“Oooh,” Jemima said eagerly, showing more obvious keenness about the box at his feet than her brother’s presence. She didn’t want Noah to think she had missed him in the slightest, because that would only give him leave to be a thorn in her side about it. “It’ll be my winter things, I expect.” She pulled the box towards her own seat and made a fuss of opening it, though the winter clothes and gloves and scarfs she had inadvertently forgotten about when packing away her life in a (miserable) frenzy to move to Bartonburg hardly made the most exciting of parcels.
“If I had anything of consequence to share you can be sure I would tell Mama directly, rather than entrust it to you, Noah,” Jemima remarked, in an easy bickering tone; she managed to refrain from rolling her eyes, but of course her brother would only remember anything she said weeks or months later, and only pipe up with it when it was grossly irrelevant. Unless it was about some strange muggle artifact she had lately encountered. Then he would be listening intently. Well, as intently as Noah ever could.
“But you can report to her that I was an excellent hostess, if you like,” she carried on, only comfortable being quite this childish because her husband and in-laws were not in the room to witness it. (She would obviously have been on her best behaviour then.) Never mind that Jemima had not offered him anything to eat or drink, or even asked how he was yet – she was currently too busy pulling out an old pair of her earmuffs from the box.
“If I had anything of consequence to share you can be sure I would tell Mama directly, rather than entrust it to you, Noah,” Jemima remarked, in an easy bickering tone; she managed to refrain from rolling her eyes, but of course her brother would only remember anything she said weeks or months later, and only pipe up with it when it was grossly irrelevant. Unless it was about some strange muggle artifact she had lately encountered. Then he would be listening intently. Well, as intently as Noah ever could.
“But you can report to her that I was an excellent hostess, if you like,” she carried on, only comfortable being quite this childish because her husband and in-laws were not in the room to witness it. (She would obviously have been on her best behaviour then.) Never mind that Jemima had not offered him anything to eat or drink, or even asked how he was yet – she was currently too busy pulling out an old pair of her earmuffs from the box.
