A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (10 page)

Well, she could
lie here all night, watching the squares of moonlight creeping slowly across
the floor and breeding foolish, fearful fancies. Or she could get up and pee
and do something useful with herself, like getting the kitchen fire lit, or
starting some bread. Something useful, and practical, and real. Seeing to the
horses, hobbled on the lawn.

She got dressed,
quietly, though she left off her stays because the idea of lacing herself twice
in the dark was more than she could bear. Stockings, and sensible boots - oh, a
most murderous man, her husband, with his insistence on clean stockings and
stout footwear, as if she was one of his soldiers - in her hand, though she
doubted that much short of a full artillery barrage would wake him, once he had
his head down.

Out on the lawn,
big grey Marlowe had his head down and his solid dappled backside turned into
the gusting rain, grazing peaceably with little black Minna sheltered in his
lee. Two less concerned beasts she had not seen. So much for ghosts and
boggarts.

The kitchen
flags were cold under her bare feet.

To light the
fire, then, or not?

So much for
ghosts, but she found she did not want to, did not want whatever, or whoever,
was out there in the waiting darkness to know she was awake.

(Go back to bed,
then, Thomazine, and hide your head in your husband's shoulder - but then you
will never know what's out there, will you?)

Marlowe was
pleased to see her. She pushed his enquiring muzzle away from her face when his
investigations became too pressing. He heaved a great sigh and pretended to be
the most desolate horse in the world while she fussed Minna. It was hard to
imagine ghosts when you had a good hundredweight of horse trying to push his
head under your arm, while another blew hot, grassy horse-breath into your face
while she made sure that you were still yourself. "Behave," she said
firmly, "you daft pair."

Her voice
sounded like the loudest thing in the world, and yet she was barely whispering,
and all the hairs rippled on the back of her neck and she was being silly, she
knew she was being silly, there was nothing here -

Then a light
showed, suddenly, amongst the ruins, bobbing and wavering. Marlowe suddenly
sprang away, stiff-legged as a child's toy, his head up and his ears
flickering, and Minna wheeled with him, the two horses in a plunging panic as
far as their hobbles would allow them. Thomazine screamed as a black figure
reared out of the ashes.

"What the
hell
are you doing wandering round in the middle of the night, lass?"

"Gillespie!"
she snapped, her voice shaky with relief. "I might ask the same of
you!"

He put his hand
out to the big grey horse and Marlowe snuffed him warily. "Aye, it's me,
you witless beast. Be still." He set down his lantern, and the blackened
apocalypse of timber suddenly took on a strangely homely glow. "Don't you
dare, Marlowe. This thing's yet primed. Mistress Russell, I'd have ye step away
from the house, if ye please. Come. And you, ye daft nag. 'Tis not safe."

He took the
grey’s halter, and his free hand out to Thomazine. “Broken glass in the ashes,
mistress. I’d bring your mare away, too. This part of the house is mostly
shored up wi’ timbers, and they warp in the damp. Ye’ll have heard it,
shifting?”

“I am not a
baby, Gillespie,” she said coldly, ignoring his hand. She was impressed at how
calm and unafraid her voice sounded. “There is no need to frighten me with
ghost stories.”

“Aye? Well, from
things that go bump in the night, may the good Lord deliver us indeed, Mistress
Russell, for it’s like to be the gable end, and it’ll go a sight more than
bump.”

“I don’t –“ She
was about to say she didn’t believe a word of it, but even as she spoke there
was a faint, hollow groan, long and low and eerie, from the ruins. He stooped
and picked up the lantern, and tugged the grey horse away. “Mistress –“

And she was
still standing like a mooncalf, when there was a slithering, hissing sound,
from somewhere in the skies above her, and something came whistling past her
head. Gillespie hurled himself at her, his shoulder taking her in the
breastbone, and the pair of them hit the rubble at the same time as a
razor-edged slab of tile hit the ground a yard from them both and burst into
lethal shards.

And Thomazine
turned her bleeding face into the inimical ash, and wept tears of shock and
pain.

The lantern was
shattered, but Gillespie had brought flint and tinder, and he sat and patiently
re-lit it, in the seeping mizzle. It would be dawn soon, and the sky was
lightening, and possibly they did not need its light, but it gave him a thing
to do with his hands and his attention while she cried, and she was grateful
for that. He did not say that he had told her so, either. He simply went and
caught up the two frightened horses and soothed them and petted them, and
Marlowe buried his face in the Scotsman’s coat with a trust that spoke of long
intimacy.

