by M. J. Logue
She stood up. "You may do as you see fit, my lord. I will see myself out." And without looking back, twitching her skirts aside that she might not even have to touch the air around him, she stalked past the outraged butler, and two scared footmen in the echoing marble hall, and out into the street, with her head up, and Deb white and shaking behind her.
(They must have heard every word of it, in the hall. The two young footmen looked scared to death. The butler looked as if he'd like to choke the life out of her.)
She wasn't scared.
She wasn't scared for about a quarter of a mile. And then she whirled and collapsed, sobbing, into Deb's arms, and mistress and maid clung together weeping in the street while London whirled about them.
62
They passed it off as some foolish fancy of a breeding maid, and she sat in the kitchen, forlornly nibbling on a crust, with her mind in a miserable turmoil. Too fretful to think, even if she could have set her thoughts in order, and she waited for him to come home because she knew it was not true, it was all a horrible lie.
It was a horrible lie that had been told to her by a man she had liked and trusted, and who had called himself a friend, and who had been Russell's friend all his life.
And it was a lie that had its roots in what she knew to be truth, and so she did not know what to think any more, except that nothing was what she had thought it was, and it made her head ache.
The Bartholomew-baby was on his feet, and she watched him idly, as he tottered under the legs of the table, purposefully pursuing a ball of rags across the kitchen. A nice little boy, sturdy, with fine dark hair that grew long enough to curl to ringlets on the back of his neck, and little bracelets of fat at his wrists. He could not have been less like tall, slight, fair Thankful, whose pale hair was thick and as straight as a yard of pump water - whose features were delicately bony, not blunt and snub-nosed - who looked, at first glance, so frail and ascetic. (Which was deceptive. She'd seen her husband and a hot pie locked in mortal combat before, many a time. The pie had not survived the experience. It had been mercifully quick, though.)
An appealing child, the Bartholomew-baby. A happy, unquestioning child, content with his lot. Truly, Thomazine, you had ever thought that nice, unremarkable little boy was your husband's by-blow?
She looked at Jane Bartholomew, until the widow looked up from her mending.
"Sorry," she said ruefully, and Jane looked back at her for a moment and then nodded her acknowledgement. She knew.
It did not go a way to mending things between them, how could it? But there - it was said, and she meant it, and the atmosphere in the fuggy kitchen lightened from being that of the cock-pit to that of two strangers sharing a space for a time with no desire to speak to one another.
"Thomazine- " the street door flung open, quite unannounced, to admit her husband, windblown and mud-spattered and radiating excitement like a banked fire. He was aware of Jane Bartholomew's presence, he nodded politely to her and said something suitable, but had no more registered her existence than he had registered the existence of the furniture. "Zee, you'll never guess -"
But the person who took most notice of him was, God have mercy, the Bartholomew-baby. Who had looked up, startled, his little round face crumpling in dismay, as the door had opened; wobbling on his fat feet, rocking to and fro, his starfish-hands splayed in a desperate entreaty for balance. Snatching at the air, and finding no purchase, and gone sprawling into the flames headlong.
His mother screamed, once. Thomazine was out of her seat so quickly the stool rocked and fell, but the child's skirts were already smouldering, the kitchen full of the sickening smell of burned hair and meat, the little boy's screams of agony rising to a piercing pitch -
Briefly. Because even before the child's own mother had had a chance to respond, even before Thomazine's seat had rocked back into its three legs, Thankful had dived into the hearth and wrenched the child up from the embers, rolling the convulsing little body in a fierce, stifling embrace. The note of the boy's screams had changed almost immediately, from agonised to afraid and hurting. Not good, but better. Beating with his fists against Russell's rain-wet doublet, where the pair of them lay half-sprawled in the hot ashes, and screaming fit to burst, wet and scarlet in the face, his curls and his skirts sadly singed. But whole.
Jane Bartholomew was shaking. "Daniel," she said, in a small voice. "Daniel."
Russell was also shaking, holding the struggling child far too tight. "You’re hurting him," the widow said wildly. "He is afraid, the lambkin, he wants his mammy -"
And she plucked him from Russell's hands, both of them sobbing now. The little boy was holding up his blistered fingers, not wanting them to be kissed better, still screaming. Hurt and frightened, inconsolably so, but - whole. "Thank you," she wept, "oh, you silly little boy - thank you so very much - you foolish infant, I have told you and told you, not so close!" And she whirled from the room in a flurry of skirts, to fret over the most precious thing left in the world
Leaving Thomazine with her husband: white-faced and stunned and shaking, blinking as if he did not believe himself what had just happened. He stared at her for a minute, and then was suddenly and noisily sick into the embers of the fire.
