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

by M. J. Logue

  The grey horse, cavalry-trained, dropped his nose to the grass, and Thomazine cocked her leg over the sidesaddle and went to dismount, to go to her man, for he looked as if he had been stabbed to the heart. He turned, and gave her a brittle, unconvincing smile, and brushed the heel of his hand to his eyes. “Well,” he said, “there is more work needs to be done than I had imagined, my tibber. Welcome –“ and his voice broke a little, “welcome to our new home, wife.”

  And she had wanted to say something bright and clever to console him, but looking at that bleak, black ruin, she could not. It was horrible, and pitiful, all at once. The new-built wing and the front door and the centre were lovely, gracefully proportioned and mellow and welcoming, and then the west end of the house was –

  It was as if a pretty girl had opened her mouth to reveal rotting, splintered black teeth.

  There were no lights in the windows, no smoke from the chimneys, no signs of life. Not so much as a slinking cat crossed the overgrown lawns, no birds sang from the shaggy bushes. It was not only half in ruins, it was uncared-for, and eerie, in the cat’s-light. And Thomazine was cold, and wet, and hungry, and tired, and she would have given much for a hot supper and her bed. Thankful was looking at her as if he wanted her to say it didn’t matter, and she could not, because it did. It mattered very much. She slithered down the mare’s flank, missed her footing in the wet grass, and twisted her ankle. No great damage, but a sharp little pain to add to her other woes, and for the first time since she had been a baby Thomazine could not get back on her feet smiling, but instead sat in the cold grass in the dark and wept.

  She had her head buried in the folds of her skirt, that still smelt of her mother’s linen-chest and home and a place that had a roof on it, and so she didn’t see him, but she felt the touch on the back of her neck and batted her hand at it with a most unmaidenly, “Leave me alone!”

  He laughed weakly, and sounded almost as forlorn as she felt. “That’s not me, tibber. That’s Marlowe. He worries about people.”

  A horse’s muzzle investigated the scant few inches of bare flesh at the nape of her neck, between her hair and her collar: investigated, and blew, moistly, and she had to laugh even though she didn’t want to. And then Thankful came and sat in the wet grass beside her, and did not much care about the rain and the indignity of sitting on the muddy ground in riding boots, but put his arms round her and pulled her into his lap and held her head against his chest and rocked her, a little, as if she had been a child again. “Oh, Thomazine,” he said, “oh, lass, it will not be so bad, come the morning. In the daylight. Looks worse than what it is, I’m sure. And, you know, we can always live somewhere close, and –“

  “I want to go home!” she sobbed, and felt him nod.

  “So did I, my tibber, so did I. Wanted this to be home and it’s not. It looks like the morning after they lifted the siege at Colchester.” He rocked her again, and lifted a hand to stroke her hair, as much for his own comfort as her own, she thought. “It’ll come good, love.”

  She wanted to be her brave little mother, right that minute, because Het Babbitt would have shaken out her skirts in a martial fashion and rolled up her sleeves and called for soap and hot water, and started in on making the place all right and tight. But Thomazine was too stiff and miserable, and just about the only thing of any warmth in that whole bleak November world was the patch of her husband’s shoulder where she clung, and even that was bony. The grey horse nuzzled at the back of her head again, and she frowned into Thankful’s damp coat. “What kind of stupid name for a horse is Marlowe?”

  “Blame your Uncle Luce,” he said dryly. “He introduced me to the man's poetry.”

  The tears still ran down her cheeks, but that was of their own volition, and they no longer hurt her eyes and her temples, they just ran, overflowing, like rain. Her nose was running, too, and the breast of his coat would be a horrible sticky mess when she straightened up, and so she burrowed her face tighter against him, scenting wet wool and fresh air. He put his hand on the back of her head again, and then cursed softly to himself. “Oh, a pox on those hairpins, tibber. There goes another one. D’you want a handkerchief?”

  It would be full dark, soon, and moonless, and chill. She wanted to go in to a warm hearth, and to her mother sitting beside it with her mending, and the smell of cooking and baking bread and scoured cleanliness.

