Chapter Nineteen
Jasper had made it, somehow, to the Coin and Cauldron. He had taken his seat. He had ordered his eggs. He had survived until the plate arrived, steaming and fragrant in front of him. Unfortunately, that appeared to be the farthest his heightened nerves were willing to carry him.
He stared at the sagging yolks, straining against their lightly cooked cauls, and ever so slowly, the horrible clarity of sanity began to settle over his shoulders.
What in the good name of hell had he said to her? Perhaps he should’ve been more concerned with what he’d done to her, but all he could think was what he’d said. What had he said?!
“Jasper? Are you listening to me, mate?” Malcolm’s voice said, cracking through the panic sharply enough to bring the room back into focus.
“What?” he replied, blinking across the table at his friend’s half-buttered toast, knife aloft in his manicured hands. “What did you say?”
“I asked if you wanted to grab my sister,” Malcolm repeated, frowning across the table.
Jasper stared.
He stared and he felt the heavy thumping of his heart. “What?”
“For the trip to the quarry. Christ, you really aren’t listening to me, are you?” Malcolm sighed. “Both of you are miles away every time I try to talk to you lately.”
“I can’t go to the quarry today,” Jasper said quickly, before Malcolm could put two and two together—math being something he was, as it happened, preternaturally good at doing. “I have to find the jack tars for Templeton-Rath.”
“Yes, I’ve explained this already,” Malcolm said, throwing his hands up.
“Errol has a building project on at the Rest. Some sort of special greenhouse. I’m going with you to hire jacks at the dockyard and I’m going to swap some of them out for quarry workers because Errol, in his good sense, asked me to sell him the rock for the foundation and some skilled labor besides. ”
Jasper was still staring. Still not entirely up to speed. “And why would you need me for that?” he asked, spearing a yolk and watching its insides bubble out down the crispy, white side of his egg. “Or Lib—or your sister?”
“I don’t need you,” Malcolm said, shaking his head and taking a large gulp from his mug of coffee. “I wanted to show you both the beating heart of my new vocation. I thought perhaps one of the two most important people in my life might give a toss. Perhaps I am wrong.”
“No, no,” Jasper said quickly. “I’m sorry. I’m … I’m a thousand miles away. I’ve got a lot going on.”
“Yes, I know,” said Malcolm. “More coffee?”
“Please.”
He watched with a bubble of sagging relief dripping from his sternum as his friend stood and made his way back to the barman to ask for a top-up.
He could remember a little now. Could remember them staring at each other after the …
erm … after. She’d turned and wrestled the windows back open, going on her toes against the panes like she needed the air from outside to restore her while he had stumbled back and collapsed with his bum against the corner of the desk.
“Aren’t you going?” she’d hissed. “You have to go before he comes back.”
“I can’t walk out there just yet,” he’d told her, shoving both hands into his hair. “I can’t walk at all yet. You don’t want me waddling down the boardwalk at half-mast.”
Shit.
What else had he said to her?!
“Here we are,” Malcolm said, coming back with a hot, iron pitcher. “And I got you the sugar cubes too. My act of charity for the day.”
“Bless you,” Jasper managed weakly, cramming a narrow wedge of toast into his yolk before it could congeal. “‘Greenhouse’?”
“Hothouse, apparently,” said Malcolm, shrugging.
“Errol says a normal greenhouse gathers heat from the sun. This one will apparently have furnaces to assist. It would wilt the stuff in the normal one and the normal one would kill the stuff in the new one with frost. His plants are fussier than a French courtesan.”
Jasper tried to laugh. It sounded more like he’d stubbed his toe.
Malcolm didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy cutting his sausage links into geometrically perfect wedges.
“I found out what my sister has been up to this morning, as it happens,” Mal said without looking up, his voice gone a little lower with displeasure.
Jasper paused, his teeth halfway into his eggy bread. “Oh?” he mumbled through the obstruction.
Mal sighed and nodded. “She got a letter this morning from our father. He didn’t sign it, but I know his penmanship. She’s apparently going ’round to his Wednesday night for dinner without mentioning a damned word of it to me. Did you know about this?”
Jasper still hadn’t finished biting the bread. He had to do that in order to shake his head, almost choking on the morsel in the process. “No,” he said. “Are you sure? She doesn’t … Why would she do that?”
Malcolm grimaced. “Hell if I know. I thought maybe she’d said something to you.”
Jasper shook his head, eyes watering as he coughed into his napkin until the toast had been sent down the correct series of piping within his fool body. “No,” he managed to croak. “Nothing.”
