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

by M. J. Logue

  She didn’t, and they hadn't, and after some negotiation as to whether the modish Joyeux might grace the countrified parish church that had been good enough for her christening, with her shining countenance, a degree of compromise had been reached.

  Thomazine stood under the weeping trees, with her mother’s hand under her elbow, and felt the chill wind lift her loose hair. Loose for the last time as a maiden, and she was quite looking forward to not being one. Most of Russell's hair was confined at the nape of his neck in a neat black silk ribbon bow, now that he had seen sense and grown it long enough to tie back. It looked darker, in the amber candlelight that lit the inside of the church on a wintry November day, but the wisps that had worked loose to frame his dear, half-handsome face were as bright and barley-fair as the first day she'd set eyes on him.

  This was the crowning day of her womanhood, her bridal day. Oddly, she wasn't frightened, not at all, not even when every eye in the church bent on her as she walked in through the door into the mousy darkness. She heard the little catch of a collective intake of breath. She hadn’t turned out in borrowed plumes, either. In point of fact, both she and her mother had taken one look at the weeping grey skies and decided that a plain, but decent, birch-green skirt and bodice in a good warm wool were much more sensible than silks.

  No, Thomazine wasn't afraid. He was, though, poor sweet. Even though that kind candlelight gave his pallor a slightly healthier colour than perhaps it merited, he was white to the lips, and although he was facing in her direction, she had the rather unsettling impression that he was beyond seeing her, or indeed anything at all.

  "That lad," her father said grimly down her ear, "that lad of yours is about to keel over, Zee. Go and poke him, or summat."

  And all those well-meant instructions about dignity and deportment, all went out of her head, and she went laughing to his side so hastily that the last candle in the aisle guttered and went out in a wisp of acrid smoke in the draught of her passing.

  "Thankful!" she hissed, and he shook himself, and a little life came back into his eyes, a very little sparkle.

  "Thomazine?" - wonderingly, as if he had not truly thought she'd come, the silly man.

  "You were expecting someone else?" she said, and he ducked his head and grinned, which was neither pretty nor seemly in this house of God.

  But which was reassuring.

  His hand was cold on hers, and his fingers squeezed hers much too tight, but she braced herself and said nothing because she suspected that her betrothed, who had been a soldier and a rebel and a leader of men, was depending on her to get through this day unscathed.

  Thankful had managed to get through his entire marriage vows without taking a breath, so far as she could tell, and was now staring at her as if he'd forgotten how to do it and swaying slightly.

  "I, Thomazine Dorcas Babbitt, do take thee, Thankful -" she couldn't say it, she was going to laugh, and she heard her father, who hadn't known either, choke slightly at her elbow - "Thankful-for-his-Deliverance Russell, to my wedded husband - and breathe, Russell - to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth."

  And then his hands were shaking so much he dropped the ring, and it went rolling away under the feet of most of the great and the good of White Notley. It was so still in the church she heard it tinkle – well, save for Joyeux’s exasperated intake of breath at her sister’s clumsiness - but by then it was funny, and she forgot herself sufficient to stoop to pick it up at the same time as he did, and they almost bumped noses, and the ring came to rest quite neatly under Uncle Luce’s foot, at the front of the congregation. And that was almost funny, too, until she met his eyes and then neither of them could look away from each other, and the rest of the world ceased to exist. His eyes were intent, and oddly shy, for a man who had been so confident in the commission of his duties but was still so uncertain of himself as a lover.

  She wanted to take his other hand, but she could not, of course, not here, not now. To put her head against his chest, and have him hold her against his steady beating heart, and for them to take comfort one from another.

  She couldn't do it, but he knew. The unscarred corner of his mouth lifted in a tiny smile of understanding, and he dropped his eyes briefly. He knew.

  3

  It was not the most ostentatious of bridal feasts, but then it would have been somewhat of a mockery, in the dark days of a sodden October, with so plain a family and so unromantic a bridegroom, and so it was a quiet affair, and no one minded that Thomazine sat with her feet in Thankful's lap and he absently rubbed her toes while he was talking because her elegant slippers had let in the damp in the church and her feet were frozen.