  She sat up and pushed her hair out of her eyes and wiped her nose on her cuff, though it was so dark he’d probably not see the unfeminine gesture. And took a deep breath, and straightened her shoulders. “No,” she said, “no, I shall be fine. A momentary silliness, that was all. A little bit tired. It’s been a long day, I think. Do we,” it was a forlorn hope, but she had to ask, “do you think there would be anything to eat, within?”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Oh, my girl, you are your mother’s daughter. Well, I can promise nothing. All I can say is that if I know the gentlemen that have been working on the west wing, and if they have been here as recently as I pay them to be, then yes. There may be a few leftovers. And if not, why, then, we won’t starve before tomorrow morning.”

  “The horses?” Because if there were stables, there might be oats, and then there might be gruel. Of a sort.

  “Leave them loose,” he said firmly, and stood up, and pulled her to her feet.

  12

  She opened her eyes blearily, to a faint, pearly dawn.

  In the first grey light, the kitchens looked like a family crypt, which thought made her shudder: long, rough-planed wood boxes stacked along the walls, like coffins.

  She hadn’t seen those, in the dark. (She might have barked her shin on one, in the dark, and used intemperate language, mind.)

  She’d not expected to sleep, but she had been so tired that she had. Wrapped in each other’s arms, rolled in two wet cloaks in front of a black-empty hearth, with a saddle for a pillow, but she had slept, in the end.

  She’d felt him get up, in the hours before dawn, and go somewhere. And that hadn’t given her pause, save that there was a chilly patch all along her flank where he’d lain, because – well, it might not be romantic to pee but you did, you had to, especially when it was cold, or there was the musical sound of water running in the gutters outside as the rain came down.

  And after that he’d come back to bed, and it had given her a good deal of drowsy pleasure to wiggle her bum in his lap until he put his arms round her middle and held her tight and beloved.

  He’d been outside, she could smell it on him. She had turned round in his arms and snuffed him like a dog and kissed him, just at the angle of his bristly jaw. And his bristles had tickled her at that tender place where her neck joined her shoulder, where he had returned the favour, and – all in all Thomazine was stiff, and sore, but feeling unreasonably well-disposed towards the world, this morning.

  She looked down at her new husband. He looked different, in sleep. (He looked like a man who'd rolled himself up in most of the cloak as soon as she'd stood up, and she hoped that wasn't going to become a habit, either.) Flat on his back with his hair in his eyes, and the collar of the cloak pulled right up to his chin, and he snored. Only a little bit, and it was rather sweet, but he did.

  There was also not a stitch of clothing on the man, and it would be full daylight soon, and she couldn't help but giggle out loud, because she was only wearing a shift herself, and it was just downright wicked of both of them.

  She leaned over and pulled the cloak up over his bare shoulder, more for the excuse of touching his bare skin than anything else.

  "Thomazine," he said sleepily, and she sat upright with a squeak. "That tickles, tibber, what're you doing?"

  She didn't have an answer, other than to blush, and he rolled over and peered up at her through his tousled hair. "Idle fornication, mistress?" he said, sounding suddenly much more awake.

  - and it was very difficult to tell with her husband, even for Thomazine, because the scarring on his cheek had faded ove
r the years, but that austere expression was still more or less perpetual. Unless you could see his eyes, and since they were presently hidden by a fall of loose mousy-brown hair, she couldn't, quite, tell if he approved or not.

  Then he slid his arm round her waist, drawing her back down under the cloak. "I'm game if you are, gal."

  Afterwards, she lay with her head on his shoulder, and her hair trapped under his arm, and she was comfortable. Happy, actually, with his heart beating against hers, and his hand on the curve of her hip, idly moving up and down. Felt a little bit odd, her skin against his, and the roughness of the cloak against both of them, but it was nice. Reassuring.

  "We ought to put some clothes on, you know," he said, and kissed the top of her head.

  "Reckon so," she agreed, and kissed the bit of him that was nearest.

  "Depraved, that's what we are."

  "No arguments from this quarter, then."

  She felt him laugh, rather than heard it. "D'you want some breakfast, then, my tibber?"

