by M. J. Logue
George Downing was a bloody turncoat regicide - not that he had turned his coat by turning King's man after the wars: God knows there were enough of them who had had the sense to see which way the wind was blowing after the Commonwealth and swear a pragmatic allegiance to His Majesty, but Downing had betrayed his old Parliament comrades, sold them to a bloody traitor's death for a mess of pottage, and Russell – who had been one of those old Parliament comrades in arms - rusted that man like he trusted the Devil. Not much moved George Downing but profit and the hope of more profit, and if he wanted war, there was gold at the bottom of it.
He sighed, and eyed the muddy Thames, where it slapped against the side of the ship, with resignation.
Wondered when Thomazine was going to finish her guided tour, for he wanted to sit down, rather badly. Wondered if she would notice if he started eating the wedge of cheese they'd bought in Leadenhall market - it seemed about a hundred years ago now, and it had only been this morning. When the bread had been still hot from the oven. he thought mournfully, and prodded a finger into the satchel he had slung over his shoulder, to see if it might still be a little bit warm. Sausage, too. Her back was turned to him, Dolling pointing something out to her towards Shadwell Stair. (Hanged pirates, probably.)
He eyed the rats-nest of rigging consideringly, hooked his elbows through it, hooked a foot in the bottom, and leaned experimentally into the rope cobweb.
Once you got used to the swaying, like a fly in a web, it was remarkably comfortable, and he took a thoughtful bite of sausage and closed his eyes and turned his face into the fetid breeze with a contented sigh. There was precious little came between Thankful Russell and his meals. Or his sleep, come to think of it. He probably could, if she kept up her questions -
"What are you doing?"
Her voice broke into his drowsy awareness, and he didn't open his eyes, but cocked an eyebrow at her.
"Sleeping, tibber. I'm a poor frail invalid, remember?"
"He has been abed with an old fever for the last week. This is his first day out of bed," she said - Dolling, presumably, or the ship's carpenter, or the ship's cat: she wasn't particular who she chatted to.
He opened one eye and tried to look reproving, which was difficult when you were hanging like a spider in a web four inches above the deck.
"Missed him, then, when the old gal came in. We said it wasn't like you to be missing when she was due, major. Wondered where you was, the other night. Some of the lads said they reckoned they'd seen you come down for a look at her the night Jephcott copped it - just like you done today, just coming down for a poke about the old lady, thought you might have seen something. Well. Can't have been you, then, if you was ill, can it? But they’d have swore to it if was you, for you’re a hard man to mistake –“
He must have bridled, for it still touched him on the quick when people remarked his scars, for Dolling shook his head, realising he had given offence. “No, major, not the look of him, no more than that he was of a size o’ you, with pale hair, and that he took pains to be sure that his face was hard to mark. Which is, you’ll own, a trick you have?”
“Had,” Thomazine said firmly at his elbow. “I like to look on my husband’s face. But it couldn’t have been you, dear, for you were in bed all week, and I was with you all the time. Wasn’t I?”
He said nothing. But he could feel her eyes on him.
39
"So, husband."
She was dismembering a pie in the shadows of a bakehouse - he knew this one, though she didn't, and she was in for a treat with their pies - though by the mutinous look on her face he was in for a stormy time of it.
"So?"
"Don't change the subject." He hadn't, but her cheeks had a lovely soft flush to them that he knew of old. Thomazine with her battle-colours flying. "Trade."
"Trade?"
"You are engaged in trade with the East India Company, sir. Master Dolling says it."
"True."
"Which?"
All right, she wasn't in a teasing humour any more, and he decided to retreat to firmer ground. "Both," he said, and her mouth fell open slightly, " - but, tibber -"
"Don't you 'but, tibber' me, you bloody - pirate!"
"Hey! I am engaged in perfectly legal trading, madam!"
"Oh, are you? Are you, indeed? Free trading, with a nation with whom we are at war -"
He could think of no other way of doing it without attracting attention, so he leaned abruptly across the table and kissed her, hard. Her eyes blazed at him, but she kissed him back, and some sarcastic whelp gave them a ribald cheer. "Mind your tongue," he said against her mouth. "That is not common knowledge."
And sat down, taking a deep breath.
“If you are asking did I send you on an errand the other night so that I might spring from my sickbed, throttle poor Jephcott, and set fire to the English East Indiamen to promote my own enterprise – er, no, Thomazine, I did not.”
She flushed, that creamy redhead’s complexion betraying her. “I didn’t say –“
“No, tibber, I know, and nor did you believe it –“
“Really,” she amended, because honesty was one of her besetting sins as much as it was his. “I wondered if –“
“And now you know. I did not, Zee. Could not, and did not. Well. We are at war, so much you know: every man in London sees the Dutch under the beds and in the closets –“ he shook his head, grimacing. “That wretch Downing. He would give us war, and men in this country are hot for it. So. War we shall have."
