A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (8 page)

She had a
red-headed temper, they said, and perhaps a year ago, two years ago, she might
have turned on the Scotsman and called him a liar to his face. Six months ago,
even, when things were yet unsettled between her and Thankful, she might have
resented being treated as a child, being ordered from his company as if she
were a silly maiden.

Now, though, she
was a respectable matron of a week’s seniority, and she had learned guile. And
she did not have to tolerate insolence from her household servants. She twisted
her wedding ring innocently, and looked at her husband. "Do you have an
office, then, to repair to, dear? Assuming, of course, that it's safe."

And to her
absolute astonishment, the Scot gave a bark of laughter. Spoke like a growling
dog, and barked like one. "Aye, mistress, touché. Well, I'll be honest,
then, me and your good man have dull matters to discuss."

"That you
need not trouble your pretty head with," Thankful said, in a very odd,
slightly strangled voice. She glared at him, and he bit his lip and looked
innocently out of the rain-streaked window, and Gillespie nodded.

"Aye,
mistress, that you’d not want to be troubled with, unless you've a mind to
discuss sheep-scab and the application of Stockholm tar. Though if you're
inclined to look over the accounts and see what that shameless rogue at Wycombe
has been charging for wormy timber, I'll not say you nay."

She had made her
point, and he had made his, and both understood each other. Also, she was
increasingly aware, as the chill of stone and plaster struck at her tender
parts, that under that all-enveloping cloak she was wearing nothing but a
shift, and that as soon as she stood up her naked feet were going to become all
too apparent. She shot her husband a quick glance, and glanced as quickly down
at herself, and his eyes widened briefly as he realised exactly what she meant.

"Perhaps
you could show
me
how the work progresses?" he said. "I can
see you're hot to be investigating those boxes, my tibber. Well, I've done my
best, poor instrument that I am -" he handed her the blackened, greasy
knife, point first, and Gillespie stiffened, as if he thought no decent woman
should be handling such a utilitarian implement. "Get on, then, gal."

"Aye,"
Gillespie said, with a deep growl of disapproval, "And I'd speak to you
privately about that, too, Major Russell! Porcelain, mistress, from
the Indies
-"

"China,"
he murmured, and she thought his bailiff might explode.

"China,
then! Brought in special, at the Lord knows how much expense, with not so much
a stick of decent furniture in the house! So aye, you might have dishes the
like of the King's, but you've got nothing to sit down to like a civilized
woman!"

"Are you
suggesting that my husband is
profligate
, sir?" she said, bridling,
and Thankful snorted.

"Well, my
sister must be turning into her grave, then."

15

"Not exactly profligate,"
Eadulf said grimly, "but Russell! What were you
thinking
?"

He closed his
eyes, and put his head back against the rough, warm plaster of the bare little
room off the hall. Office, indeed. Little more than a cupboard, windowless and
airless, and containing no more than one large, worn, and very utilitarian Army
paychest, big enough to sit on. The lock of the thing had defeated the most
determined looters of both the King and Parliament's Armies, over a course of
almost twenty year's campaigning.

There was a
great sword-slash across the iron-bound lid, which caught on his breeches as he
shifted uncomfortably. Put there by Colonel James Wardlaw and his band of
bloody brigands when they sacked the baggage-train after the battle of
Edgehill, and it had made that paychest one of the most distinctive in the
Army. He'd have known it anywhere, and he'd grown rather attached to it. (He
had a reluctant soft spot for Wardlaw, too, especially after they'd made the
disgusting old reprobate the governor of Plymouth.)

Eadulf propped
his elbows on his knees and gave another disapproving grunt. The question about
what Russell had been thinking was not, clearly, a rhetorical one.

"Can we
afford it?" Russell said, though he knew what the answer was. He was
sitting on it.

"Aye, we
can stand it, as ye well know!" Eadulf said irritably. "But Russell!
Look
at this place - it's half a house in the middle of God-knows-where, can ye no'
wait at least till the woman's cold in her grave afore ye start thinking of
setting up housekeeping, and stuffing the house wi' trinkets and gauds for the
lassie?"