  "What - why, Thankful, you're enjoying this!"

  "I am not, either!" Though he did sound suspiciously pleased with himself. "I was not a supply officer for the better part of twenty years without acquiring some common sense, madam. And, I flatter myself, I was a competent one, at that. Can't promise you any more than bread and bacon, mind you, and I wouldn't swear to it that my cooking is any better than the common run, but where there are labouring-men in these parts, there is most often a piece of bacon -"

  It made her laugh, because he still sounded marvellously prim and dignified, even whilst he was wriggling into his breeches and hauling his shirt over his head, his hair in an abandoned tangle down his back. He didn't look much older than she, at this moment. "Won't take a minute to get the fire lit," he said smugly, and then, a while later, pink and slightly flustered, "It'll catch shortly, I'm sure. No, truly, it will -"

  It was like an adventure, and she liked adventures. She'd had most of her adventures with this man. Wouldn't have married him, if he'd been quite so forbidding as he looked. She took the flint and steel out of his hand, and he smiled up at her. "A helpmeet, lady?"

  "A friend loves at all times, and a wife is born for adversity," she misquoted softly.

  The corner of his mouth twitched. "No doubt. Um, we will have staff to do this kind of thing, usually, tibber. I'm not wholly uncivilised. It's just - I wasn't expecting us to stay, ah, overnight, here," he said carefully, and she caught a spark and blew on it, onto the little pile of woodshavings in the big hearth.

  "Well, we are here, though. For as long as may be."

  He glanced up at her. "Perhaps we ought to see about employing some servants with all dispatch?"

  "And not go ho -"

  "Not go back to White Notley," he finished. Not quite severely, but with an air of finality. "This is our home, Zee." He must have caught her look of disappointment, because he blinked at her solemnly, like a hopeful owl. "It's not finished yet," he said. "I've not showed you upstairs."

  "I am only relieved that there is an upstairs. You told me half the roof had fallen in."

  "Ah, well, the lads have been working on that." He held out his hands to her. Not for her to take, but the better to display a somewhat ungentlemanly black thumbnail, and a scar the length of one finger -"Chisel," he said proudly. "I might have been known to lend a hand myself. What kind of man should I be, that wouldn't see a whole roof over his wife's head?"

  "The sort of man who stands there prattling, and lets the fire go out?" she suggested, and he closed his mouth with a snap and looked briefly affronted. He had never been good at being teased, and it took him a heartbeat to realise that it was happening. And then he laughed. "Well, there's probably bread. Somewhere. We are not yet so crammed with furniture that there are many places to conceal it."

  She had a prowl around the shadowy kitchen, not realising till now how big and dusty an unfurnished, untenanted kitchen could be. Touching her fingers to rough-plastered walls and imagining where a big black oak settle might stand, by the hearth. Looking for a cool place where a sensible country housewife might leave a hutch for her bread, and seeing the very place where she would put it herself, in an alcove by the door that might have been purpose-built for such a thing. But no hutch, because, as she turned slowly full circle admiring the bare room, her mind filling it with imagined scents and shapes, she caught sight of a lumpy linen bag, piled on one of the mysterious boxes.

  As soon as a more immediate need than curiosity was satisfied, she was going to find out what was in those boxes, too.

  She gave a little moan of shameless greed as the stale bread rolled out of its covering. “I have not forgotten quite everything I knew on campaign,” he said smugly, turning round at the sound of loaves as hard as rocks bouncing on rough boards. “See? I told you they’d leave something. And half a side of bacon in the chimney here, and – hm.”

  He sat back on his heels, scowling at the flaring lump of charcoal on the point of his knife. “You any good at toasting bread, tibber? I can’t seem to get the trick of this, at all.”

  “Perhaps we could eat it as is?” she suggested, and he raised a very sardonic eyebrow.

  “Only if they also left a hammer and chisel.”

  But she did her best, with great ragged lopsided doorsteps of rock-hard bread. “Hunger is the best salt,” he said hopefully, and she looked at the curling grey slabs of meat laid on the smouldering crusts.