  It was, very much, a family affair.

  Uncle Luce, who had been her father's junior officer in the wars, and was now a mildly successful surgeon in his own right and not a junior anything, had brought his sprawling brood of children, and they were careering about the house chasing the striped kitchen-cat (who was used to it, and bore no grudges, having met the Pettitts en famille on a regular basis.)

  His wife was expecting her fifth, any day now, and so she was saying very little, but looking somewhat white about the mouth and holding very tight to her husband's hand. Uncle Luce himself was uncharacteristically quiet, but not in any way to give concern: just, as he said himself, the quiet of a man who finds himself kicked in the softer parts every hour of the night by his wife's precious cargo, and who is enjoying a rare moment of respite.

  Her father had got changed from his own finery, a deep smoke-blue silk suit that you only ever saw him wearing on high days and holidays, and which he claimed made him nervous every hour of the day for fear he might spill something on it. He claimed that he wasn't going to do any work with his horses today, but his eyes kept straying to the window, watching what there was of the light fading and the rain streak the glass, and you could see he was thinking about putting in another hour gentling the new colt.

  Joyeux and her equally-fashionable husband had made their excuses and left as soon as it was polite, claiming a long way to travel.

  And so it was just the people she loved, on her wedding night, at the last. It had been a day of courteous, smiling busyness, of many kind wishes and many blessings and congratulations, but at the last, as the dusk came down, there was no air of wild festival about it, and that was right, that was as it should be. There was only a quiet joy, a settling at peace, like the rose-gold ember at the heart of a flame. There was a rightness about it, because neither she nor Thankful were ostentatious in their loving, but quiet - and faithful, for they had loved one another, all unspoken, for almost six years before this day. Marriage set a crown on their happiness, but it was only a recognition of a thing both of them had known already.

  The parlour was not a room that was often used, a room full of mam’s precious things, her embroidered seat-cushions and the odd trinket that her father had remembered to bring back from travels about the country in the wars. Old, now, for the most part, but comfortable, and sweet, and it had a scent of home and cleanliness about it, and Thomazine closed her eyes and sat smiling with the warmth of the fire on her face while her husband poked her cold toes and made little fond but irritable noises reminiscent of a man who thought his wife wanted for common sense. (He’d told her that already. Twice.) Frannie Pettitt leaned with difficulty from her chair by the fireside and lifted a fold of Thomazine's heavy woollen skirts. "There," she said, "I'm that glad you didn't end up wearing that lovely silk today after all, Thomazine. You would have been perished, in that church."

  - and Thomazine opened her eyes and gave Thankful a secret, happy glance, sharing the little conspiracy. She had been relieved to see that he'd come to his wedding as his own plain, unpretentious, Sunday-best self: but he had been equally relieved to see her in her good wool gown and her
lace collar. She had a suspicion that he might yet have broken and run at the last, had he faced a fashionable stranger in silks and satins at the altar.

  Frannie smiled, and took a pin from her kerchief. "I'd not have liked to put pin-holes in your taffety," she said, and pinned a silk ribbon bow to Thomazine's skirt, and straightened up with a little huff. "There you go, my dear. I wouldn't have you go without a little frivolity."

  "Not altogether without," Thankful said, with that shadow of a smile that was always more in the eyes than the lips, if you knew to look for it. "Zee?"

  And he put his hand to the breast of his coat, and handed hr a little package. He'd bought her pearls, a string of them, probably better ones than he should afford, in all conscience, and there was a little outcry of admiration from the party as they were passed about. "Every pearl a tear, they say," he said. "Your mother reckons if you have them for your bridal you might never know sadness. You – like them?"

  "Tears are for joy, as well as sorrow," she said gently, and then, because they were at home, and amongst friends, and none might laugh, she touched her fingertips to his wet lashes, because Thankful was the biggest watering-pot she knew, for all his austere demeanour. "Are they not?"

