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

by M. J. Logue

  He must have misunderstood, she thought. He was as hurt and angry and frightened as if he truly was being painted as a murderer twice over, but it could not be so, because that would be ludicrous.

  But it seemed it was so.

  The play was doubtless as edifying as Fairmantle had promised. She wouldn’t know: she watched it through a haze of tears, and Thankful at her side never took his eyes from Lord Egmont up in his box

  They were not intimates of respectable Lord and Lady Egmont, nothing so close - but on nodding terms, almost beginning to edge away from the tarnish of an acquaintance with the Merry Gang. It would not have been long before they’d have been asked to some large, impersonal social occasion, some courtly supper or masque, something where they would be on trial. Fit, or not, to be allowed more confidence in polite society.

  Well. Not now.

  She had inclined her head respectfully to the older woman, smiling, and her husband had bowed. Nothing exceptionable. Nothing to provoke Lady Egmont’s outraged stare, pulling away her sweeping swagged skirts as though Thomazine had spat on her. Certainly nothing to provoke His Lordship’s stiff, glowering fury, sweeping past them on the steps of the theatre so close that they had to step aside in haste or be knocked down.

  It might not have been so bad if someone had not laughed. If Lady Egmont’s little black page had not turned back to pick up Thomazine’s spilled gloves, with a look on his face that was both sympathetic and sad at once. If the lady had not said, loudly, “Nero, boy! Put those down!” - and then, when he would have handed them back to her, “Where you found them, boy!”

  People were beginning to stare, the orange-sellers falling quiet to gawk around them. Lady Egmont twitched her head aside, so even her eyes were not sullied by their appearance. (She had had a patch, hard by her rouged mouth, under the edges of her vizard-mask: a little crescent moon. Thomazine did not think she would ever forget that.)

  His Lordship turned his head very slowly, changing his course so that he brushed by them so close that she could see a louse crawling in the curls of his wig.

  He meant that they should step aside from his path. No gentleman would allow himself to be thrust aside so rudely, as if he were a person of no account -

  He did not know Russell very well, then, for her husband straightened his back and stopped dead on the steps, so that Lord Egmont must himself turn aside first.

  He stopped, and he said nothing, though he was white to the lips, and two furious spots of colour glared on his cheekbones.

  “Out of my way,” Egmont said icily. *And take your accomplice with you.”

  She heard her husband’s sharp indrawn breath. Under her hand, his arm was vibrating like a plucked lute-string.

  “Thankful,” she murmured, “be -”

  Careful, she meant to say.

  “You will apologise for that,” he said, and it was so silent, in that little space around them, that she heard the bone-rattle of his back teeth.

  “I don’t think so,” Egmont said pleasantly, and Russell’s hand dropped onto the hilt of his sword, quite reflexively.

  She remembered that, too. That her husband did not wear an elegantly-chased French rapier at his hip, like a fashionable gentleman, but instead wore his old worn, munitions-quality backsword with its plain, worn, blue-black metal guard. Not a weapon for grace, but a declaration that he had been a soldier once, and he was yet a man who knew the business of steel. It had not glinted in the torchlight outside the theatre, but had seemed to suck in the light instead.

  “Intending to murder me, too, Major? I don’t think so. Even your little accessory couldn’t deny it before so many witnesses.” Egmont smiled, showing all his teeth- showing all someone’s teeth, at any rate, though possibly not his own - and made to pass them.

  That was when someone laughed: a nasty laugh, the sound of someone enjoying watching a good man’s overdue come-uppance. And Thomazine's husband, who was, who had been, a good man, stiffened, and tossed his head as if he did not care that he was being laughed at. Had been insulted, and his wife insulted, by a man who was even now looking about him to see what acclaim he might gain from a fashionable audience - look at me, gentlemen, baiting this most vicious criminal -

  “Sir,” Thomazine said plaintively, and her voice trembled with a thing that if you did not know her well you might take for a most becoming timidity, instead of a roaring fury - “will you not listen to me? A moment only, sir, I beg you?”

  He stopped again, and his eyes raked her with utter contempt. “Say on, then, if you must.”

