Chapter Four
Waking up after a full night of revelry was always a bit of a squeamish endeavor at the best of times. Doing it in a parlor with whisper-thin window coverings after chasing down your ale with salt-infused-withered cucumber dregs was another matter entirely.
But the church bells had just chimed eight times. That was a summons of no ambiguous order. Voices were rising and footfalls passed the parlor archway. And most damning of all, Jasper smelled coffee.
There was no resisting that last call to rousing.
The problem, as it happened, was opening his eyes to find Malcolm Lennox’s well-chiseled face half an inch away from his nose, glowering down at him like he was sleeping in an offensive manner.
He shot up in alarm, his hat flying across the room, barking “Poseidon’s left tit!
” in a ragged voice of shock, loud enough to at least send Mal stumbling back a few steps, coffee sloshing out of both of the mugs he was carrying in his clenched, manicured hands.
“The absolute devil is wrong with you, Lennox?!”
“With me?!” Mal snarled back, jutting out one of the coffee mugs in the world’s angriest offering of joy. “Templeton-Rath?!”
Jasper froze, hands halfway out to accepting the drink, his heart sinking into the pit of his ribs. “She told you?”
“She didn’t have to,” Malcolm snapped, shoving the cup into Jasper’s extended hands and stalking over to take the opposite armchair.
“She asked me if I knew what it was and I immediately knew what you were about. Of course, I should have guessed. I’d heard the rumors too, about the forwarding office.
Limestone too mundane for the likes of you, Townsend?
Can’t stomach the thought of trading anything less fine than cinnamon and sapphires? ”
Jasper’s ribs unclenched, allowing his heart to float up an inch or two, back toward its usual resting place. “Oh,” he said, blinking. “No, it isn’t that. Limestone’s … fine.”
Mal grimaced at him, flashing his teeth like an angry dog. “Fine, is it? It’s not just the rocks, you know, though the rocks are literally what England is built upon! It’s limewash, Jasper. It’s quicklime. It’s chalk. It’s quartz if you need something sparkly.”
“Will you please unclench your arse?” Jasper replied, sipping at his coffee with a roll of his eyes.
“It’s got nothing to do with your precious bloody limestone.
I turned you down because I don’t want to be your subordinate and because your partners, particularly the Holloways, are intolerable fools. ”
“‘Intolerable foo…’” Malcolm started to repeat, eyes scrunching up as he frowned. “So what? What’s that got to do with business?”
Jasper sighed. Heavily.
“You forgot to put sugar in this,” he told his friend.
“Because it doesn’t need sugar, you philistine,” Mal replied testily. “Coffee is meant for cream or milk only. Christ.”
“Now, see,” Jasper said, knowing he was only antagonizing the other man, “Templeton-Rath would never deny me a cube of sugar.”
Mal’s eyes narrowed, his nostrils flaring.
“I know what you’re picturing,” he said, utterly confident in his incorrectness.
“A mahogany desk with brass fittings overlooking the wharf, is it? An ivory globe to spin when you get bored counting your cinnamon money and sending smug updates off to Ceylon? Stockton, Holloway, and Lennox might have plain oaken furniture, Jasper, but what we also have is—”
“Will you please stop?” Jasper sighed, closing one eye under which a throbbing pain was beginning to build. “I never insulted your damned rock-trading enterprise. Not once.”
“Oh, certainly not,” Mal mocked. “Especially not in how you just described it.”
Jasper groaned. “Six months ago, you had a townhouse in Mayfair and a job at a bank,” he reminded his best friend. “If I’d approached you then singing the praises of limestone, you’d have sent me to a doctor on suspicion that someone had hit me in the sconce.”
That did shut him up, at least for a moment, but it didn’t erase the petulant frown.
“So what if I put myself forward for the new office?” Jasper said in the blessed pocket of silence. “I might not even get it. There’s no harm in trying, and I won’t lose my factor position at East India in the meantime.”
Malcolm frowned at him but did not seemingly have a good argument for that point.
Thank God Libba hadn’t said anything else.
“You might get it,” he finally allowed, swallowing a big gulp from his mug, his voice stilted and awkward. “You’d be fine at it. You’d do well.”
“Thank you,” said Jasper, just as awkward.