She wanted to say any number of things. Instead, she took hold of his wrists, careful of his poor burned hands, and helped him out of the ashes. She brushed his hair back from his face, and did not mind that the ends of it were singed off, or that his poor scarred cheek was pockmarked with burns. For he, too, was afraid, and in sore need of comfort, and she put her arms around him and held him against her breast and rocked him and said silly nothing-words until he stopped shaking. And then she called him a few choice names, for surely his life was more important than that of some witless toddling infant with no more sense than to tumble into a perfectly evident kitchen fire. And then he wept against her shoulder, not in any elegant manner, but the horrible, dribbling tears of someone who is gone beyond knowing or caring how unlovely tears make him.
He was afraid of fire.
He did not have an ordinary man's healthy respect for the flames, he was miserable, sick-afraid of it - of burning. He had nightmares of it. She knew that, then. He had still thrown himself across the kitchen to pull that little boy clear. She had no words to ask why he might do that, and yet he looked up at her through his ragged hair, with eyes that were puffy and black-smeared, and he said, "She burned me, Zee. Not much older than him." He gagged, retched, sat shaking again, panting with his mouth open. "Fly held my hands in the fire. To punish me. I was - " he had to stop, his teeth chattering, "was a little boy like that. And she huh- hurt me."
Fly Coventry had taken her little brother's hands, and held them in the kitchen fire, in punishment for some childish sin. So that he might know what the flames of hellfire were like, and mend his ways.
That thought made Thomazine's own mouth go dry, and she could not speak for rage against a woman who had been dead and buried this twelve months and more, who had died in the most horrible way imaginable. (Who deserved it, for what she had done. It was a dreadful thing to think. But Thomazine thought it, most passionately.) Russell buried his head in the curve of her shoulder and wept again, but not hopelessly, now. "How could I let that happen to another child?" he said indistinctly, and sniffed. "It hurt. It hurt so much. How could I?"
In the room next door, in that little, overstuffed room where Jane Bartholomew's married life was squeezed into half her house, her son was settling. Through the thin plaster his screams were dying to pitiful sobs, to hiccups. (Through the plaster Jane was singing to him, the words inaudible.)
"It hurts," Russell said again, in that same shaky, frightened voice. “I couldn’t –“ and she touched her lips to his forehead.
"I love you," Thomazine said, and the tears ran down her own cheeks unheeded, for that long-ago little boy, who had been hurt, and uncomforted, and who had not been loved. And she hoped it would be enough.
63
She would have told him, she probably would have told him what had happened, but first of all he was grey and shaking and she didn't want to distress him any further. The Widow was weeping not-quite-silently on the other side of the wall, and Thomazine took her man in her arms and rocked him against her breast as if he was her child, murmuring nonsense-words to him.
(Like he had done for her, not so very long ago. The world turned.)
"Thomazine," he said, after a while. He still sounded shaky, but better. Steadier. Slightly muffled. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry." - he smelt of burnt hair, a little, and she bent and put her cheek against the top of his head. "It's not your fault."
"No. But I'm sorry you saw it."
He sat up, and scrubbed his hands through his hair, wincing a little at the frayed ends. "Well. Now you know."
It would have been the perfect time, she thought afterwards. She knew. She had always known some of it, now she knew all of it. And it did not feel like a triumph, or a vindication, that now she knew why he had never spoken of his childhood. It made her sad. And it made her determined that their child should grow up happy, and loved.
And then the Widow came out of her own rooms with the Bartholomew-baby wobbling at her side, all red and tearstained but cheerful with a childish ability to forget hurt almost straightaway, and Russell got to his feet and stood looking at the child with his hands behind his back.
"Well, sir, how do you fare?" he said. He sounded awkward and shy and her heart quite turned over in her chest for loving him, for he had no idea how to be easy with the child, and he was trying so very hard. (And how would he, she thought, and her heart squeezed again – for what children had he ever known?)"Are you quite mended?"
The little boy looked at him suspiciously, and Thomazine crossed to his side quickly before there were more tears - from either party, for she suspected that her strained, over-weary husband might be minded to weep too, if the child was afraid of him. "Show me your hands, sweeting," she said, "show Zee?"
He put his little chubby fingers up, and said, "Burn," solemnly.
And Russell huffed, and sat on his heels beside Thomazine, and peered at the boy with more intensity than was possibly comforting for an infant, for he shrank against his mother's skirts with his poor blistered fingers in his mouth. "What d'we mean to do about it then, hm?"
"Daniel, do not trouble the Major -"
"I'd like to be troubled, mistress," he said. And then glanced up at Thomazine, as though she might be angry with him for saying so, "I need the practice, you see."
And of course that suddenly diverted that fearful gathering into celebration, with Deb and the kitchen-girl pressed into service to run out and get feasts of fat things, and the Bartholomew-baby bundled into Russell's lap whilst his mother and Thomazine whirled into impromptu gaiety, and the evening ended with Thomazine's health drunk in good homely lambswool and wedges of bread and toasted cheese.
It was not, at all, what she had grown accustomed to, these last months. It was not clever or witty or elaborate, but the company was sweet, and the kitchen was warm, and on a chilly evening in late spring it was the finest thing in the world to sit and talk and laugh with friends, to hold a wriggling baby or a cat in your lap, to hold your husband's hand between your own.
