by M. J. Logue
“Major Russell has his position to think of, madam,” she said, and the street door opened on a gust of lovely cool fresh air and Major Russell’s considered position was immediately declared to be hard by the fire.
It was not so cool that he ought to be shivering, and she looked up at him sharply.
“’M all. Right, tibber,” he said, and there was that little break in his speech that she only ever heard when his ruined cheek had locked stiff on him. He did not like her to speak of it – to be pitied - and so she did not, but she put her hand on his scars in passing, because sometimes warmth would ease the stiffness, and the widow would think it no more than a foolish display of affection.
His skin was hot, though, and slightly damp to the touch.
The Bartholomew-baby made a happy noise, and shuffled on his bottom to snuggle into Thomazine’s skirts whilst his mother busied herself warming ale and fetching food that Russell did not want.
“Mistress, my husband wishes to be left in peace,” she said, and enjoyed saying it. “He needs his bed. Can you not see as much?”
“Sound like your mother,” he murmured, and that made her laugh, even though she was worried about him.
He was sufficiently biddable as to frighten her. He lay down – he did not try and incite her to lie down with him – and she pulled the blankets over his shoulders, and tried to smile at her though his teeth were chattering. (And that was why he had sounded so odd.) “Be all right, Zee,” he said. “Been so before. Come about.”
She sat on the boards at the side of the bed, loosed the tie from his hair and ruffled it loose on his shoulders and then, for the sake of comfort, kissed his poor forehead. “Poor Apple,” she said, and she meant it, for he looked weary and cold. “Let me -”
“Don’t.” He gave a shiver, and twisted to bury his face in her shoulder, “Don’t let me go, tibber. Don’t ever let me go “
Cold and unhappy, then, and she ran her hand up and down the back of his neck, under his hair. Where it was already hot and wet with sweat. “Long enough to bring you something hot, perhaps? For you must be hungry, after so long at your work. And you need to eat something, husband. “
She thought he meant to shake his head, and to be no trouble. And then he sighed, and rubbed his face against her arm, and she could feel him shivering. “I love you,” he said, and he sounded desperate about it. “Thomazine, I love you. Always."
32
The widow looked up from her never-ending mending, as Thomazine pushed open the kitchen door. “My husband is sick,” she said, and the older woman nodded.
“I thought he might be, so. It recurs.”
“He has often been so?”
“And did not tell you?” She laughed, without much humour. “Why should he? He is a man like any other -” and folded her sewing, and stood up. “He is not wholly your fool, Mistress Thomazine, for all you might think he is at the crook of your little finger. He has his pride. Sometimes, it is all he has. Well, then. I have sat up a-nights for the Major before, and I see I must again. Will you see to the child?”
“I - no.” He had his pride, and sometimes it had been all he had. No longer. “Will you tell me what to do?”
And the widow looked at her thoughtfully, and nodded. “Jane. My name is Jane. God grant him a quick return to health, this time, for the Lord knows he is much needed.”
“Upright wi’ breeches on,” Thomazine quoted one if her father’s precepts, and Jane Bartholomew’s lips quivered.
“I have never seen him else, mistress. On my honour, I have not. Now.”
“Frumenty,” Thomazine said firmly. “And I will see to it, my own self. For of all things he liked – he likes – frumenty the way I do it.”
“Eggs,” Jane Bartholomew said, equally firmly. “Buttered, mistress. He needs rest, and care, and nourishing.”
“I am more than capable of caring for my own husband, madam!”
To which the widow said nothing, but her eyebrows moved in a manner that was both sceptical and unflattering. “Indeed,” she said. “Indeed. Perhaps, then, mistress, you should like to make frumenty. Your way.”
Thomazine inclined her head equally frostily. “Have you wheat, madam?”
“No,” the widow said. “We are in the city, Mistress Russell. If I would have wheat, then I must go and buy so much as I required.” She was not, quite, smirking as she said it, but she had an air of definite smugness that made Thomazine itch to slap her.
“I see. Milk?”
“I have milk, though I trust it is still good, though not today’s –“
“And no doubt your butter is of the same dubious quality,” Thomazine snapped.
“Since I rely on your husband’s rent for my housekeeping, my lady, yes, I imagine it is!”
The widow’s head was up, and her eyes were level and defiant, but for the first time Thomazine wondered if Jane Bartholomew might be thus well-ordered because she was afraid. Because a strict order was all that stood between her and the darkness of chaos. “Does he – do we- do we owe, Mistress Bartholomew?”
The widow shook her head. “The major would never allow such a thing to happen. Unless.”
She did not finish that sentence. She did not need to. Thomazine finished it for her.
“But that will not be. So. Now either you or I must go to market, and get the makings of frumenty – for tomorrow – and today it seems that the major must make do with his buttered eggs, and be, ah.” It was a clumsy joke, but she had heard him make it often enough. “He must be, um, thankful.”
And it was not a truce, precisely, but more in the way of an armed neutrality, and the widow lent Thomazine an apron and between the two of them they managed as pretty a dish of buttered eggs as Robert May and his accomplished cookery could have managed.
