by M. J. Logue
(She was a countrywoman, not a stupid one, and if they thought they had the monopoly on gullibility in the metropolis, they’d never tried to buy a bolt of cloth in Witham on market-day.) And after she had wrapped herself in her own plain, sensible cloak and put Russell’s over the top of it, for there was not much between them for height: after she had slipped on her stout pattens and her thick woollen hood, and when there was little more than the gleam of her eyes visible between the layers of plain dark wool - why, then, Thomazine was ready to brave the darkness.
He was asleep, and restless again, his breath catching between his teeth as he jerked on the pillow. She kissed his forehead as she passed, but he did not wake. He did not wake when she took one of his pistols from the clothes press, either. (She was the daughter of a most well-respected officer of the old New Model Army, and wife to another. Honestly, did he really think she was squalmish around firearms?) Primed it, and slipped it into her muff.
Money, she would not take, for what she did not have could not be stolen. But she slipped that letter on which all his hopes rested, in with the pistol, and crept downstairs.
London after dark was a different, frightening place. This was the respectable end of the poor quarter, and all the swathed and muffled bodies that jostled her were no more than workmen and plain women returning home from a day’s labour, or from marketing for the last of the day’s bargains, or from prayers at St Gabriel's. Tired, hungry, aching people, longing for their beds and their boards - not menacing predators, no matter how much they pushed and jostled.
And then she and Debby were out of Aldgate, and all changed again, for she barely recognised the bustling streets she saw by daylight in these shifting torchlit shadows.
Doors swinging open on noise and blasts of heat and the stench of too many bodies in too small a space, like doorways into hell. Beggars in alleyways, and what Thomazine hoped was the glint of light on an open mouth, or the gleam of an eye. And what might not be.
A brawl, that almost spilled over her feet, and was cut off sharp.
She could smell the river, that rich tidal silt of salt mud and decay. “Mistress,” Debby said close to her ear, “Mistress Zee, are we anywhere close to, yet?”
And that poor lady was near to weeping with fear, and yet they were barely a mile from home, and not even across the bridge yet, and –
“Hell. And. Bloody. Death!” she said, and would have stopped and stamped like a child, had she not wanted to weep, or to throw herself headlong into the freezing mud and howl. A most unmaidenly mode of expression, judging by Deb’s shocked intake of breath, and yet a fully well merited one. For Thomazine’s own feet grew numb and cold, her hands ached, her nose was running, and she was entirely, wholly, lost.
Well. Not lost, then. She knew where she was. What she did not know, Russell, was where Master Pepys’ office was, for they had never seen him in it, had they? They had seen him at the Fighting Cocks tavern at Leadenhall, which was no use at all to a woman and a maid, and so all this subterfuge had come to naught, and she could have sat down and wept in the street for the waste of it.
For it mattered, it mattered very much that this letter should be delivered, and not only because its safe receipt mattered so very much to Russell. It was the first thing he had trusted her with - the first thing any of them had trusted her with - and if she could not do so simple a thing as hand over a note without incident, she was not fit to be let out unattended.
“Mistress?” Debby said woefully, and Thomazine straightened her back.
“A little further, Debs. We are to go to Birstall House, in Kensington. Sir Charles will see our note of hand delivered, and let us see if you don’t get a look at how persons of note - other persons of note and quality,” she amended quickly, “see how they live!”
It was – what? four miles? so far? to Kensington. And yet it was the longest journey of nightmare she had ever known, dappled with creatures of darkness who loomed in her path, and the smell of burning and disease everywhere about her.
In daylight, she told herself, she knew these streets, and they were not full of monsters. (She sort of knew these streets, then. She was not a regular haunter of the banks of the Thames, and nor did she enjoy so much freedom here as she had known at home, and she was beginning to flag a little at the unaccustomed distance. Not so breathless that she could not chivvy the quivering Deb along with promises of scenes of Lupercalian debauchery to make the neighbours stare, when she returned.)
