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

by M. J. Logue

  "When ye're done thinking on that lass in her underlinen," Eadulf said with resignation, "I'll tell ye, Russell. It's no easy task, finding labourers for this house. There's some reckon it’s haunted and that's a daft thing to think, but if ye're a gullible fool ye'd believe it, and they do. What bothers me is the ones that don't think it's haunted, aye? I caught three lads from Wycombe a week since, bent on mischief. And they weren't the first. It's every night, now. One of Lane's boys from out at Everhall, the other night, though he was just out for sport. Smashing a few windows, to teach ye not to come amongst decent folk wi' your nasty ways. Setting a little fire or two, just to keep ye mindful. I had a run-in with a boy on the path down, two-three nights since, though he came off the worse for it, and I blacked his eye for him. Aye, and worse," he said grimly. "Russell, they're saying ye murdered her in her bed, for the sake o' the house and the lands, to have her out of your way so ye could come home. Or that ye had me do it for ye."

  16

  She wasn't, precisely, eavesdropping.

  She had a little rabbit in her hand, a tiny thing the size of her thumb, made in a shiny, smooth creamy stone. It was sitting on its haunches, with its paws tucked underneath it, and it was the smallest, most perfect thing she had ever seen, and it had been tucked in the corner of that great wooden crate as casually as if it had been forgotten.

  And she knew it had not, because she recognised her husband's careful, methodical hand in that packing, and knew that if he had not done it himself he had overseen it. It was a beautiful thing, and it had no purpose that she could see, other than to make her smile, and instead it made her cry. Because it was not a good stout English rabbit, it was a well-travelled rabbit, who must have spent many months travelling, stowed in the hold of an exotic merchantman, or packed in a rocking wagon on dusty roads under foreign suns, and that meant that her darling, sensible, practical Thankful, had been considering their marriage, in a very real and impractical sense, for much, much longer than she had ever suspected, to have set all this in train.

  The fragile blue and white dishes were beautiful, and frightened her a little, because they were so delicate, like eggshells. Too beautiful to touch, or to love, but only to admire, like dewy cobwebs on an autumn morning, where even a breath could have shattered them.

  The silk was lovely to touch, and perhaps, one day, she would have a gown made up in it, but it was not practical. Not a thing for everyday, for a plain countrywoman and a good wife.

  But that little rabbit - that solid, earthy little rabbit, who grew warm in her hand from the heat of her skin - was a real, living thing, for all it was made by a craftsman many hundreds of days' ride away from here. She could feel that stranger's hand on the rabbit as close as a hand on her shoulder; she could almost know what he was like.- a man who felt, and looked, and cared, enormously. And she did not mind that Eadulf Gillespie thought she was a child, or a silly little girl to be sent away while the men talked of business, because this was not an ivory rabbit, it was a statement of his loving as public as if he had written it up to be pinned on the church door, and she wanted to be with him, so that he knew that she understood. Showing him the rabbit's tiny claws, and the whiskers on its carved velvet nose, and the fur on its scut, and sharing her joy in this tiny thing that he had chosen with such care.

  And instead, she was standing outside the door whilst Gillespie accused him of murder.

  Which was the stupidest thing she had ever heard, and so she had simply pushed the door open, with her indignation a great bubble of speechlessness in her throat.

  Gillespie had been shocked by her unwomanly lack of ceremony, and the pair of them had sat blinking at her like two owlets in a hollow tree, dazzled by the watery sunlight. The Scotsman had started to gabble something in his uncouth voice, and Thankful had simply said, very coolly, that he would hear no more of it.

  "This is my house," he said. "And I do not mean to be frightened out of it. Take heed."

  "Wi' no food, and no furniture in it, save yon spindly bawbees? Aye, and I wish ye well of it, major! Mistress, will ye no' talk some sense into the man - this is no' a safe place for ye, either of ye, till the talk dies down." He forgot himself. That grim, badger-haired Scot lurched from his perch and grabbed both her hands in his, and she jumped back with a little yelp, because his hands were hard, callused and warm, and that she had not expected. "In all charity, Mistress Russell - I beg of ye, please. Don’t stay in this unchancy place."

