He’d need it, she reckoned, to buy more pickle jars.
“Your theater has a lot of room above it too,” Jasper said, once they were outside and crunching through the gravel thatled from the road to the grassy beachfront path toward Starling’s Rest. “Seems like it has a whole second building above stairs.”
“It does,” she said, glancing at him. “About half of it is habitable rooms. My players live in those. The other half is storage and vaulting. It doesn’t look like it was a theater before Willa bought it for me. Perhaps it was some sort of inn or something similar, based on how the structure is gutted out.”
Jasper gave a choking chuckle, rubbing his fingers over his brow.
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“Lib,” he said seriously. “It was a bawd house.”
“It was not.”
“It was,” he told her, choking on his own amusement. “The madam went to America and took her girls with her and the baroness bought up the properties she left behind. That particular madam was a savvy landlady besides. You don’t want to know what the storefront that Monica and Ruby inherited used to be.”
Libba stared at him, stopping mid-stride. “Oh,” she said seriously, “I think that I do.”
He laughed again. “Malcolm would have my head,” he said, seemingly to himself. “Maybe some other night, when I’m not half-soused.”
“Oh, half,” she mocked, trying not to slur as she picked her gait back up toward the house. “Only half.”
“Only half,” he agreed. “And I was just wondering why you didn’t take those apartments for yourself, rather than giving them over to the actors and moving back into the Rest.”
She shrugged, kicking a pebble out of her sandal. “I had to move them all from our lodgings in Covent Garden down to Brighton at the drop of a hat. I had a place to stay already and they didn’t.”
“You could’ve put them up in the Rest,” he pointed out. “It’s plenty big.”
She scoffed. “I didn’t want them making off with the silver.”
It made him laugh. “Even the nun?”
“Especiallythe nun.”
He continued to chuckle as they turned toward the big hill that the house sat upon. “I did miss you,” he muttered, shaking his head and kicking at some of the pebbles himself with the pointed toe of his boot. “I did.”
“Of course you did,” she said back with a sniff, which only made him laugh again.
Starling’s Rest rose up in front of them, silhouetted by the half-moon hanging low in the sky. Its coat of slate-gray paint glinted against the moonlight, casting an eerie glow out toward the pebbled drive.
Libba often thought that it would be completely invisible in the dark, if not for the few windows that always had lights in them. But seeing it like this, catching the silver of the moon, she considered that perhaps she had always been wrong about that, after all.
When she looked back to Jasper to tell him so, she almost laughed at how visible he himself was in the same pale light, his red hair glowing like a lighthouse beacon on the shore, while he stared back at her guileless and tipsy and utterly unaware of any of it.
“What?” he demanded, blinking those amber-hued eyes, each one glowing like a shadowed lantern beneath a hood. “What?!”
“Nothing,” she said. “I was just realizing how easy it would be to find you in the dark, should we get separated. That hair of yours glows, you know.”
He made a face. “I am aware.”
She grinned. “Always good to be aware.”
He made an annoyed noise in his throat and set his shoulders forward as they continued, the wind picking up almost on cue to accompany his ill temper. “You’re not too hard to spot yourself, you know,” he said. “With all that hair and the unusual dress and the… the so on.”
“Oh, ‘the so on’?” she mocked, laughing at how pouty he looked about his own lack of eloquence.
“Perhaps I should’ve gone back to my flat, after all,” he muttered, though it was clear he was amused at himself under it all.
“Well, you have two of them, apparently,” she replied. “So yes, why not?”