“Now then,” he
said, when she had cleaned herself up. "I've a job to do, mistress. Can ye
bide a minute, or d'ye need my undivided attention?"

He grinned at
her, his dark face devilish in the lantern-light, and did not wait for an
answer. Still holding her gaze, he drew a pistol from his belt, the
lantern-light glinting along its barrel. Raised it above his head. And fired.
"Didn't fancy trying to worm it out in the cat's-light, now."

The echoes of
the shot were still ringing when he drew his second pistol and fired that into
the heavens. "You -" her mouth was dry, and she found herself
shaking, her ears ringing, for all she was a soldier's daughter,
 "they were loaded? You carry them,
loaded
?"

"Usually
are, mistress. They'd not be a lot of use to me, else."

"But - but
Master Gillespie, you will have roused half of Buckinghamshire, sir, have you
no -"

"Half of
Buckinghamshire's used to it, lass. It's not the first time. Now -"

He moved aside,
unexpectedly lithe for all his muscular bulk, as she fell to her knees,
retching up bile. As taken by surprise herself as he was, as she huddled on all
fours amongst the rubble with her eyes and nose burning and her whole body
shaking, drooling bitter spittle. After a long moment he heaved a great sigh
and knelt beside her, rubbing her back awkwardly. "Acht, mistress, I've
told him ye shouldn't be staying here, but you know how he is, once that man o'
yours has an idea in his head there's not much will shift it save a musket-butt
between the eyes. Well, maybe now he'll listen. This is no place for a
lass."

"Why?"
She was sick, but she wasn't stupid. "What is there here, that you must
prowl the house through the dark hours with a brace of primed pistols? What are
you hiding?"

He snorted.
"Hiding? I wish. Well. Ye've seen what state the roof's in." And then
he puffed his cheeks out, and blew his hair out of his eyes, looking
uncomfortable and suddenly considerably younger. "We get a fair few
visitors, mistress, with one thing and another, and not all of 'em mean well.
Hunting for gold that don't exist is a game, aye, I'd not mind that. Stones
through the windows, and pulling away the timbers that's shoring up the west
wing, that's no game. That's wanton damage, mistress, and I'll not have
it."

"Why should
they do such a thing?"

She did not see
Gillespie spit, but she heard it land, with a wet splat. "Don’t pretend to
be dafter than you are, Mistress Russell, it doesn't become ye. You know verra
well. And so does he, though he'll carry on pretending he doesn’t till hell
freezes over, wanting to protect ye. I asked him to take you hence and maybe
this time ye'll heed me, for sooner or later it'll end in tears, lass. Someone
will get hurt. Or worse."

"I will not
be driven from -"

"No one's
talking of retreat, mistress. For myself, I'm talking of a tactical withdrawal,
aye? Withdraw, and recover your ground. And if your man queries me, tell him to
remember Dunbar." He snorted again. "Though he'll not - remember
Dunbar, that is, given that he was under a dead horse for the better part of
the battle and off his head with fever for nigh on a fortnight afterwards. Aye,
though enough in his right mind to tell his master he knew me - me, a bloody
Covenanter, an enemy soldier, who'd taken up arms against him. Oh, he knew me,
all right. I'd hauled him out from under the horse in the first place. I'd not
have left a dog to die so. Well, he lied to Cromwell himself, Mistress Russell.
He looked him in the eye, all bloody and stinking wi' the dirt of battle as he
still was - looked him full in the face and he swore on the Bible I was his own
troop lieutenant and had got confused amongst the Scots prisoners in the
battle, since I was in no state to speak for myself by then. Your man had me
took out of the prisoners, for what I'd done for him, and but for him I'd have
perished wi' the rest of my men, in the cathedral at Durham where that black-souled
bastard Cromwell put us, the sick and the hurt together, to die like
dogs."

Oh, Thankful
. "Why are
you telling me this?"

