“Oh, no, we all think it’s good fun,” Hattie said earnestly. “Except Malcolm, but I think he just worries for you.”
Libba sighed, shaking her head. She opened her mouth, right on the cusp of telling Hattie everything, about Jasper, about Templeton-Rath, about the flat.
Instead, she said, “You’ve been to Africa, haven’t you? Where Xandine is allegedly nobility?”
Hattie nodded. “The northern part. Tunis and Egypt and Morocco. I went a little farther south to look at the Kushite ruins, but it was rather treacherous. Even the Bedouins were worried about the sandstorms and the unseasonable heat, so we did not stay for long. I would go back, I think, farther into the continent, beyond the desert and into the jungles. Did you know there are peoples there whose languages include clicks of the tongue?”
She demonstrated, making sounds like a broken clock and giggled, sighing in awe. “I should love to learnthat.”
“Right,” said Libba, staring at her with no small amount of bemusement. “I was only thinking, Renaissance Verona is so trite. I’ve got Monica two doors down from me, a world-renowned modiste; why not do something creative with the costuming forRomeo and Juliet,hm? And then that talk of Xandine made me wonder how her people might dress in a similar setting.”
“Oh, what a question!” Hattie said, setting her glass aside and clasping her hands under her chin. “I suppose we ought todecide first on exactly where in Africa she originates. Oh! It will determine everything, of course. Shall we call Monica in?”
“Not yet,” said Libba. “We could also use the geography, culture, and language to add some details to the Montagues and Capulets, couldn’t we? Perhaps they are rival merchant families in whatever goods would be appropriate for the region we choose. What do you think of that?”
“Oh, I think it’s splendid,” Hattie said eagerly. “Shall I get a quill and some paper? Do you really want my help? Mine?”
Libba nodded and watched her skitter away, batting down the guilt in her chest.
This was a necessary part of getting Jasper out of trouble of his own devising. If they were going to do this, they needed to be convincing. They needed real, quality costuming, not slapdash illusions that could only pass in the low light of a pub. They needed to understand the cultural and mercantile landscape of the region they were claiming Xandine had come from. And perhaps most of all, they needed a few words of a real foreign language.
This would accomplish all of that.
And it wasn’t entirely a loss, Libba thought, that it would make her production of Shakespeare a little more interesting as well.
Chapter Six
It had neveroccurred 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.
