A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (21 page)

"I think I am being
stupid," Russell said.

"I don't think you are,
major. I think you are very far from stupid. I think you know very well what I
mean, and I reckon you would do well to be mindful of it. Folk talk. Stupid
talk, for the most part, but there it is. There was damage caused here, the night
Tom Jephcott was throttled. The
Ariadne'
s going to be out of the water
for the better part of a month -"

"Will
you
want for
work, sir?" Thomazine said urgently, and poked Russell in the flank under
cover of the edge of her cloak.

"Me? No, me dear, though I
thank you for asking: no, she's a fixer-upper. No, there was a bit o' damage to
a few of the shops that are laid up fitting for the long voyages, a little bit,
nothing a good carpenter can't mend. A dozen bales o' silk - cargo, for the the
most part, stored by, and had it not been for them lads off the
Perse
,
the whole boiling lot would've took fire, the whole far end of the dock gone up
in smoke. Four ships just come in after the
Perse
, and they'd have lost
the lot. All
English
trade, though, major. East Indiamen, you get me?
English
East India Company. Four ships damaged, a warehouse full o' cargo burned up,
and not a scratch on the
Perse
. And for meself, I happened to be playing
both sides off against the middle, I might watch meself. Eh?"

"Master Dolling,"
Thomazine said sweetly, "would you let me go on board your ship?"

38

He
did, of course, and she tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and trotted
about the deck with him while he pointed out the bits of the
Ariadne
that needed repair, and told her enormous lies that Russell was too polite to
call him on. (He wasn't jealous. precisely. Much. Just - well. A little bit.)

He skulked behind them, amusing
himself by placing his feet precisely where hers had trod, half-listening to
Dolling's phenomenal tale of a great whale he had seen off the coast of Norway
once, and wondered what the bloody hell had been going on, in this last week.

Murder. Arson. Profit. Greed?

War, for sure. Were the two
connected? He didn’t know – though in his experience, it wasn’t unlikely.

Bloody George Downing, the King’s
erstwhile ambassador to the Dutch - expelled from the Hague for his perfidious
politicking, poking and poking until His Majesty thought war was the best
option. Russell wasn't so sure. (Hadn't took to war when he'd been a
seventeen-year old lieutenant in the New Model Army, liked it even less when he
was in Scotland with Monck and half-dead with a fever, and thought any man who
wanted it now had to be out of his tiny mind. But. It was different, in all
probability, if you were the one giving the orders and not the one taking them.
Which thought made him smile for it seemed he was still, at heart, the same
ungovernable rebel he had always been.)

George Downing was a bloody
turncoat regicide - not that he had turned his coat by turning King's man after
the wars: God knows there were enough of them who had had the sense to see
which way the wind was blowing after the Commonwealth and swear a pragmatic
allegiance to His Majesty, but Downing had betrayed his old Parliament
comrades, sold them to a bloody traitor's death for a mess of pottage, and
Russell – who had
been
one of those old Parliament comrades in arms -
rusted that man like he trusted the Devil. Not much moved George Downing but
profit and the hope of more profit, and if he wanted war, there was gold at the
bottom of it.

He sighed, and eyed the muddy
Thames, where it slapped against the side of the ship, with resignation.

Wondered when Thomazine was going
to finish her guided tour, for he wanted to sit down, rather badly. Wondered if
she would notice if he started eating the wedge of cheese they'd bought in
Leadenhall market - it seemed about a hundred years ago now, and it had only
been this morning. When the bread had been still hot from the oven. he thought
mournfully, and prodded a finger into the satchel he had slung over his
shoulder, to see if it might still be a little bit warm. Sausage, too. Her back
was turned to him, Dolling pointing something out to her towards Shadwell
Stair. (Hanged pirates, probably.)

He eyed the rats-nest of rigging
consideringly, hooked his elbows through it, hooked a foot in the bottom, and
leaned experimentally into the rope cobweb.
Once you got used to the swaying, like a fly in a web, it was remarkably comfortable,
and he took a thoughtful bite of sausage and closed his eyes and turned his
face into the fetid breeze with a contented sigh. There was precious little
came between Thankful Russell and his meals. Or his sleep, come to think of it.
He probably could, if she kept up her questions -

"What
are
you
doing?"

Her voice broke into his drowsy
awareness, and he didn't open his eyes, but cocked an eyebrow at her.

"Sleeping, tibber. I'm a
poor frail invalid, remember?"

"He has been abed with an
old fever for the last week. This is his first day out of bed," she said -
Dolling, presumably, or the ship's carpenter, or the ship's cat: she wasn't
particular who she chatted to.

He opened one eye and tried to
look reproving, which was difficult when you were hanging like a spider in a
web four inches above the deck.

"Missed him, then, when the
old gal came in. We
said
it wasn't like you to be missing when she was
due, major. Wondered where you was, the other night. Some of the lads said they
reckoned they'd seen you come down for a look at her the night Jephcott copped
it - just like you done today, just coming down for a poke about the old lady,
thought you might have seen something. Well. Can't have been you, then, if you
was ill, can it? But they’d have swore to it if was you, for you’re a hard man
to mistake –“

He must have bridled, for it
still touched him on the quick when people remarked his scars, for Dolling
shook his head, realising he had given offence. “No, major, not the look of
him, no more than that he was of a size o’ you, with pale hair, and that he
took pains to be sure that his face was hard to mark. Which is, you’ll own, a
trick you have?”

“Had,” Thomazine said firmly at
his elbow. “I like to look on my husband’s face. But it couldn’t have been you,
dear, for you were in bed all week, and I was with you all the time. Wasn’t I?”