Not sure what was worse: the stinking, bustling streets of the City, or the shadowy, deceptive marble of Kensington, elegantly silent and menacing, where every dark house was haunted. A cat who darted across her path might be the Witch of Endor, and reduced Deb to frightened tears.
It came on for midnight. She was sure of it. She could not even hear the chimes of a church to tell her so, or the cry of a watchman, but she knew it, and he would be missing her soon, would be worried, would send someone to look for her –
So, better make haste, then, madam.
“No!” Debby said in awe. “Mistress Russell you cannot mean it!”
“I assure you I do,” she said firmly, and proceeded to drag her squawking maidservant up the great moonlight-pale marble steps of Birstall House, with Deb protesting every step of the way – their hair, their shoes, the state of their skirts –
“My lord Fairmantle, if you please,” she said sweetly, and then out of the side of her mouth, “It’s all right, Deb, they always look like that. Thankful said. He hires them for a certain rigidity of expression. Heaven only knows what goes on in this house.”
Deb gave a horrified whoop, and the butler gave her a stern look. “The Earl of Birstall is not at home, madam.”
“Indeed,” Thomazine said. She was of an unwomanly height and she had a prominent nose. That was from her father’s side of the family. He’d made a career of using both to intimidate, and she’d learned at his knee. She straightened her back and looked down that prominent nose at the butler. “Indeed, sir. Then perhaps you would be good enough to interrupt the Earl whilst he is not at home in the drawing-room, and tell him that Mistress Russell would beg a few moments of his time on a matter of some delicacy.”
“The Earl is not at home,” he repeated.
“Surely. I can hear him not being at home with, I believe, Sir Charles Sedley, amongst others. Although not my lord Wilmot, or I do not believe you would have the door open. The monkey, Deb. The Earl of Rochester keeps an ape as a pet, and a horrible little beast it is. If you leave doors open it has a habit of escaping, and relieving its better nature behind the hangings. I do count the Earl as a personal friend. I have dined in this house, with my husband.”
“I am aware of that, madam. I mind the occasion well. The Earl is still not at home to callers.”
“Then I imagine I must leave him a note, must I not?”
“He will not be at home for some time, madam, and I –”
“Martin, the hell’s going on out there? Send the bitch away!”
She bridled at the coarse voice from behind the drawing-room door – not Sir Charles, not her friend, surely? – and said, very loudly, “I beg your pardon, sir!”
“It’s not mine, you slut, I won’t own it, and I won’t pay for it – Mistress Russell!”
Thomazine very slowly withdrew her muff from under the enveloping layers of two heavy wool cloaks. “It is already paid for, Sir Charles,” she said stiffly. “I fear you may be under some illusion, sir. I am not here to importune.”
“Dear God, woman, I thought you had – what on earth were you thinking, madam? Have your wits gone wandering altogether? I thought you were a – what d’you mean by it, eh? Wandering about in the dark, like a – has he not got any sense at all, that addle-pated chap of yours? Gad, I should shake the sense into you! If you were my daughter, madam, I can assure you I’d not – well? What d’ye say, then?”
“What I say, sir, is that if you are so discourteous to all your callers as you ar
e to me, I see we have nothing further to say to each other!” She tossed her head, and she would have gone – aye, and she would have wept, too, for he was her last hope and she was disappointed in him – had he not put his hand on her arm.
“Oh, don’t be so missish, Mistress Russell! I apologise, madam, but -!”
“Who ‘sit, Chas? She going t’come in and entertain us?” Sedley drawled from the dimly-lit darkness. “Got a lap wants filling, wench – she pretty, Chas? She got nice bubbies?”
“Oh, bugger off, Sid,” Fairmantle called back over his shoulder. “She’s a bloody washerwoman, come to dun me.”
“’Bout your level, sir, tupping the menials!”
“Better that than the ape,” Thomazine said quietly, and Fairmantle snorted – and repeated it, for Sedley’s edification. “What d’you say to that, then, you whelp?”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, my lord! Bet Wilmot c’d come up with something to say.”