The two blinked at one another for a moment, silence sitting between them, until they mutually cleared their throats and looked off in opposite directions.
“Say,” said Jasper, squinting out the window at the line of buildings in the distance. “Did you know that Aphrodite actress in Lib’s troupe is a French nun?”
“You don’t bloody say!” Malcolm exclaimed, his tone back to normal.
And finally, the air diffused back to its appropriate temperature and density.
“And a bit of a sticky fingers, from what I understand,” Jasper added with a chuckle, leaning to the side to peek around Malcolm’s shoulder. “Where is your sister, anyhow? She’s certainly up and about already if she’s been whispering my private doings in your ear.”
Mal glanced behind himself toward the arch of the hallway and shrugged. “Devil if I know. Oh, morning, Ruby.”
“Yes, good morning,” said Ruby, strutting distractedly into the parlor with one of her glass beakers in her white-knuckled grip, swirling around an amber liquid inside with a look of intense discontent on her face.
“I’ve tried again. If you don’t like it this time, I shall chuck it and myself into the sea. ”
“New cologne?” Jasper said, leaning forward to sniff the air, which smelled entirely the same at this distance. “Again?”
“Again!” Ruby agreed with a note of marked annoyance. “Sir Refinement here needs to evolve every year or so or he isn’t content. Isn’t that right, Malevolence?”
“’Tis,” he replied in an exaggerated clip, lifting a single eyebrow. “They’re always similar, though.”
She made a noise, thrusting the beaker out. “Yes. I’ve retained the juniper, poppyseed, and honey on an ambergris base, but I’ve swapped the fennel for gardenia and added a new core note. Can you guess?”
“Let me!” Jasper said. “I never get perfumes from Miss Little.”
She frowned at him as he set his coffee aside and bounded to his feet, scurrying forward. “You’ve never asked for one,” she muttered, watching him bend forward and sniff at the concoction. “Do you want one?”
He frowned, turning his head to sniff the normal air again and then turning to sniff the cologne once more. “I … can’t … quite …” he muttered, doing this ritual three more times.
“Oh, for godssake,” Mal muttered.
“It smells like brown bread smothered in fancy jam,” Jasper finally decided, straightening. “Wheat? Hops?”
Ruby, who lived in a persistent state of disenchanted haughtiness, actually allowed a flicker of what looked like happiness to pass over her catlike features. “Rye!” she said softly. “It is rye! Do you like it?”
“Who cares if he likes it?” Mal said, standing and striding over. “It’s mine, isn’t it?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Perception is key.”
“Do poppyseeds have much of a scent?” Jasper asked, tilting his head. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“It’s faint,” she said, handing the beaker over to Mal, “and a bit nutty, but to tell you the truth, I mostly like the swirling effect it creates in the finalized concoction. It is pretty.”
“It’s good,” Mal decided, dipping his finger into the beaker and dabbing a bit of the liquid at his wrist. “It smells expensive.”
“Ah, well, that’s the most important thing,” Jasper said flatly.
“Do you want a cologne, Mr. Townsend?” Ruby pressed, stepping closer to him. “Something with almond, perhaps?”
He glanced at her warily. “Perhaps. How much would it cost me?”
She smiled at that, a brilliant, beautiful smile that immediately lit the beacons of danger in Jasper’s mind. “The first one is free.”
Mal chuckled, turning and setting the beaker down in favor of returning to his coffee.
“What?” she said, looking between Jasper’s stricken face and Malcolm’s laughter. “What did I say?”
“I thought you’d know,” Jasper managed after a moment, scratching at his hair with a sheepish grin. “Growing up on the docks, you learn quickly that anyone who says that exact line to you is a crimp and offering something dangerous, expensive, and impossible to quit.”
“Oh,” she said, brightening. “That sounds correct, then. Good day, gentlemen!”
And with that, she swooped up her beaker and flounced out of the room, back to her laboratory and her scheming.
Jasper gathered his things shortly after, making a mental accounting of all the nonsense he had to catch up with down at the docks after taking the morning off. Making factor had been a double-edged sword, for all he’d looked forward to it since he was a lad.
For one, brief and blessed moment, sometime between opening his eyes and shouting profanity at the God of the Sea, Jasper had thought he’d dreamed telling Libba his idiotic scheme. But no, he must have, for Malcolm to have even gotten a fraction of it secondhand.
