Chapter Six
It had never occurred to Jasper that such an utterly uneventful couple of weeks could feel so completely madcap.
And yet … here he was.
It had mostly been verbal. Verbal madcap. Administered by a magnificently deranged Liberty Lennox, who kept showing up at his counting house with swatches of fabric and scraps of atlases and translation sheets, ranting about believability and preparation time.
Honestly, he’d known his scheme was more dough than bread, but after listening to her for an hour or two, he was starting to think the eggs hadn’t even been cracked yet.
There was no batter.
It was just dry flour and a dream.
And that ship was coming in any day now.
The more complicated the Xandine ruse got, the less convinced he became that he could pull it off.
He had told Libba more than once that perhaps they ought to just abandon the whole thing, to which she’d just narrowed her eyes and demanded to know if, should they abandon it, it would die completely on the vine and never come up again.
And he would sigh and say he just needed more time to refine it, which would make her silence him with a slash of her flattened hand and a glint in her eye that he knew better than to argue with.
“Lem will have to play some sort of eunuch if he’s involved,” he told her over stale biscuits and cold tea a few nights ago. “I agree that having him there sells the thing, but …”
“‘Eunuch,’” Lem had repeated from the doorway, brows rising. “You mean I have lost my …?”
“Look,” Jasper had snapped at the time. “No one is going to believe you were in the room every time I met with her and she still chose me!”
At which point Libba had groaned, eaten two biscuits, and shaken her head while Lem had chuckled in that smooth, deep baritone for an unseemly length of time.
After that encounter, Libba had told Jasper that he’d have to find her at the Odalisque from that point forward, because rehearsals were starting for her damned Shakespearean tragedy. Well, what about his?!
He did start popping in after his hours at the counting house, but the problem with that was that he went right past Stockton, Holloway, and Lennox on the way there, and often acquired Malcolm in the process.
It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the company.
Obviously, he did. Malcolm was his favorite person on this earth. Always had been. Always would be.
Hell, if he did succeed in this plan, he’d have to take Malcolm with him to Ceylon or he’d be miserable.
He just needed to stay in the dark about this particular matter until such a time as a realistic offer to go together to unknown shores could be made.
And so far, he had remained convinced that Jasper’s only aim was to run the new forwarding office here in Brighton, mostly because Jasper always caved in when Mal suggested leaving the rehearsals in favor of the pub.
Though, in honesty, he felt Libba’s glare boring into his back every time he did so.
Today, the routine had unfolded predictably, and they entered the Odalisque to find a blocking exercise as the actors read the lines. Lem was on the ground with that dandy blond Garret hovering over him, with a wooden sword and a feigned expression of utter horror at what he’d just done.
“Romeo killed Tybalt,” intoned a serious-looking chap from the velvet curtain to the right. “Romeo must die.”
“Oh, bad luck,” Rhys crowed, prancing forward to loom over Lem’s dead Tybalt. “Turnabout is fair play!”
Lem turned his head to squint up at Rhys’s hovering glee, shadowed by his brown curls falling down over his face as he peered down at Lem’s prone body. “Did you not read past your own death, little man?”
Rhys frowned, taking a step back. “Do I have lines after that?”
It seemed that the entire company sighed in unison in response.
“Good show, anyway,” he said to Garret with a shrug, turning and hopping off the stage. “Is there any cheese left?”
Mal sighed to Jasper’s right, shaking his head with a fond, exasperated chuckle.
“Oh,” he said, blinking and patting his pockets with sudden realization. “Ruby sent you a sample. I’ve got it here somewhere.”
“Oh, God,” said Jasper, wincing. “Have you smelled it?”
“Me? No,” he said. “But she did tell me to inform you not to taste it, no matter how appetizing you find it, as it is deadly poisonous. Oh, here it is.”
He proffered a small, glass vial, corked at the top, from his inner pocket and tossed it to Jasper. It had a crinkled roll of paper stuck to it with tacky wax, which Jasper unrolled with careful curiosity.
“Cherry, cherry blossom, almond,” he read, raising his eyebrows, “cinnamon, crushed amber, camphor, benzoin resin, and clove.”
“Oh,” said Malcolm, blinking. “That is poisonous. But only if you eat it. Don’t eat it.”
“I’d only have a taste. What the Devil is benzoin?” Jasper asked, glancing up at him to receive a shrug.
“No idea,” he said. “But the almond paste is what Errol uses as rat poison and the camphor for insecticide. Can’t imagine chewing amber is good for you, either.”
“Why not?” Jasper demanded. “It’s just hard sap, isn’t it?”
