by M. J. Logue
He said nothing. Precisely nothing. He could feel his wife's eyes on him, and he did not dare look at her, because he suspected she would be frightened - aye, and she would be hurt too, to think what they made of her honour, in the name of laughter. (Take offence, sir? Then you have no sense of humour, do you?)
He picked up his delicate wine glass, twirling the twisted stem between his fingers. Between a rock and a hard place.
Then he shrugged, and threw the contents in Talbot's face. "You. Outside. Choose your seconds."
46
Hell broke loose.
Talbot reared up, dripping and stuttering, with his bitch-wife squawking in outrage at the side of him, and Russell suggested that she might care to hold her scold's tongue also, lest she join her benighted husband on the point of his sword.
"Are you going to let a - a murderer talk to me like that, Francis?" she yelped, and the murderer swung his head and grinned at her - not pretty, he could feel it, the muscle going taut on the scarred side so that all his teeth showed.
"Your husband is too much of a coward to allow else. My lady. And on the matter of whores, my lord, you are not sufficient of a man for Lady Talbot, either, I understand. Or else why should she choose to bed Buckingham - who's not much of a man, either?" He pushed his chair back, and there was part of him that wished Thomazine did not see this; and there was a part of him that thought it was about time she saw what they truly said about her - about both of them.
Like a pack of apes, he thought bitterly, and tossed his head. "Anyone else wish to claim to have slept with my lady Talbot, or are we keeping tally at two, so far? I understood her to have been like Newmarket races - everyone's been there?"
"Oh, I have," Sedley said cheerfully. "There's an echo, you know. Or maybe that was her husband, got lost?"
"You dare!" Talbot screamed. "You dare to -"
"Of course he bloody dares, Talbot, you just called his wife a whore. Which is, if you ask me, the kettle calling the pot black, for I'm not sure your lady's not even taken Strephon to her bed," the Earl of Rochester said from the head of the table. Threw a grape, with deadly accuracy, at Russell. Who caught it, unsmiling.
"Don't poke Caliban, Francis," the Earl said, and raised his eyebrows. "He don't like it."
"I demand satisfaction!"
"Good for you. I suggest Mistress Abrams, in Covent Garden. Very reasonable rates, clean girls, I'm sure they won't mind your little habits, Francis." And then he smiled at Lady Talbot, ever so sweetly. "There you go, madam, no need to defend something that's as fictional as one of Master Dryden's plays."
Her face blanched, just her slightly bulging grape-green eyes turning in his direction, shiny with loathing.
"Try it," Rochester said pleasantly, and the ape leapt into his lap at the sound of its name, and he fed it another grape. "Just try it, madam, and I will see your name ruined. Imagine. No parties. No games. No intrigue. You might be forced to rusticate, my lady, somewhere dull, where they would not tolerate your little games." he smoothed the rough little grey head, and Strephon chittered, showing sharp yellow teeth. A deceptively dangerous little beast, that one. Russell didn't trust the monkey much, either. "You know I could, as well."
"Francis -" she said faintly.
"Is going to sit down, and behave like a man of sense. And Caliban, you are going to do likewise. You will apologise to my lord Talbot and his good lady for that lamentable misunderstanding, major, and you will put your sword away - right away, there's a good man - and go and sit elsewhere. Go on. Banished, major."
And gladly so, for he was shaking so hard he must sit down or fall, and his heart was choking him.
He would have killed Talbot, here, in front of them all -
"No you wouldn't, Caliban."
That poor frail wine glass wouldn't take such treatment, and the stem broke in two as his fingers closed on it in astonishment. Wine and blood spattered the pristine linen tablecloth, and the Earl of Rochester sighed and handed his napkin over with a flourish. "Dear me, you are determined to see blood shed this evening, aren't you?"
"Why?"
"Well, one might say that under that rather unpromising exterior you are a seething hotbed of unresolved passions, sir. One might.”
