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

by M. J. Logue

  “Why should he feel any obligation to you, then?”

  “My husband died and left me drowning in duns, madam. This is common knowledge. Ask -” her spaniel’s eyes flicked to Fairmantle, braying on the opposite side of the table. “He hears all, doesn’t he? Hears all, tells all, and knows nothing. I am much attached to His Majesty. He never has any money, either, the poor darling, or he would have helped, I’m sure. No, behold poor Astraea, running distracted from the debt-collectors with little to commend her but one set of glass pearls, one silk gown, much turned, and her wits. Enter one slightly sardonic Caliban, a little ragged at the edges.”

  “Oh, please don’t call him Caliban!” Thomasine begged impulsively. “My lord Wilmot began it. He hates it. He is not a monster, he -”

  “Began it himself, mistress,” Mistress Behn said gently. “Not honour’d with a human shape- the man-beast in The Tempest, d’you see? He signed himself so, when he made his reports. ‘Tis a humour, no more. He had always a perverse humour, my poor Crophead, and was ever much misunderstood.”

  “You mean you and he were spies, together?”

  “Did I say so?”

  “I did,” Thomazine said. “He has told me as much already.”

  “Well, love makes fools of us all, doesn’t it?”

  To which Thomazine, sitting in an overstuffed room in a gown that was too tight in the breast, with tortuous loops of her hair pinned to her skull with great jewelled pins and full to miserable overflowing with fancy cream sauce, could only agree.

  Mistress Behn smiled at her, and took the poet Nat’s inky white fingers in her own. “I believe my lord Talbot needs to piss,” she said sweetly. “We are, remember, Fortune’s whores. Observe the trollops of Cheapside. The tuppenny strumpets display their wares like a market stall,” she gave her hostess a charming smile up the table, “those who would rise are more audacious. Ask Nelly Gwynne. She’s made her way in the world with little more than wit.”

  “You are suggesting that I become an actress?”

  “She’s suggesting that you move up the table and sit in Talbot's chair while he’s not in it,” Nat said mildly. “Though, you know, if you’ve a mind to go on stage, Aphra is the lady to write it -”

  “Hush, Nathaniel. Women playwrights? Shocking!”

  And leaving them giggling at some shared private joke, Thomazine made her way up the table. And then the rich sauce made its way up her throat, and with one piteous look at the back of her husband’s head, she fled.

  43

  Russell was saying as little as ever, but although he did not seem to have noticed his wife's dignified dash for the door, Chas would have laid good odds that he had.

  Kettering was squawking at him, jiggling like a badly-set custard in his seat with excitement. Odd thing, that. Must be quite a useful trick, having that carefully expressionless look on your face. Meant you didn't look as if you minded when excitable pups like Kettering were four inches from the end of your nose and spraying you with part-masticated supper and spittle.

  Fairmantle put his hand on Russell's shoulder - see, you puppy, I know this man, I am his intimate - and leaned down to whisper, "I believe Thomazine is indisposed, sir. You may wish to -"

  And the major turned his head and stared at him with those glittering mad eyes, and said, very clearly, "Mistress Russell, my lord. I would only choose that her friends use her given name."

  Kettering snickered, and Russell slid out from under Fairmantle's hand to stalk out of the room after his wife.

  "Well, there's you told, sir!"

  "Jealous," Fairmantle said stiffly, "jealous as a cat, poor soul. After all -"

  "D'ye say?" Kettering said, round-eyed.

  But he wasn't talking to Fairmantle. He was talking to the Earl of Rochester's whore, who had leaned across to whisper something in his ear. (Something about Fairmantle? No: she wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the door, and whispering behind her fan, as if the thing, whatever it was, was a thing of excitement.)

  He went back to his seat, and sat down, pasting the smile to his face.

  "Again, Chas?"

  He stiffened. Not often the Duke of Buckingham noticed him, and he turned, eager, wanting to say something memorable, intelligent. Something witty, for once, that would -

  "My dear man," Villiers said, smiling, and Fairmantle preened, "you are like a little dog, sir. The harder we kick you the more you whine for attention."

