A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1)
Page 21
Well, she supposed if he never regained his post with the Admiralty, he could take up work as a labourer - and she smiled to herself at that, for she didn't think he would mind. And she was suddenly submerged in a wave of tenderness for him, for all his dignity was for his person, not his position, and he was as prim and funny in a ragged shirt and a pair of breeches out at the knee as he was in his lutestring silk suit. She took his hands in hers and kissed his dear, capable fingers, exclaiming over the lack of splinters and black fingernails.
Which he had liked, and which had rather shocked the Widow, when she came upstairs and found her most respectable lodger nuzzling his wife's ear with definite intent.
"I will be back at my business again tomorrow," he said firmly, and blew in her ear so that she whooped in tickled surprise and earned a second reproving look from the Widow.
"You mean to carry on with your work?"
He gave her one of those long, slow blinks, like a happy cat, that passed for an expression of joy with him. "My accounting, my tibber? - aye, I do. I am yet a man of business, and I have yet an interest in a ship. I note that Mijnheer di Cavalese withdrew from negotiating with me: he has not withdrawn his interest in commerce. I have a share in the Perse, and I am under an obligation to your Uncle Luce to maintain it -"
She made a noise of amusement, for Uncle Luce and ships was still an unlikely combination, and he laughed. "D'you think she was named the Persephone by chance, love? Luce has a part-share in her too. She was named after your cousin, and, God willing, we shall have the Fair Thomazine in the water for next spring. No, my darling, I am not wholly a lily of the field, for I do toil, and I do spin. Doubtless my lord Rochester will have some comment to pass about soiling his hands with trade, but then, I thank God, one of us means to meet his obligations!"
And he spun her about and kissed her soundly, and even the Widow's lips twitched, so he kissed her too, on the cheek, very respectably.
"We shall stay?" Thomazine said, and her husband gave her a cockeyed grin.
"Oh, very yes. I have business to transact, Thomazine. I have a ship to outfit, and a second to build, and you have seen barely a fraction of what there is to see in London, and -"
"And, Thankful?" He had stopped rather too suddenly for her tastes.
He shrugged. "I have always had a mind to join the Royal Society, dear. Haven't you?"
50
It seemed he had been giving much thought to what she had said, so ardently, about having his vengeance against those malicious, anonymous gossips. “Living, my tibber,” he said earnestly. “Leading a happy, and useful life, and loving each other, and…”
“And joining the Royal Society,” she said dryly. “Gracious, dear. If we cannot gain access to civilised society without the aid of a gang of horrible reprobates like the Earl of Rochester, what hope have we of gaining access to the Royal Society?”
“Oh – well, you know. Anyone might attend their lectures, and learn fascinating things about the wonders of reason and science. They are the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, dear. Perfectly fascinating.” He actually fluttered his eyelashes at her. Truly, he must think she came down with the last shower.
She fluttered hers back mockingly. “Why, darling, since you are become a man of some leisure you are grown quite the man of letters, too. Science, Thankful?”
“Reason, then.” And he knew he was being made fun of, and he still didn’t know how to take it, quite, so he wriggled a little. “I know I don’t make a habit of going about London throttling people, Zee, and so do you, but I wondered if there might be a way of saying for sure that I had not done such a thing? For in the late wars your Uncle Luce was used to say he could tell much from the wound a man took – whether his opponent was left-handed, or how tall he was – “
“Dear, the watchman was strangled. There would be no wound to show. Would there?”
“Surely. But tibber – they are enlightened men, they must find something! I mean, it might be that the image of the murderer will be in the poor man’s eyes, and I am quite distinctive to look on, and –“
“Thankful, that’s horrible!”
“Isn’t it?” he said cheerfully. “There was a Frenchman – he was a Jesuit, I’m told – Shiner? Schoner? – he was doing dreadful things to a frog, and he said that you could see a thing on a frog’s eye when you cut it open to – observe. Your Uncle Luce told me. You know he has an interest in such things.”