"But -"
"But whose interests - other than my lord Downing's, of course - would be served by war? Not the King's. Not the nation's. And the King knows it, sweet. He is not his father. He is not bloody stupid. On the one hand, Downing pushes for it, and men of like temper whip the people up to want it - greedy for gold, as ever. The King is hot for the gold - and to make sure that none of my old comrades in Europe come home to start stirring up any further republican trouble. We ageing rebels being the very devil for insurrection. On the other hand, he can't afford a war. And he surely cannot afford to risk losing what trade routes he has, if the Dutch start to fire on our spice fleet." He thought about that. "Again. They've tried that already, and we didn't like it, d'you remember? After Smyrna."
"But the Dutch do awful things to our men -"
"Oh, do they hell, Thomazine! I have been engaged in talks with Mijnheer di Cavalese these six weeks and more and not once as he tried to eat me, convert me to Papistry, or torture me. I have been trading with the Dutch in my small way for - what, three years? - I still have all my own fingers and toes and my head is still on my shoulders. You read too many pamphlets, gal!"
"But -"
"Tibber, in Amsterdam, I used to lodge with a very nice family called Brouwer. They live up by the Kalverstraat, the flesh-market. You'd like Mevrouw Brouwer. She feeds me. Very respectable people, very devout. They sent one of those horrible blue and white jars that's neither use nor ornament, for our wedding. I think you took it out of one of those chests at Four Ashes and asked me what it was for, and I didn't know? Utterly pointless piece of pottery, anyway. But more expensive than they could rightly afford, and they bought it for me - for us - because they were happy that I was to marry a woman I loved. Does that sound like the sort of person who eats babies, Zee? Really? Any more than I was, when they said it of me? Or your father?"
One of the things he loved very much about Thomazine was her fairness. He saw the thoughts flit across her face, like the wind over the river, all the awful things they'd said about profane, drunken Dutchmen, torturing Englishmen wherever they could capture them.
All the awful things they'd said about crop-headed Roundheads, all the time she'd been growing up: all the atrocities her father's men had apparently committed, in the late wars, everything just shy of the sack of Magdeburg.
Some truth in them. There was always a grain of truth in such. But not enough for hatred. Injustice had always roused him worse tha
n anything else, and if she had not been fair he should not have loved her. Her eyes dropped, and then she leaned across the table and took his hand.
"Sorry," she said, and he gave her a wry smile.
"So the respective governments of England and the United Provinces get their war, and all the people cry huzzah, and all the naval officers rub their hands in glee at the prospect of making their names in glorious battle. And all the merchants who would rather not have a very disruptive and very expensive war, thank you, get on with the business of talking to each other to ensure that we - um, they - can protect their interests, and any warfare that takes place is going to take place somewhere else. We enjoyed a period of co-operation between England and the Low Countries in Indonesia until Amboyna, so it is possible."
"And the King knows you are doing this?"
He could not help it. He laughed, and then stopped himself quickly, for it wasn't kind, but - "Oh, yes, best-beloved. He knows. He pays me to do it, darling."
40
Thomazine stirred, and squirmed blissfully against the bolster, and stretched her toes out to brush against her husband’s foot.
The sheets were cold, and she sat upright with a muttered word she should not have known.
His clothes were not folded neatly on the press at the foot of the bed. (They had not been last night, either, Thomazine Russell, and you would be well advised to search for that button before it is lost altogether.)
Her hair was still half pinned-up on one side, the other half falling down her back in riotous tangle. There was a tender patch just under her jaw that she suspected, with some shame, might be a kiss-mark, and another high up on her thigh.
He was - talkative, that was what he was, in his passion, now that he was all but mended, and she had a suspicion that most of Aldgate now knew where and just how hard he liked to be kissed. She barely knew how she would hold her head up in the streets -
he had begged her, that dear, prim, formal man of hers had been twitching and mewing like a new kitten begging her - no, not begging, not then, he had been demanding that she finish what she had started -
He had done that. Been that. She had made as free with his body as if it had been her own - freer, for the things she had done to him, in the long, ardent hours before dawn, had been things that she could not have conceived of, by herself. You might expect that a man who had lain panting in his wife’s arms, covering her face with kisses, telling her of all the ways that he loved her -
Well, you might expect that the bloody man would have the grace to remain in her bed until first light.
And he had not. He had not been here for some while, by the coldness of the sheets. She tightened her lips, and dressed, and went downstairs to the Widow Bartholomew.
Who was just as tight-lipped, but not for the reasons that Thomazine had suspected. It seemed the day was far advanced. Ten of the clock, by the chime of St Gabriel’s, and the Major gone since before daylight, when a messenger had come for him.
- had the bloody man not slept at all, she thought irritably, picking at the plain brown bread and bacon the widow had set before her. He was supposed to be recovering, damn him -
So ill that he did not reappear at noon. Nor by the time the bells at St Gabriel's rang for evensong, and nor was he at home when they returned from evening prayers. The Bartholomew-baby was fretful, wanting to be attended to, and the widow was anxious, flitting like a bat between cooking-fire and table, trying to oversee a supper for the wrong number of people.
Her food was good, Thomazine must acknowledge that. Although in London, that implied a degree of marketing competency, and not, necessarily, housewifely skills.