  And quite unselfconsciously, and quite gravely, he took her hand and touched his lips to her fingers. "Happiest day of my life, my tibber. Bless you."

  4

  She’d come through the day with absolute serenity, and he’d taken much of his lead from her, because he would have been lost, else. Surrounded by old comrades gone respectable, and he felt a little awkward, being the last bachelor of their old company at forty-two. Forty-two and missing in action for the better part of twenty years, in Scotland and in one place and another afterwards. Never quite settling, never quite at ease, never quite finding his own place, and he'd thought he never would, actually. Not till he'd had news of Fly's death and even then he’d always assumed if he lived at Four Ashes at all, it would be alone.

  He'd never dreamed that he might have a hearth of his own, one day, and a girl of his own to sit at it.

  (Thomazine Babbitt, sitting by the hearth and placidly spinning? Aye, right. Thomazine Babbitt in one of her father's scruffy old coats walking the chalk hills with him and muttering darkly about sheep, more like. She might be his dear love but she was her own self first. That was fine. He suspected if he wished his hearth to be populated by placid spinners, he might have to learn to use a distaff himself.)

  His old comrades, come for the day to see him married, that he'd not seen since the wars. Young Luce, who had been skinny as a barn cat when Russell had last set eyes on him - not so quite so little, now. Prosperous and sleek and not quite as lithe or as golden as he had been, despite the elegant silver buttons on his lovely embroidered waistcoat: still with most of his own hair, a little greyer, a little faded, somewhat thicker in the waist and definitely more tired about the eyes, with a sprawling brood of fair-haired babies tagging onto the skirts of his coat.

  His new father in law, half a head taller than just about anyone else in the room and for once in his conspicuously russet-haired life wearing something other than grey or black. Judging by the mutinous look on his old commander’s face, the slate-blue silk was a source of some contention between Hollie Babbitt and his wife. Russell would have given a good deal to overhear what Het was saying to her notoriously-scruffy husband, but he was definitely being told off for something. And Het - well, Het was what you'd expect, from any lady who had had the misfortune to have been married to that engine of domestic destruction for over twenty years - plump and placid and imperturbable, regardless of what disasters and surprises her beloved husband dumped in her lap. Sturdy and round and freckled as an egg, and since he doubted that Het had ever suffered much in the way of the storms of passion, as comfortably devoted to her Hollie as she had been when they married. Wearing a stubbornly-unfashionable gown, and blissfully unaware that her husband had positioned himself in such a way behind her that he could look straight down the front of her bodice, with an expression of great personal satisfaction on his uncompromising features.

  None of that mattered, of course, set against the glowing fire that was Thomazine Babbitt - Thomazine Russell, now, with her amber hair glowing loose on her shoulders and her rosemary-grey skirts kilted above her knee as he sat with her poor little cold feet in his lap, scowling at her damp stockings and trying to rub the feeling back into her toes after that cold, raw morning in the damp stone church. In those daft, impractical, modish, high-heeled silk slippers, a gift from her fashion-crazed sister, no doubt. "Those wretched shoes," he muttered, " - must you suffer in the name of vanity, sweeting?"

  And she lifted her eyes and smiled up at him, brimful of joy and mischief and radiance. "But I do like to be pretty for you, lamb. And," she leaned a little forwards and whispered, "in heels, I am almost of a height to kiss you."

  It wasn’t what you'd expect a gently-reared nineteen-year-old virgin to say, but then his bride had always had the trick of reducing him to helpless giggles in company. He’d intended to say that Thomazine was as lovely and as warm as cream, and needed no trinkets and baubles to make her lovelier; that he was still amazed that this beautiful young woman was in love with – wanted to spend the rest of her life with, in his bed and at his board – a scarred, disillusioned Puritan. He’d started to say it. She’d looked up at him with those big green eyes, sighed meltingly, and said, “Shut up, Thankful.”

