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

by M. J. Logue

  He had been drinking. She had a cold suspicion that he had been walking, too. In the rain, and the dark, alone with his thoughts, for long enough to walk himself into sobriety -

  “But Thankful that’s silly, you’re talking about - about a few nutmegs, the world won’t end if - no one would believe that you would insult him, deliberately. You are not made so.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her face with eyes that were bloodshot, but steady. “Sweeting. I was sick of that infernal fever. I could have said anything, for aught I know.”

  “But you wouldn’t have -”

  “Thomazine - my dear, my very dear love - I am known to speak more freely than perhaps I might otherwise, in fever. You know this for truth, darling girl, for in a fit of wild talk I asked you to do a thing that - well, I should not have.”

  “I would have taken the letter,” she began, and he looked resolutely over her shoulder at the cracks in the plaster.

  “I do not refer to the letter “

  “But -oh. But Thankful, I liked it!”

  “So. Did I,” he said grimly. “Which makes me, I think, everything he said I was - a hypocrite, and a lecher, and a- “

  “And a dear and loving husband, a faithful friend, and a bloody idiot at times. He’s being silly. Look, if I - “ she took his cold hands in hers and squeezed them, “I will go round and say to this man, I wrote the letter, I have these antic fits, I thought it would be funny?”

  “I am not sure that would help. But thank you for thinking of it.”

  “You are sure it was your letter? I mean, it was the proper one, it hadn’t been mixed up with, I don’t know, a poem or a pamphlet or something?”

  “He threw it across the desk at me, love. I barely knew my own writing, such a scrawl - he believed I'd been so drunk when I wrote it that I might barely form my letters - but I do know my own seal, God help me, for it’s our rosemary branch. I wrote that letter, Zee. I don’t know why I would do such a thing but I did it.” He put his head against her shoulder and sighed. “That, and there appears to be some ludicrous fiction that I rose from my sickbed like Lazarus and spent the evening of Wednesday last haunting Wapping docks strangling the watchmen. As if I have nothing better to do with my time.”

  “You did what?”

  “Zee, I am missing a ribbon. You know that. I know that. I imagine half of London is aware that I am missing the ribbon you gave me at our wedding, for I have made some endeavours to locate it, and I know you have -" he gave a woeful sniff, "it was a gift, and you took care to make it, and I am sorry I was so useless as to lose it. They are saying that Jephcott was strangled with my ribbon, darling, and what with bloody superstitious sailors putting it around that there was a man in a cloak on the quay, as if most of London does not wear a cloak in bloody spring - Oh, damn it, Thomazine! Why must I be thought responsible for every flood, fire and famine that occurs in this bloody city? Bloody gossip: rumour and vicious tattle - I’m tired of it, Zee, I am tired of it!" And he put his head down on her shoulder and wept, horribly and despairingly, without any thought for her linen or his looks, and she held him and rocked him gently to and fro for she thought he had finally reached his breaking-point.

  "But you were here, dear," she said patiently. "I can vouch for that. You never left the house. So I can just say so, can't I?"

  He sighed, and rubbed his cheek against her shoulder, and then pushed himself off. Stood up, paced about the attic, narrowly avoided cracking his head on the pitch of the roof, and glowered at her. "If any man came out and made an allegation, tibber, then possibly, you could. But they haven't. They whisper, and Mijnheer di Cavalese, and his associates, prefer not to be associated with a man that is the subject of such low common gossip." He gave her a shaky grin that did not reassure her in the least. "Flung mud sticks, tibber. It seems my name is the subject of every vile rumour this morning - every word I have ever spoken, taken out and turned over to see if I may have meant some evil by it -"

  "But it is just words, Thankful! They cannot blame you for a thing you did not do! No one can!"

  "Yes they can, Thomazine." He ran both hands through his hair, his loose, ribbonless hair, the irony of which was not lost on her. "I make a lovely scapegoat, darling. I am not popular, because I am too bloody honest."

  "Then be honest!" she said ardently, "tell them!"