“Wilmot is never at a loss for words,” Fairmantle said, and there was a noise that sounded remarkably like a pistol shot from the drawing room behind him, and a smash of splintering glass.
“Ah, damn it, you wasn’t fond of that glass, was you?” another voice brayed, one that she didn’t know.
“I shall have to learn not to be, won’t I?”
“You paid that slut off yet? I declare, we’ve more labour for her here – Emmett’s spilled his guts on the tablecloth –“ and another cackle of raucous hilarity, and a drunken mumble of outrage from the maligned Emmett.
“Fucking tradesman,” someone said, very clearly, and she saw Fairmantle flush.
“You see why I am not at home to lady callers, dear. Now. What errand brings you out on such urgency – and in God’s name, be brief!”
She handed him the letter, with a very brief explanation. He expressed a brief, blurred sympathy for Russell’s indisposition, but no more than that: no surprise. Squinted at the inscription. “Handwriting’s terrible, dear. Bad this time, is he?”
“He will recover. With care, and if he is not pressed with stupid cares - like some wretched butterbox plaguing him about pepper.”
“Well, he normally manages to come about, so – yes, I’m sure he’ll mend nicely. Very wifely, dear.”
She took a deep breath. “Will you deliver it for me? To Master Pepys’s office?”
“I?” he looked, briefly, appalled. “Well, but – but madam, you heard – and I wish you had not – I have no wish to taint myself with the shop, no offence to Master Pepys you understand, but – I mean –”
“They will call you names, if you are seen to be involved with decent working men such as Master Pepys?” she said with gentle malice, and he raised his eyebrows at her, and scratched under his wig.
“Madam, if you consider that smellsmock to be a decent anything, you have yet to have any acquaintance with his wife. She has a number of stories to tell, and none of them reflect very well on her husband. Now, speaking of reflecting on your husband, would you care to do likewise, and bugger off, dearie?”
“But you’ll do it?”
“The very first thing tomorrow morning, Mistress Russell, I shall send a very discreet footman to slip a note under Master Pepys’ office door. Now in God’s name, dear, begone, before Little Sid comes staggering out thinking I’m sampling your wares!”
She withdrew that primed pistol – that plain, worn, well-handled pistol, that had seen over twenty years of service under Cromwell and Monck in her husband’s hand – from her muff. “I am not desperately concerned about Master Sedley, you know. If he chooses to retain his balls where the Lord placed them, I suggest he treats women with a little more respect. I am, after all, a respectably married lady.”
Fairmantle gave a great shout of laughter. “Mistress Russell, you are possibly the least respectable, and the most firmly-married, lady I know! Let me call my carriage.”
“I thought we had agreed on discretion, sir?”
“We had. Only you and I will know that I am soiling my hands with trade, dear. Will I allow you walk home through the streets at the peril of your life – I will not. If any harm befalls you, well- I rather fear the Major would make my life nasty, brutish and short, as that clever Master Hobbes would put it.”
“Why?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, dear. Just humour me. There have been a sufficiency of rather grisly murders enough of late.”
“Oh, will you stop trying to frighten me, sir, I am not a child!”
“No, well, and no doubt the poor woman who was strangled, Mistress Russell, a most respectable lady apparently coming late from church less than a month ago ! – no doubt she wasn’t a child either, but she was still throttled – aye, madam, and – well, a thing done to her that you and I will not speak of, now, if you take my meaning. And if you were a little more in the world you would know all about that, for ‘tis the talk of the town today, that there is a fiend abroad. So yes, you will take my carriage home, and you may instruct the driver to deliver you to so far as you please and walk the rest of the way, if you still have a mind to deceive your husband.”
“Whassmatter, Chas, paying in kind?” Sedley yelled. “She paying you, or are you paying her? Hey?”