  And Russell, who might have been an officer and accustomed to the unquestioning obedience of men, once, but who knew his new place in the world and rather liked it, had shut up, meekly.

  He’d tried again, later – Zee with one elbow propped on his knee and her hair tickling his nose, working her way industriously through his plate from the wedding supper, marvellously, wondrously unladylike. “What?” she said indistinctly, delicately dabbing pastry crumbs from her lips.

  He still expected that one of these mornings she’d wake up and look at him and change her mind, but she hadn’t so far, and since he’d been Thomazine Babbitt’s plaything since she was two years old, he was a fool for her, he always was, and he always would be. And now here she was, twenty-one, beautiful, very slightly drunk – he was not going to meet her father’s sardonic gaze across the table, because if Hollie even suspected that his eldest daughter was tipsy, he was more than capable of up-ending her under the stable-yard pump, big as she was.

  Actually, take that back, because Hollie was nuzzling his stout, middle-aged lady’s ear in a way that Russell suspected might be the result of a comfortable degree of inebriation on his own part, and Het was squirming without much conviction. “She’ll end up in his lap before long,” Zee said happily, following her husband’s gaze. “How old is mama, d’you know?”

  “Your mother? Um – fifty- something?”

  “Too old for another baby, I suppose. Well. That’s a relief.” He probably should be shocked. Instead, it made him laugh.

  "Russell." She settled herself comfortably against him, her bare shoulders warm against his arm even through the layers of linen and sensible wool. "Russell, will we have babies?"

  "What?"

  "Every -" she straightened her back, "every time I've seen mama get - that friendly - with daddy, she - um - I end up with a sister."

  "Would you mind?" He wouldn't. God help him, he wouldn't.

  "What - another sister? Well, no, but -"

  "No, Thomazine, our own baby."

  "No. It would be nice. Is that why mama does it?"

  "What?" She wasn't wearing scent. She didn't wear scent. She smelt of clean skin, and fresh air, and very slightly, of rosemary. He couldn't think straight.

  "Is that why she does it - for the babies?"

  "Um. No." He had no idea what Hollie was doing to his wife under the table, but Het had a particularly glazed expression on her face and Hollie looked very well pleased with life. Not precisely smirking, but - "I - Thomazine - it's - it's, ah. not something I can
really explain, it's, ah -"

  "Ahhh." Enlightenment dawned. "You have to show me."

  5

  He didn't want to hurt her, or frighten her. He wasn't sure he wouldn't do both.

  She sat on the edge of the bed wearing only her prettiest shift, running a comb through her hair. Looked up at him and smiled, that loving, wide smile that lit up her whole dear face, and he sat down on the polished boards right where he was and put his head in her lap. "Oh tibber, I do love you," he said softly.

  She loosed the ribbon out of his hair and ruffled it onto his shoulders, and he shivered. "Cold?" she said. And scooted up the bed and turned the covers back, sitting up against the pillows with her hands round her knees.

  And then he took a deep breath. "Thomazine - wife - I -"

  No, she was absolutely unfazed. Not frightened. Not intimidated. Curious, but no more. Why should she be? God knows her parents were all over each other - a miracle that Het Babbitt wasn't knee-deep in children, by now. No, Zee knew what loving looked like, in a most real and passionate sense. (If Russell was any judge, he'd just sat across the table from Het whilst that unregenerate ruffian she was married to had done the loving. In a most real and passionate sense.) "I think I should be grateful for a hug," he said feebly, and she scooted back down and put her arms round him.

  And she held him so for a moment, and then drew back, looking quizzical. "Ah. Thankful."

  "Thomazine?"

  "Is that - is that my fault?"

  "Well, I shouldn't say you are to blame entirely, Thomazine. It is, after all, attached to me, not you."

  "Thankful."

  "Thomazine."

  "Is that what, ah -"

  "I should prefer not to conjecture, Thomazine," he said firmly, having a very good idea where this conversation was leading and distinctly preferring not to go there.

  "Thankful."

  He sighed. "Thomazine."