A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (28 page)

"I will be back at my
business again tomorrow," he said firmly, and blew in her ear so that she
whooped in tickled surprise and earned a second reproving look from the Widow.

"You mean to carry on with
your work?"

He gave her one of those long,
slow blinks, like a happy cat, that passed for an expression of joy with him.
"My accounting, my tibber? - aye, I do. I am yet a man of business, and I
have yet an interest in a ship. I note that Mijnheer di Cavalese withdrew from
negotiating
with me: he has not withdrawn his interest in commerce. I have a share in the
Perse
,
and I am under an obligation to your Uncle Luce to maintain it -"

She made a noise of amusement,
for Uncle Luce and ships was still an unlikely combination, and he laughed.
"D'you think she was named the
Persephone
by chance, love? Luce has
a part-share in her too. She was named after your cousin, and, God willing, we
shall have the
Fair Thomazine
in the water for next spring. No, my
darling, I am not wholly a lily of the field, for I do toil, and I do spin.
Doubtless my lord Rochester will have some comment to pass about soiling his
hands with trade, but then, I thank God, one of us means to meet his
obligations!"

And he spun her about and kissed
her soundly, and even the Widow's lips twitched, so he kissed her too, on the
cheek, very respectably.

"We shall stay?"
Thomazine said, and her husband gave her a cockeyed grin.

"Oh, very yes. I have
business to transact, Thomazine. I have a ship to outfit, and a second to
build, and you have seen barely a fraction of what there is to see in London,
and -"

"
And
, Thankful?"
He had stopped rather too suddenly for her tastes.

He shrugged. "I have always
had a mind to join the Royal Society, dear. Haven't you?"

50

It
seemed he had been giving much thought to what she had said, so ardently, about
having his vengeance against those malicious, anonymous gossips. “Living, my
tibber,” he said earnestly. “Leading a happy, and useful life, and loving each
other, and…”

“And joining the Royal Society,”
she said dryly. “Gracious, dear. If we cannot gain access to civilised society
without the aid of a gang of horrible reprobates like the Earl of Rochester,
what hope have we of gaining access to the
Royal
Society?”

“Oh – well, you know. Anyone
might attend their lectures, and learn fascinating things about the wonders of
reason and science. They are the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural
Knowledge, dear. Perfectly fascinating.” He actually fluttered his eyelashes at
her. Truly, he must think she came down with the last shower.

She fluttered hers back
mockingly. “Why, darling, since you are become a man of some leisure you are
grown quite the man of letters, too.
Science
, Thankful?”

“Reason, then.” And he knew he
was being made fun of, and he still didn’t know how to take it, quite, so he
wriggled a little. “
I
know I don’t make a habit of going about London
throttling people, Zee, and so do you, but I wondered if there might be a way
of saying for sure that I had not done such a thing? For in the late wars your
Uncle Luce was used to say he could tell much from the wound a man took –
whether his opponent was left-handed, or how tall he was – “

“Dear, the watchman was
strangled. There would be no wound to show. Would there?”

“Surely. But tibber – they are
enlightened men, they must find something! I mean, it might be that the image
of the murderer will be in the poor man’s eyes, and I am quite distinctive to
look on, and –“

“Thankful, that’s horrible!”

“Isn’t it?” he said cheerfully.
“There was a Frenchman – he was a Jesuit, I’m told – Shiner? Schoner? – he was
doing dreadful things to a frog, and he said that you could see a thing on a
frog’s eye when you cut it open to – observe. Your Uncle Luce told me. You know
he has an interest in such things.”

“I will speak very sternly to my
Uncle Luce, when I next see him,” she said, with a strong desire not to
continue this conversation.

“But dear, imagine!”

“I should rather not, Thankful!”

“But if we were to gain access to
the Society and to set our case before them as a matter of rational interest,
and not as a topic for lewd intrigue, well, just think! They might – I don’t
know, dear, they might perform any number of public marvels, they might be able
to perform a dissection on that poor man and hold his eye up for everyone to
see, and – Thomazine, darling, where are you going?”

“Anywhere but where you are, you
dreadful man,” she said, and meant it.
She only meant it briefly, until she was relieved of her breakfast, and then he
was very solicitous and very apologetic. He wiped her sweaty forehead and held
her hair away from her face, and blamed last night’s pie from the bakehouse on
Pudding Lane, he’d known it was on the turn, had he not said at the time it
tasted funny?

And she nestled limply into his
solid encircling arm, and put her face against the warm, slightly rough linen
of his shirt, and closed her eyes and breathed in the comforting scent of him,
for he smelt of home, if home was warm and slightly musky with hard work.

He took her hands and rubbed them
between his own. “But sweet, you said you wanted me to –“

“Thankful, shut up!”

“But you cannot argue with
logic,” he said earnestly, “you see, tibber, reason is the way for enlightened
men, not rumour, and if –“

“And if you don’t shut up I will
puke in your lap?” she suggested, and he shut up, and stroked her hair instead
until she stopped shivering.

“I mean it,” she said, a while
later.

“I had said not a word!”

“About the Society, husband.
Given that we are presently less welcome in most polite circles than a fart in
a sermon, how do you propose to gain admittance to the Royal Society?”

“Anyone may go to their lectures,
Thomazine. Anyone at all. They have a journal which is published every month –“

“You have been looking into this,
haven’t you?”

“You know what their motto is,
Zee?
Nullius in verba
. Take nobody’s word for it. It could be the King
himself trying to say that I did these things and they would pay it no heed –
oh, love, if they cannot prove my innocence beyond a shadow of any man’s doubt,
no one can! And they would prove it by reason, and logic, that cannot be
disputed – not by one word against another, but by evidence, for they don’t
take any man’s word for anything unless it can be proven!”