“No,” said Mal with a wrinkle of his nose. “It isn’t.”
“Oh, God,” Jasper said again, ignoring his friend as he went about waving the uncorked vial under his nose. “It’s completely divine. Blast.”
Malcolm gave a sad nod. “That’s how she gets you.”
It was too late. Jasper was already dabbing it at his pulse points, his eyes rolling back at the collision of scent on his skin with the air. “I’ll pay her whatever she asks,” he said to no one in particular.
“Jasper! There you are!” came Libba’s voice, causing his head to snap up guiltily as she walked to the center of the stage.
“You left a scarf here last week that’s been floating through my costume trunks and confusing the Devil out of everyone.
Come and retrieve it. I shan’t have it appearing on Friar Lawrence and ruining the aesthetic. ”
“Oh, now you’re in trouble,” Malcolm said with a chuckle. “Hurry back, I’m itching for a pint. Maybe we can steal Rhys.”
Jasper gave a nod and a distracted wave, corking the bottle and pocketing it as he made his way up to the stage to the cadence of Libba’s impatient, tapping foot. “A scarf, you say?”
“Back here,” she snapped, gesturing to be followed and leading him behind the stage as the players arranged to skewer Tybalt all over again. “It’s in one of the costume trunks.”
“It isn’t cold enough to wear a scarf,” he said, wrinkling his brow. “I don’t recall bringing one.”
She threw a door open and pushed him inside.
“There is no bloody scarf, idiot,” she said, knocking the door shut behind her with a swing of her hip.
“I needed to talk to you without my brother hovering in the air like a gnat. Where the hell have you been? I heard the Templeton-Rath ship was docking today.”
He paled immediately, a queasy lurch spiking in his gut. “What? No, not today. I haven’t heard anything.”
“Haven’t you? Is that because you have better sources or because you don’t listen?” she asked, crossing her arms and raising her brows. “And furthermore—” She paused, frowning for a moment and sniffing the air. “I say,” she said, taking a step closer. “What is that?”
“Oh, it’s …”
“Shut up,” she said, going up on her toes and leaning so close, her nose was almost at his throat. “Oh, my God. That is amazing. You smell like … like marzipan and Christmas.”
“Ruby,” he said, his cheeks heating for some stupid reason as he gave a hapless shrug and took a stumbling step backward, all his extremities suddenly tingling. “She got me.”
“She did get you,” Libba agreed, looking a little dazed, her pupils flared out like dinner plates. “Give me another sniff, then, come on.”
“No!” he said, shooting his arm out to hold her shoulder, his heart crashing against his ribs in an absolute panic at the idea of her putting her face up against his neck again.
He held her steady and even took a step backward for good measure, locking his elbow.
“Focus! Who told you the ship was here?”
Her head turned toward where he’d dabbed more of the scent at his wrists, her long, curled lashes batting several times. “Oh,” she said, sounding suddenly sedate. “It’s the word around the wharf. Spotted off the lighthouse, I think.”
“Libba!” he screeched, using the hand on her shoulder to shake her. And himself. Christ. “We aren’t ready!”
“‘We’? ‘We’ aren’t ready?” she repeated, sharpening immediately as she flicked his hand off her with her fingernails, somehow dislodging the whole, locked-in stance he’d taken with nothing more than a light graze of manicured ovals.
“Perhaps you aren’t. I can be at the dock in thirty minutes if necessary.
So, why don’t you scuttle off and find out what our schedule needs to be? ”
He frowned, opening his mouth, closing it, then opening it again, the heat on his face growing warmer with every second. “Give me a scarf,” he barked at last.
“What?” she said, drifting closer again, sniffing suspiciously at the air. “Hm?”
“A scarf,” he snapped, dancing backward with panic in his throat at how she looked just now, half-lidded and shiny-lipped as her tongue darted out over her mouth. “So I have one when I go back out there.”
“Oh,” she said, still very soft, her eyes traveling over his throat and down to his wrists. “All right, in just a moment.”
“Christ, you’re like a cat in heat!” he declared, knowing it would put her back up.
“Oh, he’s a dreamer,” she replied with a high-pitched laugh that relaxed some of the primal, run the hell away instincts that were clamoring in his ribcage. “Maybe I shall pick up a frangipane on the way home. Hmm. Or Bakewell.”
“Libba!” he cried, desperate.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Scarf. Right. Just a moment.”
And then it seemed to him that he blinked and found himself propelled back off the stage and into Malcolm’s orbit, clutching a scrap of alien fabric that was apparently his scarf.