“You won’t be doing shows at your pavilion when it gets cold, will you?” Libba pressed. “What would you be doing in the off season otherwise?”
He frowned, picking up a peanut shell and twisting his hand so that it appeared to vanish. It did, for a moment, and then immediately fell out of his jacket sleeve and into his pint of half-consumed ale with a delicate plink. “Practice. Innovation. Other things,” he said weakly, giving a look of rebuke to the uncooperative peanut shell. He sighed and shook his head. “Oh, all right. But Icoulddo magic in the cold, you know.”
“Certainly,” Libba agreed. “But no one would be there to pay you for it.”
His frown deepened. “I need a new ale.”
He drank what was left of the one with the peanut shell, anyhow.
“Why does Rhys get to act?” Ruby Little demanded, tossing her dark hair. “I would make a fetching Juliet, if you aren’t going to play her.”
Libba snorted, not because Ruby wasn’t fetching. She certainly was. Annoyingly so. She snorted because Ruby couldn’t act to save her life. She was as pure and potent as the perfumes she concocted from her chemistry lab, and nothing would ever change that.
Artifice was beyond her.
Still, the snort was not appreciated as a reaction. And that lack of appreciation was clear because as noted, Ruby did not hide how she felt about things.
“Well, wait a moment,” Jasper said, his brow wrinkled like a walnut. “What about Benvolio? Romeo’s best mate? The peacemaker?”
Libba gave him a flat-mouthed stare. “Who?”
He narrowed his eyes. “What!”
Libba rolled her eyes. “Really? Benvolio?”
“He actually survives the thing!” Jasper pointed out, taking a final swig of the dregs of his own ale. “That’s worth something.”
“Yes, we all mourn the lost sixth act,” Libba cooed, “where Benvolio and Nurse abscond to Roma together to live in sin. Please. No one leaves the play thinking,Gracious, I certainly wish there’d been more of that milquetoast friend character.”
He gasped, his hand coming up to grip his cravat.
“Who will you play?” Malcolm asked, sounding genuinely curious and genuinely disinterested in Jasper’s theatrics. “If not Juliet? You are too young to be a matron.”
“If we do Shakespeare instead of the far superiorPyramus and Thisbe, you mean?” she snapped, making him both flinch and grin at her. “No one. I have long been tired of iambic pentameter unless it is in service of Titania.”
“You’re going to sit out your own production?” Jasper asked, perching his hand on his chest like a scandalized church matron. “Why would you do that?”
“I will direct it, of course,” Libba answered impatiently. “There is more to stagecraft than the acting, you know.”
“Is there?” he replied, clearly to goad her into giving him a firm whack on the arm, which he rubbed with a smug chuckle of satisfaction. “Well, I suppose that’ll free you up a bit, won’t it? For other endeavors?”
“‘Other endeavors’?” she asked, finishing off her second glass and taking up the pitcher for both herself and Rhys. “Such as?”
“Oh, nothing in particular,” he said so easily, she immediately knew it was a lie. “Whiling away the chill here in the pub. You could polish off your old Princess Xandine gambit.”
“That’s for tourists,” Monica Thresher told him from the opposite side of the table, tucking her wispy, blonde hair behind her ears. “There are no tourists when it is cold.”
“There are always sailors,” Jasper pointed out. “They’re tourists of a sort.”
“It needs no polish, anyway,” Libba said with a lift of her chin. “I was Princess Xandine not two months ago here at this very pub, if you’ll recall, and it was as well-oiled and perfect a performance as ever.”
“Lord,” Malcolm muttered, rolling his eyes and looking around for someone else to speak to.
He had never approved of anything he perceived as a scam.
And Princess Xandine of the African Isles, while harmless, was certainly a scam.
The game was a simple one. Libba would fashion a costume out of whatever was available already amongst herself and her compatriots and transform herself into a believably foreign and alien beauty. Then, when new and alien patrons came into the bar, she would assume the character of the beguiling Princess Xandine, usually to the end of many free drinks and the occasional gift or two extra.