And not to be afraid. For once, not to mind what you said. To talk of things that mattered - real things, that were comfortable, that you could pick up and hold. The price of salt fish. Whether the baker in Pudding Lane gave better quality than the baker in the market at Leadenhall. How much rain they were having, and how awkward it was to get clothes dry in such weather.
How much notice the Widow would require, to pack her things, and come to Buckinghamshire with them, when this was all done. Keep their house, and run it with the same fearsome efficiency with which she ran this one.
If there were any decent - decent, Major, I'll not have this house turned into a house of ill repute - families of his acquaintance of the captains and ships' masters of his acquaintance at Wapping, who might wish to rent the house on Fenchurch Street. On a long lease, of course. Possibly not an elegant enough residence for any of his mercantile acquaintances, but it was a good, stout, well-appointed house, and did he wish that the furnishings should come to Four Ashes with her, or might they stay with the house?
And he said he would ask questions in the morning, and what did it mean when the child made such ferociously intent grunting noises, did the boy ail, what should Russell do to ease him: and Thomazine sniffed, delicately, and suggested that the young gentleman in question might benefit from a change of his linen.
- To which Thomazine's beloved held the young gentleman in question at arm's length with an expression of some resignation, and suggested that he might himself benefit from a change of linen, feeling somewhat damp about the breast.
It was a happy, ordinary, uncomplicated evening, and as close as she had been to home since she had left Essex. And looking at Russell, his fair head bent over the child's feathery dark one, she thought he might feel the same way.
It was a promise of spring. And she forgot, in the warmth of that promise, what business she should have tended to, pushing it to the back of her mind.
He slept badly that night, whimpering and twitching in his sleep, coming awake blank with nightmares of burning.
That was when Thomazine remembered.
He could no more have burned that woman than he could have flown to the moon. Oh, she would have believed he might have killed her - and she imagined there were a number of people who might have held his coat while he did it, too. Thomazine's head was tight with rage at just the thought of what the godly bitch had put that poor long-ago little boy through.
Fly-Fornication Coventry had stolen much from her little brother: his hope, his joy, his childhood, his faith.
And his ability to bear uncontrolled fire.
He could not have burned her: he probably would have loved to, if he could, but he couldn't. Physically, he could not. He was too afraid of fire, she had seen it tonight, he would have been sick and shaking with it.
And if Master bloody Fairmantle wanted to try and blame him for that one, he could whistle. He was wrong. Utterly, utterly wrong, and she could prove it, and Charles Fairmantle could tattle to whoever he liked, and she would tell him so, because fire was not her husband's weapon of choice. Cold steel was Russell's particular weapon; either in his hand, or in his backbone, and Master Fairmantle was going to find that one out, if he persisted in his misguided beliefs.
She smiled into his chest, and wriggled a little for joy.
64
And so she smiled in the morning, and sang, and promised him good things for supper, and that she would come to his offices at the dock at noon that they might spend an hour in idle marketings like any country goodwife and her man.
And he went to his work with a rather dazed look of happiness, whistling a very reproachable little tune he'd picked up in the streets somewhere.
And then she sat down in the kitchen - if that overstuffed ninny wanted formality she would give him formality and be damned to him - and she wrote a very curt little note to Master Fairmantle requesting a few moments of his time at a convenient hour this morning on a matter of some import. His obedient - his obedient, by God, she would give that man obedient, oh yes, obedient like one of her father's unstoppable cavalry charges, they were obedient. Unstoppable, but they did as they were bid. Damn it.
"You do not mean to," Deb said.
"Oh, I do."
"Mistress Russell, you cannot intend -!"
"Very much I do, Deb. If he thinks I - if he thinks we - are to be intimidated by his, his utterly misinformed blabber, he has got another think coming!"
"Should you not at least tell Major Russell where we mean to be?"
"No," Thomazine said, "- because he will not like it."
"Then -"
"He will not like it, Deb - not because he thinks I am unladylike, or unmanageable,
but because if he thinks that Lord Birstall - a man I believe he has never been especially fond of, which tells your more about my husband's judge of character than it does mine - if he thinks that man is trying to frighten me, I imagine he will be very cross indeed."
She paused, thinking of Russell squaring up to Lord Egmont outside the theatre. And Francis Talbot. And Prince Rupert.
"He can be quite," she paused, seeking for the right word.
"Fiery?" Deb suggested. Which was, possibly, the least appropriate description ever, but which sort of fitted, this time.
So Thomazine sent her note, asking the boy from two doors up whom the Widow often asked to run errands, and she asked him to wait for a reply from Birstall House - on promise of an extra penny for his time - and to run all the way home with it.
And then she waited.
"Well, madam?"
He was beaming at her, as if yesterday afternoon had never happened, and she longed to slap his beefy, stupid face for him. "May I offer you a dish of tea, Mistress Russell? See - we can retain the elegancies of friendship, without laying ourselves quite so open to unwarranted intrusion, as previous."
