A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (22 page)

Her
hair was still half pinned-up on one side, the other half falling down her back
in riotous tangle. There was a tender patch just under her jaw that she
suspected, with some shame, might be a kiss-mark, and another high up on her
thigh.

He
was - talkative, that was what he was, in his passion, now that he was all but
mended, and she had a suspicion that most of Aldgate now knew where and just
how hard he liked to be kissed. She barely knew how she would hold her head up
in the streets -

he
had begged her, that dear, prim, formal man of hers had been twitching and
mewing like a new kitten begging her - no, not begging, not then, he had been
demanding that she finish what she had started
-

He
had done that. Been that. She had made as free with his body as if it had been
her own - freer, for the things she had done to him, in the long, ardent hours
before dawn, had been things that she could not have conceived of, by herself.
You might expect that a man who had lain panting in his wife’s arms, covering
her face with kisses, telling her of all the ways that he loved her -

Well,
you might expect that the bloody man would have the grace to remain in her bed
until first light.

And
he had not. He had not been here for some while, by the coldness of the sheets.
She tightened her lips, and dressed, and went downstairs to the Widow
Bartholomew.

Who
was just as tight-lipped, but not for the reasons that Thomazine had suspected.
It seemed the day was far advanced. Ten of the clock, by the chime of St
Gabriel’s, and the Major gone since before daylight, when a messenger had come
for him.

 -
had the bloody man not slept at all, she thought irritably, picking at the
plain brown bread and bacon the widow had set before her. He was supposed to be
recovering
, damn him -

So
ill that he did not reappear at noon. Nor by the time the bells at St Gabriel's
rang for evensong, and nor was he at home when they returned from evening
prayers.       The Bartholomew-baby was fretful, wanting to be attended to, and
the widow was anxious, flitting like a bat between cooking-fire and table,
trying to oversee a supper for the wrong number of people.

Her
food was good, Thomazine must acknowledge that. Although in London, that
implied a degree of marketing competency, and not, necessarily, housewifely
skills.

She
hefted the whimpering child into her lap - a solid little boy, who wriggled,
but whose warm weight was oddly homelike and reassuring. It was raining again
as the sun set, one of those bitter spring squalls that seemed to blow up out
of nowhere, and she had been sitting downstairs in the kitchen playing with the
Bartholomew-baby since her return from church and pretending that her husband’s
absence was perfectly normal and she had known about it for days.

Only so long you could keep that pretence up, with Jane
Bartholomew - her husband had been a sea captain and not always on the side of
angels, Zee, it is a wonder she has not walked hollows in those kitchen
flagstones, all the nights she must have sat up waiting for news of her man.

And Thomazine did not care that Jane Bartholomew should know, that
there was a serpent in the garden of Eden. A very little one - a small, thin,
very pale green worm, and one of no account. But. The shutters were shut, and
the bed was warmed, and grace was said, and supper was eaten, and still he did
not come.

She wondered how she would know, if some harm had befallen him. If
they would bring him here, or carry him to some other place - to Four Ashes, to
be buried -

How she would manage, and how she would go on. She went to bed. He
did not come. She undressed, and slipped between the warm sheets, and he did
not come. And she had just decided on finding his brace of travelling-pistols
somewhere in the bottom of the clothes press and going in search of his poor
broken body, when she heard a noise.

So, clearly, did the widow, who came scampering out of her room on
the landing below with a glint of martial zeal in her eye and the poker in her
hand.

But
it was only, finally, Russell, tripped over his own feet at the worn bend in
the stairs, and sprawling headlong and foolish over the attic threshold. He
propped himself on his elbows and peered up at her where she stood in the
doorway and by the light of the banked kitchen fire downstairs it was possible
to observe that the errant husband had one eye swollen almost shut and the
evidence of a badly stifled bloody nose. “Have you been set upon?” Thomazine
said warily, and he panted at her with his mouth open, blowing bloody bubbles through
his nose. “Thankful -”

She was concerned, she was afraid, she was - suddenly sniffing his
breath, she was furious. “
Get in here
, sir. All is well, Mistress
Bartholomew, no cause for alarm, my husband -” and she had her fingers biting
into the flesh just above the bones if his elbow as she hoisted him to his
feet, “is as drunk as fiddler’s
bitch
, sir, what d’you mean by it?”

That last was not intended for the widow’s ears, and so once the
door was closed she gave him every single choice epithet a decent upbringing
amongst soldiers had taught her, and a few more she had acquired more recently.
“I have been worried sick!” she finished, “while you - look at the
state
of you, Russell, I don’t imagine we will ever get the stains out of that
waistcoat - drinking and brawling, sir, I thought you had grown past that
foolishness twenty years ago!”

He sat on the bed and blinked at her earnestly, which would have
been a considerably more appealing sight without the bloodstains. “Tibber,” he
said. “You
really
cross with me, darling girl?”

“I am bloody pig-livid, Thankful!”

“Oh thank God,” he said, and his teeth chattered together just
once. And she remembered that sound, that bone-rattle, because it was how he
had sounded when she first knew him, when she was a little girl and he had
first been so horribly hurt. He had not wanted to weep in front of anyone who
might pity him, even then, and she remembered that noise. Like skeletons
dancing, she thought, and she had hated it, because when he tried to set his
teeth together so it was because he was hurting and lonely and uncomforted. And
she could not bear it when she was a child, and she was a woman grown and she
still could not bear it. And she dropped to her knees, regardless of what the
widow might think of the thump in her chambers beneath, and she flung her arms
round him, cold and wet and bloody as he was, and she left him burrow his face
into her clean shoulder and cry, and rubbed his back - oh, his poor back, that
had been so smoothly muscled a month ago and was now as bony and stiff as any
stray dog’s -

“I think you need to tell me all,” she said firmly, and he raised
his head and gave her a shaky smile.