  She blinked, clutching her gloves to her bosom, imagining them to be his scrawny chicken’s neck. ”Sir - my lord,” - little accessory, and kiss my arse. Might as well be hung as a sheep, as a lamb - “Your wife, sir, is a poxed whore, and sleeping with my lord Dorset - check your privy member for sores, sir, were I you, for ‘tis common knowledge Dorset won her from Wilmot in a card game, and everyone knows he has it.”

  And leaving him gaping, and Her Ladyship - who was sleeping with both Dorset and Wilmot, though it wasn’t common knowledge, and she had Chas Fairmantle’s word of honour on it - scarlet-faced with mortification, Thomazine made her obeisances, took her husband’s arm, and went to see the play.

  Russell’s only comment was, “I’m going to cut his heart out. And make him eat it.”

  But she didn’t think he enjoyed the play, even the bits with the princess in her feathery cloak and precious little else. And Thomazine felt hot and miserable for the rest of the night, and was sorry she had said it.

  "I'm not," he said grimly, without taking his eyes from Egmont laughing in his box. (Thomazine's imagination, or was His Lordship's gaiety beginning to look slightly forced, as if he knew very well that Russell was watching him with malice aforethought?)

  "I'm not sorry I said it. I'm sorry that I made you conspicuous. And now everyone is looking at us."

  She squeezed his hand, and for the first time he stopped looking at that shadowy box up above the stage, and looked at his wife. "Are you? Sorry?"

  "If it makes you unhappy, love. Yes."

  The princess onstage had flung herself to her knees, clutching the villain's thighs and orating for all she was worth. The theatre was hushed, as she approached her doom.

  Russell dug his thumbnail into a somewhat disreputable orange, and tore a great strip of peel loose. He claimed to like the peel. If she didn’t stop him, he would eat the thing like an apple. He cocked his head, and looked at her thoughtfully, and then dissected the wet flesh neatly. (With intent, she thought.) Licked his fingers clean of the bitter pith, and held a segment to her lips. "Well, they will continue to look," he said with resignation. "So -"

  And then bent his head and kissed her, orange segment and all. "Let us give them something to watch."

  And that was how it began.

  It frightened her, a little, how easily it happened; that one day, they had been a decent, new-married couple, and looked on with indulgence, if not precisely warmth. And the next, they were existing in an odd, shadowy half-world, where he was not quite a murderer, and not quite a traitor, but definitely a villain, and where she was an accessory to the fact, and neither of them were welcome, and doors that had been open to them yesterday were barred and bolted in their faces today.

  Money bought you nothing.

  Money bought you food to go on the table, and put a roof over your head and clothes on your back, but it did not open doors that had been slammed shut, or compensate for friendships - acquaintances - lost. You could not buy back honour. You could only try and make up for the things that had been lost with the loss of it.

  She had not known that the loss of an intangible thing could be as physical as the loss of a limb. And all the silk gowns, and all the jewels - which she did not have, but could have had for the asking - in the world, did not make up for the fact that she was lonely. She had Thankful, and he was all the world to her, but increasingly he was bright and black by turns and she never
knew which he would be.

  She had the uncomplicated company of Chas Fairmantle, and she thought without his good-humoured interventions she would have run stark mad, for at least he did not take things to heart so. You could have a civil conversation about a play, or talk of the illness that was beginning to afflict the poor: they had buried the first poor lady who had died of the new disease, not a week ago in Covent Garden, and there were rumours that the contagion and the new comet that was seen very bright in the sky, was a sign of God's having turned his face against them in this war against the Dutch. Not the murders. He very carefully did not mention them, although there were a multiplicity in the City, where life was cheap and death was cheaper. Or, rather, he mentioned them once, with a horrible careful avidity, to see what she would say; where Russell had been that night, or that afternoon, when another life was snuffed out somewhere in their little circle of streets. And she did not say he was in bed, or he was at the docks, working, setting all to rights for the Perse, or finding work for some of the men who crewed the burned ships that they and their families might not want for bread: increasingly, she grew to appreciate her husband’s stubborn view that the more credence you gave such contemptible stories by treating them seriously, the more you appeared guilty. If someone wished you to be so.

