Chapter Three
By the wee hours of the morning, only Libba, Jasper, and the Travellers were left.
And between them, a plate of dry pickles in exchange for their continued tenure past closing time.
“Eat them,” the barman had said. “They don’t have a jar to go back into.”
Honestly, it wasn’t a bad pairing with the ale. At least in Libba’s estimation.
The young girl who had won the drinking game was asleep on a booth bench, her head resting on a woman’s knee. The elderly man who’d lost it was staring at her with a bleary look of admiration and occasionally repeating while slurring, “I’m moudin’ fur a drop of tea.”
“No tea,” the others would chant at him and then enjoy a series of yawns.
And then he’d frown and mutter, “Shay joug, the lot o’ ya.”
Libba watched it all with a lazy smile.
If Hattie had been there, she’d have been trying to interpret, and it would ruin the poetry, but the poor thing was either vomiting or eating vile things at all hours these past weeks and had been one of the first to depart.
And besides, she’d picked up a bit of the Travellers’ cant once when they’d been children and it hadn’t been much appreciated by the Travellers who’d heard her doing it.
Jasper, apparently, did not remember that Shelta was not for them to understand and repeated some of it back, anyway. “Shay joug,” he echoed. “‘Coppers,’ innit?”
He won a few sleepy nods in return, making him grin in triumph and bite into another crisp pickle.
“Are you going back to Paris this year?” Libba asked them. “Now that the war is over? I remember that was always your route when I was little.”
There were some grumbles and shrugs around the table.
“Remains to be seen,” said Persephone Boswell, a member of the caravan who had befriended Libba in childhood who was just now studying one of the bumpy pickle exteriors with the edge of her fingernail. “It’s been a long time since it was safe, you know.”
“Long time,” agreed Libba. “Would you go? If they do?”
Seph grimaced, her eyes snapping up from her pickle examination. “Shush,” she said, though a few heads had already turned to listen to her answer.
Libba pressed her lips together in apology.
She had been in London for so many years that she had evidently forgotten her manners, and the likely attitude that the caravan had toward Seph opening a permanent storefront here in Brighton, her cabinet of curiosities on the wharf.
Libba glanced at Jasper.
He was cross that Malcolm and Libba had gone from here.
Seph’s people were cross that she might stay.
There was no pleasing anyone, was there?
“That woman in your troupe who played Aphrodite,” Seph said, sounding anxious to change the subject. “She had a French accent. I spoke to her a bit before she took off tonight. Didn’t expect her to be almost bald under the goddess’s wig.”
“Is that who that was?!” Jasper said, frowning. “First the sculptor dandy and now the goddess too?”
“Acting,” Libba said to him again, enunciating through her tipple, in the hopes of aggravating him, then turned to Seph. “She keeps it shorn because of her vows.”
“Her … Her ‘vows’?” Seph repeated, blinking. “What vows are those?”
“Carmelite ones,” said Libba with a shrug. “Her convent was knocked over during the unrest and she fled to England. Her family were nobles, so she didn’t fancy a rendezvous with Madame Guillotine or a dark oubliette, like poor Princess Thérèse.”
“A nun!” Jasper exclaimed, golden eyes sparkling in delight. “And now she plays a Hellenic goddess on stage?”
“War does strange things to us all,” said Libba with a shrug and a broad yawn. “Oh. I think that was my last pickle.”
“They should put it on the sign,” Seph agreed, mirroring the yawn. “‘Pickles and tipples at the Coin and Cauldron.’”
“Drop o’ tea,” the old man muttered mournfully.
Privately, Libba thought that wouldn’t pair half so well.
“Are you going to walk back to the Rest?” Jasper asked her as she stood and shook out her skirt. “I’ll come with. I can sleep in the parlor. Closer than going back to the other side of town, I think.”
“Fine,” she said. “Seph?”
The other young woman shook her blonde head. “I’ve a bed over my shop. And Rhys Caradoc doesn’t live in the building.”
“Fair enough,” Libba said, jerking her head toward the door. “Good night, all!”
“Night,” some echoed back, while a few opted for, “Nos da.”
