“I think I like plays with more words in them,” he said with a shrug. “Which is why you ought to listen to me about the next one.”
She managed to draw her brows together and glare at him as she tipped her head back and gulped down the remainder of the liquid in her glass before finally throwing her face back forward, a few curls quivering about her ears as she sucked in a much-needed gulp of air.
“Oh, well done!” said Jasper, taking the empty glass from her and holding it aloft over his head to a returning cheer from several other pubgoers.
“And you?” she asked, once she’d dragged in a second and third breath to her lungs, her vision swimming pleasantly as the warmth of the ale settled in her bones. “D’you think my plays need more words?”
Jasper grinned, running a hand over his copper-red hair. “Me? Think? I don’t do that.”
Both Libba and Malcolm groaned at the dodge.
He had always refused to be the deciding vote between their disagreements.
“Let’s sit,” Libba suggested, gesturing with her other, full glass toward the Starling table, where the rest of the wards once adopted by the baroness were gathered. “Maybe you’ll be able to think once you’re on your arse.”
“Not typically.” Jasper chuckled but followed, anyway, as the others made room around the big, round table in the rear corner of the venue.
“It is the same story, anyhow,” Malcolm continued, as though he’d been invited to begin this nonsense again in earnest. “Shakespeare acknowledged it himself, but it’s a matter of marketability. Your theater is still new in the city and as we head into the off season, you’re going to want to draw a local crowd. You can do that better with something they recognize than with interpretive dance and Ovid.”
“‘Ovid’?” said Hattie French, or Hattie Selwyn now.
The brassy little girl from the beach had married the pudgy little boy, quite recently, in fact. Both were adults now, grown, attractive, and newly titled. Still, Libba could never see Hattie as the baroness. Not really.
“In the original Greek?” she asked hopefully.
Libba made a face at her. “Of course not. Did I doPygmalionin the original Greek?”
“No,” Hattie said with a little frown. “You did it mostly in the silent language.”
“See?!” Malcolm exclaimed, gesturing at Hattie with both hands as though she had just agreed with him somehow. “Shakespeare! Words! Normal folk don’t pay for silence!”
“But they would,” put in the baron, “if given the option sometimes.”
This earned him a swat from his wife.
“Ugh!” said Libba. “It’s just so boring to do the same plays everyone does over and over again. And that particular one is so trite.”
“Steady on,” Malcolm said with a frown. “Let’s not insult the Bard in a room full of potential audience members. Don’t you want to play Juliet?”
“Absolutely not,” said Libba. “Thisbe is complex. Thisbe is colorful. Juliet is a half-wit child from terrible parents who foolishly falls in love with the third-most attractive man in the play.”
“‘Third-most’?” Jasper said, raising his brows. “How’s that, then?”
“Have you never noticed?” Libba replied. “It’s always the same in every production I’ve seen. Romeo is the third-most attractive man in their company. Without fail.”
“Which parts go to the handsomer two, then?” Jasper pressed, tapping the bottom of Libba’s glass so that it would get closer to her lips.
She glared at him and took a sip, holding his eye as he monitored her intake with a satisfied grin. She swallowed and wiped the back of her mouth, sucking in a breath. “Tybalt, obviously, is the heart-wrecker. When you have a smoldering beauty of a man in your troupe, he plays Tybalt. That’ll be Lem, obviously.”
“Oh, obviously,” parroted her foster sisters, nodding sagely, one by one, much to the annoyance of every man at the table.
They turned as a group to regard Lem, the actor in question, and Libba’s right hand. He was tall, dark, muscled, and undeniably good-looking. Just now, he was leaning against the bar, smiling at something a barmaid was gushing to him as he held a tiny-looking pint in his large, steady hand.
“Fine,” said Jasper, in a definite pout. “What about the second-most?”
“Mercutio,” she said impatiently. “Obviously. Oh! Rhys! Do you want a part?”
Rhys Caradoc, a former pickpocket whom Willa had once attempted to turn into a surgeon, looked up from his bowl of peanuts in alarm. “Me?”