  And so they drifted, purposeless, rootless, only existing when they were in the hard, glittering company of the outcasts of Court. It was not, she thought, a life she could maintain indefinitely. And nor could he.

  But tonight, Thomazine smiled at her raven-elegant, dangerous, gorgeous husband, and patted his hand with her ivory fan. “You look lovely, Apple.” He still sulked, so she leaned sideways, spread the fan over her lips, and whispered, “May I invite you to my bed, sir?”

  He gave her a wry look. “You’re the third one tonight to make that offer, my tibber. “

  She swapped the fan for an equally elegant fork. “Oh, am I, now. Who was she?”

  “Lady Talbot,” he said, and laughed, rather wildly. “Asked if I’d wear a highwayman’s mask and put my hands about her neck whilst - this is not a nice conversation to have with my wife, Zee. The answer was no. To either.”

  “Oh, dear, Russell!”

  “As in - oh dear, Russell, or oh, dear Russell? The pause is significant - to me, at any rate.”

  “Very dear, and very silly, Russell.” Behind the fan again, she blew him a kiss, and his dark eyes lit with warmth.

  It was a momentary fire. Fairmantle said she was cruel, and she supposed she was, for the world said she was leading Russell a merry dance of her own. He a murderer, and she a whore; another thing they whispered, behind fans, on the edge of his hearing, apparently. That the Puritan’s bride was too young and too gay to be happy with her dour Caliban. That the Puritan’s bride might, perhaps, be persuaded to seek amusement elsewhere. She had not known they thought he was fair game, though, poor lamb. And had not known how he must feel when they spoke so of her in his hearing until she had just now learned of Lady Talbot’s unusual offer, and felt as if she had swallowed a fish-bone.

  Lady Talbot had rather remarkable grey-green eyes, wide and long-lashed and slightly bulbous. Thomazine laid the fan on the table, took the heavy chased silver fork in her right hand, and stabbed the pale green, slightly bulbous grape on her plate with venom. Then she met Lady Talbot’s gaze: smiled sweetly, and bit the grape in two.

  “And your teeth are your own, tibber,” her husband breathed in her ear, and she nearly inhaled the damned thing.

  “Russell,” she said, without taking her eyes from the notorious whore who had importuned her man, “who was the second?”

  “Her husband,” he whispered back, and then she did, in truth, choke. “Asked if he might be allowed to watch.”

  “Oh, dear God.”

  Because these were the invitations they received, now. The rakes, the whores, the hangers-on. The daring, who wanted to see if he was in truth a murderer, would spring snarling across the table with a knife between his teeth, and commit horrible acts on the assembled party. They wanted him to. That was the worst of it, that the same ladies and gentlemen who had mocked him as prim and ordinary previous, were so quick to believe his guilt. Not quite one of us, you see. Always knew there was something.

  One or two of the bolder women had asked Thomazine outright - in a motherly, concerned manner, of course, seeing Thomazine’s pearls and the way she smiled at her husband across a room when she caught his eye and everyone else stopped existing for that one lovely heartbeat. Seeing how she blushed, and stopped to watch him, and how that dangerous and vicious brute glowed as if someone had lit a candle inside him – well, obviously, Thomazine had been coerced into her marriage.

  Well, she shouldn’t have done it, but she had.

  She had shaken her head, and said sorrowfully that yes, it was all true, all of it.

  But he was ever so good in bed.

  (Well, bless him, he was, he did not snore more than was acceptable, and although he was prone to rolling himself up in the blankets, he was quite civil about it, and not did not complain about her warming her cold feet on his.)

  And if they were going to whisper, at least let them whisper something true.

  The green-eyed trollop who was whore to the Duke of Buckingham was eyeing Thomazine’s husband again like a dog eyeing a meaty bone, and Thomazine twirled the fork thoughtfully in her fingers. And if the bitch thought she’d get him in her bed drunk, she had another think coming - and she slipped her hand under Russell’s elbow and switched her meagre glass for his full one.