  "Don't be absurd, Ea- Eadwolf?" she hazarded, and he gave a tiny grunt of acknowledgement. And, she thought, a little, a very little, grudging admiration.

  "Well, at least stay under my roof, then, if you will stay here. The house is no' so far from here that ye can't keep an eye on the proceedings, and - acht, major, at least there is a roof on the place, ye can't expect a gently born girl to sleep out on campaign wi' ye!"

  "Master Gillespie, I am the daughter of a most well-respected Parliamentarian commander, and wife to another!" she snapped, finally nettled beyond endurance. "I am not made of glass, nor spun sugar. I will not melt for a little hardship. Now have done!"

  And they agreed, in the end, on a compromise. That they would eat with Gillespie, and share his hospitality, and that he would bring them blankets, in order that they might spend a night in something that resembled comfort.

  ("And some breakfast," Thomazine said firmly, and her husband had given her a wry look.

  "And some breakfast.")

  And Gillespie would see to it himself that a message went to their servants, lodging in the inn at Everhall and awaiting word, that all was well.

  With that, the bailiff must rest content.

  17

  She had thought she would be tired, after the rest of the day riding round her featureless new estate. Up. Down. Up. Down, and one rolling chalk hill dotted with dirty sheep looking much the same as another. (She did not take to sheep, Grubby, charmless creatures, with little wit and a depressing fragility, apparently. The number of ailments that could reduce a perfectly healthy sheep to dust in a matter of days, seemed endless.) Her body was exhausted and aching. She had almost fallen asleep over supper in Gillespie's comfortable flint cottage, over a supper of homely mutton stew and bread and cheese, and rosy autumn apples and warmed ale. She'd have slept where she sat, if it hadn’t been for sheer wilful pride, that she might not go back on her word before a man who thought of her as a silly child.

  The black mare was weary, too, although the indefatigable Marlowe still seemed game for another few miles yet. As did her equally-indefatigable husband. "Tired, love?" he'd said, with his hand on her ankle, not quite holding her foot out of the stirrup. It was a caress, but thinking about it now, she wondered if it had been a small kindness. That if she'd swallowed her pride a little and admitted her weakness they might even now be sleeping in a bed, and not on a pallet of itchy sheepskins in an empty bedchamber. As it was, she'd taken offence at being babied, and she'd snapped at him, and his feelings had been hurt, and they had spent the ride back up the valley in mutually affronted silence.

  Well, and then they'd made up, and it had been sweet. She put her cheek against the cool skin of his back, and he murmured something that she didn’t catch, and wriggled himself closer to her.

  He was a funny, stiff, loving thing, she thought, with an ache of tenderness. And he hadn't done it. He wouldn't have done it, and he couldn't have done it. Just thinking of it made her overtired head ache, and her eyes burn behind their gritty closed lids.

  If they'd said out loud that he had - like men, and not mice - if they had said within her hearing that her husband was a murderer, she'd have had some ground to defend him on. The treasure - well, people always said that, didn't they? There was always talk of treasure, no matter how ludicrous that an ageing Puritan widow might be protecting a cache of looted gold.

  But not that Thankful had murdered that woman.

  He did not have the trick of popularity; he was too proper, too awkward, and the s
cars on his face made his expressions too hard to read, for him to be a man of easy friendship. He was fierce, and loyal, and under that implacably cold exterior he had always been her rebel angel, but being shy in company did not make him a murderer. Not liking to be looked at, or to have liberties taken with his person, did not make him a murderer. Having a strange foreign bride, and a bailiff who growled like a barking dog when he spoke, did not make him a murderer.

  He had never lied to her, not once, and she had known him for twenty years. Since her babyhood, and he had never lied to her, not once. He had been her father's lieutenant, and he had been known even then, even as a boy of nineteen, throughout the New Model Army as a man of honour and principle. No matter how much he had loathed his sister, no matter what injustice she had done him, he would not have killed a defenceless elderly widow in cold blood. Not for money, and not for vengeance. It was not how he was made. She would have staked her life on it.

