by M. J. Logue
A Broom at the Masthead
The Drowned Books: 1
M J Logue
First published 2016
Copyright © 2016 Climbing Tree Books Limited
This Kindle edition does not require an ISBN,
but we’re traditionalists, so we’ve given it one anyway.
ISBN 978-1-909172-26-5
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Published by Climbing Tree Books Limited, Truro, Cornwall, UK
All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without the prior permission of the publisher.
Four Ashes, Buckinghamshire, England
November 1663
She looked up as he entered the room, her eyes narrowing to see him in the gloom of a few meagre tapers. A paltry display, for such a family, and on such a bitter midwinter night. It gave him enough light to see her clearly, though, and he was astonished at the change in her: but then, it had been ten years, and they had not been kind years, for Fly-Fornication Coventry.
She had always been for the King, during the late wars, and it must have gone hard with her to have had a brother who was not only a most notorious rebel and subversive, but who had narrowly escaped being executed for his political beliefs, with a pack of fellow Dissenters and horse-thieves calling themselves the Levellers. And he had not had the grace to slide into obscurity, after his grudging pardon, but instead had gone on to serve quite conspicuously in the Army of General Monck after the King was restored.
It must have been bitter as wormwood for her, to know that he was still out there in the world. That those sins of which she had spoken, at such length, with such contempt, had gone unpunished, and that he was still unrepentant, and his existence still as shameful and abhorrent to her.
Bitterness had withered her. Her hair was hidden by the same stiff starched cap, untouched by fashion or flattery, but her eyebrows were as dark and uncompromising as ever. Not an unattractive woman, for a widow in her late fifties. She was as tall and slender as her brother, and her shoulders were straight. He found himself quite admiring her, actually. Not as a woman, but as a fierce thing of beauty, like a falcon or a well-made sword.
"Well," she said. And that was all she said.
He bowed, with as much ostentation as he could, because he had been on the peripheries of court these four years and more and he had learned the weapons of vicious courtesy. "I am glad to see you well, Mistress Coventry. After so long absent."
"As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly. Should I say I am as glad to see you? Well, I won't." She smiled, which was unexpected. "I do not lie, sir. I am not in the least glad to see you. Prinked out in your degenerate finery - 'For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness.' Do you seek to impress me, you nasty, womanish thing?"
"Good lord, no," he said mildly, and she lowered her head and glowered at him.
"Less of your blasphemy. This is a godly house. What do you want?"
She had not invited him to sit, or offered him hospitality, and he was glad of that, actually. She still made him nervous, for all he had not set eyes on her in ten years. And she had no power over him, and she never had, because for all her malice she was no more than a woman, and a thin, bloodless, bitter one at that.
"I wanted to assure myself of your continued good health," he said, and dropped his eyes to hide that particular lie.
"Did you. Well. I wonder why, since you never did before - when you were drinking and whoring all over the county, keeping your low company?"
"They say hereabouts that you are grown - odd, mistress. That you grow overly zealous, even more than you were previous, and that none of your servants will stay longer than a few weeks with you, for your harshness. That you can be cruel, and whimsical, in your ways." He took a deep breath, and went on, "That you are often alone, in this house, at night, for such staff as can bear your intolerance will not stay under the same roof. Is that true?"
Her dark eyes, ringed about with tender blue shadows, lifted to his face. "True? What concern is it of yours, then?"
He was still on his feet. Had not been asked to do otherwise, and so it was quite easy to go and stand over her, and set his hands on her shoulders. Such slight, narrow shoulders, for all their straightness. Her bodice, close to, was shabby: a little shrunken at the seams, unevenly faded, as if it had been remade from another garment, and covered by an old-fashioned linen collar that had a darn at the fold. A fine darn, but a darn, nonetheless. "There is not the money here to pay a servant's hire, is there, mistress?" he said gently. "You have lost all, since the wars. Have you not?"
She almost rose from her seat, an unlovely blush mottling her cheeks and her neck. "How dare you, sir -"
And he put his hands about her slight throat and snapped her neck, as simply as that. Like snapping a coney's, when it was snared, and with as little emotion.
She was not expecting it, and she did not struggle, after that initial convulsion; she only hung between his two hands with her dark eyes blank and staring at him, and her mouth slightly ajar.
He was not as frightened as he thought he would be. She was dead, and it had been easy. He did not feel anything, apart from a slight repulsion, as a sliver of saliva drooled from her lolling mouth.
(Such little bones. So frail. Not like her brother, not at all like her brother, in the end. For Thankful Russell was still alive, and Fly was, distinctly, dead.)
She would not be missed, until it was too late. Of that he was very sure. He wished her eyes would close, though, and that she might not keep looking at him.
Well, he had done what he came to do, and now he knew. It would probably not be so easy again. But he had done it, and perhaps – well. Perhaps he must needs try again, then, to be sure, with someone who would be more of a challenge than this bitter, unmourned woman -
She was limp, and she had soiled herself, and he wrinkled his nose at that. Her head flopped on her shoulder when he lifted her, and she was unwieldy, her feet dragging on the bare boards as he laid her on the floor in front of the hearth.