  "Tell them what? That I am answering a case that has never been put to me - oh, aye, and then they will say there's no smoke without fire, and what is my guilt that I must protest my innocence so much - Thomazine, love, I cannot defend myself against an enemy I cannot see!"

  "I am not just going to let you be accused of - it's ridiculous, Thankful, you wouldn't murder anyone, never mind go about London knocking people on the head left and right, it’s comical, you can't just -"

  "But they want to blame someone, dear. Dolling said as much, did he not? I should have known. I should have known he was trying to warn me - what they were already saying -" He closed his eyes again, and his mouth set in a straight line. "Well. We do not, God be thanked, want for money. We can go back to Four Ashes, and -"

  "And what, Thankful? Run away?"

  "No!"

  "What else would you call it? You know you did nothing, but you would rather hide away than -"

  "Than be stared at? And whispered about? Yes! Yes, tibber, I would! I loathe it! You have no idea how I loathe it - and I pray God you never will, wife, for it is a horrible, horrible feeling, that you walk into a room and everyone go silent, or look at you out of the tail of their eye - that you are the subject of every idle conjecture, every -"

  "So bad?"

  He tossed his hair out of his eyes, and he was panting with the force of his emotion, vibrating with it. "Thomazine, when I - when it became common knowledge that I was to marry - people asked, you know, they wondered in my hearing, what manner of girl might - might- choose to bed a man such as I. What might be - made amiss - in you, that you would love me: if you pitied me, or if you were one of those perverse women who came into heat at, at the thought of being bedded by a monster -"

  "Oh Russell, you are not a monster!"

  "I am, Thomazine! Marred and bloody mad, and I do not know what you love in me, and it frightens me - it scares me out of what bloody scattered wits I have left, that one day you will wake up and wonder why you have shackled yourself to this, this thing, this horrible, ruined, thing-"

  She wondered if he knew he had done it, that he had backed himself, almost imperceptibly, against the wall, and that he had turned his face aside so that the scars on his cheek stood out in stark relief in the unkind candlelight. Wondered if he forgot, too, that she had known him all her life, and that it did not matter how plain he made his scars, for she had never known him any other way, and he had always been so – always thrown down his disfigurement as a challenge, this is how I am, you may take as you find -

  "That does not make you a murderer, Thankful," she said calmly.

  He closed his eyes. "It does not, love. But it makes me afraid. I care nothing for other people's opinion of me - save yours, my tibber, and if you decided I was not worth the trouble, I - I don't know what I should do."

  "Are you not angry? That someone can say such things, and go unpunished?"

  He shook his head. "No. Not angry. Frightened. I -please, Thomazine. In most things I count myself to have sufficient courage, but not - I am not brave enough for this. I am sorry. I cannot."

  And she believed him. He was - oh, sufficient courage be damned, he was one of the bravest men she knew, he had suffered hurt and privation and fear and misery and he had done most of it as lonely as a man could ever fear to be in this life. He did not fear pain. But he feared other people, and what they might make of him. And that was a terrible thing.

  She held her hands out to him, palm up, and he looked at her warily and then took a step away from the wall. And another, until he stood in front of her, and then knelt on the bare boards to take her ha
nds.

  "Do we need money?" she said again, and he shook his head and would not meet her eye.

  "The Perse -"

  "I will not go back and hide at Four Ashes, Thankful. I won't run away. I'm not made like that. But nor, if you wish it, will I make you a public spectacle." He put his head in her lap, with a sigh. It might have been relief. It might have been because it was just past dawn and he was tired. Her fingers found the stiff knots of muscle across his shoulders, and worked at them. "But I cannot promise you that I will not speak, if I hear someone repeat that lie in my hearing."

  "What. What do you mean, that we should do?" he said, and he sounded like a little boy, frightened and hopeful and shy all at once, that he could put a problem that he could not bear into her lap so that she might take it up and share it with him.

  (That was what marriage was, you dear, foolish man. Thomazine at twenty, knew that better than Russell, at forty-two. A friend loveth at all times, but a brother is born for adversity.)

