A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (7 page)

"I am only
relieved that there
is
an upstairs. You told me half the roof had fallen
in."

"Ah, well,
the lads have been working on that." He held out his hands to her. Not for
her to take, but the better to display a somewhat ungentlemanly black
thumbnail, and a scar the length of one finger -"Chisel," he said
proudly. "I might have been known to lend a hand myself. What kind of man
should I be, that wouldn't see a whole roof over his wife's head?"

"The sort
of man who stands there prattling, and lets the fire go out?" she suggested,
and he closed his mouth with a snap and looked briefly affronted. He had never
been good at being teased, and it took him a heartbeat to realise that it was
happening. And then he laughed. "Well, there's
probably
bread.
Somewhere. We are not yet so crammed with furniture that there are many places
to conceal it."

She had a prowl
around the shadowy kitchen, not realising till now how big and dusty an
unfurnished, untenanted kitchen could be. Touching her fingers to
rough-plastered walls and imagining where a big black oak settle might stand,
by the hearth. Looking for a cool place where a sensible country housewife
might leave a hutch for her bread, and seeing the very place where she would
put it herself, in an alcove by the door that might have been purpose-built for
such a thing. But no hutch, because, as she turned slowly full circle admiring
the bare room, her mind filling it with imagined scents and shapes, she caught
sight of a lumpy linen bag, piled on one of the mysterious boxes.

As soon as a
more immediate need than curiosity was satisfied, she was going to find out
what was in those boxes, too.

She gave a
little moan of shameless greed as the stale bread rolled out of its covering.
“I have not forgotten quite everything I knew on campaign,” he said smugly,
turning round at the sound of loaves as hard as rocks bouncing on rough boards.
“See? I told you they’d leave something. And half a side of bacon in the
chimney here, and – hm.”

He sat back on
his heels, scowling at the flaring lump of charcoal on the point of his knife.
“You any good at toasting bread, tibber? I can’t seem to get the trick of this,
at all.”

“Perhaps we
could eat it as is?” she suggested, and he raised a very sardonic eyebrow.

“Only if they
also left a hammer and chisel.”

But she did her
best, with great ragged lopsided doorsteps of rock-hard bread. “Hunger is the
best salt,” he said hopefully, and she looked at the curling grey slabs of meat
laid on the smouldering crusts.

“You reckon?”

"Well.
Perhaps a little more salt, then."

The house looked
better in the sunlight. Such sunlight as there was, in mid-November, but it
streamed through the sparkling window-glass onto spotless stone flags, onto
pristine plaster and new wood.

It was bare and
somewhat comfortless and very, very clean, and that was her husband all over,
really. He'd been a soldier for so long he didn't know how to be else.
Scrupulously clean, and very neat, and with no more baggage than he could
carry. She thought of her own clean, but cluttered, chamber at White Notley. Of
the kitchen there, with the mending basket under the settle by the fire,
because everyone ended up in the kitchen at White Notley. Her father's habit of
leaving his boots by the kitchen door, a habit he claimed was the result of
twenty years of persistent reminders from his wife about tracking mud across
the clean floors. Nell's embroidery, systematically being dismembered by one of
the kitchen cats. (Not infrequently, the kitchen cats themselves, strewn across
the patches of sunlight in the kitchen, or belly-up on the settle.)

It made her a
little sad, because White Notley was home, and Four Ashes was a house. It was
going to be her house, hers and Thankful's, and yet it was empty, there was
nothing about it that made it their own. 

And yet, there
were the beginnings of hope, and of laughter, here: of the things that might
make it more than four walls and a roof, but a home. There was a smear of soot
on his patrician nose. Thomazine wondered if she ought to point it out. Shortly
after dawn this morning, she might have thought it would bother him. Right now,
looking at her bright-eyed, dishevelled husband, who couldn't grin, but was
nonetheless radiating joy like a wriggly pup, she wasn't so sure. On his knees
in front of a hearth that hadn't been swept in months, if not years, with his
shirt-sleeves pushed up to his elbows (and he had rather nice, muscled, solid
swordsman's forearms, she thought absently) blowing onto a very reluctant pile
of grubby, smouldering shavings, and getting pinker and pinker with the effort
of it -

"Oh,
Thankful, I do love you," she said, quite without thinking, and he looked
up, blowing his hair out of his eyes.