"Because he
couldn’t murder anyone, lass. Any man that can save the life of a worthless -
heh! worthless by their count, not by mine! - prisoner of war, at the risk of
his own neck, is no' a man who goes sneaking about the countryside murdering
old ladies in their beds. So. If you care to, you can betray both myself and
your good man, and have me transported and the major hanged. If ye feel ye
cannot trust my word as an officer and as a gentlemen." He laughed again,
with a weary bitterness. "A Scot can yet be both, despite what Master
Cromwell might have had ye believe. Both our lives in your hand, mistress, as
parole. Have him take ye hence, out of harm's way, and then -"

He patted her
shoulder again, awkwardly. "In all charity, lass, give him his good name
back."

18

She was shaking, with cold and weariness
and sickness, but she sat on the edge of their rough bed of sheepskins and
pulled her shoes and stockings off, unhooked her skirt ad tugged the laces of
her bodice free and left them where they fell, puddled colourless on the bare
boards in the first rosy light of dawn.

Then she crawled
under the blankets and held her husband very tight. (Gillespie did not think
him capable of it, either. Go away, Mistress Coventry. Take your vengeful ghost
elsewhere.)

He turned over
in her arms, murmuring sleepily, and buried his face in her hair.
"Wassmatter, tibber?"

Her head just
under his chin, her cheek against the beating hollow in his throat. He was
warm, and solid, and reassuring, and just being held so began to still the
tremors that ran through her. "Cold," he said firmly, and pulled the
blankets over them both again, and began to rub her back. And her breathing
began to steady, and her heart to settle, and she was on the verge of sleep,
yawning fit to crack her jaw.

"Bout time
we slept in a proper bed again, Zee," he mumbled into her hair.
"Still got lodgings in London. If you wish it?"

19

Thomazine sat down on the lumpy, homely
bed in her first proper lodgings as a married woman, smiled nicely at her
landlady, and waited until the door was closed before she flopped backwards,
with a groan.

It was a bare
sixty miles from White Notley to London. Sixty miles, a couple of days' ride,
even in January. And it had taken them a
week
.

To be fair, it
had taken almost two months of painstaking correspondence, of drafting
carefully-worded letters and awaiting replies, of appointments with
mantua-makers and shoemakers and, under duress, tailors, before they were
anything like ready to travel anywhere. It had driven her stark mad. Every time
she had seen her husband, he'd had inky fingers, and had had one eye on the
road over her shoulder, in case of any inward-bound responses.

Her mother had
been rather taken with Thomazine's new wardrobe, even though Thankful had
looked askance at it being only the finest
Essex
had to offer. And, in
all honesty, though Thomazine was not a vain girl she had to admit that the
long, clean lines of the new fashions suited a girl of her height and
slenderness, and that her husband had a good eye for line and colour. Would
wear none of it himself, mind, for fear of drawing the eye, but would see
her
garbed like a peacock.

She carried her
tiny rabbit with her, though, in her little hanging pocket, under her skirts
against her thigh.

It was a
reminder that her husband was exactly the same man as she had known for twenty
years, and not quite so fixated on presentation and propriety as he seemed to
have become, lately. By a mutual and unspoken agreement, they had returned to
her parents and said nothing of that peculiar defamation that had seen them
driven from Four Ashes. Because in the daylight, when you took it out and
looked at it, it was a ridiculous, contemptible thing, a coward's whisper, to
malign a man who wasn't there to defend himself. It would blow over, when the
next scandal-broth came their way. But for the meantime - she thought of the
grim Gillespie prowling the ruins with a brace of loaded pistols through the
dark, and shuddered.

He had changed,
though, since that night. He'd not taken as much care over their marriage, as
he had with those letters to and from London, before Christmas, or with his
choosing of the cut and style of her new wardrobe.

And he had not
taken such care with their lodgings, either, she noticed. His old
bachelor-lodgings, in Aldgate, he said, with a respectable widow. She'd
expected some plump, white-haired old beldame. She got Jane Bartholomew, who
must have been barely five years older than Thomazine, who was neat, plump,
becomingly timid, and very pretty, and who had a plump little baby at her
skirts. (And where, Thomazine thought grimly in her pettier moments, might that
plump little baby have come from, with Thankful comfortably ensconced in the
attic at the time?)

And London was a
seeping wet disappointment. It was not full of exotic sights and smells, unless
you happened to count the stink of far too many unwashed bodies in too small a
space exotic. And shit. It smelt of shit. A lot. She suspected that of the many
fascinating modern developments of this age, the ability to empty a jakes more
than once a year in this part of London was not amongst them.