“I’m torn between confronting the little wench or just showing up on Wednesday as though I too were invited,” Malcolm said, spearing his sausage through at long last. “Which do you think is more dignified?”
Jasper blinked at his friend through the salty sheen of his wandering eyes and took a wheezing breath. “I’m not the person to ask,” he said, and he meant it.
It at least got a laugh out of Malcolm and a shrug. “Fair enough. Eat up; we’ve got to go find our jack tars. I’m pleased to hear you’ve already ingratiated yourself with the Templeton-Raths, you know. I knew you could do it, even if I was a bit of a child about it before.”
Jasper gave a nod. “We shall see, anyhow.”
“If you do get in good,” Mal said thoughtfully, “maybe you can convince them that it’s in their best interest to repair the Rusty Reaper, since that’ll be their nearest crane. Someone needs to do it, and neither the harbormaster nor city hall have any interest in the wretched thing.”
“It’s a thought,” Jasper said.
Perhaps the safest sentence in the English language.
A magical spell, even.
For it got him through the remainder of breakfast without having to scramble for quick thinking again until the bill came due, and he realized he’d left all his coin locked in his desk back at EIC.
“Sorry, mate,” he’d said to Malcolm with a genuine shrug of attrition and the most honest thing he could use as explanation. “It’s been a hectic morning.”
*
Libba had walked very briskly back to Starling’s Rest.
The drop in temperature and the icy mist in the air had done wonders for her clarity of mind and her temperature of face.
By the time she’d gotten through the door, she had almost forgotten that Jasper had said the word “half-mast” to her and drawn her attention directly to the bulge in his trousers. Trousers she had never once pondered the contents of before this morning.
Not once!
And now she wanted to trace the outline of what was happening inside them with her tongue.
She coughed, hesitating in the doorway of her home, and used the knob to fan herself with the full weight of the front door until her thoughts got back into order. Or at least got out of Jasper’s trousers.
She shook herself, pulling the door shut with a smart snap meant to startle her thoughts into order.
She wasn’t dazed. Dazed would have been preferable.
She was horribly, vibrantly alert. She was fizzing like a freshly poured pint of ale. She was obsessed with the memory of his tongue in her mouth, his lips on her throat, his teeth grazing the tops of her breasts while his palms had seen to the remainder.
Shit!
How long had it been since she … Since someone had …?
Too long, evidently.
Jasper. Bloody. Townsend?!
She glanced down at the tray of mail that sat on the little table by the door and immediately spotted the folded, unsealed, handwritten scrawl addressed to her by her father. It was just sitting there, hanging open for the world to read.
She snatched it up, her lips curling into a frustrated snarl, and stuffed it into the pocket of her pelisse before anyone could wander past and peek at it.
“Morning!” Ruby’s voice sang from the hall, snapping Libba’s head up in her direction. She was hovering in the archway to the entry hall with a steaming cup in her hands. “Were you already out and about today? Gracious, I’m the only one in this house who knows how to sleep.”
Libba blinked at her, knowing she likely looked rather ferocious just now. “Ruby?”
“Did you run errands? What errands can one run at the crack of dawn?” Ruby pondered. “Did you bring me anything? I heard you brought candies to Hattie and now I’m jealous.”
“No candies,” said Libba, frowning as Ruby gave a sigh and a one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe next time.”
“Oh! Mr. Harcourt is here,” Ruby added, sipping at the rim of her cup. “He’s with your muscled friend. I think they were looking for you. Ought I to make a scent for Lem, you think? I made one for Jasper recently. I’ve grown bored of all my usuals.”
“Yes, I know you did,” Libba said through her teeth, stalking forward. “Marzipan and Christmas.”
Ruby gave a soft laugh, watching through her long, curling lashes as Libba got closer. “Yes, something like that. It suits him, doesn’t it?”
“Where are Lem and Harcourt?” Libba asked, rather than answering, her fingers reaching up to fumble with the brass buttons on her pelisse. “The parlor?”
Ruby shook her head. “Willa’s old study, by the library.”
She paused, turning her head and giving a little sniff to the air, a glint of recognition seeming to light in her eyes as she took a step closer to Libba.
“Get off!” Libba cried, dancing away from her. “Go smell someone else.”
Ruby’s lips were peeling back in a very slow, very predatory smile. “My, my Liberty. Are you all right?”
“I’m splendid,” Libba snapped. “Excellent! Perfect!”