“I will speak very sternly to my Uncle Luce, when I next see him,” she said, with a strong desire not to continue this conversation.
“But dear, imagine!”
“I should rather not, Thankful!”
“But if we were to gain access to the Society and to set our case before them as a matter of rational interest, and not as a topic for lewd intrigue, well, just think! They might – I don’t know, dear, they might perform any number of public marvels, they might be able to perform a dissection on that poor man and hold his eye up for everyone to see, and – Thomazine, darling, where are you going?”
“Anywhere but where you are, you dreadful man,” she said, and meant it.
She only meant it briefly, until she was relieved of her breakfast, and then he was very solicitous and very apologetic. He wiped her sweaty forehead and held her hair away from her face, and blamed last night’s pie from the bakehouse on Pudding Lane, he’d known it was on the turn, had he not said at the time it tasted funny?
And she nestled limply into his solid encircling arm, and put her face against the warm, slightly rough linen of his shirt, and closed her eyes and breathed in the comforting scent of him, for he smelt of home, if home was warm and slightly musky with hard work.
He took her hands and rubbed them between his own. “But sweet, you said you wanted me to –“
“Thankful, shut up!”
“But you cannot argue with logic,” he said earnestly, “you see, tibber, reason is the way for enlightened men, not rumour, and if –“
“And if you don’t shut up I will puke in your lap?” she suggested, and he shut up, and stroked her hair instead until she stopped shivering.
“I mean it,” she said, a while later.
“I had said not a word!”
“About the Society, husband. Given that we are presently less welcome in most polite circles than a fart in a sermon, how do you propose to gain admittance to the Royal Society?”
“Anyone may go to their lectures, Thomazine. Anyone at all. They have a journal which is published every month –“
“You have been looking into this, haven’t you?”
“You know what their motto is, Zee? Nullius in verba. Take nobody’s word for it. It could be the King himself trying to say that I did these things and they would pay it no heed – oh, love, if they cannot prove my innocence beyond a shadow of any man’s doubt, no one can! And they would prove it by reason, and logic, that cannot be disputed – not by one word against another, but by evidence, for they don’t take any man’s word for anything unless it can be proven!”
And that was well, that was all very well, and she had not the heart to look at his excited face and say that he was a disgraced intelligencer with a shadowy reputation, and no matter how interesting his proposition might be, he was still not likely to get through the door. Could pay his subscription and stand at the back and gawk, like all the other gentlemen who admired reason and discourse and paid their subscriptions, but get so far as to lay out his proposal? To one of his scientific gentlemen in person, for long enough to explain himself, and he whispered as a murderer and a traitor to his country?
In his dreams, the poor sweet.
She wriggled her shoulders against his chest, and he set his arms about her waist, and they sat, so, for a while, on the bed.
She had inspired him. She had given him hope where, perhaps, there should be none, and now she could not bear to disappoint him, so she looked out across the rooftops, at the crooked chimneys and the slip
ped tiles and the pigeons in the pale silver sun.
“How do we gain access to this society, then, husband?” she said, and he huffed into her loose hair.
“Prince Rupert,” he said smugly. “I had considered that.”
And she said nothing, for – well, nothing that was said about that old Cavalier could shock her, she had been brought up believing that Rupert of the Rhine was something next to AntiChrist in his ability to perpetrate supernatural acts of daring villainy against his gallant Parliamentarian opponents.
Her father had hated Rupert worse than he hated the Devil. Her father had been one of those gallant Parliamentarian opponents. So had her husband.
“He is a scientist in his own right,” Russell said, mistaking her silence for disapproval. “He is apparently a very educated man.”
“And – um, what, love? You will go to the Royal Society of whatever-it-is and say that you and Prince Rupert have a prior acquaintance? But dear – the only acquaintance you have is –“
“I might have shot his dog at the battle of Marston Moor,” her husband said, and she felt his chest vibrate with amusement, “and I may have knocked his hat off at the battle at Edgehill.”