"You know
the answer to that," he said mildly, though he considered himself
reproved.

"Aye. I do.
But does she?"

"Have you
ever known me lie?"

His bailiff
snorted. "No. Well, the once, though I wasn't complaining at the time.
I've known ye evade any number of questions, mind. Well, I'll not have ye
perjure yourself, major, so you'll pardon me if I'm as straightforward as you
are yourself. She's a young woman, and a pretty one - if ye don’t mind that I've
noticed?" He didn’t wait for an answer, which was as well, because Russell
wasn't going to give him one. "I'd not have the two of ye marked for a
happy match, Russell, so I'll ask again. As a friend. Does she know ye for what
you are?"

"She knows
what I was," he said, and it was dark enough to see the whites of Eadulf's
eyes flash as he rolled them in resignation.

"Aye,
that's the sort of daft answer I thought ye'd give."

"Well,
then. I have not changed. She knew me when I was young and stupid -"

"Aye, and
she knows you now you’re
old
and stupid, Russell! Were you always a
King's intelligencer, then?"

"I always
did as my conscience bid!"

He snorted
again. "Aye, well, I never did reckon your conscience had much
sense!"

"No. No,
well, there was a time
you
were glad of it."

That was too
far. He heard the Scotsman's hurt intake of breath. "Must ye throw that in
my face, Russell? Every time I seek to check you? I am yet glad of it. I can
still call it the daft, shiftless act it was. Had ye not -"

"Had I not
claimed you as one of my company, Eadulf, you would have died in the cathedral
at Durham, with the rest of your countrymen. I do know. And had you not pulled
me clear of my horse at Dunbar, a week before it, I would have died in
Scotland, and we would not be sitting in the dark having this conversation.
For, I think, about the fiftieth time of our acquaintance. I consider us
quitted of any obligation to one another, sir. More than quitted."

"It does
not make you any the less soft-heided, major," Eadulf grumbled. He always
did.

"Surely."
He could smile to himself, in the gloomy closet, and not have Eadulf miscall
him for a dreamy romantic fool. "I always was."

"Aye. Save
in one matter." The bailiff sighed. "I'm glad you broached it,
Russell. I would talk to you of - that. Her. Things have - well. Matters are
grave. Ye'd know, of course?"

It should not
surprise him. Even from the grave, Fly-Fornication’s malign influence tried to
extend over him, then. She'd been a nasty bitch in life; had taken a shy,
sensitive, lonely little boy, after their mother's death, and tried to force
him into as frigid a pattern-card Puritan as she'd been herself.

She'd failed, of
course. Their mother had been a good woman, a decent and godly widow, but she
had also been a loving one and a joyful one. Her God was a God of warmth and
loving and comfort, and her skirts had smelt of sunlight and roses, so far as
he could remember. He had been three, four, perhaps, when she had died, and he
could barely recall how she had looked, now. Only the kindness of her voice and
the soft folds of her scented skirts, and a singing as she worked. After that,
had been darkness, and Fly's cruel dominion. He had been shy before, but under
her rule he had grown fearful and timid; unloved, and not knowing why, and
tormented by it. She had held that unloving over his head like a man baiting a
dog - promising that if he conformed, if he thought and behaved as she said the
Bible told him to, she might come to love him.
God
might love him.

It had taken him
a long time to learn that love was not a thing of conditions and bargaining. By
then there was Thomazine, and she had been a small, bright baby, and then a
bright girl, who did not care that he was scarred and uncertain of temper, but
only that he was her own. He'd never thought that brave, sturdy young woman
with her steady green-gold eyes might ever see him as more than an object of
pity.

Thomazine hadn't
pitied him, or scorned him. She'd been kicking him up the backside,
metaphorically, since she was old enough to walk, and he'd grown accustomed to
it, and he'd not have changed it for all the world. Eadulf sighed, and that
recalled him to the here and now, a little. "Russell, I don't know who
that lassie is, or where you found her, and I'll not ask. She seems like a nice
enough maid, and I wish ye both happiness. I will ask, though, for they talk of
it. How d'ye come by the money?"