She hefted the whimpering child into her lap - a solid little boy, who wriggled, but whose warm weight was oddly homelike and reassuring. It was raining again as the sun set, one of those bitter spring squalls that seemed to blow up out of nowhere, and she had been sitting downstairs in the kitchen playing with the Bartholomew-baby since her return from church and pretending that her husband’s absence was perfectly normal and she had known about it for days.
Only so long you could keep that pretence up, with Jane Bartholomew - her husband had been a sea captain and not always on the side of angels, Zee, it is a wonder she has not walked hollows in those kitchen flagstones, all the nights she must have sat up waiting for news of her man.
And Thomazine did not care that Jane Bartholomew should know, that there was a serpent in the garden of Eden. A very little one - a small, thin, very pale green worm, and one of no account. But. The shutters were shut, and the bed was warmed, and grace was said, and supper was eaten, and still he did not come.
She wondered how she would know, if some harm had befallen him. If they would bring him here, or carry him to some other place - to Four Ashes, to be buried -
How she would manage, and how she would go on. She went to bed. He did not come. She undressed, and slipped between the warm sheets, and he did not come. And she had just decided on finding his brace of travelling-pistols somewhere in the bottom of the clothes press and going in search of his poor broken body, when she heard a noise.
So, clearly, did the widow, who came scampering out of her room on the landing below with a glint of martial zeal in her eye and the poker in her hand.
But it was only, finally, Russell, tripped over his own feet at the worn bend in the stairs, and sprawling headlong and foolish over the attic threshold. He propped himself on his elbows and peered up at her where she stood in the doorway and by the light of the banked kitchen fire downstairs it was possible to observe that the errant husband had one eye swollen almost shut and the evidence of a badly stifled bloody nose. “Have you been set upon?” Thomazine said warily, and he panted at her with his mouth open, blowing bloody bubbles through his nose. “Thankful -”
She was concerned, she was afraid, she was - suddenly sniffing his breath, she was furious. “Get in here, sir. All is well, Mistress Bartholomew, no cause for alarm, my husband -” and she had her fingers biting into the flesh just above the bones if his elbow as she hoisted him to his feet, “is as drunk as fiddler’s bitch, sir, what d’you mean by it?”
That last was not intended for the widow’s ears, and so once the door was closed she gave him every single choice epithet a decent upbringing amongst soldiers had taught her, and a few more she had acquired more recently. “I have been worried sick!” she finished, “while you - look at the state of you, Russell, I don’t imagine we will ever get the stains out of that waistcoat - drinking and brawling, sir, I thought you had grown past that foolishness twenty years ago!”
He sat on the bed and blinked at her earnestly, which would have been a considerably more appealing sight without the bloodstains. “Tibber,” he said. “You really cross with me, darling girl?”
“I am bloody pig-livid, Thankful!”
“Oh thank God,” he said, and his teeth chattered together just once. And she remembered that sound, that bone-rattle, because it was how he had sounded when she first knew him, when she was a little girl and he had first been so horribly hurt. He had not wanted to weep in front of anyone who might pity him, even then, and she remembered that noise. Like skeletons dancing, she thought, and she had hated it, because when he tried to set his teeth together so it was because he was hurting and lonely and uncomforted. And she could not bear it when she was a child, and she was a woman grown and she still could not bear it. And she dropped to her knees, regardless of what the widow might think of the thump in her chambers beneath, and she flung her arms round him, cold and wet and bloody as he was, and she left him burrow his face into her clean shoulder and cry, and rubbed his back - oh, his poor back, that had been so smoothly muscled a month ago and was now as bony and stiff as any stray dog’s -
“I think you need to tell me all,” she said firmly, and he raised his head and gave her a shaky smile.
“You still love me? You will still love me?”
“Because you have been out on the spree with
-” she sniffed again, delicately, “Master Pepys, I surmise, for he has less expensive tastes in liquor than some? Always, Thankful.”
He closed his eyes, and his hand closed on the soft flesh of her hip, hard enough to hurt. “Not. Sam,” he said, and his teeth chattered again, but this time her free hand found his. Held it. Tight. There are two of us now. “Not my friend. He - sorry. But he cannot remain my friend. When. I am so -” Another deep shaky breath, but he straightened up. “Thomazine, I am -am removed from my duties with the Dutch negotiations. The letter? that you took to Mijnheer di Cavalese?”
“It arrived?” - she had almost forgotten that letter, after so much had happened, and he had not failed her after all.
“It was received. Dear God, tibber, I must have been sicker than ever I imagine, to write such - He did not take it kindly.”
“But why -?”
“He did not take kindly to my apparent suggestion that we arrange reciprocal trade in butter, cheese and whores.”
She could not help it. She laughed. “You said such a thing? Oh, hardly! Any man who knew you -”
“Would know that I am the kind of duplicitous filth who could murder his own sister, debauch an innocent young woman, and spend what time he has left over from murder and rapine in drinking with Rochester and his cronies. Which, in addition to making me deeply morally suspect, implies that I am of His Majesty’s inner circle. Which means, my tibber, that any right-thinking Dutch trader would - not unreasonably - not consider me a fit and proper person to enter into any negotiation with, while our two countries are at war.”