “reality is a pillock.”
It diffused his pique, getting a startled little chuckle out of him and a shake of his head. His eyes softened and his shoulders too. He had been easier since they’d come back. He had been less bunched up about the spine.
He shook his head and leaned back against the bar, reminding himself to enjoy her presence while he had it. He took note of her hair, messy and hastily pinned, her dress, even her odd, little shoes. He made it a memory, just in case May came faster than expected.
“Isn’t she just?” he said with a sigh. “Besides, I can’t imagine either of you staying on permanently with the Rest as home. It’s probably fine right now, but it’s only been a few months. How long before one of you suffocates Rhys in his sleep?”
“Hattie has certainly already considered it,” Libba replied with a smirk. “I did too after I saw him traipsing around the house in a pair of harem trousers from my costume chest. I still haven’t gotten them back.”
“And you never will,” Jasper intoned. “And just think, you’re only a quarter of the way through.”
Libba blinked at him as though she hadn’t considered that and then frowned. “Yes, all right,” she said, crossing her arms. “Just because you and Mal are in mutual pucker doesn’t mean I need to be as well.”
“Perhaps I have a solution for you,” Jasper said, leaning closer, as though a single drunken patron gave the first toss what they were saying.
It was better to be safe, he reasoned. And besides, he liked the jasmine hair oil she used.
It was much nicer than stale ale. “An outfitted, comfortable flat, ready to claim for your own.”
“Oh, is that so?” she answered, eyes flicking down to the fizzing pitcher of ale as though it were the thing speaking rather than Jasper himself. “At what cost?”
“I’m still working that out,” he said, straightening. “But if the trade is intriguing, I know I should continue forth on my current line of thinking.”
“It is intriguing,” she allowed. “But not a guaranteed sell.”
“No? Haven’t you always wanted a place of your own?”
She pursed her lips. “Of course I have. And now I have the Odalisque, don’t I?”
“You do,” he allowed. “But half your troupe is living there. Hardly all your own. In fact, it’s probably even more chaotic than the Rest. Am I right?”
“Rarely,” she answered, though her gaze had sharpened a little. “Let’s just go back to the table before that ale goes flat.”
“Fine,” he said. “So long as you’re intrigued.”
But he was in a much better mood all the way back to where he’d come from in the first place.
Because he knew Libba Lennox well enough to know that intrigue was all he really needed to tip the scales.