  "Carry on living," she said gently. "That is our best revenge, I think. To live - and be happy - and not to be frightened. Face them down. We can do that." And her hand slipped over his shoulder, her fingers tracing the ridges and rags of his ruined cheek. "Will you trust me that far?"

  "To the ends of the earth," he said, and she felt his shaky indrawn breath. "When - when do we start, tibber?"

  "When are we next engaged to dine, then?"

  "Tomorrow? With the Talbots - provided they do not choose to cut our acquaintance, as well."

  She ignored that. "Would you like to attend the theatre tonight, husband?"

  The look on his face was a joy. "Thomazine, I am supposed to be disgraced, I-"

  "Am no such thing. Master Dryden has written a new play, I believe. The Indian Empereur - Master Fairmantle saw it on its opening night, he says it is very edifying, and most educational."

  Which cheered him up a little.

  "Does he, indeed. And how many ladies in dubious states of undress does it contain, dear? Master Fairmantle not being known as a patron of the arts?"

  "He said it was very suitable for me," she said primly, and he raised his eyebrows.

  "Did he. Did he, now. Do you think people would be very shocked, were I to attend?"

  "Horrified, darling. Especially if you were to enjoy it. Perhaps we ought to see if we can find a rather more spectacular waistcoat for you, too?"

  "I think that might be going a little bit too far, my tibber."

  But he was smiling as he said it, no matter how faint and tremulous that smile, and she thought that possibly - just possibly - whoever it was that had thought they could make malicious sport of her man, might have underestimated him.

  And that she had promised him she would do nothing to make him a public spectacle, and she would not.

  She was perfectly capable of discretion.

  3

  FIRE

  41

  But he forgot, the next morning, and that made her cry, later, so he didn’t know. Forgot that he had been turned off, and was up at dawn, hunting about the room for clean stockings with that dear, annoying atonal humming, like a bee in a bottle. And then he stopped as if he had been slapped, and sat upright with a loose stocking hanging in his hand. She thought he was going to faint. He was, instead, very sick in the pisspot.

  He had remembered, then. And she put her arms round him, and sat on the bed with his head against her breasts. He did not want to be held, at first. He wanted to seem proud and stiff and unconcerned, and she thought had she not been awake, he would have slipped out and pretended he had gone to his business, and spent a second day drinking himself vicious and walking himself sober again.

  Twenty years ago, my darling, perhaps. But there’s two of us, now.

  “I have been thinking,” she said firmly, and kissed the top of his head.

  “Oh God, Thomazine, can you not leave well alone -”

  “No, my Apple, I cannot.”

  He groaned, and she kissed him again. “Dear. You know you didn’t murder Thomas Jephcott-”

  “Stop saying that!”

  “I know you didn’t, because I was here with you all along. So really, since we both know you are nothing of the kind as a - well, one of those, then - the easy part is telling people the truth, isn’t it?”

  “But no one has said anything, wife.” He gave her a horrible bleak smile. “To me, at any rate. We had this discussion yesterday. We can do nothing, my tibber, and that's the worst of it - we can only stand by and lead as blameless a life as possible, until they move on to the next scandal -”

  “Caesar’s wife?” she said, and felt him laugh.

  “I don’t know about Caesar's wife, but Caesar is feeling particularly hard done-to this morning.”

  “What did my father always used to say, when you served with him?”

  “A number of very unhelpful things. Which, particularly?”

  “Regroup, and come about, and re-engage the enemy in a rearguard action,” she said primly, and he gave a bark of startled laughter.

  “Doubtless useful, but -”

  “Carry the war into the enemy’s camp, o my beloved. And take them up the arse.”

  And that did make him laugh, properly, and then he gently disengaged himself from her and lay back in the rumpled blankets with his arm over his eyes and said he didn’t even know who the bloody enemy was. (And that was swearing, from Russell.)