  He rummaged amongst the debris of supper on the table, till he found a chicken wing. A foul object, greasy with sauce and ragged with gnawed flesh.

  "Here we are, Chas," he called, and heads began to turn on the far side of the table, "now, sir - fetch!"

  44

  She did not feel so ill, lying down.

  Lady Talbot's maid was very kind: a plump, motherly woman who reminded Thomazine of her own mother, and who did not show any revulsion at all at her heaving up most of her supper into one of Her Ladyship's bowls.

  She was a little bit cross at the tight-laced stays.

  "Well, young lady?" she said, and she had a wet cloth in her hand which felt like heaven as she wiped Thomazine's mouth with it. "How long d'you mean to go on with this?"

  "Until I find out what I need to know," she said wanly, and the maid - whose name was allegedly Hortense, and who had dropped her genteel French accent almost as soon as Thomazine had collapsed in a sad puddle of emerald silk on the banquette - looked at her blankly.

  "D'you not know, then, girl? How many might it have been?"

  "How on earth would I know?"

  "Well, I assume you were there at the time, mistress! Unless -" her eyes flickered, "you weren't - I mean - has he promised you marriage, dear? Because most of them are already married, and not like to put their wives aside for such as you -"

  "I'm already married myself." Which made her feel a little bit happier, "the tall gentleman with the fair hair, in black? Is my husband."

  Hortense patted her hand comfortably. "Well, I'm sure it will all work out, then. Though not John Wilmot's, I hope, young lady - not that it's any of my business, but he's not known for his kindness to his girls when he tires of them, and I'd not look to him for help -"

  "Why on earth would the Earl of Rochester help me? Unless he happens to know something useful -" she struggled upright, and gave a sigh of relief as the stiff bones of her unlaced stays parted over her tender belly. "I imagine it would be the first time in his life he did!"

  She wondered if it would be a dreadful thing to take her shoes off, too. Hortense was staring at her. It seemed she grew stupid, as well as queasy. "I think we may be at a misunderstanding," Thomazine said with dignity. "This is my husband's child. Not the Earl of Rochester's. You didn't really think I would - oh, please!"

  "You wouldn't be the first, madam."

  "I'm sure. London draws fools faster than a turd draws flies."

  The Frenchwoman's lips twitched. "Surely. Well. That is some relief, mistress, for if your husband is the fair gentleman, he'd not own a son that favoured my lord Wilmot, who's as black as a raven. What on earth possessed you, then? D'you mean to do that child a mischief, coming out so tight-laced? That babe needs room to grow! For you're no slip of a thing, if you'll pardon my free speaking, and your man's a fair height - does he know?"

  "Don't you dare tell him!"

  "Is he daft altogether that he hasn't noticed?"

  "He hasn't said," she corrected gently. "I think he - he hopes. But I would rather he did not know until he - until we - until I know."

  "Don't tell my lady," Hortense said, and her eyes darted suddenly sideways, as if the willow-light, romantic figure of Lady Talbot might suddenly drift through the wall. "She's slipped two before now."

  "Oh, I am so sorry -"

  "One was her husband's, and she didn't want to lose her place with Buckingham. And t'other was Buckingham's, and she didn't want His Lordship to know. She doesn't care for children, her ladyship. Not if they might disadvantage her.
"

  "What has that to do with me and my husband?"

  "She won't like it," Hortense said firmly - what was the woman's real name, she wondered, she could not keep thinking of her as a fake Frenchwoman - and Thomazine still did not understand, "not one bit she won't like it. You do not want to put yourself out of favour with Her Ladyship, madam. If you draw the attention she’s marked for herself, she will not care for it. She is a jealous lady, and hot-tempered."

  "Is she known, then, for such malice?"

  Wondering what she might have done to Lady Talbot, perhaps what Thankful had done to her - slept with her (she didn't like that thought), not slept with her, not been sufficiently in awe of her - Thomazine didn't think she'd set eyes on the woman before this week to have deserved such malevolence.

