“Of course not,” Libba answered, her back coming up a little. “He’s too canny and creative for his own good; he just gets ahead of himself sometimes. I’d never call him ‘stupid.’ Not ever.”
“Libba, what do you think ‘idiot’ means?” Seph asked with half a smile.
She only clicked her tongue in irritated response, waving her hand to dismiss the subject. “You know, for a second this morning, I thought he was going to call the whole business off. Just a second. But he didn’t.”
“Well, it’s hard to turn your back on something you’ve roped another person into, I would think,” Seph said, layering her egg and cheese atop one of the ovals of baguette on her plate and then biting the thing in half without a single droplet of concern for propriety. She chewed, holding up a finger until she swallowed and could continue her thought. “If you were standing there, already dressed in all your finery, up at the break of dawn, ready to follow through, he would’ve felt like a right arse saying, ‘Y’know what? Never mind.’”
Libba nodded, sighing.
“I suppose that’s true,” she said. “I could’ve given him permission to retreat and I didn’t because I thought he needed to be even deeper in the muck to realize how unpleasant it feels to stand there. So he’d never try it again.”
“You’re not his mother,” Seph said. “Even if you were, I’d call that meddlesome.”
Libba narrowed her eyes. “Someonehas to look out for him.”
“He’s a grown man,” Seph returned. “Successful in the most competitive shipping firm in Brighton. Handsome. Well-liked. I think he is looking out for himself well enough.”
“Perhaps we agree to disagree and enjoy our breakfasts,” Libba suggested, frowning. “And later, I’ll buy a nice hourglass from you in thanks.”
Seph grinned at her then, showing the full array of her pearly, white teeth. “Now that,” she said, waving her fork lazily in front of her plate, “sounds like a well-thought-out plan.”
Part IV
The Fool Doth Think Himself Wise
Chapter Twelve
By the timeJasper had washed, dried, and put himself into an ensemble made up entirely of his own clothing, he had found himself in a bit of a pickle.
Did he take the borrowed, soiled items he’d plunged into the Channel and through the breakfast leavings of a cat to a laundress, without a word to their owners, in an attempt to return them unscathed in full, good faith of owning up to his error? Or, did he take them straight to Monica, who might be the only person in Brighton who could restore them to their former state of perfection, and risk looking like a lazy, entitled bastard?
It was a question with no answer, and so he did the only thing that fell right in the middle of those two options: he took them to Monica’s mother.
The Widow Thresher had a laundry near his own parents’ house in Barrel End, a thriving affair with half a dozen laundresses and a scaffolding network of drying pegs and lines that always smelled like flowers and cotton, even in the coldest days of winter.
She might tell her daughter, but then, at least, Jasper would have attempted to fix the thing on his own, with coin from his very pocket.
“Jasper Townsend, what on earth did you do to this waistcoat?” Mrs. Thresher demanded, holding the thing with adelicate pinch of her two fingers, the full length of her arm away from her face. “It smells like fish guts.”
“Itisfish guts,” he told her, sighing. “You could compete with Ruby at next summer’s showcase, where she identifies the smells in the blindfold.”
That suggestion had both softened her and somehow irritated her too, and she’d shooed him away, pink-faced and giggling and also cursing his name as she called for someone to bring her a cold soak, vinegar, and her horsehair brush.
“Wool soaked in saltwater,” she’d lamented. “And in such a vibrant dye. Two bottles of vinegar, if you please!”
Which, of course, only hastened his departure.
He might have imagined it, but he thought, just outside the door, he’d heard her pause and say, “Did my daughter make this? Did that scamp do this to one of my daughter’s creations?!”
Surely not.
No, that was his guilt talking.
And pushing his gait into a canter all the way up to Starling’s Rest.
He needed to find Libba immediately and… he didn’t know. Apologize? Shout at her? Cry at her feet?
He didn’t know.