He took one of the smouldering logs from the fire and laid it underneath her skirts. Stood back and admired his work. It was a meagre, thin, smoking fire, and he had to kick it and poke it till it flared into sullen life, tightening his lips at the smuts it left on his good stockings. Her plain woollen garments smouldered, but did not flare, and he touched flame to the rest of her. Her loosened hair, flaring like a banner across the boards where her cap had spilled. Her darned collar.
The old-fashioned rushes on the floor caught like tinder, and he backed away, scrambling with a loss of dignity as flames began to lick at her skirts, outlining her in a bright halo. And to trickle outwards, starting to crackle, with the first wisps of greasy smoke as her flesh started to scorch. So quick -
And then the first of the wall-hangings that rippled in the old house's draughts caught light, and he turned and left the hall.
Not running, because why should he run? He felt nothing, except the satisfaction of a job well-done - that, and a sense of relief, that it was done so quickly, and so easily.
He could move on.
1
TINDER
October 1665
1
He sniffed surreptitiously at the stiff, lustrous collar of his court suit.
It smelt faintly, of stale rosewater and tobacco and sea-coal fumes, with an acrid note of sweat, and a slight overlay of wine. Under that was the strange, fugitive scent of silk, of tar and the sea and the spices of the hold of a
n East Indiaman - although that was possibly in his imagination, for he had never set foot on a ship bound for anywhere more exotic than the Low Countries.
He'd been told, in no uncertain terms, that he'd shirked long enough. That an officer of some seniority, even a supply officer of no great military significance or birth - General Monck had been very specific on that last, and Russell could still hear his old commander's round rural Devonshire accent in his head at the memory of it - it was his duty to present himself at court and pay his respects to His Majesty, on the glorious event of his restoration to the throne after eleven years of misery under the Commonwealth.
And then Monck had glowered, and narrowed his little bull's eyes, pouched in sagging red flesh. "You'll do the pretty, Major Russell, for all ye were a damnable Roundhead."
With which Major Thankful Russell could not argue, for with a name like Thankful, he could scarcely deny his staunch Puritan upbringing, and having almost had himself executed as a political subversive at Burford with the rest of the Leveller ringleaders, he had to admire General Monck's perspicacity.
But. He had thought that after twenty years of keeping his head down, of being a ferociously good supply officer of no great military significance or birth, of waking and sleeping lists and requisitions and logistics - after a life of ruthless and selfless service, he might not be forced to show his face at court. Well. Monck had said it was a matter of respect. Russell was a god-damned administrator, a jumped-up pen-pusher, who the hell did he think he was, in his arrogance, to refuse to present his respects to His Majesty in person?
They forgot, you see. They saw this neat, slightly austere, mouse-haired gentleman in his forty-second year, tall and a little stiff in the shoulders as a result of stooping over his requisitions these last twenty years. Slightly deaf in one ear, and scarred in the face where a Royalist pike had ruined his youthful beauty for ever in the early days of the civil wars. Short-haired, where preposterously curled wigs were the fashion, and so they called him Old Crophead, for his old Parliament leanings and his present lack of vanity. Not given to excess of any nature, but a most prim and sober and respectable senior officer, the sight of whose marred face could be relied upon to damp the high spirits of any sociable gathering.
They forgot that twenty years ago he had been a firebrand, and a rebel. He looked cold and implacable, but how else might a man look, who had taken the thrust of the shattered butt of a pike through his cheek?
And so it had been a matter of duty, and a direct order, that Russell should present himself at court. Well, he had. He remembered little of it. He had, admittedly, fortified himself with perhaps more wine than he ought to have: anything to stop the shaking of his hands, his absolute bone-deep horror of being so conspicuously displayed in a public place, of being stared at. More than that, though, it had just been dull. Nothing happened. Lots of nothing happened. Just a lot of people talking a lot of nothing in a big, over-furnished room, that smelt of stale bodies and tallow and too much scent. He didn’t remember being presented to the King, though he supposed he must have, or Monck would have made him go back. Smiling politely at everyone, because he didn’t have a clue who was sleeping with whom, male or female, and it did not do to cut the reigning favourite, or the court wit. Being called Bosola, which he did not understand, but which had been kindly explained to him some time later by a friend who had read such old-fashioned tragedies that it referred to a most notorious court malcontent and bird of ill omen, in an old play.
Being told, by a gaggle of cackling, bewigged striplings, that if one gilded a turd, it remained nonetheless a turd. And suggesting to their braying whelp of a ringleader, a drawling jackanapes who gave himself out as the Earl of Rochester, that if he passed such remarks in Russell's hearing again, Russell would take Rochester's ungodly pet ape and insert it where the Lord's grace did not shine.
(Russell had known poets, in his youth. The men he had known would have hesitated to scrawl such lewd doggerel as Rochester wrote, on the wall of a troop latrine. He was not impressed by a seventeen-year-old libertine. And he meant it about the monkey.)
