Chapter Eleven
The morning had not gone in any of the twenty-seven directions Libba had previously accounted for: a fact that would likely irk her for years to come.
First, and perhaps most disastrously, Jasper was too soggy for an immediate invite to breakfast or some other such intimacy-building social call following his feline rescue showcase. Though she supposed it had impressed the Templeton-Raths enough to immediately extend an invitation to dinner.
To both of them.
A week from now.
And then, by necessity, they’d all been forced to go their separate ways almost immediately.
It wasn’t quite a disaster, but she couldn’t think of another word for it just yet.
She knew she ought to go directly to the Odalisque and change back into her normal clothes, but she was so agitated, so full of bristling, snapping, static energy, that she found herself marching toward the boardwalk and plastering herself against the glass window in the glossy, red door at Miss Persephone’s Oddities and Curiosities until Seph, still bleary, still wearing a set of men’s pajamas and her dressing gown, and clearly not ready to open shop, had found her there and let her in.
Two cups of tea, a discarded cloak, and two meetings of her forehead to Seph’s cool, wooden breakfast table later, Libba found that she’d somehow verbally unloaded the whole of her current barrel of schemes on the other woman, who was simply staring, nodding, and stirring her own tea, like Libba had just come by to express frustration with a late order from the laundress.
Libba stared at her, her fingers looped through the large, false-gold earrings that were dangling from her lobes as part of Juliet’s ensemble, and waited three ticks of the second hand on Seph’s cuckoo clock. Then she demanded, “Well?!”
Seph sighed, sipping her tea and then setting it down gently in its saucer, rotating it just so that the handle was facing the corner of the room, and shook her head. “Mercutio? Really?
Libba blinked.
She opened her mouth and closed it.
She swallowed.
And then she began to laugh, a ragged, hysterical thing that somehow eased the planks of wood that had taken residence between her neck and her shoulder blades back into gooey submission.
“He is so good,” she said, hiccupping and wiping tears from her eyes. “You’re going to hate it. He’s perfect in the role. And he’s so indignant about dying.”
Seph curled her lip and reached for the teapot to refill them both. “He didn’t know Mercutio dies?”
“No!” Libba lost herself in another bubbling series of desperate laughs. “He didn’t know Tybalt was revenge-killed, either. He was delighted about that. He stood over Lem gloating like he’d gotten the chance to truly haunt his actual murderer.”
Seph pressed her lips together and proffered the sugar.
Libba watched her cube bob and dissolve, just as the hysterics in her chest did the same, dragging and diffusing out in her body into something like sanity again.
She picked up the teaspoon.
She stirred.
And she sighed.
“Never once did I think this entire business with Jasper and Xandine would crack so hard on its maiden voyage,” she said, watching the eddy in the brown liquid form and swirl. “Cats, Seph! He dove into the bloody Channel without a second thought for cats!”
“Yes, so you said,” the other woman replied, watching her carefully. “You cast him as a hero and he played one. Ought that to please you?”
Libba hesitated, clenching her teeth a little at the memory of his swan dive over the edge of the pier, his stupid heroic splashing, and his grip on those cats even while the white one had shredded his mouth to ribbons.
Her throat tightened, and so she cleared it.
“Not just that,” she insisted, a little higher-pitched than her usual alto.
“What about that woman throwing real African words at me? Then posh Mama with the rescue. They asked me if I spoke French and I responded in a garble of Catalan Franglais. Hattie would have fainted.”
“Hattie might be able to help,” Seph pointed out, shaking off her dressing gown and reaching behind her head to pull her dark-blonde tresses into a braid. The little birds on her set of pajamas appeared to hop and take flight as she worked. “If you told her what you were doing.”
Libba frowned. “It will hurt her feelings if she finds out I used her expertise for mischief when I let her believe she was helping with a theatrical production. I can’t hurt Hattie’s feelings. She’s too pure.”
“She’s pregnant,” Seph pointed out. “Giving her the wrong number of cashews is going to hurt her feelings right now. It’s the best time, honestly.”
Libba blinked at her and sniffed. “Do you have cashews?”
