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Janet isn't Ayle. She doesn't have the capacity to pick up a man and toss him bodily into the streets; certainly, if the ruffian had been of Jacob's stock she would not have been able to repeat Ayle's competent handling of the situation.

Luckily, he isn't of Jacob's stock: he is a short and thin and mousey little creature, and perhaps that is why he had taken so much pleasure in pushing the limits of his rights as a client.

"And be glad," she spits, a towering, raging cyclone of distilled wrath, "that Maeve is away and the farm boy's disappeared somewhere, or you'd be walking away with more than a missing tooth."

She slams the door on him, and wheels first on the other kitchen girl. "Go get a bucket and scrub his ******** blood off the ******** porch," she instructs her imperiously.

Then she turns to the whores peeping over the stair railings with wide eyes, and to the girl clutching her bruised arm, her cheeks white and her jaw slack. "You all right? Good. None of you say a ******** word to Maeve. If the blood's still there tell her one of you had an accident slopping out the rag buckets and not a damned word to the contrary. Are we ******** understood?"

They all nod, in a sort of submissive haze, and Janet points at the tall blonde that hovers with a combination of horror and delight at the landing. "Where the ******** that pretty boy?"

Meeting no answer save a blank stare, Janet gathers her aprons into her bloodied knuckles and sweeps up the stairs, the girls scattering like pheasants before an angry dog, and she begins systematically throwing open doors. The first is occupied and the startled customer and alarmed girl get not so much as an apology before it's slammed again. The second and third are empty. The Swan is not a large place, and Janet is running out of both doors and patience.

There are... noises. Janet, in a rage, pauses to close her eyes and take a deep breath of anger and disgust, before unceremoniously throwing open the door so hard that it bangs the wall and rattles an empty glass off the nightstand, sending it shattering on the floor.

"Oh no, by all means carry right the ******** on," says Janet, and her voice is acid on a knife's edge. An oak tree would have withered under that.

"God forbid you wait until the slow hours when you might not be needed. I'd hate to deprive you of your valuable job perks. By all means, let me cover your damned shifts for you. I can scrub a floor, roast a ham, and put a man's teeth out." And her she holds up her barked knuckles for him to observe. "More's the pity I can't do all three at the same ******** time. Go on! Have at."

Fine. Fair enough. She had told him to go right ahead. She waits beside the door with her arms crossed over her chest, listens to the entire sordid scene unfolding with the infinite patience of a boulder or a swamp, and does not even tap her foot impatiently.

She can outwait him. Outlast him.

And if other women were blushed and flustered by the sight of Ayle clothed, let alone Ayle naked, Janet was not one of them. She hadn't even turned pink at his approach. Janet's rage inhabits a world far beyond the flesh.

She again puts up her bloodied fingers. By now they've scabbed over--some of the blood was hers, then--and look about as disgusting as Janet's face does disgusted. She'd said nothing to the girl--not her fault, after all--and levels her eyes to Ayle's with an absolute lack of shame or apology.

"You have a job to do. You are graciously given perks in exchange for it. This is peak business hours and you're not only tying up a bed, you're letting s**t happen on your watch and there's no one down there to take care of things. Alice's got a bruise on her forearm the size of a damned crab apple."

Janet goes rigid, her fingers white as the curl into fists at her sides. The blood runs out of her face--out of her lips, even--leaving her even more a paper-white shadow, and when she speaks it's with a trembling, barely-constrained passion.

"You do that. Be sure and tell her what circumstances led me to realize I had the ability to run the place on my own. Don't omit a single ******** detail."

She glances up from where she's furiously scrubbing out the inside of a bucket. Janet always cleans as though the dirt has personally insulted her mother. She eyes the offering skeptically. For her own part, she had spent the intervening time in a sort of wrathful flurry, but that is how Janet spends all her time, and separating out a specific well of anger from the rest is generally impossible.

"If this is about my knuckles, they healed up a long time ago," she informs him, but she drops the scrub brush and reaches to take it up in her dirty fingers. "Where've you been?"