His lips tightened, and he looked angry, for the first time. “Carriage, Mistress Russell. And you will oblige me by keeping that pistol to your hand, if you please. You may not be frightened, but I am. A woman was done to death not a mile from this house. Cruelly, and, for aught I can tell, purposelessly. It has been the subject of every clacking tongue for days, and none the nearer to apprehending the miscreant, dear. I’m sure the lady’s husband is perfectly distracted – for who’s to say it was even done by human agency, and not by a fiend?”
The idea seemed to please him, for his cheerful countenance lit like a salacious fishwife’s. “So we have no idea with what we are dealing, madam, and I would be grateful if you might take all due precautions, for there are murderers abroad – rogues and murderers, dear, who would come on us all in our beds. It may even be the beginning of an invasion by the Dutch, and then where would we be?” And he clapped his hands together, looking purposeful. “Now. For once, mistress, be obedient, and do as you are bid, and behave like a conventional woman of town. You are not amongst your friends in Buckinghamshire now. This is London, and things are done differently here, and you must abide by town rule, not country ones. Dear God, that I should live so long to be nursemaiding a wench still wet behind the ears!"
She found herself smiling at him. “I believe you are an old sweetheart, sir.”
“Less of the old, you minx. I’ll have you know I am six months younger than your husband.”
He did not hand her into the carriage. He sent her down to the kitchens, as befitted her status as a washerwoman – which she doubted Sedley and his crew believed any more than she did – to await it. But before she went, there was one final question she needed to ask.
“Sir Charles – did you, did your coachman, um, did anyone find a ribbon in that carriage? It was an embroidered one – I – um – it was a wedding favour, and we – I embroidered it,” she could feel a flush rising from her collar, “I think Thankful lost it from his hair, when we were – when we – um, when –“
He blinked at her, and shook his head thoughtfully. “No, dear, not that I know. But I imagine it’s quite distinctive, if anyone were to find it.”
36
They’d asked the carriage to stop at St Gabriel’s, and walked home. It was cold, but not so cold, now. Deb said her feet were hurting, and Thomazine said it wasn’t far now, and they’d walked on at a snail’s halting pace through streets that were suddenly kinder, now that tomorrow all would be well. Slipped gratefully into bed, and put her head on his beating heart, and slept.
She did not know at first what woke her.
And then she sat up, flipping her braid over her shoulder, knuckling the sleep out of her eyes.
She needed to pee. That was not so fr
ightening. Russell was breathing beside her, a little shaky, a little too fast, but steady. He was still, not restless. (He was asleep. That was a relief, because married or not she did not like to pee in front of him, and she really needed to.) She slipped out of bed and padded across the dark-cold boards to use the pot, wincing as her sleep-warm skin met night-cold air.
“Thomazine.”
She stood up abruptly, shaking her shift down. “Er - Thankful? Are you awake?”
A long sigh, and then he sat up. “Thomazine, take your shift off.”
“I- what?”
“Take it off. I want to see you.”
“You want to what?” Outside in the street she heard the rumble of the night soil cart and entirely by reflex she clapped a hand to hide herself from its driver, though unless he could see into shuttered attics her modesty was safe. “Thankful it’s freezing, you can’t mean it!”
“Then come back to bed. And let me warm you.”
“You’re ill! You can’t -”
“Sick of love,” he said, and he sounded so much like his old, dry self that she smiled and shook her head and slid back under the covers. And he rolled over, as quick as a hunting falcon, and pinned her to the mattress with the whole burning weight of him, kissing her throat and her jaw with barely-leashed ferocity -
She should tell him to stop. (His whiskers tickled, on her suddenly-very-hot skin, and she wanted him to kiss her harder, to take the tickle out of it -)
His hand closed on her hip. Caught a handful of linen. Pushed the crumpled linen up to her waist.
She made a noise of protest - no: more of this marvellous fevered kissing before -
He pushed the folds of her shift up further, up over her tingling cold-tight breasts, and he dipped his head and kissed the salt-cellar of her throat. “Darkness is no friend to lovers,” he said conversationally. “I want to see you, tibber. All of you.”