“You still love me? You
will
still love me?”

“Because you have been out on the spree with -” she sniffed again,
delicately, “Master Pepys, I surmise, for he has less expensive tastes in
liquor than some?
Always
, Thankful.”

He closed his eyes, and his hand closed on the soft flesh of her
hip, hard enough to hurt. “Not. Sam,” he said, and his teeth chattered again,
but this time her free hand found his. Held it. Tight.
There are two of us
now
. “Not my friend. He - sorry. But he cannot remain my friend. When. I am
so -” Another deep shaky breath, but he straightened up. “Thomazine, I am -am
removed from my duties with the Dutch negotiations. The letter? that you took
to Mijnheer di Cavalese?”

“It arrived?” - she had almost forgotten that letter, after so
much had happened, and he had not failed her after all.

“It was
received
. Dear God, tibber, I must have been sicker
than ever I imagine, to write such - He did not take it kindly.”

“But why -?”

“He did not take kindly to my apparent suggestion that we arrange
reciprocal trade in butter, cheese and whores.”

She could not help it. She laughed. “
You
said such a thing?
Oh, hardly! Any man who knew you -”

“Would know that I am the kind of duplicitous filth who could
murder his own sister, debauch an innocent young woman, and spend what time he
has left over from murder and rapine in drinking with Rochester and his
cronies. Which, in addition to making me deeply morally suspect, implies that I
am of His Majesty’s inner circle. Which means, my tibber, that any
right-thinking Dutch trader would - not unreasonably - not consider me a fit
and proper person to enter into any negotiation with, while our two countries
are at war.”

He had been drinking. She had a cold suspicion that he had been
walking, too. In the rain, and the dark, alone with his thoughts, for long
enough to walk himself into sobriety -

“But Thankful that’s silly, you’re talking about - about a few
nutmegs, the world won’t end if - no one would believe that you would insult
him, deliberately. You are not made so.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her face with
eyes that were bloodshot, but steady. “Sweeting. I was sick of that infernal
fever. I could have said
anything
, for aught I know.”

“But you
wouldn’t
have -”

“Thomazine - my dear, my very dear love - I am known to speak more
freely than perhaps I might otherwise, in fever. You know this for truth,
darling girl, for in a fit of wild talk I asked you to do a thing that - well,
I should
not
have.”

“I would have taken the letter,” she began, and he looked
resolutely over her shoulder at the cracks in the plaster.

“I do not refer to the letter “

“But -oh. But Thankful, I liked it!”

“So. Did I,” he said grimly. “Which makes me, I think, everything
he said I was - a hypocrite, and a lecher, and a- “

“And a dear and loving husband, a faithful friend, and a
bloody
idiot at times
. He’s being silly. Look, if I - “ she took his cold hands in
hers and squeezed them, “I will go round and say to this man,
I
wrote
the letter, I have these antic fits, I thought it would be funny?”

“I am not sure that would help. But thank you for thinking of it.”

“You
are
sure
it was your letter? I mean, it was the proper one, it hadn’t
been mixed up with, I don’t know, a poem or a pamphlet or something?”

“He threw it across the desk at
me, love. I barely knew my own writing, such a scrawl - he believed I'd been so
drunk when I wrote it that I might barely form my letters - but I do know my
own seal, God help me, for it’s our rosemary branch. I wrote that letter, Zee.
I don’t know
why
I would do such a thing but I did it.” He put his head
against her shoulder and sighed. “That, and there appears to be some ludicrous
fiction that I rose from my sickbed like Lazarus and spent the evening of
Wednesday last haunting Wapping docks strangling the watchmen. As if I have
nothing better to do with my time.”

“
You
did
what
?”

“Zee, I am missing a ribbon. You
know that. I know that. I imagine half of London is aware that I am missing the
ribbon you gave me at our wedding, for I have made some endeavours to locate
it, and I know you have -" he gave a woeful sniff, "it was a gift,
and you took care to make it, and I am sorry I was so
useless
as to lose
it. They are saying that Jephcott was strangled with my ribbon, darling, and
what with
bloody
superstitious sailors putting it around that there was
a man in a cloak on the quay, as if most of London does not wear a cloak in
bloody
spring - Oh,
damn
it, Thomazine! Why must I be thought responsible for
every flood, fire and famine that occurs in this bloody city? Bloody gossip:
rumour and vicious
tattle
- I’m tired of it, Zee, I am
tired
of
it!" And he put his head down on her shoulder and wept, horribly and
despairingly, without any thought for her linen or his looks, and she held him
and rocked him gently to and fro for she thought he had finally reached his
breaking-point.

"But you were here,
dear," she said patiently. "I can vouch for that. You never left the
house. So I can just say so, can't I?"

He sighed, and rubbed his cheek
against her shoulder, and then pushed himself off. Stood up, paced about the
attic, narrowly avoided cracking his head on the pitch of the roof, and
glowered at her. "If any man came out and made an allegation, tibber, then
possibly, you could. But they haven't. They
whisper
, and Mijnheer di
Cavalese, and his associates, prefer not to be associated with a man that is
the subject of such low common gossip." He gave her a shaky grin that did
not reassure her in the least. "Flung mud sticks, tibber. It seems my name
is the subject of every vile rumour this morning - every word I have ever
spoken, taken out and turned over to see if I may have meant some evil by it
-"

"But it is just
words
,
Thankful! They cannot blame you for a thing you did not do!
No one
can!"

"Yes they
can
,
Thomazine." He ran both hands through his hair, his loose, ribbonless
hair, the irony of which was not lost on her. "I make a lovely scapegoat,
darling. I am not popular, because I am
too bloody honest.
"