  Hortense's face stilled, and she shook her head. "I could not comment, mam'selle," she said, in her best careful Parisian accents. "I will leave you to rest, if you please. To be careful, of the child, you see?"

  And she bustled out with the bowl and its horrid contents, leaving Thomazine in peace.

  The room smelt of rosewater, and a little of spice - see, another tiny, tenuous link, that could mean something and could mean nothing - and it was dark and here, in the little-used apartments at the back of the house, she could not hear the laughter and the voices from downstairs. Might as well be on the moon, for her remoteness. And Thomazine felt very lonely, and she wanted, very badly, to be at home, in her mother's house, being petted and made a fuss of. One hot tear slipped from the corner of her eye and burned its way down onto Lady Talbot's damask upholstery.

  She might have slept. And she might not. But she heard the door open.

  "Tibber?" he whispered, "you all right?"

  She sat up, and did not care that her bodice fell about her in stiff disarray, or that her stays were all but unlaced. Sat up and put her arms out to him like a child wanting to be picked up, and he came and held her, with a great sigh.

  "That lady gave me a - garment - for you to borrow," he said, and rocked her gently against his shoulder. "She said she forbade you to lace your stays so tightly as previously as you had, for the sake of what reason you knew. Are you feeling better?"

  "The better for your being with me."

  He smelt of smoke, and sweat, and stale food-smells, but under that he smelt of Russell, and home, and she buried her face in the ribbed silk over his warm shoulder, and felt the solid curve of muscle, and the bone beneath it. “Should we return to supper, then?” she said against his arm.

  “Unless you would rather we made an early night of it, tibber? We don’t have to – we are not obliged to be polite – we could go home, we could – you could read to me, and I could comb your hair out, like we were used to, before?”

  Oh, but she wanted to. Wanted to go to their plain, warm lodgings, where she could take her shoes off and sit with her feet in his lap and he could rub her aching feet, and they could talk of what had been, and what might yet be, God willing.

  And then there was Lady Talbot, whose malevolence might not extend to ruining a man’s reputation for the joy of it, but who might take pleasure in a woman’s sickness, and exult in having seen a rival off. “I would rather go back in,” she said. “I was enjoying the company, you see.” He looked so forlorn, and at the same time so indignant, as if she’d just slapped him. “Oh, lamb, it’s not that, it’s just – Lady Talbot –“

  “You would rather spend time with Lady Talbot than with me?”

  And there were times when it was tempting to slap him for his stupidity. “No! But I’ll not have her think –“

  He stood up, and his mouth had taken on that prim, twisted look, as if he had bitten into something not ripe. “I see. I see. Well. I shall keep you no further, Thomazine, if you prefer to keep the company of that – that –“

  She was not a plaster saint, and he was a pain in the backside. She stood up as well. Her bodice was not closed, and her stays were loose, and once he would have looked down at her undress and smiled and probably kissed her, or at the very least he would have put his arms round her. Tonight he held up Lady Talbot’s elegant fur-lined velvet jacket and thrust her arms into it as if she were still a child –

  I am not a child, Thankful, I am a grown woman, and your wife –

  Hooked it closed and tugged it straight with the cool efficiency of a man who has had a lot of practice. And Thomazine had never seen one of these jackets before –

  “Most women wear them in the Low Countries,” he said absently, and she looked up into his face, startled – when had he grown so experienced in the matter of Dutchwomen’s dress? – but he didn’t look back. Not once. His eyes were fixed on the closing of her jacket. “As undress,” he added, sounding quite critical about it. “Not in a public place.”

  “Well, if I had not your –“

  And she stopped herself. Because it was not a thing to share like this, in anger, and she would not use their unborn child as a weapon. (She was in truth a grown woman, it seemed. She learned a little of a woman’s dignity, and not a child’s impulsivity.) “Temper,” she finished, which did not make sense, but was a little needle. “May we return to supper?” she said stiffly, and held out her arm, and he nodded equally stiffly, and took it.

