He hated it?
“Papa, we can’t find Mutiny!” came yet another interrupting voice, this one younger and feminine as two young ladies emerged from one of the tug boats bobbing next to the large ship. “Even with the fish heads, she’s refusing to come out.”
“Pippa,” her mother snapped. “Come meet our new friends. This young woman is royalty, and this young man was about to introduce himself.”
The younger woman, Pippa, frowned at her mother and shrugged, hopping onto the dock and tossing two juicy fish decapitations onto the waxed wood of the wharf, where two other cats were already waiting, each licking a fish skull that had already been picked clean.
He knew he ought to examine her, considering. He ought to be standing up straighter and taking in every detail.
But he couldn’t just now. She was just a young woman on the wharf. Skinny. Her hair was brown. He couldn’t quite… He blinked, looking down at the fish heads.
The bigger cat, a tom judging from the spiky mat of hair that jutted out above his tail and the general disarray of his fur after a month at sea, immediately moved to hoard them both, much to the affront of a slender, white cat with big, blue eyes, who watched him with her head quirked to the side just like Libba’s was, as though she were curious about how stupid he might actually be.
“I… erm,” he said, trying to drag his attention away from the cats. “Jasper Townsend,” he said, giving an odd. jerking little motion to Libba that later would haunt him as something like a curtsey, and then turning and nodding to the Templeton-Raths. “I’m nobody, really.”
Another young woman was climbing out of the tug, this one shorter and darker than the one before. Not the daughter, he reckoned, based on the complexion of the parents, but grinning like part of the family, anyway.
“I am Agatha Templeton-Rath, and this is my husband, John,” the woman who was clearly in charge of this operation announced. “This disaster of decorum with the fish heads is my daughter, Philippa, and this is my niece, Ayomide Rath. Her father is around here somewhere.”
“Just in my office,” the harbormaster muttered. “With the money.”
“You arenotnobody.” Libba gasped, pressing her fingertips to her glossy, rose-scented lips. “You fought four men for insulting my honor! You saved me when they would have taken liberties, here near this very dock!”
He had thought he would struggle to feign humility for this moment, but Jasper found he was not struggling at all to be red in the face and deeply uncomfortable. It wasn’t humility, of course. It was bone-deep, quaking regret.
But it likely looked the same.
“Oh, it was really nothing,” he managed.
“Squalor, no!” Philippa Templeton-Rath snapped, pointing at the orange tomcat. “You know better.”
The orange tomcat gave her a disdainful blink, which was enough for the white one to paw her fish head over to her side of the planks, next to the clean skull she’d already finished.
Jasper noted that the tomcat’s fish skull was in significantly worse shape, gnawed and pitted. It still had bits of gray viscera streaking it.
“It wasnotnothing,” Libba was gushing, going into vivid detail about his daring deeds and how he had rescued her from a clutch of brigands while her bodyguard had been securing their lodgings for the night.
He could hear her, as though she were very far away, as he watched the cats.
“I did not know the docks were so dangerous in England! In Africa, we think England must be a land of nothing but laws!”
“Africa!” the niece, Miss Rath, exclaimed. “Ibo lo wa?! Iw? oòrùn Africa?”
Libba blinked at her. “My apologies, I don’t…”
“She is a Bedouin,” Mrs. Templeton-Rath said quickly. “Northern Africa, Ayo. Saharan. She doesn’t speak Yoruba; she likely speaks French. Isn’t that right, my dear?Parlez-vous français?”
Libba gave a little, stuttering breath, color rising in her face that seemed to at least be recognizing all the heat in Jasper’s own cheeks. “Oui! Naturallement. Comme Napoleon.”
All four Templeton-Raths made a noise of distaste at that.
And still, Jasper could not look away from the damn cats.
The white one was inching closer, one claw at a time extending toward that second fish head, the meaty one that the tom had not started in on yet.
The tom, Squalor, was watching her out of the corner of his eye but not moving just yet, not acknowledging what she was about.
It was fascinating. Like watching someone get shot by a very, very slow bullet.