Seph smiled then, for the first time since she’d come in the door, just a twisting, grudging little thing. “Actually, I do,” she said. “I nicked a tin from the store. My edible oddities are doing very well, I’ll have you know.”
Libba sniffled. “I like edible oddities.”
Seph gave her a look, her sharp features softening a little around the edges. “I’ll fry some eggs too, if you like? Maybe some bread? Cheese? Something other than nuts?”
Libba nodded. “Just don’t drop them like I did with the ruse,” she muttered, “and my rose oil. Do you carry rose oil?”
Seph shook her head, already standing and floating past to withdraw a pan from her cupboard and a basket of eggs. “No. You’ll want an apothecary or some such for that. Not Ruby?”
“Not if I don’t want to be charged triple,” Libba replied dryly.
It made Seph titter. “You have to break the eggs to make them into anything worthwhile,” she said, plunking a pat of butter onto the pan and firing up her range. “Perhaps it’s a metaphor.”
“My father cooks his eggs so long that the yolks turn gray,” Libba replied, staring down at the glossy edge of the table again and wondering if her forehead would like another visit to it. “I thought I had forgotten he always did that. It’s disgusting.”
“Hm,” said Seph, breaking off a few sprigs of dried rosemary from the bundle over her window. “Mine likes them so undercooked, the whites still jiggle. Also disgusting.”
Libba gave a little huff and a nod. “Do you carry hourglasses? Perhaps we should gift them both one for seven minutes exactly.”
“I do carry hourglasses,” the other woman confirmed. “That one, I can help with.”
“They are likely figuring out I am a fraud right now in their drawing room while the servants unpack their trunks,” Libba moaned, wrinkling up her brow and huffing out another sigh. “I speak fluent French! Willa had us all learn, even Rhys! What the Devil was I doing?”
The sizzle of the eggs hitting the pan resonated in her chest.
Seph withdrew a long, serrated knife and took out half a baguette, considering which angle to slice it from as the eggs bubbled. “Well, Xandine isn’t French, though,” she said. “She’s African … or … where are you making her from?”
“We were still deciding,” Libba moaned. “Hattie had suggested this little island off the eastern coast of Northern Africa, where there’s a heavy influence from Arabs, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and so on.
It sounded perfect, but then the costumes are so heavily inspired by the Bedouins, we weren’t certain if being from an island made sense. ”
“Bedouins are nomads?” Seph asked, the yeasty equivalent of sawdust exploding around her as she sawed the baguette. “So are my people, and we are from Ireland. Also an island. Didn’t stop us.”
Libba paused, turning to stare at her friend. “That is an excellent point.”
“And the language,” said Seph, tapping her chin with the glinting edge of her bread knife in a way that likely would have been alarming had anyone else done it. “If someone spoke Irish Gaelic and heard us talking Shelta, they’d think we were pretending too. Maybe your people also speak a cant.”
Libba blinked. “Isn’t Shelta just a cousin to Irish, though? Like say Dutch and English?”
Seph shook her head. “It’s more like Pig Latin and English.
The root is Irish, but a lot of it is made up of rhymes and references and then borrowed from other languages too.
There are words in Romani, some in German and Polish, a few English speckled in.
That’s why it shocked everyone so badly when Hattie launched into a full oration that year at the showcase when we were young.
It’s not just a language; it’s a puzzle. ”
“That sounds a hell of a lot more complex than Pig Latin,” Libba replied, making Seph laugh.
“Of course it is,” she said, moving the eggs off the fire and dousing it. “It’s a real language, not a child’s game, but it’s a better comparison than Dutch. Do you want Stilton or Swiss?”
“Both,” Libba said, affronted. “What a question!”
“Right, what was I thinking? Cashews are in this tin. Catch!”
And Libba did, shaking the tin like a tambourine to enjoy the clatter before she peeled the lid off. “I should’ve come to you the day this all started,” she said absently, choosing a particularly fat, glossy nut and popping it in her mouth with a sigh. “You are perfect, you know.”
