A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (38 page)

(Someone was having hysterics in the kitchen, and Russell was
possessed of a strong desire to giggle.)

“Temper, temper,” Wilmot said mildly. “Now, then, man. We mean you
no harm. What
is
his name, Caliban?”

“How the bloody hell should I know?”

“Well, the Earl’s your friend, dearie! According to him, you
practically live here!”

“I can assure you he is not!”

“He puffed himself up that he was, I can promise you that.” And
Wilmot’s face went very carefully blank. “Ever since you grew dangerous. How
very interesting.”

“He
made
me dangerous, that I might be a better subject for
his intrigue?”

It was unbelievable.

Coming from that cock fool of all these fools it was all too
plausible. Wilmot shrugged. “As I said. No man of sense had any regard for it.”

“But sufficient bloody fools did that I might be removed from my
position!” he snapped. “Where
is
he?”

“He left on official business –“

“Was he alone?” Wilmot said delicately. “Did he, in fact, have a
fair companion – a – “

“Did he have my wife with him,” Russell said. And said no more
than that, because although the butler blanched a little, and although his
blank face remained perfectly innocent of any incriminating expression, the
answer was not one that he wanted to give.

One of the under-footmen wasn’t so nice about it, though, and a
couple of the likelier looking lads from below-stairs were lurking about the
hall wanting to see what all the excitement was about, and whether they might
get a share of it. Bit surprised to see the Earl of Rochester, in His
Lordship’s absence, but both Wilmot and Russell were distinctive persons and
well-known in the household, and there was no accounting for the ways of the
gentry –

Especially not when the gentry in question was the husband of the
woman who’d apparently been hanging off the Earl’s arm on his way out, earlier,
and her with her dress all awry, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.

No accounting for tastes, but she had been all over the Earl, she
had. He’d had to practically carry her to his carriage, to get her out of the
house. 

(But Thomazine had left their lodgings at Aldgate in a perfectly
respectable state of attire, on her own two feet, not three hours since.)

He’d given Joseph a shilling, for his help in bundling her in.

Red-haired lass – a
natural
redhead, if you took me, for he
had left her sprawling in sottish oblivion on the seat of the carriage with her
skirts hiked around her waist anyhow: aye, she had the look of a wench who had
been well-pleasured, and she cared not a blink when Joseph had had a feel of
her pretty red garden, but had groaned aloud with the pleasure of it, lying
there with her head lolling on her shoulders and her white throat all printed
with kiss-marks –

“No
,” Wilmot shouted in warning, and Russell had not realised he had
done anything, that he should be near to choking the life out of one of
Fairmantle’s servants, let alone to knocking the man’s brains out on the
newel-post.

That his shoulder was all but pulled out of joint by Wilmot trying
to wrench him off the man, or that the servant’s face should be the colour of
raw liver, his eyes bugging from their sockets as he fought for breath –

“Russell,
no
!”

“He.” There was a word. It was a word he knew, and he could not
think of it. “You – they – “ he was beyond speech, he wanted to growl, like a
dog. “If she is hurt,” he said eventually, and it wasn’t what he meant, but it
was all he could think of the words for, “if she is hurt, sir, if any of you
have harmed a hair on her head, I –“

No. No, he would not come back here and burn this vile place to
the ground, he would not sow the ashes with salt: he would not make it a haunt
of owls and bats and every unclean thing, for God knows there were sufficient
unclean things here already.

But he would be the sword in her hand while
she
did it.

“Chatham,” the frightened maid – the one who’d had hysterics, by
the wan and red-eyed look of her - said, and the butler shot her a look of
concentrated venom. “I heard him direct the coachman to Chatham, sir, he has
business there.”

“He often has business there!”

“You mean he takes his mistresses there,” Russell said, and meant
to be cold, and instead his teeth chattered just the once, and his hand
tightened on his sword again. “Tell me, does he often take the unwilling ones,
or is my wife just unfortunate?”

They were all staring at him. (He was used to that.)
Wilmot
was staring at him. “Unwilling?” Wilmot said, and his lip curled in unconscious
contempt. “You mean he has
kidnapped
your wife? This is not just some
stupid game, to draw attention?”

Ah, God, that did not even merit an answer, and Wilmot knew it.
Congratulations, Fairmantle. You have just managed to shock the Earl of
Rochester.

Kiss marks and drunkenness, by Christ, this was his
wife
they
spoke of, she would not – well, she had, but not with Charles Fairmantle. With
him
.
And that bloody
hurt
, that Fairmantle had taken that – that brightness,
that memory of love and wicked joy, and he had
ruined
it.

And if she had been willing: if she had been another man’s wife,
and gone with him by choice, none of them would have been shocked at all: not
at any of it. That was quite funny. Would be quite funny, when Thomazine was
back. All the household staff were staring at him. “You will be requiring my
lord’s light carriage,” the butler said, and there was something funny about
that, too, that they were ordering a carriage, formally, to drive forty miles
and rescue his wife.

“Oh no,” Russell said, quite cheerfully, “no, I will be requiring
his fastest horse. Much faster than a carriage, I find. Don’t trouble with
harness, please. I think I shall manage swifter without.”

He turned on his heel. He would have probably walked into the door
frame, for he was not quite
sure
where he was going, blind with rage and
tears.

The only thing that was real was the hilt of his sword under his
hand, and the fury.

He heard a sigh at his shoulder. “Make that two horses,” the Earl
of Rochester said, with resignation. “And for myself, Caliban, I should prefer
a saddle. If I must be cast as a gallant knight-errant, for once, I should
prefer to arrive
without
bruises on my arse.”