  To come back from the Army's service in Scotland, with no word to anyone - come back to that house with the intent of killing her?

  He would not have done it.

  She growled to herself, and turned over, and punched her pillow with feeling. Thankful did not lie.

  (He had never told her he hadn't killed his sister. Had never mentioned it at all, except to say that he did not care how she had died.)

  He was fierce, and loyal. And under that implacably cold exterior she had known him shaking with passion, losing all sense of time and place and self.

  (But that was with her. And that was loving, that was not - something else.)

  He had been gone for ten years in the Army's service, with no word to anyone. And she thought he was still, at heart, the same bright-haired boy that had held her hands when she was learning to walk, had set her on her first horse, had told her long and involved made-up stories to make her laugh when she was a little girl.

  (A man could change a lot in ten years. A man could do a lot in the hours he spent away from home, about matters of business, he said, but what business?)

  He would not have done it.

  Beside her, he mumbled something incoherent, and pulled the blankets over his shoulders.

  It was cold. She could not deny that Four Ashes was a cold house, with the coldness of new plaster and raw wood; the coldness of emptiness, she thought, and that not only from the construction work. Thomazine was not much given to fancies, but she thought she could feel this house's resentment, in the dark hours. When the new timbers settled and groaned, and the wind hissed through the gaps in the west wing, you could imagine that this had never been a happy house, either. Alone, and brooding on imagined slights, and -

  Thomazine, it is a house. Fill it with a sufficiency of clutter and fat fair-haired babies, and it will be as much a home as White Notley ever was.

  Her feet grew cold. If she had any complaint of her man it was that he was an appalling coverlet thief - and if he carried on so, the only murderer in these parts was likely to be Thomazine, when she smothered him with a pillow. It was that stupid. It really was that ridiculous, that anyone might think he -

  This was her second night here. She wouldn't always come awake in the night, snuffing frantically for the smell of burning, because she could not stop thinking about the first time she'd seen Four Ashes, with the whole of the west wing a pile of blackened, tumbled rubble, a handful of burnt rafters sticking up against a weeping sky.

  She lay flat again, and looked at her darling, asleep with his hair in his eyes. This was his home. He had been a little boy, here. He had grown up, lisping his first prayers at his mother's knee here. Had taken his first faltering steps in the hall downstairs.

  It was no consolation, none at all. She lay awake, thinking she smelled burning, wondering whether her sister-in-law had been dead before the roof fell in on the west wing. Looking for the blackened patches on the bricks, and the shadows on the new plaster where the charring might show through.

  Was it here, she lay? Or here? And did she know, as the flames came for her? Did she cry for help? Or was she already dead - had she fallen, alone in the dark, or died of an apoplexy, or had she been done to death, as they said, and -

  She shook herself. Anyone would think you were breeding, miss, such fancies as you take, and the Lord alone knows it was too soon for that.

  Well, she could lie here all night, watching the squares of moonlight creeping slowly across the floor and breeding foolish, fearful fancies. Or she could get up and pee and do something useful with herself, like getting the kitchen fire lit, or starting some bread. Something useful, and practical, and real. Seeing to the horses, hobbled on the lawn.

  She got dressed, quietly, though she left off her stays because the idea of lacing herself twice in the dark was more than she could bear. Stockings, and sensible boots - oh, a most murderous man, her husband, with his insistence on clean stockings and stout footwear, as if she was one of his soldiers - in her hand, though she doubted that much short of a full artillery barrage would wake him, once he had his head down.

  Out on the lawn, big grey Marlowe had his head down and his solid dappled backside turned into the gusting rain, grazing peaceably with little black Minna sheltered in his lee. Two less concerned beasts she had not seen. So much for ghosts and boggarts.

  The kitchen flags were cold under her bare feet.

  To light the fire, then, or not?