And then the three of them sat to table, there in the kitchen, Thomazine and the widow and the Bartholomew-baby, and they ate a good half of that pretty dish between them, taking it in turns to spoon the creamy eggs into the child’s peeping mouth.
They talked of medicines, warily, and of the nature of Russell’s illness, and how he might best be mended. Of what good nourishing things they might give him to eat, until he was well, and where Thomazine might find some good plain whole-cloth stockings at a sensible price. It was simple housewifely conversation, and she had missed it, for much though Thomazine enjoyed listening to the high-flown poetry and politics around Charles Fairmantle’s supper table, she had not known how much she missed real talk, of things that mattered.
This was the world she knew: this, feeding buttered eggs into a little boy’s mouth, and talking of whether sage oil was a better plaster for a man with phlegm in his lungs than mustard. Of being competent, and a woman in your own right, a person of significance, and not merely of value for a daring turn of wit or beauty.
“You are smiling, madam?” Jane Bartholomew said, leaning forward to turn the bread on the fork where it toasted fragrantly.
She was. “I was thinking on the nature of power,” she said mildly, and dropped her eyes, because she did not think the widow would approve of what Thomazine was truly thinking, not at all.
But it crossed Thomazine’s mind that the diplomacy with which she and the widow Bartholomew were setting out their rules of engagement, and beginning their peace negotiations, was every bit as sensitive and fraught as those her husband was engaged in.
A little commonwealth, indeed.
33
He had not played the obedient patient, and he was not in bed. Through the attic window the sun had moved almost all the way round the street and the room was lit with a soft amber light, and her husband was still half-dressed, shaking hard enough to rattle plaster-dust from the walls, and determined that he must go out and finish his business.
“Apple, you’re ill, and you should be abed,” she said, and gave him a stern look.
“I know! You come bearing medicine -”
“I come bearing buttered eggs, sweeting.” H
e was neither that daft nor that feverish, and he grinned at her, and she acknowledged defeat. “Well. A little medicine, then. Jane tells me you take these fits, when you are - “ Strained. Worried. Tired. And she had not known, because -
“Did Jane tell you I was like to die, the last time?”
“She did not, husband, and you are certainly not going to die this time. Now hush, and get in bed.”
He took three strides about the attic, stopped in front of her. (She was glad it was a small lodging. He could not exhaust himself pacing its perimeter.) “Did she tell you it was a tertian ague? Had it since Scotland. It’s not important -”
“She said very little, save that you can be a pig-headed patient and the only reasonable course of action is to have you knocked on the head and restrained. Now.”
“It's a tertian ague, tibber. Three days out of commission, and I haven’t got three days. I -”
“Am going to finish undressing, put on the flannel nightshirt that your loving, but impatient, wife has so conscientiously put against the chimney breast to warm, take my medicine, and sleep.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, sounding so marvellously like an outraged small boy that had she not been afraid of what the widow - what Jane - had told her the next three days would bring, she might have laughed.
“Dear, nothing is more important than you getting well.”
“I-”
“Am sick, and weary, and in need of rest and good feeding. Now hush.”
And because he was sick, and weary, he sat down limply on the bed and let her help him out of the rest of his clothes. He said he was cold, and she wrapped the blankets tight about him and got her cloak and her furs from the press and piled them over him, agreeing that it was cold, and insisting that he finished his tea. (He muttered darkly that she was trying to poison him, and she assured him that a pillow over the face would be much quicker. And quieter.)
And then she slid under the blankets, and put her arms about him, and he put his head on her breast with a little sob of what sounded like relief.
“I am here,” she said, and he felt for her hand under the covers and held it hard enough to hurt.
“I know,” he said, and his teeth chattered together just once before he set his jaw. “But tibber - may God have mercy on me, lass, I am afraid “
“No need,” she said, and kissed the top of his head, her eyes squeezed shut. “No need at all, my darling. Rest. I will see to all in the morning.”
“You promise?”
“As God is my witness, Apple. Sleep now.”
And she felt all the tension leave him, on one long shaky sigh. And wondered what she had just let herself in for.
34
Well, she had always wanted to look after him, and now she was doing, and it was nowhere near as romantic as she had imagined. He was fractious, restless, ungrateful - distressed and irritable by turns, and she could not comfort him, which annoyed the hell out of her. And she knew of course that it shouldn't, and that if she were at home in Essex her mother would have made him comfortable in no time at all. Even the widow Bartholomew would have eased him better than Thomazine, for the unhappy bottom line of it was that Russell was not a particularly placid invalid, and she not a particularly competent nurse. When he was lucid enough to know that he was ill, he hated it, and when he wasn't, he scared her witless, although Jane Bartholomew assured her that this bout of his illness was not a particularly severe one.
(And she said it with a degree of smugness that raised Thomazine's hackles no end, because she of course she had nursed him through much worse.)
About the only consolation was that he was not contagious.