And that was well, that was all
very well, and she had not the heart to look at his excited face and say that
he was a disgraced intelligencer with a shadowy reputation, and no matter how
interesting his proposition might be, he was still not likely to get through
the door. Could pay his subscription and stand at the back and gawk, like all
the other gentlemen who admired reason and discourse and paid their
subscriptions, but get so far as to lay out his proposal? To one of his
scientific gentlemen in person, for long enough to explain himself, and he
whispered as a murderer and a traitor to his country?

In his dreams, the poor sweet.

She wriggled her shoulders
against his chest, and he set his arms about her waist, and they sat, so, for a
while, on the bed.

She had inspired him. She had
given him hope where, perhaps, there should be none, and now she could not bear
to disappoint him, so she looked out across the rooftops, at the crooked
chimneys and the slipped tiles and the pigeons in the pale silver sun.

“How do we gain access to this
society, then, husband?” she said, and he huffed into her loose hair.

“Prince Rupert,” he said smugly.
“I had considered that.”

And she said nothing, for – well,
nothing that was said about that old Cavalier could shock her, she had been
brought up believing that Rupert of the Rhine was something next to AntiChrist
in his ability to perpetrate supernatural acts of daring villainy against his
gallant Parliamentarian opponents.

Her father had hated Rupert worse
than he hated the Devil. Her father had been one of those gallant
Parliamentarian opponents. So had her husband.

“He is a scientist in his own
right,” Russell said, mistaking her silence for disapproval. “He is apparently
a very educated man.”

“And – um, what, love? You will
go to the Royal Society of whatever-it-is and say that you and Prince Rupert
have a prior acquaintance? But dear – the only acquaintance you have is –“

“I might have shot his dog at the
battle of Marston Moor,” her husband said, and she felt his chest vibrate with
amusement, “and I may have knocked his hat off at the battle at Edgehill.”

“Dear God, Thankful, don’t tell
him who your father-in-law is! Daddy’s done considerably more than knock his
hat off, in his time!”

His arms tightened about her middle.
“Oh I do love you, tibber. You make me laugh. No, sweet. No, I have no
intention of presuming on my acquaintance with Prince Rupert – which, as you
say, has been somewhat, ah, cool in the past – unsolicited. I cannot say that
were he and I to be at the same – say – supper party, I might not, perhaps,
angle for an introduction to one of the members of the Society who may have a
particular interest in matters of anatomy.”

“Oh, be sensible, love! Who do we
know who could get you an introduction to Prince Rupert?”

He kissed her shoulder. “The Earl
of Rochester, my tibber. The Prince is a bachelor gentleman of, ah, well,
bachelor personal habits. He takes as much pleasure in the arts –“

“You mean actresses,” she said
tartly, since he would not.

“I possibly mean actresses, I
could not possibly remark, I have no such intimacy with the prince’s amatory
affairs. The arts, and discourse with his friends –“

"Thankful, if what you mean
is that Prince Rupert has a habit of getting –

“Indeed he does.”

“- with the Earl of Rochester,
then , sir, I am –“

“Not at all surprised,” he said
primly. “In my humble opinion, he would be better served finding himself an
amenable lady and settling down to a blameless life –“

“Strangling watchmen and selling
state secrets to the Dutch. That way, you wouldn’t have to do it, darling.”

“True,” he agreed. “Save me a
job. Not tonight, Rupert, Thursday’s my night off strangling. Staying at home
with my good lady and a meat pie.”

“Not one of Farrinor’s.”

“
Definitely
not one of
Farrinor’s.”

51

But it was the poem, finally, that
decided her.

Addressed to
"Apocrypha" and being a lengthy discourse on an ageing Moses' failure
to douse the flames of the burning bush, it was neither erudite enough to have
come from Wilmot nor crude enough to be Sedley, and so, she assumed, it was
from some would-be acolyte of the Merry Gang, some petty satellite's attempt to
court favour by scandalising the Puritan's wife.

She noted that
she was not hailed as the reigning beauty, the which she would not have
believed, and nor were her accomplishments praised beyond the possession of a
distinctively-coloured head of hair. A burning bush, indeed. The theology was
shaky, and the verse was clumsy doggerel. Presumably, the Puritan's wife was
not expected to have an uncle who not only wrote poetry a hundred times the
superior of this cant, but would have very carefully corrected it with a most
severe pen. Had it not ended with the lines,

“And with thee,
grey-age-withered prophet,

She’ll gain no
pleasure from it, or profit.”

Well,
she'd have sent the foul text straight to Uncle Luce, and asked him to do his
critical worst, and then had the thing published. With the Puritan's wife's
retort.

But.
It had been slipped into her Bible at church one morning, whilst her head was
bowed in sober reflection: a nice touch, that, she thought, a fine line between
shocking and romantic. Cleverly folded, and when she opened it she had started
as if it had bitten her, because how could someone write such filth, such petty
innuendo, about a woman they had never set eyes on before the beginning of this
month?

She'd
pushed the vile thing into her muff and bowed her head with increased fervour.
Her maid had assumed it was a note from an admirer, and what could she say?

Clever.
Cleverly done, for if she denied all knowledge of its receipt, she was damned
as a liar, for someone had placed it there, most publicly. And if she
acknowledged its reception, then she was a whore and an adulteress. Which, to
be fair, made her one of the majority, so far as she could tell, at court. An
honest woman's price was above rubies, and it seemed that everyone was wearing
rubies this year.