They put men's
heads on spikes, and that was just barbaric. Thankful had refused to take her
where they said Cromwell's head was exhibited as a warning and a terrible
vengeance by the King on his enemies, on a spike above Westminster Hall. He had
known Ireton, and Cromwell, as living men. He did not care to see their
decaying skulls impaled for the crows to pick at.

You could buy
anything you chose, in London. Anything you had the coin for, if your heart
desired it and your mind could conceive it, you could have. Aye, and buy pardon
for it afterwards, if you wanted. Anything from a ribbon to a life, with
dreadful, thin, scrabbling figures scratching in the drowning mud at the side
of the river to see what they might scavenge and sell. Thomazine wanted to give
them money, she wanted to empty her purse and see them all fed and clothed
decently -

"Wouldn’t
help, tibber," he said, without looking at her, keeping his eyes
resolutely fixed on the road in front of them. "Too many."

And he'd tapped
on the roof of their hired carriage with the hilt of his sword to encourage the
driver to move off, an affectation which she was beginning to find profoundly
annoying.

Their lodgings
were clean, and decent, and shabby. Mistress Bartholomew was a timid little
mouse who hardly dared look Thomazine in the eye, but scuttled from room to
room with the Bartholomew-baby clinging to her skirts like a fat white spider,
wielding an anxious broom and rearranging the furniture. A good housekeeper,
Thomazine admitted, grudgingly, but she wondered if there had ever been a
Master Bartholomew, or whether that fat little baby's round blue eyes might
turn slate-grey as he grew older.

She risked a
look at her husband at that moment.
His
slate-grey eyes were closed, and
if she were feeling charitable, which she was not, ringed about with slate-grey
shadows. He looked tired, and pale, and a little ill. "Dear?" she
said gently, and the unscarred side of his mouth lifted, though he did not open
his eyes.

"Am
I?"

He had come in
from another of his interminable affairs of business, and laid on the bed
without troubling to take his muddy boots off. There, that was another thing
she did not care for, about London. It bred fevers and agues worse than a dog
bred fleas. If they had been at home in Essex, with fresh air and decent
feeding, he would not look as if he had aged ten years and lost as many pounds
in weight, in a little under a week. She passed her hand gently over his
forehead and he stirred under her touch, murmuring as if he were grateful for
it.

"Are you
unwell?" she said, and tucked a little of his loose hair out of his eyes,
behind his ear.

"Just
tired."

"I can ask
Mistress Bartholomew to make you up a posset."

"No,
tibber, she has enough to tease her without -"

"Without my
teasing her further?" Her lips tightened. Like that, again, then. "I
can make it
myself,
you know. I need not trouble that good lady
at
all
."

"Thomazine,
I am fine. I am just tired. Will you not leave me be?"

"Surely,"
she said crossly, and slid off the bed and stomped to the window. Making as
much noise as possible with her wooden heels on the bare wooden boards, which
was childish, but satisfying.

Few riders came down
this far into Aldgate. Their carriage had been stared at as if it came from the
moon, when they arrived. A shabby part of the city, but dignified-shabby, not
desperate, not beggarly. This was where working men and women lived; the silk
workers, the seamen, the carpenters. Poor, but decent. But a carriage was
beyond most of their wildest dreaming, and even the stabling of a fairly
average horse was an expense few could support. The dark horse picking its way
gingerly through the puddles and the missing cobbles was not an average horse.
It was a rather fine one, if presently somewhat dejected, in the penetrating
grey mizzle. And its rider was dismounting, and disappearing under the
projecting overhang of Mistress Bartholomew's upper storey. He retained a firm
hold of his mount's bridle, Thomazine noted with amusement.

Shouting. There
was always shouting, in London. Any time of the day or night, someone,
somewhere would be shouting, whether it was wares, or bloody murder, or the
night-soil cart, or the watch. So many people, all coming and going, all the
time. They did not keep sensible hours, like Christians, but instead came and
went through the day.

The
Bartholomew-baby yelled, suddenly, downstairs, and there was a slam as of a
heavy door and then a thumping of footsteps on the stairs.

"Major
Russell, sir?" Jane Bartholomew's mousy little voice peeped on the
landing. "Major Russell, I have a letter for you, sir. A messenger just
brought it, sir. Could you, please?"

Thomazine leaned
on the windowsill, and said nothing, in a very pointed fashion.

