Chapter Two
Miss Persephone’s Oddities and Curiosities was closed on Sundays.
Ostensibly, this was because Sunday was for attending mass. Never mind that in the eleven years Seph’s caravan had been stuck in Brighton, they’d never once been allowed into a mass house, even with other Irish. Never mind that at all.
They’d had a sort of observational collective near their settlement over the years. Not every Sunday, of course, but many of them. Saints’ days especially. Twice on Christmas.
But her curio cabinet was closed on Sundays, despite all that.
It was the day to be closed, and that was all there was to say about it.
Used to be, she used Sunday to visit her family, even if there was no mass.
But the caravan had finally moved on, almost a month ago now, for the first time in a decade.
The war had been over for long enough for things to begin to return to normalcy on the caravan route.
Paris was open again. And the Channel wasn’t getting any warmer.
Seph, however, had stayed.
She’d stayed because of the shop. And because of the apartment above the shop. And because she hadn’t lived as a nomad for even a single day of her adult life.
She stayed and it had cost her.
But even so, she was closed on Sundays.
It gave Seph time to stock inventory, to run to the docks and intercept new shipments, to do her numbers, and to dust the damn place for once.
Today, she was hanging up a sign. A new sign. One she’d ordered back in July that had taken its sweet time being made. She was doing so alone, wearing an old pair of her cousin’s cast-off trousers, suspenders pulled as tight as they would go as the garment sagged around her waist.
She had an old hammer. She had a stepladder. And she had hands.
What Persephone Boswell didn’t have was patience.
The sign was teak wood, polished, carved, and painted. It had come with two holes in the top for the hooks she’d hung from the rafters. It read Edible Oddities in bright, red paint.
And it would finally replace the paper sign she’d had on a stick for the last six months.
The sign kept getting oddly shriveled, surrounded as it was by tins of sugar and oil and acid. She’d had to replace it half a dozen times already.
The display was a good one. The products were selling. The only problem was the damn sign. And the too-big trousers. And the uneven stepladder.
Those were the reasons she almost fell to her death at the ring of the bell. Certainly the only reasons.
Persephone Boswell was perfectly competent with a hammer, thank you very much.
She shambled down, grimacing, and moved toward the curtain on the front door, debating whether or not she ought to peek out.
The sign outside said Closed. Ferme.
It was not ambiguous.
But a lot of sailors couldn’t read.
So either it was an illiterate would-be customer. Or it was a friend.
Neither should really see her dressed as she was, but she could never abide a puzzle with no answer. And so, she peeked, and in doing so, gave away her presence behind the door.
Perhaps because it was Sunday, and that always put God in a friendly mood, it was indeed a friend. The only friend whose attire was frequently more scandalous than Seph’s trousers, in fact, and as such, she was able to wrench the door open a crack and usher the other woman inside.
“Seph!” Liberty Lennox declared, frowning at the darkened store. “The Devil are you doing in the shadows? Is that a ladder?”
“No,” lied Seph with a grin. “Good morning.”
“Good morning to you,” Libba replied, raising her dark brows.
She was a beautiful creature, her skin a gleaming hickory brown, her beauty marks drawing attention to her full cheeks.
Even first thing in the morning, with not a speck of rouge and her hair twisted and stabbed into place by a brass fork, she looked ready for the stage.
Seph had always found Libba’s effortless glamour enviable, if exhausting. Inspirational, if unattainable. And deeply endearing besides.
“You had a circular at the door,” Libba told her, holding out a copy of Ackermann’s Repository of Arts.
“Ah! I’ve been waiting for that,” Seph said, brightening. “Thank you kindly.”
Libba hesitated, looking down at it. “Not the reading I’d have guessed for you.”
“Why not?” Seph said, raising her brows as Libba gave her trousers a smirk. “Are you saying my fashionable ensemble doesn’t belong within its pages?”
“Of course not,” Libba tittered.
“Flip to the back,” Seph suggested, turning and looking around for somewhere to deposit her hammer. “You’ll see its value to me there. Plenty of bizarre and delightful little things that I should either stock or seek out composites for.”
“Ah,” said the other woman, the pages ruffling as Seph wandered toward her till to drop the hammer next to it. “Yes, I see. Oh, thaumatropes! I like those.”
“Exactly,” said Seph, turning back around and dropping her hands on her hips. “It’s also just a bit of fun. I like fun, Libba.”
“Yes, yes,” said Libba, still squinting dubiously at the stepladder and at the sign, which was, just now, only hung on one side and dangling precariously over a stack of tinned cashews. “I can see that you do. Shall I help you with that?”
