Re: [jude & hannah: tea]
He hadn't studied it. It was how the world was, a perspective, like looking at Oli's paintings and seeing the Grand Master instead of the forgery because it was nearly the same but not exactly. Jude knew, as best as he could, what right probably was but small boys adapted quickly, and he could still pick a pocket within arm's reaching distance if he felt like it. Jude's morality, if you're asking, came down to end benefit and harm. How many people did it benefit, and how many did it harm? He had, before, wheeled out good-faith support for people who needed it, somewhere along the line he had shut down and sheltered inside his own self. It needed adjusting, as world-views did.
But that was all presently sideways to the point, the point was Hannah laughing opposite him. Jude didn't know there was a humanity to question, she looked like a girl who laughed easily and often and who could find an adventure in a tea-cup or a lake, or a book she'd never read. A very good girl to know, if you're ever in doubt of laughter or adventures and he liked her, with an unquestioning rapidity. She was very pretty, which wasn't an essential, if you liked someone but oh it made sitting opposite an exercise in finding the girl rather than the prettiness. Jude didn't much care for etiquette rules on staring, but he did mind observation being observed. So he looked, for the smile and for the sense of daring that had been as much a girl of stitchery than the one in front of him. She whispered as if she was sharing a delicate and very sensitive secret and he couldn't help laughing.
He leaned into his own elbow and tipped himself forward until he was dangerously close to his own tea-cup to whisper back. "Louis has a hundred secrets, and not all of them are on sale. His past is both dark and mysterious and he's a very nice man who won't possibly give it away for all the tea in China." He sat back himself, and considered skyscrapers and sea air on the inhale of chai.
"I didn't look anything up before I moved. My brother and I had a house, or we knew of a house and it was here, so we just pitched up one day. It was in the woods, and I'd never been anywhere with real woods before, just tame parks. You can't inhale the sea but you can smell pitch and pine and petrichor, which I think is rather nice, sunshine, even if it isn't brine."
A grandmother. What was a grandmother to a girl who found stories in things? Someone who told them, very probably. Biblical or not, he shook his head, "I think it's a neat trick rather than a made one. Sometimes found things are better than ones built for the purpose, sunshine. Hannah's Biblical, it's also in the Torah, if you're minded to know. It's a shared one," and he grinned at her.
But it had been a time since he'd shocked the town. A terribly long time and a very staid and ordinary existence, and he sat back in his chair and smiled over the lip of his tea-cup. "But we could declare it an arranged marriage. You could languish, I think there's something about that in those books. And I could be fearsome. Rotchester, or Heathlcliff or even Darcy, if you're really stretched. If you're going to summon gossip, sunshine, why not make it a grand affair?"