"Well. I
thank you. I should feel considerably more loveable if I could get this thing
to stay alight, mind."

He was a dear,
funny thing at times, and she was torn between the desire to stand there being
unhelpful and ruffle him yet further, and do something useful.

In the end, she
decided in the interests of domestic harmony it was better to be helpful, and
she whirled and set off into the body of the house, to see what scraps and
splinters might have been left from the construction work.

And it was an
odd thing, but that bare, empty, plaster-scented house felt more like home,
already.

13

They had just about managed to achieve
something that was almost edible, with much laughter and restrained cursing,
when they heard hoofbeats on the cobbles, and the sound of boots running. And
Thomazine had barely had time to extinguish the present smouldering crust,
before the barton door slammed open.

 He had not
knocked, and nor did he stand on ceremony.

The stocky,
black-haired man with the brace of pistols about his person was evidently not
in the mood for discussion, because he had that very scarlet, blotchy look
about his face that very angry fair-skinned people often got when they were
vexed beyond endurance, and with a remarkable presence of mind Thomazine, shift
and all, whisked behind one of those intriguing wooden chests, and pulled her
husband’s cloak tight round her.

“What the hell
d’you mean by this, ye shameless vagabond? Get out and show yourself like a
man, or I swear I’ll – Major
Russell!”

He never so much
batted an eyelid. Facing down the barrel of a cocked pistol and an irate
gentleman at the end of it, Thankful put the knife and the smoking bread down,
and gingerly moved the bacon from its perilous placement at the edge of the
flames. “Eadulf, sir, I am delighted to see you taking such an interest in the
house, but really.” He turned full round, pushing his hair out of his eyes with
his un-greasy hand, and because she’d loved him all her life Thomazine could
tell from the set of his shoulders that he was happy. “It
is
my house,
you know.”

“You never
said!” the irate gentleman said, and the hectic colour was fading from his
cheeks, leaving a mottled flush. “I might have shot you, you great –“

“Scotsmen,”
Thankful said to Thomazine, as if it explained everything, and about all it
explained to her was the accent, like a dog barking. “Eadulf is my bailiff,
tibber. He’s been seeing to the estate in my absence.”

“Aye, since –“
his eyes moved, very slowly, to the shadows, as if he was afraid of what he
might see there. “Who’re you talking to, major?”

“My wife. Who
did you think I was talking to? My sister’s shadow?”

The expression
on the man called Eadulf’s face was a joy to behold. He looked as if someone
had punched him in the belly. “Your
wife
?”

“Someone had to
be daft enough to marry me eventually,” Thankful said smugly, and she stood up,
surreptitiously holding the edges of that crumpled cloak together over her
body-linen and grateful that he hadn’t arrived an hour earlier. When he would
have been in no doubt at all that Thomazine and he were man and wife. “I am
delighted to make your acquaintance, sir,” she said sweetly, and curtseyed, so
that the folds of cloak covered her bare feet.

“Mistress
Russell – Eadulf Gillespie. My bailiff. As I said. He lives about a mile up the
valley.”

“You brought
your wife,” he said again, “to
this
unchancy ruin? Major Russell, that
was no’ well done! Ye should have sent word, sir! I’d have – well, I’d at least
have seen you decently provisioned! When did all this happen, major?”

“We came over
yesterday,” she said, “at dusk. We didn’t intend to stay overnight, but it was
raining, and near dark, and - well, we didn’t. I am sorry, did we inconvenience
you?”