He sighed, running a hand over his face, and shook himself.
Well, there was no taking it back now, was there? And besides, he hadn’t been wrong when he’d said he needed to stand out if he wanted a family like that to even take the first notice of him.
He was a shipyard lad. A Brighton boy born and bred.
The Lennoxes had never understood that. If he’d come to them, even as a boy, with ideas that would have impressed his fellow dock rats, neither would have ever even shown a smidgen of interest. Both of them were remarkable.
One had to compensate for that to capture their interest.
And he supposed it only followed that the same logic applied to the disgustingly rich and successful.
So he’d said it. Oh well.
Maybe now he’d get a chance to see if it would work. He just needed to track down his accomplice and make sure he’d been speaking full words to her the previous evening rather than just enthusiastically slurring and touching her lips.
He had touched her lips, he thought.
He remembered that much.
Why the Devil had he done that?!
There wasn’t time to dissect the memory, as it happened, because he stumbled onto her the instant he emerged from Starling’s Rest’s front doors.
Libba was sitting on the benches perched in front of the house, in particular, the pair that faced the morning patch of sunlight.
She was with Rhys, who was wearing a very sparkly pair of baggy, red trousers as he flipped through a leather-bound book, frowning at this passage or that.
“Of course, I don’t believe he wrote them all,” she was saying airily. “My beloved Kit Marlowe absolutely penned several, and there was also the remarkable Emilia Lanier. Oh, Jasper! Good morning. I was hoping I’d see you.”
“You were?” Jasper said, unable to look away from Rhys’s trousers, which had silver stones on them that flashed blindingly in the morning light.
“I was,” she said, pushing herself off the bench and gliding over the drive toward him. “I was all but prepared to tell you to go to Hades this morning, but after seeing my brother’s reaction to the mere suggestion that you might have aspirations of your own, I’ve been forced to reconsider.”
He gaped at her, hope beginning to stir in the queasy chamber of his chest. She looked refreshed this morning, as though she’d gone to bed at the chime of dusk and slept without a single disturbance, despite having been next to him for their crawl home at near dawn.
Her hair was in a loose braid over her shoulder, springy curls escaping both from the plait and the bit around her face.
She looked like a fern made flesh, he thought, her skin glinting the same way the smooth fronds in the forest did under the sunlight.
The three beauty marks on her left cheek glowed like little embers when she turned her face to meet his.
“Really?” he managed to say, still not quite believing it.
“Somewhat,” she amended, raising her brows. “I won’t participate in a farce of cruelty, Jasper.”
“Wait a bloody tick!” Rhys exclaimed in his Welsh lilt, throwing his hands up from the book he was holding and letting the pages flutter dramatically in the morning breeze. “I die?!”
“Oh, Rhys, everyone dies,” Libba snapped at him over her shoulder.
“Well, yes, eventually,” he replied, with impatient horror. “They don’t get stabbed while trying to impart levity on a bunch of drama-bent sods in the prime of their lives. Typically.”
“Sometimes, though,” Jasper said, which got a frown from the other man and an attempt at stifling a smile from Libba.
“Poor Mercutio,” Rhys muttered, stroking the pages as he found his spot again. “You deserved better.”
She rolled her eyes, her back to Rhys, and let her amusement twist her lips a little since only Jasper could see her.
He couldn’t help but grin back at her.
She sighed, shaking her head. “I mean it, Jasper,” she said again.
“I won’t toy with some young woman for the sport of it.
If you meet her and genuinely do fall for her, then the farce may continue, perhaps.
But I think we ought to talk about multiple angles here before we embark on any scheme of this nature. ”
“Yes, naturally, of course,” he blurted out, each word toppling over the ones on either side of it. “Anything. Obviously. I told you it was still half-formed.”
“Hm,” she said, squinting at him as though trying to see through any artifice, her dark eyes shining. “All right. We will discuss the matter further sometime soon.”
If the morning had just ended there, Jasper might have bounded off happily, optimistic about the weeks to come.
Instead, he made the mistake of reflecting on his good fortune.
And just as he did so, Rhys flipped the script forward, chose a line at random, and moaned loudly, “O, I am fortune’s fool!”
Which of course put a leery bent on the remainder of the day.