Re: [jude & hannah: tea]
She was born storyteller - or made, perhaps, but storyteller Hannah was. It made Jude think of three things all at once, of learning as a boy to repeat a fable until the fable was truth from God's own lips and he somebody aside from Jude, of sitting by candlelight and listening to his mother read, and of the stacks and stacks of books buried at the back of the secondhand store, where you could sit and live written word until the real one faded away. It mattered not at all that Louis was a silly highlander even if he probably could wear a kilt, but Hannah's own infectious pleasure with her own cleverness was catching, and he laughed as she tied the story off with a knot.
"Very serendipitous. The highland lass could be old. She could be disappointed in love. She could love another, you could put all sorts of kinks in the tale, sunshine, but if it all comes round right in the end, it's the same tale."
Jude had little handle on the finer points of women's outfits. He'd practice in some aspects, but not in whether or not a skirt was suitable finery for climbing trees and he blinked as she rattled off conditions that he was signed up to surmount, hook or by crook. But climbing a tree - building a treehouse, it was a story as soothing as the one Hannah made up on the spot, and one with a simpler ending. He'd take trees, any day of the week, over complicated conflict and he rather liked the idea of Hannah getting her sky back, even if she couldn't have brine and seagulls.
He'd no experience with people who believed truly and deeply save his mother. He watched her face pitch into darkness, a look that seemed at odds with Hannah's merriment and quickly scudding across like clouds. "We'll put the bible into a box, sunshine. Bury it under Jane Bennet, in a very worthy and meek grave."
But she'd picked apart the book to find the thread that stitched it together and wasn't that novel? Jude, who tangled the warp and weft of prose around his own fingers until he'd taught himself to find the story beneath the story, smiled into her defiance. Definitely not Jane Bennet, milk and tea and enduring. "You sound like a revolutionary for your own wants, sunshine. I rather like it, I'm signing up for classes. And St John Rivers is as bland as good society, which I think was rather the point. Jane went back to the man who wasn't good and kind and sweet and well-liked but she went to the one she loved. And you're free to like them, but please don't marry them, you'll wind up in an attic. D'you want more tea?" Because she'd finished the cup and Jude rather felt like keeping her for another few stories, like Scheherezade.