Russell sat with his mouth open and said precisely nothing, possibly because he was presently incapable of speech. Which gave him the opportunity at least to suck his bleeding fingers, and look at the Earl for some clue as to what the bloody hell -
"No, I didn't think so, either," Wilmot said blandly. "Because you didn't do it, of course. And I wonder why someone is at such pains to make it seem as if you did."
"I am a man of blood, sir, did you not know -"
"Oh, come off it! I am not so new-fledged as that, major. You haven’t been a man of blood for some time – if, Major Russell, you ever were, and that not merely a tale put about to explain your somewhat individual charms. You intrigue me strangely, you know. You will persist in being stubbornly who you are, despite it making you the butt of every man's wit. Which is interesting, because you share that fair mantle. And we mock him, because he is precisely nobody. A desperate, scrabbling, encroaching person of no significance whatsoever. How very strange, wouldn't you say?"
"That your little coterie seek to destroy that which they do not understand?"
"No, Caliban, for so far as Chas is concerned there is precious little substance to understand. Were he forty years younger I should send him to bed with no supper and tell him to stop pestering the grown-ups. As he is, we can only ignore him and hopes that he goes away. Which he does not. You are always quick to see offence, sir, aren't you?"
The ape put its hairy little hand on Russell's knee and he looked down at it and smiled in spite of himself.
Wilmot leaned his elbow on the table and rested his chin in his hand. "Now I wonder, sir. I wonder. If you were always so hot at hand, or if it is a thing that comes with being so - marked - that you think yourself the object of every eye, when you are not?"
"Perceptive."
"Oh, no, sir. I don't pay you the least mind. I like to watch your wife - see, there you go again, major, stiffening up - I like to watch people. To see how they work, and -" he shrugged his elegant shoulders, "to meddle, perhaps, a little. She is hardly the serpent of the Nile, your Thomazine. She doesn't trouble to hide her feelings. See - she is worried for you, see her look this way, and trying to pretend she isn't, in case you don't look back. You may as well, major. She has seen you. She's smiling. I don't think she means to, but - look."
She was.
Very, very shyly, in case someone should see - should know - he smiled back at her, and her whole face lit with a secret joy, as if there were not the best part of a quarter-mile of table between them and the better part of thirty inimical gossips.
"Mainly, Major Russell, I take an interest in you for her sake," Wilmot said wearily. "Because she is a nice little thing, and honest, which is about as rare as gryphon-shit in these parts, and because she was kind to me. She is a little less kind, now, since she knows my reputation. A nice child. Two nice children, major."
That was supposed to be a surprise. "I know," he said, and Wilmot smirked. (The Earl was not always so perfectly beautiful, then, and that was comforting. That smug look sat ill on his lovely features.)
"You are not entirely made of wood, sir."
He was not. He felt, actually, as if he were melting like butter, basking in her confidential smile. She had not tired of him. Other people marked it - it was not the wishful thinking of a foolish, ageing man -
"Well, then. What do you propose to do about it?"
He turned his head and looked at Wilmot and said, dreamily, "Love her. And the child. Always."
And was rewarded by an expression of grave amusement on those perfect features. "Of course. And presumably the whispers will go away by themselves? Amor vincit omnia, and all that? Dear me, you are a romantic. Who'd ever have thought it?"
He didn't care.
"Major Russell, I believe you are flirting with your wife," John Wilmot said, sounding quite shocked, and Russell applied himself to his plate again with the oddest warm feeling about his heart. Then he looked up. "I believe she is flirting back, too, my lord." He did not say it was marvellous. But he thought it.
"I can barely believe I am saying this to you, of all people, but - may I remind you that you are not a murderer?"
"Nor am I a source of common gossip, sir. And of the two things - would I rather tend to my wife, who is pleasant company, and civil, and -"
"You're blushing, major."
He'd been baited once tonight already and he would not bite again. "- Or would I rather give credence to baseless rumours by paying them heed. Well. You work it out."