70

It hurt to breathe, and her eyes felt dry and bruised, but dear
God, not as much as her throat hurt. It felt like she was breathing through
boiling sand –

But she was breathing, though, and that was a thing she was
grateful for. Because the longer she breathed, the more the stupid cleared from
her swimming head, and the more her boiling red-haired temper promised her that
nobody throttled Thomazine Russell senseless and did not reap the whirlwind.

She ought to be afraid, and she had been brought up in blood and
fire with the New Model Army and she was not afraid.

She was bloody livid.

“You.” She gagged, choked, hawked a great clot of dried blood out
of her raw throat, and slumped back on the velvet cushions, panting. “You know
he will kill you for this. Don’t you?”

“I do hope so, dear.”

That was the dreadful thing. That he sounded no different - he
still sounded cheerful, and friendly, and nice. And he had just put his hands
around her throat and choked her unconscious, and put her in his coach - no
bloody wonder he liked his staff po-faced, she thought wildly, if they often
saw such things!

“You.
Hope
?”

“Thomazine, dear, I have every intention of your husband meaning
to kill me. I do not mean that he should succeed, of course. But I do mean that
he should try. So, you know, do please feel free to scream and struggle a
little when he arrives at our destination. If you would be so obliging? It
would add such a lovely touch, I think.”

She lunged from her seat, and snatched at the window-blind -

And then fell back with a sob because the rushing dark outside was
just that: dark. The carriage was rocking and swaying, the team crashing on
into the moonless night at what she knew was no more supernatural than a team
of four fit, rested, high-bred blood horses at a full gallop. She knew that.

It felt as frightening as riding behind the North Wind, though,
and even if she could have recognised where she was, even if the anonymous
darkness put her beyond the bounds of the City of London, and out into the
leafy commons beyond, and Thomazine did not know them. Save as the haunt of
highwaymen and footpads, and she did not think, very much, that she could rely
on highwaymen and footpads to rescue her.

She did not think she could rely on Russell to rescue her this
time, either, and that made her want to cry. Because she might never see him
again, and -

“I wouldn’t jump, dear,” he said lazily. “Break your neck at this
speed.”

“What is it to you, you -”

“Well, I don’t want you dead, Thomazine. You’re no use at all to
me dead, are you? I imagine that even your husband would balk at rescuing a
dead woman.” He pursed his lips, and reached out and lifted her chin with his
horrible dry-scabbed knuckle, and she cringed back in her seat. “Although it is
entirely the kind of foolishness he might countenance, of late. I’d never have
thought it of him, the silly boy. I should never have imagined him to be
capable of such romantic foolery.”

“Why?” she said.

“He never was before, dear. And I have known him for thirty years
and more, and d’you know what? It seems I barely knew him at all.”

It hurt her to speak, and to swallow, and yet she had to ask,
because it made no sense. “Why me? Are you carrying me off?”

He stared at her in comical shock for a second, as if she had made
a lewd suggestion. “Mistress Russell!” he said, bridling. “I have a wife in
Buckinghamshire, madam, what do you take me for?”

“Murder. Does not trouble you. But adultery. Does?” She wanted to
laugh, and instead she had to pant like a dog with her mouth open, because
laughter hurt, but she felt it bubbling up in her anyway. This was a bad dream.
She would wake up. It was a bad, silly, unreal dream, in which her mouth was
coppery with blood and her head hurt and her raw throat thumped in time with
her heart.

“Had you done as I asked, madam, we would not be in this
position,” he said primly. “I gave you the option of simply leaving the
country. I was nothing but fair, Thomazine, you have brought this on yourself.”

She shook her head – why should we? Why should
I
have to
fly the country of my birth at your whim? – and he pursed his lips at her.

“I am very disappointed in you, dear. In both of you, actually.
The boy I knew would have just gone away. Even when he was a little boy he
would rather have hidden away than been exposed to every scrutiny. Which would
have been considerably easier on all of us, I may assure you. Why else do you
think I looked to Thankful to oblige me in this enterprise, dear? Because up
until your arrival, he was the one man I knew who would rather perish than draw
attention to himself! Always quite the little Spartan, even as a boy. And the
man I knew would have taken his punishment - he would have taken
anyone
's
punishment, dear, he deserves it, in his head, all of it. Well, you have
changed him, madam, and I do not like this course of action, but you have made
it
quite
unavoidable. You have been a malign influence on Major Russell,
Thomazine. He has grown perfectly reckless, since you married him.”

She stared at him, and he shook his head. “Well, I’m sure we have
no time for that, dear. I would estimate we will be arriving at Chatham,
shortly, and I have much to prepare.”

She would have said more. But the carriage was slowing, a little,
and he reached across the carriage and grabbed her shoulders and yanked her
roughly so that she fell sprawling across his thighs, and while she was
struggling with the jerking of the vehicle to get her feet underneath her, he caught
her hand – one hand, then the other, in those strong white hands, gripping her
wrists twisted behind her back so that the bones ground together. Off-balance,
she could only heave and buck, she could not get her legs under her to fight.
Her face was pressed into the meat of his thigh and she could not even bite,
her teeth could not get a purchase in the rough, loose wool of his breeches. He
tasted of sweat, sweat and unwashed male and layer on layer of stale scent. She
ground her face against the flabby muscle, wanting to set her jaws in like a
terrier. Caught. Held. His knee caught her a stunning smack in the face as his
body convulsed with pain and she tasted blood, but she held on, meaning to
tear, to rend – 
- bite your bloody balls off, you murderous swine -

And then he was wrestling her arms up behind her back and he was
brutal, he was cruel and he was meaning to hurt her, the muscles in her
shoulders straining in screaming protest as he pinioned her wrists in the small
of her back. Something soft wrapping about them, a sudden throbbing burn as he
yanked it tight, whatever it was, and the flow of blood to her fingers was cut
short.