Entertaining Angels: A Christmas Novella
Page 13
"No," Russell said, and turned his head away.
"Oh yes," Thomazine said, with equal firmness, and aimed the spoon at his lips again.
"I don't want," he was about to say, and found himself with a mouthful of particularly horrible tonic.
"Don't you dare spit it out," that incorrigible little wretch said, looking down her nose at him and closing one eye in a manner that reminded him quite frighteningly of her father sighing down the barrel of a carbine.
He tried pleading, and he tried flattery, and she was having none of it. He would have electuary of hyssop - which tasted like something drained from a midden - and he would have a tonic to cleanse his blood and he would have -
"I may assure you, madam, that my - ah - my - my inner workings are perfectly adequate!"
"Bowels, Russell, I believe you mean."
"I would not speak of such things to a lady!" he yelped, and she stopped with her fingers in a pot of something unspeakable, eyeing the open collar of his borrowed nightshirt consideringly.
"Why? Do you not think ladies have bowels?"
"Thomazine!"
"I may assure you, sir, that we do," she said mockingly, "and my sweet sister is no scented violet, either!"
"Thomazine!"
That was Het, on the landing, and he couldn’t help but exchange a glance of some sympathy with the girl, calomel or no.
She made him laugh, and he was all out of practice at laughing. Het gave her froward eldest another fearsome glare, and then she advanced on Russell with the noxious pot.
He was compelled by dignity to sit absolutely rigid while she basted him like a joint of meat, and that infernal young woman cackled like a setting hen at the look on his face -
"What," he hissed - as soon as the door was closed - "what, precisely, is causing you so much merriment, mistress?"
"You," she said, quite blithely, and then while he was still being outraged she took his face between her two hands and kissed him on his forehead. "You are a funny old thing. I should have thought it was a fool's errand to be dignified in somebody else's nightshirt, but you will persist in trying, bless you."
"And what was that for?"
"What?" She'd turned away, tidying the assorted nostrums and potions into order. As if she didn't know. As if it didn't matter -!
"You just kissed me!"
"Well, yes, I often kiss mam and daddy, I even kiss my sisters betimes, what of it?"
"Thomazine, you cannot go about kissing strange men! It's not decent!"
And she turned back and eyed him consideringly, her head on one side. "Ye-e-es," she said, at length. "Yes, you have grown stranger than I was accustomed to, before," she said. "But I'm sure you will come about, when you grow used to handling."
"I am not one of your father's horses!"
"No, well, surely -"
"Or he would have had me shot by now for kennel-meat," he said, putting his head back against the pillow with a sudden return to the hopelessness that had dogged him, these last months. (Tired, and sick, and wretchedly lonely - and she was laughing at him again, and he opened one eye and prepared to be irritated, for it was not a matter for amusement, not at all -) "What is so comical now?"
"We don't have a dog, Russell," she said, and blinked at him, and then her mouth twitched and her shoulders heaved -"oh bless you, you look so funny -"
And she giggled, and once it was out she could not stop herself, she hitched and hiccupped and eventually sat down in a puddle of skirts on the boards and put her head on her knees and howled. He would have been outraged, save that in her descent the pot of sage oil had tipped on its end and he folded his arms and sat up again, watching with immense personal satisfaction as the murky fluid oozed from the top of the coffer, down - and -
Down -
And right down the back of her collar, where her head was bent and the clean linen pulled away from the white skin underneath.
It was cold and sticky together, he knew that from bitter experience, and she yelled very satisfyingly as it must have trickled down her back. Soaking into her linen, which was clammy and uncomfortable and he knew that from bitter experience too. He did not smirk; it was not an expression he was physically capable of. But she looked up with an expression of childish outrage on her face, and she said, "You whelk!"
"Temper," he said reprovingly, and a very immature giggle escaped him.
"You horrible whelk!" Thomazine said slowly. "You absolute, wretched, whelk!"
And that was when she hit him with the towel that all those dreadful potions and pills had been standing on, and he ducked neatly sideways and all of a sudden he was not himself any more, or at least, not the wretched, unhappy self he had been ten minutes ago. He had become the sort of self who might throw a balled-up handkerchief at the wench, and to squawk and squirm most horribly when she retrieved it at speed and rammed it down the back of his nightshirt.
He was about to wreak a dreadful revenge when -
"Thomazine Babbitt, what on earth is going on in here?" her mother said from the doorway, and Russell turned an innocent face to her and said, "I was having some sort of seizure, mistress. It seems I have them often, whilst I have been afflicted with the fever."
And Thomazine, with a handful of rancid ointment pressed to the back of his neck, patted him gratefully.
(Which was every bit as revolting as if she had still been endeavouring to drown him, but which was considerably more reassuring.)