“With what?” Seph asked, blinking innocently. “Shouldn’t you be at home with that new husband of yours today? He practically had to carry you home from the Cauldron last night.”
Libba smirked, smoothing a hand down the bright-blue paisley of her dress. “Yes, I should,” she said haughtily. “And I would be, if you hadn’t sent Rhys into the vapors first thing. He accosted me at my flat before I’d even finished my first cup of tea. What have you done to him this time?”
Seph frowned, her hackles going up a little. “Not a damned thing,” she said with feeling. “I didn’t even breathe in his direction last night. I never do!”
“You always do,” Libba corrected with a titter. “As far as he is concerned.”
“Well, that must be it, then,” she replied, frowning and marching back to her ladder. “I can’t account for Rhys Caradoc’s piques of drama.”
“No, of course not,” Libba agreed, watching her as she wobbled the stepladder for a moment and then snatched up the paper Edible Oddities sign to fold into a leg bolster for the stupid thing. “But you did inspire one this morning, anyhow. More than the usual glitter and groaning.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea about it,” Seph said, setting her jaw as she bent down to wedge the folded sign under the ladder. “If he came to you ranting about it, surely he told you why.”
“Oh, please,” Libba said flatly. “You might not speak to him anymore, but you’ve known him half your life. Rhys is tenuously coherent at the best of times. Did you perhaps add to your stock of magic trick kits? Reveal another one of his precious secrets?”
Seph grunted, testing the stepladder again and nodding at its newfound and temporary stability. “No,” she said. “I only release new ones during the high season. He didn’t invent any of those tricks, anyhow. Hell, I taught him several.”
“And yet the wound still seeps,” Libba intoned somberly, crossing her hands in front of her skirt.
“It’s not harming him,” Seph snapped. “Or anyone else. If he’s still trying to dazzle people with the rope snip or the vanishing coin, that’s his own sad stagnation of progress.”
“Perhaps,” Libba said, her voice very clearly hiding a smile. “Though I did just put on a production of Romeo and Juliet, which is hardly novel or groundbreaking, so I will choose not to take offense at your stance.”
“Entirely different,” Seph muttered.
“Is it?” Libba sighed, somehow sarcastically. “Well, you’ve done something. He claimed you were playing with his mind, something about theft, nocturnal omens, and then quite a long rant about how steaming wax seals off of letters doesn’t actually work very well.”
Seph blinked, pausing. “What?”
Libba shrugged. “I thought you would know.”
Seph sighed, digging a hand into her messy, blonde braid, and racked her brain for anything that aligned with the things Libba was saying. She shook her head, puffing her cheeks out with a gust of air. “I’ve got nothing.”
“Ah, well,” said Libba, seemingly unbothered as she swayed across the room to the till to take up the discarded hammer. “Get up there. I shall hold your nails and so on. And then you will tell me what those new pink tins are.”
“They’re dried tropical fruits,” Seph said, turning and stomping her way back up the ladder. “I need the silver hook with the nail on the end. Just there.”
Libba passed it up. “What sorts of fruits?”
“Pineapples, tamarinds, melons,” said Seph, squinting up at the mark she’d made on the ceiling beam. “They’re coated with a hot chili powder and then dried out and dusted with salt, lime juice, and sugar. It’ll burn your tongue, but it’s also divine.”
“I shall take two,” Libba decided immediately. “Here’s the hammer. I actually decided to come immediately because Rhys’s theatrics reminded me of a task he’d given me, some weeks ago, that I never concluded. A gift, for you.”
Seph paused, hammer, mid-tap. “That sounds wrong.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Libba said so emphatically that it startled Persephone. “It makes no damned sense. He doesn’t want you to know it is from him, but I’ve gone and told you, anyhow, so that cat has fled its bag.”
“I don’t think that’s how that expression goes,” Seph told her, resuming the tapping until the hook was firmly planted in the beam. She handed the hammer back and reached for the swinging sign. “What is it?”
“A fossil,” Libba said, still clearly disgruntled by its refusal to make sense. “An ammonite. He found it up at Malcolm’s quarry and polished it with my rose oil and told me to give it to you, to tell you that these would sell, and to not say it was from him. He thinks it’s a dragon.”
“Do you know for certain it isn’t one?” Seph asked, huffing as she hoisted the heavy wood onto the hook. “Oh. Does that look level? Can you walk back and check?”
“Yes, yes,” said Libba, trotting over toward the door again and peering up. “Looks perfect.”
“Good.” Seph slithered back down the ladder, ready to collapse. “Want to go upstairs? I can make you a consolation tea.”
Libba nodded, snatching up one of the pink tins as she came back around. “Yes, let’s do that,” she decided. “And I shall give you your dragon.”