"That, of course, why your wife has got Master Fairmantle's nose to the scent, and his little busy hound's tail is wagging merrily?"
Touché.
"If I find the source of the rumours, my lord, I will kill him," Russell said, and meant it.
"And you not a murderer," the Earl said mournfully. And he was beginning to rather like John Wilmot, who was a reprobate and shockingly without either conscience or moral compass, but who was - amusing. Cheerful, funny, and wholly untroubled by anything that resembled a scruple. "D'you know, then, I think you may be rather fun after all, major. Do let me know when you plan to carry out the deed of darkness, won't you? I think I might like to hold your coat."
He stood up, and all the tongues started wagging again: another table they would not be welcome at, then, in the future.
Thomazine put her hands on the table, as if she meant to come with him, and he grinned at that. Whither thou goest, tibber –
And thought, the hell with it, they were all looking at him anyway, and he put his hand out to her and the rest of the party could go to hell and pump at thunder, as they said back home at Four Ashes.
"You ready, then, my girl?" he said, and she linked her fingers in with his.
"Shameless," Lady Talbot said, very loudly. “The hot-tailed little strumpet.”
Thomazine curtseyed. "My thanks for the loan of the jacket, madam. Mistress Behn, should you choose to call on us for supper -"
"The Widow will have an apoplexy?" Russell suggested, and his wife snorted. "You will be most welcome, Mistress Behn."
47
They did not call a carriage. Which was all right, because no one asked them if they required it.
"Not a long walk, and a fair night," she said comfortably.
"As long as you're comfortable with it." And then he stopped, and turned her gently to face him. "Both of you?"
She said nothing for a moment. "I wondered if you'd noticed."
"I had noticed," he said gravely. "A fair night, then. For the three of us to walk home."
48
She was drowsing, midway between sleep and wakefulness, when she heard the tinkle of breaking glass and a brief commotion, of shouting and banging in the street -
Of one high, piercing scream from downstairs, and the sudden angry roar of the Bartholomew-baby woken untimely from his dreams.
The Widow Bartholomew’s voice raised in outrage, topping the shouts outside, and then she felt the bed lurch as Russell was out of it and across the room in one lithe movement, jerking open the stiff casement.
“You will disperse!” he roared out of the window, evidently forgetting in his agitation that he had been a civilian this twelve months and more and had no more authority over a mob than the kitchen cat.
He had no more clothes on than that cat, either, which possibly did not help his authority, but provided Thomazine with a satisfying view, particularly when he leaned forth to brandish a thing menacingly from the window.
It turned out to have been the chamber pot, the contents of which were a remarkably efficient means of breaking up a party.
The widow looked furious.
This was a quiet, respectable working neighbourhood. People did not throw rocks through the windows of decent folks’ houses without something being done about it.
Russell turned the rock over in his hand, and returned her martial stare with a perfectly cool one of his own. Thomazine unscrewed the paper that the missile had been wrapped in. “Death to the duck lovers?” she said blankly, and her husband snorted with more honest amusement than she’d seen in him for the better part of a month.
“Something like, my tibber.”
He folded the paper and tucked it into the breast of his shirt, and gave the widow a quick, reassuring, and entirely absent-minded smile. (He was up to something, Thomazine thought suspiciously. That man did not do sweet and reassuring unless he was up to the neck in it.)
“The wrong house,” he said blandly. “Feeling against the Dutch runs higher than I thought.”
“Especially in this good English part of London,” she said, and dropped her eyes modestly.
That good English part of London populated by French and Flemish Huguenot weavers, by second-generation immigrant families fleeing the wars in Europe, by the Jewish families winked at by the late Lord Protector for their gold - black seamen, hulking blonde seamen from the Baltic ships, Portuguese sailors. "You recognise the handwriting?" she said warily, and he stopped with one arm in the sleeve of his coat and gave her a grin of sheer, wild joy.