  45

  No one laughed, and no one was surprised to see them return, only perhaps there was a little ripple of what you might call astonishment, if you were sensitive to such things. She returned to her place at the foot of the table, with the groundlings, and he resumed his, where he could be baited like a bear, and he knew it. But he could see her from here, and that steadied him a little, though if he kept his head down she would not know he was looking.

  Even in that dreadful ill-fitted jacket she was radiant, though the pale amber colour did not flatter her, much. (And, he suspected, Lady Talbot knew it. It had not been a charitable attempt to make Thomazine comfortable. It had been meant to make her look pallid and dowdy. It had failed. She looked pale and dishevelled - he gave Her Ladyship a false smile, across the table - but seating her next to Mistress Behn had been a blessing, for he had never known that lady other than a heartening influence and a lift to the spirits.)

  He heard Thomazine's giggle again - his foolish, doting ear was tuned to both her laughter and her tears, over twenty years of loving, in one way or another.

  He hoped Aphra was not filling her head with total fabrication. She meant well, and there was a brain in that ringletted head that many of the men around this table would have wondered at, but she had a history of - well, romanticising her friends. But she had had a time of it, with the late Master Behn. He had not been kind, always: certainly not kind enough to leave her in a position of independence, and she had been in a sorry way when Russell had first known her. He had not rescued her, he had not been her protector, he had certainly never done any more than lend her money for rent and food in Antwerp. She liked to imply that he had, though. She reckoned people understood her relationship with the world, if they thought she was a whore.

  "We're all whores, chick."

  - It was her catchphrase. They laughed at her for it - thought it was a woman of the world's world-weary wit. It wasn't. She was a funny lass, Mistress never-quite-legally-Behn. She was possibly the most loving, generous spirit he had ever met, with the two possible exceptions of his wife and his mother-in-law. One day it was always going to be wine and roses with Aphra. But it was always going to be tomorrow, and she lurched from crisis to crisis cheerfully living on her wits till then. Because like St Martin, what she had, she had a habit of giving away.

  She had never, ever, in the - what? ten years? - he had known her, sold her body. A lot of people called her a whore. (A lot of people were wrong, too.) But she had sold her wits, a good deal. That was what she meant. They all did that, to a greater or lesser degree: sold our gifts to people who did not deserve them, in order to live.

  She was, though, a bugger for trying to make things nicer for her friends. And t
hat was not always helpful. There were a number of people in Antwerp who were under the impression that plain Thankful-For-His-Deliverance Russell was a noble scion of the House of Stuart, and that he had been of the King's household when he'd come by his scar at Edgehill. She had meant well, bless her. She had thought he wanted for society, and she meant that he should have none but the best.

  He had a dark suspicion that going by the laughter, she was telling Thomazine some similar faddle about exactly what he had been doing in the Low Countries: thinking, no doubt, that a pretty, gay young woman should rather believe in her husband as a tragic figure of romance than a rather plain information-gathering merchant. Which he had been. Which he had told Thomazine he had been.

  And that Thomazine, because she was her plain-dealing father's daughter, would not see it as a rosy-tinted fiction, but think that he had lied to her.

  Oh, bloody hell, Aphra, can you not turn your imagination to something more useful than making up exciting stories about your friends?

  "How soon one whore knows another," he heard Talbot sneer, just on the edge of his hearing. "Birds of a feather, eh?"

  Kettering, the nasty little bastard, passed some remark about plucking. He saw Talbot look his way. He saw it. He knew he was being baited. "The little red wench has been plucked by just about every man in the 'Gang, don't you know? Plays the whore for Fairmantle, every man knows it -"

  "I grow tired of that word," Russell said, very clearly, and all of a sudden it was very quiet about that table.

  "I understand you are not comfortable with the truth in any of its guises.... Mijnheer Russell."

  Someone giggled.

  He looked at Talbot, and continued to look at Talbot, till His Lordship flushed and looked away.

  Charles Sedley smirked. "Care to pass the butter, sir?"