Neither did
Thankful, and she turned round. He'd turned his head a little on the pillow,
and one hand - ink-stained, which reassured her somewhat that his business
affairs were presently, at least, just that - lay limp on his breast, the other
trailing on the boards. He looked like a marble effigy of a knight on a church
memorial, and he was about as likely to wake up as one.

She pulled the
door open, and glared at the little widow. "My husband is sleeping, madam.
He is not to be disturbed."

"I'm
glad," their landlady said, and a nervous little smile came and went about
her lips. "He does work ever so hard. I hope you will- will take care of
him, mistress. I am fond of the major. Could you take the letter, please? It’s
just that if I keep it, Daniel is likely to gnaw on it." She thrust it
into Thomazine's hands - a thin packet, sealed with a blob of expensive
blood-red wax and a signet seal. Her mouth twitched again. "He's teething,
mistress. I daren't leave him with
anything
."

And there were still
probably any number of tart retorts to that, but as Thomazine would have been
making them to the back of the widow's sensibly-capped little head as she
scuttled back downstairs to the baby, she did not lower herself to making them.

She set the
letter on the coffer at the end of the bed, where he would be sure to see it
when he woke up.

It would be
dark, soon, and cold. Boots crunched and hissed on the road outside, and she
heard the whimper of a rising wind in the chimney behind the bed-head.

It was not a
night to be alone.

20

It was not a morning to be alone,
either, but she woke up in bed with the rain pelting on the windows and her
husband perched on the end of the bed, humming like an atonal bee, half-dressed
with his letter in his hand.

"Good news?"
she hazarded sleepily, and he wrinkled his nose.

"Not
really, my tibber, but better than no news. It seems the Earl of Birstall is
willing to condescend to receiving our humble company at an informal little
supper this evening."

She stared at
him. "Who, is what?"

"Birstall.
Not ideal, but better than nothing."

"Thankful
-" she was beginning to wonder if she was actually still dreaming,
"Thankful, what on earth are you talking about?"

He grinned, and
tossed her the letter. It still made as little sense to her, but it seemed to
be a genuine letter, although it was signed by someone called Fairmantle, not
Birstall -

"His
name
is Charles Fairmantle, and he
is
the Earl of Birstall," Thankful
explained. "And he is an old neighbour at Four Ashes, though not a man I
should care to call an intimate. He is not really a fit person for you to know,
Thomazine, but he is a beginning, and hopefully he will act as an introduction
to slightly more appropriate society."

"What,"
it had all started so well, too. She hadn't seen him look quite so happy in
weeks. Since they'd arrived. And now -"husband, might I enquire, why you
think you have the authority to dictate who I may and may not be acquainted
with?
You
brought me here -"

"
You
wanted to come!"

"I wanted
to?
I
wanted to come and live in a garret upstairs from one of your
cast-off mistresses and eat stale pies for breakfast?
I
did?"

"Madam,
your temper -"

"
My
temper," she said, quite calmly. "Mine. You drag me from my family,
to stay in some mouse-haunted attic in a slum, and you accuse
me
of
intemperacy -"

"It is a
perfectly respectable house, madam!" he snapped back at her. "And you
have done nothing but complain since you arrived, and let me tell you -"

"Well, you
hardly keep your mistresses in comfort, sir, do you? That whore downstairs
-"

"Thomazine."
He looked as if he might shake her, and she sat back hard against the wall,
drawing the bolster into her lap for protection, so that he could not. "Is
that, truly, what you think?"

"That
Mistress Bartholomew is your light o'love? Well, do you deny it? She seems very
fond of you -"

"Your
father would be ashamed of you," he said, very clearly, and stood up,
smoothing his hair back with both hands to tie it neatly at the nape of his
neck. (Without brushing it. He was, then, so shaken.
Good
.)

"For
-?"

"Jealousy,
madam, unwarranted, unreasoning jealousy - sheer vicious spite! And I should
never
have suspected you of it! How could you even think it, Thomazine? How
could
you?"

"I hardly
know what to think of you, Thankful! I married you thinking you were a retired
soldier with no money, and all of a sudden it turns out your family owns half
of Buckinghamshire! And you
might
have killed your sister, and your
landlady
might
have whelped your bastard, and on the other hand you
might
be as hapless as daddy always called you -"