  So much for ghosts, but she found she did not want to, did not want whatever, or whoever, was out there in the waiting darkness to know she was awake.

  (Go back to bed, then, Thomazine, and hide your head in your husband's shoulder - but then you will never know what's out there, will you?)

  Marlowe was pleased to see her. She pushed his enquiring muzzle away from her face when his investigations became too pressing. He heaved a great sigh and pretended to be the most desolate horse in the world while she fussed Minna. It was hard to imagine ghosts when you had a good hundredweight of horse trying to push his head under your arm, while another blew hot, grassy horse-breath into your face while she made sure that you were still yourself. "Behave," she said firmly, "you daft pair."

  Her voice sounded like the loudest thing in the world, and yet she was barely whispering, and all the hairs rippled on the back of her neck and she was being silly, she knew she was being silly, there was nothing here -

  Then a light showed, suddenly, amongst the ruins, bobbing and wavering. Marlowe suddenly sprang away, stiff-legged as a child's toy, his head up and his ears flickering, and Minna wheeled with him, the two horses in a plunging panic as far as their hobbles would allow them. Thomazine screamed as a black figure reared out of the ashes.

  "What the hell are you doing wandering round in the middle of the night, lass?"

  "Gillespie!" she snapped, her voice shaky with relief. "I might ask the same of you!"

  He put his hand out to the big grey horse and Marlowe snuffed him warily. "Aye, it's me, you witless beast. Be still." He set down his lantern, and the blackened apocalypse of timber suddenly took on a strangely homely glow. "Don't you dare, Marlowe. This thing's yet primed. Mistress Russell, I'd have ye step away from the house, if ye please. Come. And you, ye daft nag. 'Tis not safe."

  He took the grey’s halter, and his free hand out to Thomazine. “Broken glass in the ashes, mistress. I’d bring your mare away, too. This part of the house is mostly shored up wi’ timbers, and they warp in the damp. Ye’ll have heard it, shifting?”

  “I am not a baby, Gillespie,” she said coldly, ignoring his hand. She was impressed at how calm and unafraid her voice sounded. “There is no need to frighten me with ghost stories.”

  “Aye? Well, from things that go bump in the night, may the good Lord deliver us indeed, Mistress Russell, for it’s like to be the gable end, and it’ll go a sight more than bump.”

  “I don’t –“ She was about to say she didn’t believe a word of it, but even as she spoke there was a faint, hollow groan, long and low and eerie, from the
ruins. He stooped and picked up the lantern, and tugged the grey horse away. “Mistress –“

  And she was still standing like a mooncalf, when there was a slithering, hissing sound, from somewhere in the skies above her, and something came whistling past her head. Gillespie hurled himself at her, his shoulder taking her in the breastbone, and the pair of them hit the rubble at the same time as a razor-edged slab of tile hit the ground a yard from them both and burst into lethal shards.

  And Thomazine turned her bleeding face into the inimical ash, and wept tears of shock and pain.

  The lantern was shattered, but Gillespie had brought flint and tinder, and he sat and patiently re-lit it, in the seeping mizzle. It would be dawn soon, and the sky was lightening, and possibly they did not need its light, but it gave him a thing to do with his hands and his attention while she cried, and she was grateful for that. He did not say that he had told her so, either. He simply went and caught up the two frightened horses and soothed them and petted them, and Marlowe buried his face in the Scotsman’s coat with a trust that spoke of long intimacy.

  “Now then,” he said, when she had cleaned herself up. "I've a job to do, mistress. Can ye bide a minute, or d'ye need my undivided attention?"

  He grinned at her, his dark face devilish in the lantern-light, and did not wait for an answer. Still holding her gaze, he drew a pistol from his belt, the lantern-light glinting along its barrel. Raised it above his head. And fired. "Didn't fancy trying to worm it out in the cat's-light, now."

  The echoes of the shot were still ringing when he drew his second pistol and fired that into the heavens. "You -" her mouth was dry, and she found herself shaking, her ears ringing, for all she was a soldier's daughter, "they were loaded? You carry them, loaded?"