A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (9 page)

"When ye're
done thinking on that lass in her underlinen," Eadulf said with
resignation, "I'll tell ye, Russell. It's no easy task, finding labourers
for this house. There's some reckon it’s haunted and that's a daft thing to
think, but if ye're a gullible fool ye'd believe it, and they do. What bothers
me is the ones that
don't
think it's haunted, aye? I caught three lads
from Wycombe a week since, bent on mischief. And they weren't the first. It's
every night, now. One of Lane's boys from out at Everhall, the other night,
though he was just out for sport. Smashing a few windows, to teach ye not to
come amongst decent folk wi' your nasty ways. Setting a little fire or two,
just to keep ye mindful. I had a run-in with a boy on the path down, two-three
nights since, though he came off the worse for it, and I blacked his eye for
him. Aye, and worse," he said grimly. "Russell, they're saying ye
murdered her in her bed, for the sake o' the house and the lands, to have her
out of your way so ye could come home. Or that ye had me do it for ye."

16

She wasn't, precisely, eavesdropping.

She had a little
rabbit in her hand, a tiny thing the size of her thumb, made in a shiny, smooth
creamy stone. It was sitting on its haunches, with its paws tucked underneath
it, and it was the smallest, most perfect thing she had ever seen, and it had
been tucked in the corner of that great wooden crate as casually as if it had
been forgotten.

And she knew it
had not, because she recognised her husband's careful, methodical hand in that
packing, and knew that if he had not done it himself he had overseen it. It was
a beautiful thing, and it had no purpose that she could see, other than to make
her smile, and instead it made her cry. Because it was not a good stout English
rabbit, it was a well-travelled rabbit, who must have spent many months
travelling, stowed in the hold of an exotic merchantman, or packed in a rocking
wagon on dusty roads under foreign suns, and that meant that her darling,
sensible, practical Thankful, had been considering their marriage, in a very
real and impractical sense, for much, much longer than she had ever suspected,
to have set all this in train.

The fragile blue
and white dishes were beautiful, and frightened her a little, because they were
so delicate, like eggshells. Too beautiful to touch, or to love, but only to
admire, like dewy cobwebs on an autumn morning, where even a breath could have
shattered them.

The silk was
lovely to touch, and perhaps, one day, she would have a gown made up in it, but
it was not practical. Not a thing for everyday, for a plain countrywoman and a
good wife.

But that little
rabbit - that solid, earthy little rabbit, who grew warm in her hand from the
heat of her skin - was a real, living thing, for all it was made by a craftsman
many hundreds of days' ride away from here. She could feel that stranger's hand
on the rabbit as close as a hand on her shoulder; she could almost know what he
was like.- a man who felt, and looked, and cared, enormously. And she did not mind
that Eadulf Gillespie thought she was a child, or a silly little girl to be
sent away while the men talked of business, because this was not an ivory
rabbit, it was a statement of his loving as public as if he had written it up
to be pinned on the church door, and she wanted to be with him, so that he knew
that she understood. Showing him the rabbit's tiny claws, and the whiskers on
its carved velvet nose, and the fur on its scut, and sharing her joy in this
tiny thing that he had chosen with such care.

And instead, she
was standing outside the door whilst Gillespie accused him of murder.

Which was the
stupidest thing she had ever heard, and so she had simply pushed the door open,
with her indignation a great bubble of speechlessness in her throat.

Gillespie had
been shocked by her unwomanly lack of ceremony, and the pair of them had sat
blinking at her like two owlets in a hollow tree, dazzled by the watery
sunlight. The Scotsman had started to gabble something in his uncouth voice,
and Thankful had simply said, very coolly, that he would hear no more of it.

"This is my
house," he said. "And I do not mean to be frightened out of it. Take
heed."

"Wi' no
food, and no furniture in it, save yon spindly bawbees? Aye, and I wish ye well
of it, major! Mistress, will ye no' talk some sense into the man - this is no'
a safe place for ye, either of ye, till the talk dies down." He forgot
himself. That grim, badger-haired Scot lurched from his perch and grabbed both her
hands in his, and she jumped back with a little yelp, because his hands were
hard, callused and warm, and that she had not expected. "In all charity,
Mistress Russell - I beg of ye,
please
. Don’t stay in this unchancy
place."

"Don't be
absurd, Ea-
Eadwolf
?" she hazarded, and he gave a tiny grunt of
acknowledgement. And, she thought, a little, a very little, grudging
admiration.

"Well, at
least stay under my roof, then, if you will stay here. The house is no' so far
from here that ye can't keep an eye on the proceedings, and - acht, major, at
least there
is
a roof on the place, ye can't expect a gently born girl
to sleep out on campaign wi' ye!"

"Master
Gillespie, I am the daughter of a most well-respected Parliamentarian
commander, and wife to another!" she snapped, finally nettled beyond
endurance. "I am not made of glass, nor spun sugar. I will not melt for a
little hardship. Now have done!"

And they agreed,
in the end, on a compromise. That they would eat with Gillespie, and share his
hospitality, and that he would bring them blankets, in order that they might
spend a night in something that resembled comfort.

("And some
breakfast," Thomazine said firmly, and her husband had given her a wry
look.

"And some
breakfast.")

And Gillespie
would see to it himself that a message went to their servants, lodging in the
inn at Everhall and awaiting word, that all was well.

With that, the
bailiff must rest content.