It was the uselessness that riled her the most: and that wasn't fair, because it wasn't his fault that nothing she did could make him comfortable. There was no gentle smoothing of his fevered brow. There was precious little rest, never mind spooning nourishing broth between his pale lips - he swore, a lot, and knocked the bowl out of her hand, and was determined that he would get up. (And Thomazine, oh, Thomazine the gentle ministering angel, yelled at him that if he did not stay where she bid him she would tie him to the goddamned bed. And he was quite himself at that point and his hackles had raised as much as hers and he had yelled right back at her that she was her father's bloody daughter, and a little termagant - and, well, that was when Jane Bartholomew had come up the stairs and told both of them to hold their tongues. Had told Thomazine to go downstairs - right downstairs, mistress, if you cannot be woman grown enough to mind your tongue in a sickroom - and then he'd yelled at the widow, too, because he didn't want Thomazine to leave him.)
She was tired, and irritable, and she had gone, just to spite him. And all the way down the stairs, she could hear him shouting her name, and Jane Bartholomew trying to settle him, and her husband's voice growing scratchier and more afraid as the door closed, and she went down to the widow's quarters and sat with the Bartholomew-baby and played with him, his fat little hands patting her wet cheeks in wonder.
And she sat him on her knee, and played shoe the little colt with the boy's chubby bare feet, and tried not to hear Russell promising wildly to be good, please, he would be a good boy, he would be quiet, please, if she would only not leave him -
It seemed like a long time later when the widow came back down the creaking stairs, very slowly.
"He is asleep," she said, and Thomazine said nothing, but only nodded. "At last." She wiped her hands on her apron, and the little boy gave a happy gurgle and put his hands up to his mother, who hefted him absently to her hip, like a bundle of laundry.
Thomazine looked at her own, useless, hands. She had thought herself competent, and she was increasingly sure she was not. A sturdy wench, and fit to lift and carry and heft, but she had not the widow's sense of - well, peace, almost. Thomazine had not been a restful child, and she was not a restful woman. (He knew that. She had thought he didn't mind. She still thought he didn't, but she wondered if perhaps her own cheerful chaos was not the best thing for his comfort.) She took a deep breath.
- she did not like to ask advice from this woman, either -
"What can I do? To make it - make him - better?"
"Be quiet?" the widow said tartly. And for possibly the first time in her life, Thomazine did not answer back.
She went up, later, though, when the sun was setting behind the rooftops, and the attic was floating in a sea of rose-gold. If you listened carefully, you could hear the city turn about its axis, taking a breath as the day's work ended and the night's work had not yet begun.
He was breathing. That was the first thing she listened for, halting on the top stair to listen. (She did not know what she would have done if he was not.)
And then he gave a sigh of his own, and turned over with a great creaking of bed-ropes and a rustle of blankets, and he sounded as if it hurt him, and she dropped to her knees at the side of the bed and burrowed her head into his shoulder and wept great hot, bitter tears of shame. "Tibber," he said drowsily, "I am not dying of anything, maid, and I'd prefer not to be drowned in salt water."
“Does this mean you’re better?” she sniffed, and he laughed - she felt it, felt his body jerk with silent amusement - and brushed his dry lips to her forehead.
“For now, love. For now. Tired, but - mending.” He did not look well. His hair was plastered dark with sweat across his forehead, clinging in limp rags to his back, and his nightshirt was soaked right through. “A night’s sleep,” he said firmly. “And - would you - could you do a thing for me? I’ve a message that must go. Must, tibber, or I’d not ask you. I should have been at the table with Mijnheer di Cavalese today already, and God knows my name is uncertain enough as it is with him, at present.”
“Mine- who?”
“Cavalese. He is, believe it or not, a Dutchman. He is a merchant - oh, lass, may I trouble you with the details another time, for my head is ringing like a blacksmith’s anvil.” He sat up stiffly, reaching for pen and paper. It was not l
ike his usual sure, spare script. His hands shook, and she had to dip the pen in the ink for him, for he could not keep it still enough to find the ink-bottle. But in the end it was done, a matter of a few apologetic lines that he had not transacted business with Master di Cavalese that day due to the recurrence of a tertian ague, and might he be excused without causing offence.
“Can you take it to Master Pepys? You mind his office - we were there, was it only last week?” He was beginning to shiver again, but she suspected it was the healthy shivering of a man in a wet shirt sitting in a draught, and she tucked her tippet about his shoulders feeling, for the first time, competent.
“I should rather stay with you,” she said honestly, and kissed his forehead.
“I should rather you did, too, tibber. But take your maid, and go. Please.”
35
And of course she did not want to go, did not want to leave him ill and unhappy, did not want to leave that stout, shabby, comfortable house on such a night - hardly a night for seeking assignations, with the mist seeping in up the river in draggled white ringlets, and the bitter incense smell of chimney-smoke in your throat.
But. There it was. And Debby thought she was mad, and the widow thought she had some kind of furtive illicit liaison arranged, and the more they thought she was up to no good the more she was determined to carry out this daring plan and prove the lot of them wrong. The widow wanted to send a boy with the note, and that seemed sensible, save that the widow did not personally know a sensible, reliable boy to send for, and Thomazine was hanged if she was going to trust a letter that her darling had risen from his sickbed to write, into the hands of some dirty little urchin they didn’t know from Adam who might throw it in the river and run to the nearest pothouse on the proceeds.