"Army
pay," he said innocently. "I
am
a senior officer."

"Oh,
bollocks are ye! A retired half-pay one, sir, and well I know it - d'ye take me
for a fool together! There was no money in this estate when she - when the
mistress died here, and well ye know
that,
too. She couldn't keep a
servant in the house for more than a week, given that the old besom was living
on bread and scrat. Ye know verra well she failed to thrive under your masters
in Parliament, Russell, wi' no man to stand her corner under Cromwell. I'd not
say you put them up to it, but I know what ye are on your mettle, and I don't
say ye'd have lifted a finger to help her. This estate was on its knees, major,
and suddenly the mistress of it dies and ye turn up from nowhere throwing gold
about like there's no tomorrow? Well, truly, what d'ye
think
they’re
saying?"

"The wages
of sin is death?" he suggested, and felt, but did not see, the bailiff's
exasperated glare.

Most of the
King's intelligence work was dull, painstaking, line-by-line accounting, of the
sort that only a clerk could appreciate. Requisition lists that did not add up,
quite, or added up to more than they should. Deliveries to occasional places
where deliveries should not go, or too many names on a muster roll, or the same
names in different places. Men who should not have been where they were, or who
should not have known each other, mentioned in dispatches.

It was also
almost entirely voluntary, and that suited him well enough, for
his
name
would be appearing on no pay-lists. But Thomazine's porcelain was beautiful,
and fragile, and it had been worth every penny of the money he hadn’t paid for
it. As had been the bolt of gold-green silk, the colour of her eyes, that he'd
bought the same day. In Amsterdam, a year ago to the day almost. He remembered
seeing it packed in the great wooden chest - remembered the smell of the sea,
and the salt wind coming up off it, bringing with it the romance of tar and
hemp from the great ships rocking on the bosom of the North Sea. Also brought
with it the slight rotten tang of the Kalverstraat flesh-market, and he'd
laughed with the merchant about how he should get a discount for having to buy
his bride's wedding gifts downwind of the winter beast sales.

The King did not
pay Thankful Russell's wages, in any real sense. His Majesty did, however, make
a very real and practical contribution to fostering the foolishness of one
ageing Puritan, trying to bribe his way into the heart of a pretty young girl.
Russell passed without comment in the Low Countries, just one more plain,
stern, middle-aged discontented Protestant of unremarkable habits. A fool and
his money were soon parted. He was well-known, a contemptible dupe, to be
flattered into buying unicorn's horns and silks and gold lacquer cabinets.

Killigrew had
called him out on the cabinet, mind. It was not often that you heard that most
urbane of royal spymasters squawk in outrage – apart from anything else, Master
Killigrew’s own tastes ran more than a little to the expensive, and what he
spent on his mistresses alone would have kept Four Ashes for a twelvemonth -
but he'd looked at the bill of lading from that little gilded lacquer box and
his hand had been trembling, a little. "
How
much, Russell?"

"It was
needful," Russell said coolly, which was true. It had been needful. It had
been black, and glossy, and it had had a little, beautiful, house and trees on
the doors, and a man and a woman standing on either side of it, painted in gold
with a brush that must have been finer than an eyelash.

"Do not.
Ever
.
Pull a stunt like that again, sir."

And he had been
able to say with a comfortable degree of honesty that he wouldn't. For he was
retired, he had handed in his note of resignation as an intelligencer along
with his commission. Done his duty, for the last time, and had not met a single
one amongst the men and women he had come across in his times in Amsterdam,
that he should not have been proud to call a friend; no matter what the common
gossip was about the vile and bestial habits of the Dutch. Such was war. He
knew that. He'd been here before, twenty years ago, when brother had been set
against brother by the King's intransigence - aye, and sister against brother
by both of their intransigence, for that matter, for he knew he was no saint
when he was on his mettle.