“Dear God, Thankful, don’t tell him who your father-in-law is! Daddy’s done considerably more than knock his hat off, in his time!”
His arms tightened about her middle. “Oh I do love you, tibber. You make me laugh. No, sweet. No, I have no intention of presuming on my acquaintance with Prince Rupert – which, as you say, has been somewhat, ah, cool in the past – unsolicited. I cannot say that were he and I to be at the same – say – supper party, I might not, perhaps, angle for an introduction to one of the members of the Society who may have a particular interest in matters of anatomy.”
“Oh, be sensible, love! Who do we know who could get you an introduction to Prince Rupert?”
He kissed her shoulder. “The Earl of Rochester, my tibber. The Prince is a bachelor gentleman of, ah, well, bachelor personal habits. He takes as much pleasure in the arts –“
“You mean actresses,” she said tartly, since he would not.
“I possibly mean actresses, I could not possibly remark, I have no such intimacy with the prince’s amatory affairs. The arts, and discourse with his friends –“
"Thankful, if what you mean is that Prince Rupert has a habit of getting –
“Indeed he does.”
“- with the Earl of Rochester, then , sir, I am –“
“Not at all surprised,” he said primly. “In my humble opinion, he would be better served finding himself an amenable lady and settling down to a blameless life –“
“Strangling watchmen and selling state secrets to the Dutch. That way, you wouldn’t have to do it, darling.”
“True,” he agreed. “Save me a job. Not tonight, Rupert, Thursday’s my night off strangling. Staying at home with my good lady and a meat pie.”
“Not one of Farrinor’s.”
“Definitely not one of Farrinor’s.”
51
But it was the poem, finally, that decided her.
Addressed to "Apocrypha" and being a lengthy discourse on an ageing Moses' failure to douse the flames of the burning bush, it was neither erudite enough to have come from Wilmot nor crude enough to be Sedley, and so, she assumed, it was from some would-be acolyte of the Merry Gang, some petty satellite's attempt to court favour by scandalising the Puritan's wife.
She noted that she was not hailed as the reigning beauty, the which she would not have believed, and nor were her accomplishments praised beyond the possession of a distinctively-coloured head of hair. A burning bush, indeed. The theology was shaky, and the verse was clumsy doggerel. Presumably, the Puritan's wife was not expected to have an uncle who not only wrote poetry a hundred times the superior of this cant, but would have very carefully corrected it with a most severe pen. Had it not ended with the lines,
“And with thee, grey-age-withered prophet,
She’ll gain no pleasure from it, or profit.”
Well, she'd have sent the foul text straight to Uncle Luce, and asked him to do his critical worst, and then had the thing published. With the Puritan's wife's retort.
But. It had been slipped into her Bible at church one morning, whilst her head was bowed in sober reflection: a nice touch, that, she thought, a fine line between shocking and romantic. Cleverly folded, and when she opened it she had started as if it had bitten her, because how could someone write such filth, such petty innuendo, about a woman they had never set eyes on before the beginning of this month?
She'd pushed the vile thing into her muff and bowed her head with increased fervour. Her maid had assumed it was a note from an admirer, and what could she say?
Clever. Cleverly done, for if she denied all knowledge of its receipt, she was damned as a liar, for someone had placed it there, most publicly. And if she acknowledged its reception, then she was a whore and an adulteress. Which, to be fair, made her one of the majority, so far as she could tell, at court. An honest woman's price was above rubies, and it seemed that everyone was wearing rubies this year.
But, she was neither. She was a plain country goodwife who was supposed to be appalled by this scurrilous little piece of ill-advised wit, and instead she was the daughter of a rebel commander who would have hunted down the perpetrator and shot him, the niece of a rebel poet, and the wife of yet a further rebel officer with a most unforgiving and vengeful nature, where such abuses were concerned. Truly, she could do without her first visit to court ending with her husband imprisoned and incurring the King's displeasure for mutilating his courtiers.