Mostly, though, he'd stayed close to the wall, trembling, with the small of his back against the moulded plaster, taking some comfort from that cool strength. Holding to his duty, because that was what he did, what he had done since he was seventeen and first a young officer, and he had no idea how to do else. Twenty-five years of duty above all became a sort of habit. Feeling like an impostor, in his charcoal-grey lutestring silk, with a jacket that was so short and tight it barely covered his backside, and great billowing shirt-sleeves hanging from under the shrunken sleeves. Festooned with ribbon, like a damnable maypole, with a cravat that trailed in his supper if he was not cautious how he sat. Ribbons and lace and high-heeled shoes, which made him mince like a girl, and he could not and would not grow one of those ashy smears of moustache, even if his scarred face would allow it.
He had been a little drunk, and a lot nervous, and his teeth had been chattering on the rim of his delicate Venetian glass goblet even before he'd seen a face he knew, however vaguely: the chubby, deceptively amiable countenance of Charles Fairmantle, a distant neighbour from back on his home Buckinghamshire chalk hills. Member of Parliament now, he thought he'd heard. Had gone to school with Russell, and done well for himself after the wars, they said. Couldn't remember what the man had done - married well? Invested? Something, and he did not care, overly much. Fairmantle was a toady and a lecher, and a pathetic ageing hanger-on to the peripheries of Rochester's lewd young cohort. The touch of his chubby hand made a sweat of repulsion break out on Russell's top lip, as if a warm slug had crawled over his skin. But Fairmantle was familiar, for all that, and even his seedy familiarity was a small comfort in this glittering company, like a pair of worn but stinking boots.
They exchanged idle pleasantries - or at the least, Fairmantle made idle pleasantry and Russell stared blankly at him for the most part. And then,
"Accept my condolences, Major. A bad business. A bad business, indeed. You must be devastated."
"Oh. Indeed," Russell said blankly. "Which condolences?"
The pudgy hand on his sleeve, patting, solicitous, leaving a faint, damp print on the glimmering silk.
"But I am so sorry, sir. I had assumed you knew. Your sister, major. God rest her, she - Four Ashes was burned, not three months ago, and poor Mistress Coventry with it." Fairmantle shook his head. "I am sorry. I had not meant - I had not known - sir, you turn positively pale -"
And Russell, who had hated his sister, and not set eyes on her in the better part of ten years, had bitten clean through the rim of his goblet in his shock nonetheless.
He thought that had been the moment when he had decided to come back to Buckinghamshire for good and all, though it had taken him a few months of despair and soul-searching to work out how he might rebuild the house at Four Ashes.
And then a further few months of despair and soul-searching when he realised that there was only one woman he'd have entertained as mistress there, and that she was as utterly, irrevocably not for him as the moon for the moth.
Possibly he ought to have mentioned that uncertainty to Thomazine Babbitt, for she was under no such doubts at all, as it turned out. There had only ever been one man for Thomazine, from when she'd been knee-high to him, and the Lord be praised, it turned out it had always been Russell. It seemed she'd considered him her especial property since she was three years old, and he twenty, and her father's lieutenant in the old New Model Army. It might have saved him some considerable distress of mind if she'd thought to tell him earlier, though, he thought wryly.
Well. He smoothed the charcoal silk again, absently.
He'd thought to do her honour on their wedding day, and wear his finest.
She was marrying a plain gentleman, not a courtier. He'd given all that up, along with his commission, just under a year ago. He was no man's but his own.
- And hers, of course. Always hers.
He
took a deep breath, and pulled on the plain, decent, pewter-grey wool waistcoat with the plain silver buttons, and the plain, old-fashioned, straight-fitting coat that went with it.
"At least the lass will recognise you," he told himself, smiling wanly at his reflection in the mirror.
Ruffled a hand through his hair - grown to his shoulders, now, and no longer so indeterminately mouse as it had been when he'd worn it close-cropped, but streaked fair and dark as a field of wheat when the wind blows through it. She liked it so, worn long, and straight.
He was scarred, and worn, and weary, and his head hurt when the wind was in the north.
All that was true.
But Thomazine loved him. And further than that, he did not care.
2
He turned his head to look at her as she walked in under the dripping arch of leaves and everything Thomazine's mother had been fiercely telling her about comporting herself with dignity - about walking slowly, not loping like a dismounted cavalry trooper, she got that from her father - about behaving with a becoming shyness and grace, on her wedding day - she forgot most of it, in the sheer joy of seeing her own dear Russell standing at the altar looking like himself, and not some courtly fashion-plate.
Which she hadn't thought he would, not really, but her fashionable sister, married these twelve months and more, had been most insistent that he ought to at least make some effort to look like a man of some import and not like a ragged provincial sheep-farmer. To which Russell's uncharacteristically tart retort had been that he was a provincial sheep-farmer, and intended to stay one since his retirement from the Army, and that if Thomazine wanted to marry a periwigged ninny like his future brother-in-law he might consider their engagement at an end.