He said nothing. But he could
feel
her eyes on him.

39

"So,
husband."

She was dismembering a pie in the
shadows of a bakehouse - he knew this one, though she didn't, and she was in
for a treat with their pies - though by the mutinous look on her face he was in
for a stormy time of it.

"So?"

"Don't change the
subject." He hadn't, but her cheeks had a lovely soft flush to them that
he knew of old. Thomazine with her battle-colours flying. "Trade."

"Trade?"

"You are engaged in trade
with the East India Company, sir. Master Dolling says it."

"True."

"
Which?
"

All right, she wasn't in a
teasing humour any more, and he decided to retreat to firmer ground.
"Both," he said, and her mouth fell open slightly, " - but,
tibber -"

"Don't you 'but, tibber' me,
you bloody -
pirate
!"

"Hey! I am engaged in
perfectly legal trading, madam!"

"Oh, are you? Are you,
indeed?
Free trading
, with a nation with whom we are at war -"

He could think of no other way of
doing it without attracting attention, so he leaned abruptly across the table
and kissed her, hard. Her eyes blazed at him, but she kissed him back, and some
sarcastic whelp gave them a ribald cheer. "Mind your tongue," he said
against her mouth. "That is not common knowledge."

And sat down, taking a deep
breath.

“If you are asking did I send you
on an errand the other night so that I might spring from my sickbed, throttle
poor Jephcott, and set fire to the English East Indiamen to promote my own
enterprise – er, no, Thomazine, I did not.”

She flushed, that creamy
redhead’s complexion betraying her. “I didn’t say –“

“No, tibber, I know, and nor did
you believe it –“

“Really,” she amended, because
honesty was one of her besetting sins as much as it was his. “I wondered if –“

“And now you know. I did not,
Zee. Could not, and did not. Well. We are at war, so much you know: every man
in London sees the Dutch under the beds and in the closets –“ he shook his
head, grimacing. “That wretch Downing. He would give us war, and men in this
country are hot for it. So. War we shall have."

"But -"

"But whose interests - other
than my lord Downing's, of course - would be served by war? Not the King's. Not
the nation's. And the King knows it, sweet. He is not his father. He is not
bloody stupid. On the one hand, Downing pushes for it, and men of like temper
whip the people up to want it - greedy for gold, as ever. The King is hot for
the gold - and to make sure that none of my old comrades in Europe come home to
start stirring up any further republican trouble. We ageing rebels being the
very devil for insurrection. On the other hand, he can't
afford
a war.
And he surely cannot afford to risk losing what trade routes he has, if the
Dutch start to fire on
our
spice fleet." He thought about that.
"Again. They've tried that already, and we didn't like it, d'you remember?
After Smyrna."

"But the Dutch do awful
things to our men -"

"Oh, do they hell,
Thomazine! I have been engaged in talks with Mijnheer di Cavalese these six
weeks and more and not once as he tried to eat me, convert me to Papistry, or
torture me. I have been trading with the Dutch in my small way for - what,
three years? - I still have all my own fingers and toes and my head is still on
my shoulders. You read too many pamphlets, gal!"

"But -"

"Tibber, in Amsterdam, I
used to lodge with a very nice family called Brouwer. They live up by the
Kalverstraat, the flesh-market. You'd like
Mevrouw
Brouwer. She feeds
me. Very respectable people, very devout. They sent one of those horrible blue
and white jars that's neither use nor ornament, for our wedding. I think you
took it out of one of those chests at Four Ashes and asked me what it was for,
and I didn't know? Utterly pointless piece of pottery, anyway. But more
expensive than they could rightly afford, and they bought it for me - for
us
- because they were happy that I was to marry a woman I loved. Does that
sound
like the sort of person who eats babies, Zee? Really? Any more than I
was, when they said it of me? Or your father?"

One of the things he loved very
much about Thomazine was her fairness. He saw the thoughts flit across her
face, like the wind over the river, all the awful things they'd said about
profane, drunken Dutchmen, torturing Englishmen wherever they could capture
them.

All the awful things they'd said
about crop-headed Roundheads, all the time she'd been growing up: all the
atrocities her father's men had apparently committed, in the late wars,
everything just shy of the sack of Magdeburg.

Some
truth in them. There was always
a grain of truth in such. But not enough for hatred. Injustice had always
roused him worse than anything else, and if she had not been fair he should not
have loved her. Her eyes dropped, and then she leaned across the table and took
his hand.

"Sorry," she said, and
he gave her a wry smile.

"So the respective
governments of England and the United Provinces get their war, and all the
people cry huzzah, and all the naval officers rub their hands in glee at the
prospect of making their names in glorious battle. And all the merchants who
would rather not have a very disruptive and very expensive war, thank you, get
on with the business of talking to each other to ensure that we - um,
they
- can protect their interests, and any warfare that takes place is going to
take place
somewhere else
. We enjoyed a period of co-operation between
England and the Low Countries in Indonesia until Amboyna, so it
is
possible."

"And the King
knows
you
are doing this?"

He could not help it. He laughed,
and then stopped himself quickly, for it wasn't kind, but - "Oh, yes,
best-beloved. He knows. He pays me to do it, darling."

40

Thomazine stirred, and squirmed blissfully against
the bolster, and stretched her toes out to brush against her husband’s foot.

The
sheets were cold, and she sat upright with a muttered word she should not have
known.

His
clothes were not folded neatly on the press at the foot of the bed. (They had
not been last night, either, Thomazine Russell, and you would be well advised
to search for that button before it is lost altogether.)