On the other hand, she owed it to him to show him the wretched thing, since it was his honour that was being maligned, not hers, so far as the world was concerned.
In the end, he was not angry. He unfolded it, where she had had it screwed up in her hand, and she saw his eyes move over the paper without so much as a flicker of emotion on his dear, half-handsome face. And then he inclined his head with his old frigid grace.
"Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Thomazine."
Not Zee. Not his tibber, or any of the other private, sweet endearments he had for her. Thomazine.
"Apple, it’s silly, it's not important, don't let it bother you."
Folding his hands on the paper and smiling at her, his careful, polite company-smile. "Of course."
"I only showed you - I didn’t want - no secrets. I didn’t like to think that we - that I - that you should be laughed at, if you didn’t know -"
"Rather than laughed at, if I did know?" And he looked up at her, and his face was still calm and impassive, and his eyes, his lovely dark eyes, were full of rage and pain, his lashes spiky with tears he would not shed. "I am twenty years older than you, Thomazine. I cannot change that. My lord Rochester was born the year your father and I were appointed Agitators to our regiment. I imagine he was cutting his first teeth when we sat at the Debates in Putney. And no, I do not for one minute believe that the Earl of Rochester has singled you out for his particular attentions, though I suspect it's exactly the kind of merry stunt that debauched young ass and his colleagues would pull in the name of humour. I do feel it, Thomazine. Every time one of those young bucks runs his eyes over you, I feel every one of those twenty years, and then some."
"Because I am evidently so flattered to be ogled by penniless drunken wastrels who talk to my bubbies," she said dryly. And then, because she was honest, added, "Such as there is of them."
He snorted, which was both undignified and lamentably unromantic. "One of the things I shall love about you till the day I die, my tibber, is your ability to make me laugh at the most inopportune moments. I thank you." And then he gave her an apologetic shrug. "I still feel like a very old man, in their company. I do not find them funny, I do not find them clever, and what they pass off as erudition any schoolboy could scrawl on a wall. I left the Army to get away from their like, and now I find court infested with them."
"Thomazine, I will not be sweethearted into a better humour," he said sternly.
"No, dear."
"And as soon as we may be granted audience at the Royal Society, I would like nothing better than to return to my own hearth, with my own dear girl, and -"
"The advantage of our lodgings here," she said, "is that court is such a place of depravity -" she felt him shudder, "such a place of depravity, indeed, that a man may take his wife to bed in the middle of the afternoon and none raise so much as an eyebrow."
There was a pause. The fire crackled, and the spring rain pattered against the windows, and outside in the streets someone was shouting wares for sale. Thomazine slipped her arms round her scarred, ageing, formal, and very much beloved husband's neck. Toyed with the buttons on his waistcoat briefly, and then - "That is not my eyebrow, Thomazine," Russell said.
"Surely, dear. I merely use it to illustrate a point."
"Your point being?"
He sounded somewhat distracted, which had been her intent, and was her delight.
"That a man may take his wife to bed in the middle of the afternoon and none raise so much as an eyebrow. Obviously, Thankful, do keep up. Whatever did you think I meant?"
Oh yes, that vile poem had got under Thomazine Russell's skin. No pleasure or profit in her darling's bed? She'd show them. Show him as well, the dear, foolish man, not to take any notice of a troop of braying topers with more hair than wit, the most of both being borrowed.
She wondered if the Earl of Rochester, at the tender age of nineteen, knew how to kiss a woman till her skin sang, or whether he considered his exalted company sufficient pleasure. If Charles Sedley would take a maidservant's care over a woman's disrobing, kissing each inch of her bare back as he unlaced her stays. "Stiff as a cuirassier's breastplate, madam," Russell said disapprovingly. "I do not care for such tightness. It cannot be healthy." And then kissed her just below her ribs, which tickled.