On the way out the door, Libba dropped a handful of coins from the night’s ticket takings for the barman.
He’d need it, she reckoned, to buy more pickle jars.
“Your theater has a lot of room above it too,” Jasper said, once they were outside and crunching through the gravel that led from the road to the grassy beachfront path toward Starling’s Rest. “Seems like it has a whole second building above stairs.”
“It does,” she said, glancing at him. “About half of it is habitable rooms. My players live in those. The other half is storage and vaulting. It doesn’t look like it was a theater before Willa bought it for me.
Perhaps it was some sort of inn or something similar, based on how the structure is gutted out. ”
Jasper gave a choking chuckle, rubbing his fingers over his brow.
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“Lib,” he said seriously. “It was a bawd house.”
“It was not.”
“It was,” he told her, choking on his own amusement.
“The madam went to America and took her girls with her and the baroness bought up the properties she left behind. That particular madam was a savvy landlady besides. You don’t want to know what the storefront that Monica and Ruby inherited used to be. ”
Libba stared at him, stopping mid-stride. “Oh,” she said seriously, “I think that I do.”
He laughed again. “Malcolm would have my head,” he said, seemingly to himself. “Maybe some other night, when I’m not half-soused.”
“Oh, half,” she mocked, trying not to slur as she picked her gait back up toward the house. “Only half.”
“Only half,” he agreed. “And I was just wondering why you didn’t take those apartments for yourself, rather than giving them over to the actors and moving back into the Rest.”
She shrugged, kicking a pebble out of her sandal. “I had to move them all from our lodgings in Covent Garden down to Brighton at the drop of a hat. I had a place to stay already and they didn’t.”
“You could’ve put them up in the Rest,” he pointed out. “It’s plenty big.”
She scoffed. “I didn’t want them making off with the silver.”
It made him laugh. “Even the nun?”
“Especially the nun.”
He continued to chuckle as they turned toward the big hill that the house sat upon. “I did miss you,” he muttered, shaking his head and kicking at some of the pebbles himself with the pointed toe of his boot. “I did.”
“Of course you did,” she said back with a sniff, which only made him laugh again.
Starling’s Rest rose up in front of them, silhouetted by the half-moon hanging low in the sky. Its coat of slate-gray paint glinted against the moonlight, casting an eerie glow out toward the pebbled drive.
Libba often thought that it would be completely invisible in the dark, if not for the few windows that always had lights in them. But seeing it like this, catching the silver of the moon, she considered that perhaps she had always been wrong about that, after all.
When she looked back to Jasper to tell him so, she almost laughed at how visible he himself was in the same pale light, his red hair glowing like a lighthouse beacon on the shore, while he stared back at her guileless and tipsy and utterly unaware of any of it.
“What?” he demanded, blinking those amber-hued eyes, each one glowing like a shadowed lantern beneath a hood. “What?!”
“Nothing,” she said. “I was just realizing how easy it would be to find you in the dark, should we get separated. That hair of yours glows, you know.”
He made a face. “I am aware.”
She grinned. “Always good to be aware.”
He made an annoyed noise in his throat and set his shoulders forward as they continued, the wind picking up almost on cue to accompany his ill temper. “You’re not too hard to spot yourself, you know,” he said. “With all that hair and the unusual dress and the … the so on.”
“Oh, ‘the so on’?” she mocked, laughing at how pouty he looked about his own lack of eloquence.
“Perhaps I should’ve gone back to my flat, after all,” he muttered, though it was clear he was amused at himself under it all.
“Well, you have two of them, apparently,” she replied. “So yes, why not?”
“‘Two’? Who said I have two?”
She shot him a look, turning her back to the house to stop him before they could go any farther up the drive. “You offered me one of them,” she reminded him. “Earlier tonight.”
“Oh, that,” he said, wincing. “That’s not a second flat. That’s mine own. I won’t need it anymore if you help me, so you ought to have it.”
For a moment, she simply stared at him. Part of her was convinced the ale had addled her past the point of comprehension, and the other seemed to think that a bit more time would allow the words to rearrange themselves in her ears until they made sense.
“What are you blathering about?” she finally snapped, when clarity did not arrive on the back of the rising wind. “Where will you be living?”
He sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking up at the house. “Ever heard of Templeton-Rath?” he asked, raising his brows.
“No.”
He sighed. “Of course you haven’t. Your brother would have.”
“Oh, indeed?” she snapped. “Shall I just go fetch him, then?”
“No!” He lurched forward, stopped by her hand snapping out and landing flat against his chest, her expression flat and impatient. “No.”
“‘No,’” she repeated, feeling the way his heart had clicked up to a canter beneath the thin linen of his shirt. “Are you going to explain yourself?”
“Lib, I’m foxed,” he whined, staring down at her hand. “And the scheme is still half-formed. You’ll think I’m stupid.”
“I already think you’re stupid,” she said, dropping her hand so she could cross her arms over her chest. It wasn’t serving her to feel how nervous he was. Sympathy wasn’t the play here. “What is Templeton-Rath? A bank?”
He shook his head, frowning. “Shipper. Import magnate out of Ceylon. Cinnamon, gems, tea, and graphite. The graphite in particular doesn’t ship fast enough to satisfy the demand. High demand means flexible asking price, you understand?”
“I understand,” she said tersely. “So what?”
“So they want to set up a forwarding post here in Brighton instead of relying on East India to facilitate their parcels at a third of the profits,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Which means they are coming here to set up. The Templeton-Raths.”
“All right,” she said, nodding slowly. “And you want to run the forwarding office? You’ll still need your flat for that, Jasper.”
“No, bag the forwarding office!” he said, exasperated.
“I want the whole kit! The dynast only has one child, a daughter. Plain, little thing, from what I understand, and she’s coming with.
If I come in poised as a candidate for the forwarding office but instead win the heiress, either they set me up with the lass here in some big manor house or I go back to Ceylon with them to learn the trade.
Either way, I insert myself as the next in line for the entire operation.
It’s the opportunity I’ve been waiting for my whole life, Lib! ”
For another long, windy moment, she just stared at him. She was, in a rare state of events, speechless.
“You want to marry some girl whose only defining feature is her plainness?” she finally managed to say. “To use her for her fortune?”
“Well, don’t say it like that,” he retorted, frowning. “I’m sure she’s lovely enough. I’m half in love with every woman I meet, anyhow. All she has to do is be a woman in my vicinity and I’m certain I’ll be beyond uxorious. Positive.”
She licked her lips, staring at him some more.
“I mean it,” he exclaimed, too loudly to be sober or sincere.
“And why would you need my help, then?” she said, mentally filing away the word uxorious to run past Hattie in the morning. “To seduce the plain heiress?”
“Because I cannot be the only cursed sod who’s tried seducing the heiress, can I?” he said, a shrill note of hysteria creeping into his voice. “It’s an obvious temptation. They must bat off a dozen blokes or more a year trying the same thing.”
“Right,” she replied, frowning. “And you are going to make yourself stand out somehow?”
“Precisely,” he answered, sounding relieved that she’d caught on. “I was thinking, what if I come into the fold already affianced to a beautiful, mysterious, wealthy woman, whom I then set aside in favor of Miss Templeton-Rath … Well! That changes the game, doesn’t it?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Princess Xandine!” he breathed, reaching out and grasping her shoulders, which he then gave a little shake to. “It’s brilliant! You don’t see it yet, but once you sleep on it, you’ll realize it’s brilliant!”
“Jasper,” she said, alarmed. “No.”
“Don’t say no,” he said quickly, dropping her shoulders and putting his fingers over her mouth as though to shove the word back in, his fingers lingering over her lips, warm and dry and salt-touched from the pickles and the briny air.
“Don’t say anything. Just … Just sleep on it, all right? Just sleep on it.”
And before she could reply, he yawned so loudly, broadly, and deeply that she couldn’t help but yawn right back at him.
And after a yawn like that, sleeping did sound more appealing than arguing. It sounded more appealing than much of anything else the world might have offered, in that moment.
“Fine,” she said. “Shut up and get in the house. I’m exhausted.”
“As my princess commands,” he replied, and then he stepped too far away to get swatted for the cheek of it.