17

She had thought she would be tired,
after the rest of the day riding round her featureless new estate. Up. Down.
Up. Down, and one rolling chalk hill dotted with dirty sheep looking much the
same as another. (She did not take to sheep, Grubby, charmless creatures, with
little wit and a depressing fragility, apparently. The number of ailments that
could reduce a perfectly healthy sheep to dust in a matter of days, seemed
endless.) Her body was exhausted and aching. She had almost fallen asleep over
supper in Gillespie's comfortable flint cottage, over a supper of homely mutton
stew and bread and cheese, and rosy autumn apples and warmed ale. She'd have
slept where she sat, if it hadn’t been for sheer wilful pride, that she might
not go back on her word before a man who thought of her as a silly child.

The black mare was weary, too,
although the indefatigable Marlowe still seemed game for another few miles yet.
As did her equally-indefatigable husband. "Tired, love?" he'd said,
with his hand on her ankle, not quite holding her foot out of the stirrup. It
was a caress, but thinking about it now, she wondered if it had been a small
kindness. That if she'd swallowed her pride a little and admitted her weakness
they might even now be sleeping in a bed, and not on a pallet of itchy
sheepskins in an empty bedchamber. As it was, she'd taken offence at being
babied, and she'd snapped at him, and his feelings had been hurt, and they had
spent the ride back up the valley in mutually affronted silence.

Well, and then they'd made up,
and it had been sweet. She put her cheek against the cool skin of his back, and
he murmured something that she didn’t catch, and wriggled himself closer to
her.

He was a funny,
stiff, loving thing, she thought, with an ache of tenderness. And he hadn't
done it. He wouldn't have done it, and he couldn't have done it. Just thinking
of it made her overtired head ache, and her eyes burn behind their gritty
closed lids.

If they'd said
out loud that he had - like men, and not mice - if they had said within her
hearing that her husband was a murderer, she'd have had some ground to defend
him on.  The treasure - well, people always said that, didn't they? There was
always talk of treasure, no matter how ludicrous that an ageing Puritan widow
might be protecting a cache of looted gold.

But not that
Thankful had murdered that woman.

He did not have
the trick of popularity; he was too proper, too awkward, and the scars on his
face made his expressions too hard to read, for him to be a man of easy
friendship. He was fierce, and loyal, and under that implacably cold exterior
he had always been her rebel angel, but being shy in company did not make him a
murderer. Not liking to be looked at, or to have liberties taken with his
person, did not make him a murderer. Having a strange foreign bride, and a
bailiff who growled like a barking dog when he spoke, did not make him a
murderer.

He had never
lied to her, not once, and she had known him for twenty years. Since her
babyhood, and he had never lied to her, not once. He had been her father's
lieutenant, and he had been known even then, even as a boy of nineteen,
throughout the New Model Army as a man of honour and principle. No matter how
much he had loathed his sister, no matter what injustice she had done him, he
would not have killed a defenceless elderly widow in cold blood. Not for money,
and not for vengeance. It was not how he was made. She would have staked her
life on it.

To come back
from the Army's service in Scotland, with no word to anyone - come back to that
house with the intent of killing her?

He would not
have done it.

She growled to
herself, and turned over, and punched her pillow with feeling.
Thankful did
not lie.

(He had never
told her he
hadn't
killed his sister. Had never mentioned it at all,
except to say that he did not care how she had died.)

He was fierce,
and loyal. And under that implacably cold exterior she had known him shaking
with passion, losing all sense of time and place and self.

(But that was
with her. And that was loving, that was not - something else.)

He had been gone
for ten years in the Army's service, with no word to anyone. And she thought he
was still, at heart, the same bright-haired boy that had held her hands when
she was learning to walk, had set her on her first horse, had told her long and
involved made-up stories to make her laugh when she was a little girl.

(A man could
change a lot in ten years. A man could do a lot in the hours he spent away from
home, about matters of business, he said, but what business?)

He would not
have done it.

Beside her, he
mumbled something incoherent, and pulled the blankets over his shoulders.

It was cold. She
could not deny that Four Ashes was a cold house, with the coldness of new
plaster and raw wood; the coldness of emptiness, she thought, and that not only
from the construction work. Thomazine was not much given to fancies, but she
thought she could feel this house's resentment, in the dark hours. When the new
timbers settled and groaned, and the wind hissed through the gaps in the west
wing, you could imagine that this had never been a happy house, either. Alone,
and brooding on imagined slights, and -

Thomazine, it is
a
house
. Fill it with a sufficiency of clutter and fat fair-haired
babies, and it will be as much a home as White Notley ever was.

Her feet grew
cold. If she had any complaint of her man it was that he was an appalling
coverlet thief - and if he carried on so, the only murderer in these parts was
likely to be Thomazine, when she smothered him with a pillow. It was that
stupid. It really was that ridiculous, that anyone might think he -

       This was
her second night here. She wouldn't always come awake in the night, snuffing
frantically for the smell of burning, because she could not stop thinking about
the first time she'd seen Four Ashes, with the whole of the west wing a pile of
blackened, tumbled rubble, a handful of burnt rafters sticking up against a
weeping sky.

She lay flat
again, and looked at her darling, asleep with his hair in his eyes. This was
his home. He had been a little boy, here. He had grown up, lisping his first
prayers at his mother's knee here. Had taken his first faltering steps in the
hall downstairs.

It was no
consolation, none at all. She lay awake, thinking she smelled burning,
wondering whether her sister-in-law had been dead before the roof fell in on
the west wing. Looking for the blackened patches on the bricks, and the shadows
on the new plaster where the charring might show through.

Was it here, she
lay? Or here? And did she know, as the flames came for her? Did she cry for
help? Or was she already dead - had she fallen, alone in the dark, or died of
an apoplexy, or had she been done to death, as they said, and -

She shook
herself. Anyone would think you were breeding, miss, such fancies as you take,
and the Lord alone knows it was too soon for
that
.