  He was drinking more than he should, lately, but he was wretched. Why should he not? Sometimes it lightened his mood sufficient to forget the whispers. Sometimes it made him irritable.

  Tonight was one of his black nights. Lady Talbot had not improved his mood.

  Buckingham – what fool had invited both of them to the same supper anyway? - was playing silly buggers, idly baiting Lord Talbot about his horns.

  Lady Talbot, the stupid bitch, was in her twittering element, thinking she might play one off against the other and display her overripe charms to the company as she did it.

  Thomazine was tired, and bored, and had heard nothing tonight more than the same lacklustre rumour than she had heard from a hundred lips for the last fortnight, and the long-boned waist of her bodice was uncomfortably tight around her overstuffed middle. (Getting poddy, my tibber, he had said contentedly to her in bed last night, folding his hands over the little pot she was acquiring. All this rich living. And he’d buried his face in her loose hair, snuffed her like a dog, and gone to sleep.)

  He looked icy and stone-cold furious as she left his side, to take her own place at the outcast end of the table. They had seated Russell near to Lord Talbot - between Francis Talbot and Lord Kettering, and opposite the Duke of Buckingham – the better to observe him, she thought, like a wild animal in a menagerie. And set her with the undesirables, where a girl of no account from a quiet Essex bywater might be conveniently ogled and propositioned, but not be expected to participate. There was a woman she did not know, a chubby, happy wench with a giggle that jiggled her fat white breasts like a half-set blancmange, to her right, - “Mistress Behn,” she said, beaming at Thomazine. “And you’re my Crophead’s squeeze, then?”

  “His wife,” she corrected coldly.

  “How very unfashionable, bringing a wife to such a gathering! We are all whores together,” she finished, and there was a little round of applause from the rather gaunt, poetic-looking gentleman at her elbow. Who did, in fact, turn out to be a poet, and who was quietly tucking fruit up the voluminous sleeve of his shirt as fast as he could without attracting attention. She must have been staring, because Mistress Behn nudged her hard under the table. “Nat is a whore of fortune,” she said, and looked at Thomazine with brown eyes as soft and protuberant as a spaniel’s. “Fortune’s not paying well, this week. “

  “No doubt, but in any decent household we do not talk of whores
at table!” Thomazine snapped, all too aware of Lady Talbot’s white hand on her husband’s midnight sleeve, and his fair head bent towards hers.

  “Surely,” Mistress Behn agreed, following her gaze. ”We have to sit with them, in this company. And in this household, madam, the honest ones steal, and the arrant ones pander. But we never talk of it, of course.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m wondering what manner of whore you are, my lady. Poor, honest, and desperate, as this end of the table, or simply desperate, like that. Your good man was honest, when I knew him -” her eyes rested on Thomazine, thoughtfully, “in Den Haag. Though I think he did not know you, then, for he is much changed, I think?”

  “Married,” Thomazine said though shut teeth, as if that might account for it.

  “Sad. No man of sense should marry.”

  “Or woman,” Nat the poet said softly, and looked at Mistress Behn with liquid sympathy till she stroked his dark curls, like a lapdog.

  “Marriage is a noble institution, sir. But who wants to exist in an institution?”

  “You knew my husband in the Low Countries?” Not that Thomazine did not understand this flighting wit, but she happened to rather like the institution of marriage, and she did not consider herself a whore, Fortune’s or otherwise.

  “He was very kind to me,” Mistress Behn said, and dipped her lustrous eyes with a sigh. “Had he not worn his hair cropped like a yard-brush at the time, I might have let him be kinder. So unflattering.”

  “You had an affaire with my husband?” She flattened her hand on the table cloth, where the starched linen had crumpled in her grip, and patted it smooth.

  “No, mistress, I owe him - something in the region of two hundred pounds, I imagine, for six months’ rent and keeping. Living is dearer at Court, you know. One is obliged to keep up a pretence -” and she grimaced. “As you see. Smoke and glittering mirrors. I imagine I should have been cheaper to keep as his mistress. And I imagine the world should have understood it the better if he had.”