  But that didn’t matter, not really, because they had the wonderful, gossipy, unstoppable force of scandal-broth that was Charles Fairmantle in their armoury, on his perpetual busy quest to find a lovely scurrilous new bone to take to his master Wilmot, in the hope that that gang of reprobates would pat him on the head and call him a good boy. She said as much to Russell.

  “Thomazine, what have you got in mind?” he said suspiciously, and she laughed and smoothed his hair into a tail between his shoulders.

  “If the world wants scandal, Apple, scandal we shall give them.”

  “But -”

  “But, my sweet, nothing. It is a scandal, that people can say such horrible things about you and go unpunished. You are innocent, and let us prove it. And shout it from the bloody rooftops, Russell. Get the King himself to own it, if we have to. Let us make your poor injured innocence the talk of the town, instead.”

  He swung his head and looked at her, saying nothing. There was a little, a very little, colour back in his lips and his cheeks, though, and his eyes were not so blank.

  “You don’t mind,” he said, sounding as if he did not quite believe it. “This is an adventure to you, isn’t it? If I was spat on by every man at court, it would trouble you not at all.”

  “If every man at court is stupid enough to believe you capable of a thing you plainly did not do, love, based on the evidence of you not having your nose wedged up His Majesty’s bum, then really! The opinion of stupid people is of no importance to me.”

  “But it's twice now,” he said. (He had always been stupidly honest. Always. Even when it did him no favours. What a splendidly awful murderer he would make, bless him.) “They said - at Four Ashes - there was the same rumour there, too, and it has followed me here. Perhaps it’s me, tibber. Perhaps I am cursed. Perhaps -”

  “And perhaps, Thankful, the same person - people - is behind both rumours here, have you thought of that? I mean, you did say – I am sorry, love, you did - you said yourself you made a lovely scapegoat, for you would not dignify gossip with a reply. How many people here knew of your sister's death? How did you hear of it, if you had not seen her in years?”

  “Chas Fairmantle told me, in the middle of a crowded room,” he said gloomily. “I was so surprised I bit through my wine glass, bled all over His Majesty’s carpet, and bloody Fairmantle must have apologised to every footman in Whitehall for being the cause of it. That man is a bloody fool, he really is. He has no more wit than one of the King’s spaniels. He just opens his mouth and out it comes - Thomazine, what have you got
in mind?”

  “So pretty much everyone at court knew - but how many of them knew her?”

  “None, I thank God! She was not a woman who would stoop to mixing with degenerates like the present crop -”

  "Then people could say anything they liked about her, lamb, and no one would have known any different. There would be none to say - this could not have happened, or, she would not have done such a thing. People always talk, don't they?"

  "They have no right to -!"

  "No. But they do. And people make up what they don't know. And you - being gorgeous and mysterious and, oh, all those things - you're interesting."

  "I am no such thing, tibber! I am a plain man who likes his supper and his bed and his wife - " she growled at him, and he amended, hastily, "in reverse order. I am not interesting! In any capacity!"

  "Poor Apple," she said, and kissed the top of his head again. "You're interesting to me, sweet."

  "You're enjoying this," he muttered darkly, and she squeezed him gently about the middle.

  "I have a brain in my head, husband. Which I have not been permitted to use this three months and more, in case it scares the horses. Well. It seems to me, o best beloved of men, that you make a lovely subject for gossip because unlike some people, it is impossible to get you to either confirm or deny a rumour. And if one was in the market for scandal, what better as the subject for your tattle than a few juicy unsolved murders?”

  “Couldn’t I just be a plain regicide and be done with it?” he said in a rather forlorn little voice.

  “Someone evidently thinks not, sweet. Oh well. A friend loveth at all times -"

  "And a wife is born for adversity," he said wryly. "So you keep telling me."

  42

  It was not, precisely, that she didn't take him seriously.

  Just that he could be - well, he did have a tendency to take offence, to be overly sensitive to an ill-chosen word, to brood. Which was what came of being shy of people, she supposed: you didn’t always know what they meant. And that was all right, because Thomazine was not prone to saying or doing that which she did not mean, and he was happy with that, for if she said a thing was so, she intended it as it sounded.