Seph chuckled again, arranging the plates. “I know,” she said. “I’d ask you to tell my family that as they prepare for the cold season, but I don’t think they’d hear it. So fret not; you’re not the only one who feels like a cracked egg right now.”
“They’re still mad you want to stay?” Libba asked, crunching into a second nut as the other woman nodded. “I don’t know what they expect you to do. You opened a shop here. You have a home.”
“That’s what I say too,” Seph agreed, rummaging for the cheese, her voice echoing out against the back of the pantry. “They think I’m turning my back on tradition, but in truth, we’ve been in Brighton since I was little because of the war. It was never my tradition in the first place.”
“I left,” Libba said softly. “To London. And I hated the idea of coming back here. I can’t remember why anymore.”
“Well, that’s different,” Seph returned, pulling out her treasures and slapping them on the cutting board, sending up another cloud of bread dust. “You moved to live elsewhere permanently, like Jasper wishes to do with Ceylon. That would be just as offensive to my people as staying.”
Libba frowned, watching the white and yellow slices fall off the edge of the knife and be transferred to the steaming plates.
“I don’t think he really wants to do that,” she said, though she didn’t sound particularly convincing, even to herself.
“I think he wants the idea of it, the prestige and accomplishment, but I can’t imagine he actually wants to step foot off Brighton shores. ”
“Well, he’s going to a lot of trouble for something he doesn’t actually want,” Seph pointed out, carrying the plates over and sliding them onto the table as she took her seat again. “Why do you think that is?”
“Because he’s an idiot,” Libba said, half a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “He is always attempting some harebrained plot to instantly change everything about his life, instead of attempting to fix the pieces that displease him, one at a time. It’s who he has always been.”
“It’s who he was,” Seph agreed, using the heel of her fork to cut off a chunk of cheese and push it into her eggs. “When we were children. There might be more to it now.”
Libba cut into her eggs, watching the perfect yolk separate from its crisp, white edges. “Perhaps,” she said grudgingly.
Seph chewed her eggy cheese and tilted her head to the side, swallowing and taking a little breath. “Do you really think he’s an idiot? Is that your opinion of Jasper Townsend?”
“Of course,” said Libba. “But I don’t mean it cruelly. Malcolm is an idiot too, and he’s a bona fide genius.”
“Hm,” said Seph. “So you don’t think he is stupid?”
“Of course not,” Libba answered, her back coming up a little. “He’s too canny and creative for his own good; he just gets ahead of himself sometimes. I’d never call him ‘stupid.’ Not ever.”
“Libba, what do you think ‘idiot’ means?” Seph asked with half a smile.
She only clicked her tongue in irritated response, waving her hand to dismiss the subject. “You know, for a second this morning, I thought he was going to call the whole business off. Just a second. But he didn’t.”
“Well, it’s hard to turn your back on something you’ve roped another person into, I would think,” Seph said, layering her egg and cheese atop one of the ovals of baguette on her plate and then biting the thing in half without a single droplet of concern for propriety.
She chewed, holding up a finger until she swallowed and could continue her thought.
“If you were standing there, already dressed in all your finery, up at the break of dawn, ready to follow through, he would’ve felt like a right arse saying, ‘Y’know what? Never mind.’”
Libba nodded, sighing.
“I suppose that’s true,” she said. “I could’ve given him permission to retreat and I didn’t because I thought he needed to be even deeper in the muck to realize how unpleasant it feels to stand there. So he’d never try it again.”
“You’re not his mother,” Seph said. “Even if you were, I’d call that meddlesome.”
Libba narrowed her eyes. “Someone has to look out for him.”
“He’s a grown man,” Seph returned. “Successful in the most competitive shipping firm in Brighton. Handsome. Well-liked. I think he is looking out for himself well enough.”
“Perhaps we agree to disagree and enjoy our breakfasts,” Libba suggested, frowning. “And later, I’ll buy a nice hourglass from you in thanks.”
Seph grinned at her then, showing the full array of her pearly, white teeth. “Now that,” she said, waving her fork lazily in front of her plate, “sounds like a well-thought-out plan.”