“I might have
shot
ye, ye daft skite! God a’mighty, Russell, ye’re not twenty-one any more, have
ye not the sense ye were born with? I saw the smoke from out o’ the chimney and
I knew verra well there’d be none come to here after dark for any good purpose,
so I come straight down here to see what was afoot, and – well, here ye are,
safe and sound and intact, thank God, and why the- why did ye not tell me ye
were coming home? Ye didn’t even tell me ye had a - a lass promised, never mind
a wife! And this is no welcome for a gently-born maid, coming to this benighted
pile of rubble!” He glowered, running his free hand through his short, ruffled
hair. “Well. I’ve said my piece, and I’ll say no more. I bid ye welcome to Four
Ashes, mistress. What’s
left
of it.”

“Oh,” Thomazine
said faintly. “Thank you.”

“I should like
to reassure you that I am not customarily addressed in like fashion by my
staff,” Thankful said, sounding very stiff and shocked, and then the unmarked
corner of his mouth lifted in that dear lopsided grin. “I don’t hardly count
Eadulf as staff, tibber. More in the way of a friend.”

“Friend, aye,
you might call it friendship. More in the way of a keeper, I’d argue.”

“He pulled me
out from under my horse at Dunbar,” her husband explained, and his hand went,
all unconscious, to his shoulder, by which she guessed that he had taken some
hurt there as well as losing his horse.

“Aye, and you
pulled me out of the cathedral at Durham, a month after,” Eadulf grumbled. “So
I call us quits. But Russell! Have ye no more sense than this?”

“Not often,” he
agreed. “Want a slice of bacon? I reckon it’s just about cooked.”

“Give that
here,” the Scotsman said. “I’ve had the benefit o’your cooking before, major,
on the run home from Durham, if you recall, and ye're not known for the
thoroughness of it. T'was touch and go if it was going to be the fever that got
me first, or your food. Aye, well, if you don’t mind breakfasting on raw meat,
mistress, you go right ahead and eat it.” He made a disgusted noise, brushing
crumbs from the top of the box that was presently serving as a table top. “As
if the place wasn’t sufficient of a mess already, with those daubers dragging
their splatters all over the house. I’ll sit and visit with you, mistress, in
common civility, and then I mun start looking out some likely staff for this
place, or the pair of you will starve. Like children, the pair o' ye. Like
children, wi' no more sense.” He bit into his bacon with every sign of evident
relish, though, with a crackle of only slightly-blackened rind, making a little
noise of satisfaction deep in his throat as he hunched closer to the flames.

She wondered if
all Scotsmen growled like dogs, and were as fierce as mastiffs, because she had
little knowledge of any man north of Lancashire. And even her Lancastrian
father had lived in Essex for so long that his North Country burr was only
distinctive in some words. She couldn’t help peering at Eadulf surreptitiously,
over her own wedge of bread and bacon. He looked no different – an ordinary,
dark-haired, sturdy-built man, with strongly-marked dark brows, and a
highwayman’s mask of silvered black stubble on his cheeks and jaws. Broad,
strong hands, with a dusting of dark hair on their backs. Broad shoulders,
broader yet in the shabby coat he’d clearly thrown on to confront the intruders
at Four Ashes. He settled himself more comfortably on the box, and the wood
creaked under him as he stretched his booted feet out to the fire. “If ye’d had
the forethought to put a jug of ale to warm, we’d be almost comfortable,” he
grumbled, and Thankful gave his almost-silent laugh and put his arm about
Thomazine’s shoulders.

“I’m
comfortable,” he said. “Right where I am.”

14

"Aye," Eadulf said, looking
around the kitchen as if he did not often step inside, "it's a
well-appointed house, mistress. The labourers have worked hard. When," he
looked, sharply, at Russell, "when we can get them. D'ye want to have a
look round, then?"

Which was both
transparent and mendacious, and with a hint of gentle malice, she said, "I
believed the greater part of the house to be unsafe, sir? So my husband tells
me?"

"Only the
west wing," he said, perfectly unabashed. "And if you're careful, and
mind where ye step."