  “You reckon?”

  "Well. Perhaps a little more salt, then."

  The house looked better in the sunlight. Such sunlight as there was, in mid-November, but it streamed through the sparkling window-glass onto spotless stone flags, onto pristine plaster and new wood.

  It was bare and somewhat comfortless and very, very clean, and that was her husband all over, really. He'd been a soldier for so long he didn't know how to be else. Scrupulously clean, and very neat, and with no more baggage than he could carry. She thought of her own clean, but cluttered, chamber at White Notley. Of the kitchen there, with the mending basket under the settle by the fire, because everyone ended up in the kitchen at White Notley. Her father's habit of leaving his boots by the kitchen door, a habit he claimed was the result of twenty years of persistent reminders from his wife about tracking mud across the clean floors. Nell's embroidery, systematically being dismembered by one of the kitchen cats. (Not infrequently, the kitchen cats themselves, strewn across the patches of sunlight in the kitchen, or belly-up on the settle.)

  It made her a little sad, because White Notley was home, and Four Ashes was a house. It was going to be her house, hers and Thankful's, and yet it was empty, there was nothing about it that made it their own.

  And yet, there were the beginnings of hope, and of laughter, here: of the things that might make it more than four walls and a roof, but a home. There was a smear of soot on his patrician nose. Thomazine wondered if she ought to point it out. Shortly after dawn this morning, she might have thought it would bother him. Right now, looking at her bright-eyed, dishevelled husband, who couldn't grin, but was nonetheless radiating joy like a wriggly pup, she wasn't so sure. On his knees in front of a hearth that hadn't been swept in months, if not years, with his shirt-sleeves pushed up to his elbows (and he had rather nice, muscled, solid swordsman's forearms, she thought absently) blowing onto a very reluctant pile of grubby, smouldering shavings, and getting pinker and pinker with the effort of it -

  "Oh, Thankful, I do love you," she said, quite without thinking, and he looked up, blowing his hair out of his eyes.

  "Well. I thank you. I should feel considerably more loveable if I could get this thing to stay alight, mind."

  He was a dear, funny thing at times, and she was torn between the desire to stand there being unhelpful and ruffle him yet further, and do something useful.

  In the end, she decided in the interests of domestic harmony it was better to be helpful, and she whirled and set off into the body of the house, to see what s
craps and splinters might have been left from the construction work.

  And it was an odd thing, but that bare, empty, plaster-scented house felt more like home, already.

  13

  They had just about managed to achieve something that was almost edible, with much laughter and restrained cursing, when they heard hoofbeats on the cobbles, and the sound of boots running. And Thomazine had barely had time to extinguish the present smouldering crust, before the barton door slammed open.

  He had not knocked, and nor did he stand on ceremony.

  The stocky, black-haired man with the brace of pistols about his person was evidently not in the mood for discussion, because he had that very scarlet, blotchy look about his face that very angry fair-skinned people often got when they were vexed beyond endurance, and with a remarkable presence of mind Thomazine, shift and all, whisked behind one of those intriguing wooden chests, and pulled her husband’s cloak tight round her.

  “What the hell d’you mean by this, ye shameless vagabond? Get out and show yourself like a man, or I swear I’ll – Major Russell!”

  He never so much batted an eyelid. Facing down the barrel of a cocked pistol and an irate gentleman at the end of it, Thankful put the knife and the smoking bread down, and gingerly moved the bacon from its perilous placement at the edge of the flames. “Eadulf, sir, I am delighted to see you taking such an interest in the house, but really.” He turned full round, pushing his hair out of his eyes with his un-greasy hand, and because she’d loved him all her life Thomazine could tell from the set of his shoulders that he was happy. “It is my house, you know.”

  “You never said!” the irate gentleman said, and the hectic colour was fading from his cheeks, leaving a mottled flush. “I might have shot you, you great –“

  “Scotsmen,” Thankful said to Thomazine, as if it explained everything, and about all it explained to her was the accent, like a dog barking. “Eadulf is my bailiff, tibber. He’s been seeing to the estate in my absence.”