"No, my tibber, don't be daft. What d'you think I'm like to do, go round to his house and run him through? This piece of villainy is going straight to the local Justice, Zee, and nothing will satisfy me but to have the bugger what set this in motion strung up by the cods from the nearest chimney -" He stopped, cocked his head, considered. "Transported as an indentured servant. That'll learn the sod."
It wasn't funny and she ought not to laugh, but it always tickled her a little when he got cross and his careful, precise voice went slightly-country.
"Nobody," he said. "Nobody is permitted to hurt and distress the people I have a care for, tibber. There will be no more. It stops. It stops here."
And he still sounded like a backcountry boy from Hughenden, and he still looked sixteen years old, with his hair all in wisps about his dear, elegantly bony face, and a sudden chill went down her back. For there was a certain turned-inward look he had - had always had when he was on his mettle, the look of a marksman sighting down a gun barrel, and it boded ill for someone. He was not, yet, sighted on his enemy. But he would be, because he was not made for forgiving, and then -
It would go hard with someone. "Thankful," she said, and put her hand on his arm, feeling the muscle of his sword arm tense under her fingers. (Long and lean as a hunting-dog, with a swordsman's lithe muscle. It was not only good to look on. He was, still, dangerous.) He looked down at her, and the unmarred corner of his mouth twitched.
"Thomazine." Not a question, but an affirmation. She was here and she was with him. He tipped his head till his forehead rested against hers - this close, he had beautiful eyes: slate-grey and shot through with sparkles of silver and black, and gold tips to his dark lashes. He blinked like an owl, very solemnly. "Love you, tibber," he said, and blinked again.
"Be careful," she said.
No, he could not bear to be the focus of every eye, and the subject of every gossip. Not for himself. He had never had much of a care for himself.
That scared her a little bit. "Be careful," she said again, and shook his arm gently.
"Have you ever known me else?"
And there was no answer to that, because she had not known him else.
But then - a man who helped desperate Scottish prisoners of war to escape, and then employed them in a public capacity, and counted them as friends. A man who engaged in peace negotiations with Dutch merchants, whilst his country was at war with the Dutch government.
A man counted by half the world as cold and unemotional, who had wept for joy on his wedding day, and at the birth of his friend's first daughter.
No, there were any number of things she did not know he might be, and after a bare six months of m
arriage she was learning that he was not, quite, the rebel angel she had thought he was.
Didn't love him a mite the less for it, mind. It was quite exciting, that she did not know from morning to morning what she might wake up next to.
"I have never known you careless," she said. And meant it.
49
He was as good as his word. The note was presented to the local Justice, who promised to make investigation.
Russell found a glazier - he found a glazier himself, and then lurked over the man's shoulder asking intelligent questions all morning till Thomazine imagined the poor soul was glad to finish his task and escape. He probably thought he was being quizzed by a suspicious householder, poor thing, and in fact Thomazine had a dark suspicion that her husband was filing away the information for a future point when they returned to Four Ashes, when she was going to find Thankful somewhere unlikely with an empty window-frame, surrounded by splinters of glass and strips of lead, whistling sibilantly and having a marvellous time.
There, it was something else she had not known till she married him – till that morning at Four Ashes when he had been so determined to cook her breakfast - that he liked to know how to do things. A competent soul, under that elegant exterior, and a man who was not shy of rolling up his sleeves and setting-to, and who was unreasonably - and rather endearingly - proud of his competence. While he was minded towards matters of construction, he put in a row of nails - by eye, mind, and all straight, which puffed him up with pride all afternoon - into the warm wall in their lodgings, to hang their outdoor clothing to dry against the chimney breast.
"D'you remember, tibber?" he said proudly, and held up his left hand, with the long white scar across the meat of his palm where he'd managed to gouge a hole in himself helping put a roof on the ruin at Four Ashes before they married.
He'd showed her that, when he asked her to marry him. It had still been a great clotted scab, then. She remembered him being quite indignant on what kind of man would not set himself to ensuring a sound roof over his beloved's head, if labour was scant.