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

by M. J. Logue

  “Has there been a lady here?”

  “A- no, sir, there has not, I beg you –“

  Ah, well. He could always blame the company. Russell cocked his pistol, and shot a hole in the rather horrible gilt mirror that reflected the street.

  Forgot, being slightly deaf in one ear at best, just how appalling the racket was, in an enclosed space, and how much sheer unbridled mess – of broken glass, and silvering, and plaster-dust – an intemperate pistol-shot was. In the tinkling silence that followed Fairmantle’s butler was staring at them both as if they were dangerous lunatics, and Wilmot very carefully picked a long, lethal shard of broken glass from his sleeve.

  (Someone was having hysterics in the kitchen, and Russell was possessed of a strong desire to giggle.)

  “Temper, temper,” Wilmot said mildly. “Now, then, man. We mean you no harm. What is his name, Caliban?”

  “How the bloody hell should I know?”

  “Well, the Earl’s your friend, dearie! According to him, you practically live here!”

  “I can assure you he is not!”

  “He puffed himself up that he was, I can promise you that.” And Wilmot’s face went very carefully blank. “Ever since you grew dangerous. How very interesting.”

  “He made me dangerous, that I might be a better subject for his intrigue?”

  It was unbelievable.

  Coming from that cock fool of all these fools it was all too plausible. Wilmot shrugged. “As I said. No man of sense had any regard for it.”

  “But sufficient bloody fools did that I might be removed from my position!” he snapped. “Where is he?”

  “He left on official business –“

  “Was he alone?” Wilmot said delicately. “Did he, in fact, have a fair companion – a – “

  “Did he have my wife with him,” Russell said. And said no more than that, because although the butler blanched a little, and although his blank face remained perfectly innocent of any incriminating expression, the answer was not one that he wanted to give.

  One of the under-footmen wasn’t so nice about it, though, and a couple of the likelier looking lads from below-stairs were lurking about the hall wanting to see what all the excitement was about, and whether they might get a share of it. Bit surprised to see the Earl of Rochester, in His Lordship’s absence, but both Wilmot and Russell were distinctive persons and well-known in the household, and there was no accounting for the ways of the gentry –

  Especially not when the gentry in question was the husband of the woman who’d apparently been hanging off the Earl’s arm on his way out, earlier, and her with her dress all awry, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.

  No accounting for tastes, but she had been all over the Earl, she had. He’d had to practically carry her to his carriage, to get her out of the house.

  (But Thomazine had left their lodgings at Aldgate in a perfectly respectable state of attire, on her own two feet, not three hours since.)

  He’d given Joseph a shilling, for his help in bundling her in.

  Red-haired lass – a natural redhead, if you took me, for he had left her sprawling in sottish oblivion on the seat of the carriage with her skirts hiked around her waist anyhow: aye, she had the look of a wench who had been well-pleasured, and she cared not a blink when Joseph had had a feel of her pretty red garden, but had groaned aloud with the pleasure of it, lying there with her head lolling on her shoulders and her white throat all printed with kiss-marks –

  “No,” Wilmot shouted in warning, and Russell had not realised he had done anything, that he should be near to choking the life out of one of Fairmantle’s servants, let alone to knocking the man’s brains out on the newel-post.

  That his shoulder was all but pulled out of joint by Wilmot trying to wrench him off the man, or that the servant’s face should be the colour of raw liver, his eyes bugging from their sockets as he fought for breath –

  “Russell, no!”

  “He.” There was a word. It was a word he knew, and he could not think of it. “You – they – “ he was beyond speech, he wanted to growl, like a dog. “If she is hurt,” he said eventually, and it wasn’t what he meant, but it was all he could think of the words for, “if she is hurt, sir, if any of you have harmed a hair on her head, I –“

  No. No, he would not come back here and burn this vile place to the ground, he would not sow the ashes with salt: he would not make it a haunt of owls and bats and every unclean thing, for God knows there were sufficient unclean things here already.

  But he would be the sword in her hand while she did it.

  “Chatham,” the frightened maid – the one who’d had hysterics, by the wan and red-eyed look of her - said, and the butler shot her a look of concentrated venom. “I heard him direct the coachman to Chatham, sir, he has business there.”

  “He often has business there!”

  “You mean he takes his mistresses there,” Russell said, and meant to be cold, and instead his teeth chattered just the once, and his hand tightened on his sword again. “Tell me, does he often take the unwilling ones, or is my wife just unfortunate?”

  They were all staring at him. (He was used to that.) Wilmot was staring at him. “Unwilling?” Wilmot said, and his lip curled in unconscious contempt. “You mean he has kidnapped your wife? This is not just some stupid game, to draw attention?”

  Ah, God, that did not even merit an answer, and Wilmot knew it. Congratulations, Fairmantle. You have just managed to shock the Earl of Rochester.

  Kiss marks and drunkenness, by Christ, this was his wife they spoke of, she would not – well, she had, but not with Charles Fairmantle. With him. And that bloody hurt, that Fairmantle had taken that – that brightness, that memory of love and wicked joy, and he had ruined it.

  And if she had been willing: if she had been another man’s wife, and gone with him by choice, none of them would have been shocked at all: not at any of it. That was quite funny. Would be quite funny, when Thomazine was back. All the household staff were staring at him. “You will be requiring my lord’s light carriage,” the butler said, and there was something funny about that, too, that they were ordering a carriage, formally, to drive forty miles and rescue his wife.

  “Oh no,” Russell said, quite cheerfully, “no, I will be requiring his fastest horse. Much faster than a carriage, I find. Don’t trouble with harness, please. I think I shall manage swifter without.”

  He turned on his heel. He would have probably walked into the door frame, for he was not quite sure where he was going, blind with rage and tears.

  The only thing that was real was the hilt of his sword under his hand, and the fury.

  He heard a sigh at his shoulder. “Make that two horses,” the Earl of Rochester said, with resignation. “And for myself, Caliban, I should prefer a saddle. If I must be cast as a gallant knight-errant, for once, I should prefer to arrive without bruises on my arse.”

  70

  It hurt to breathe, and her eyes felt dry and bruised, but dear God, not as much as her throat hurt. It felt like she was breathing through boiling sand –

  But she was breathing, though, and that was a thing she was grateful for. Because the longer she breathed, the more the stupid cleared from her swimming head, and the more her boiling red-haired temper promised her that nobody throttled Thomazine Russell senseless and did not reap the whirlwind.

  She ought to be afraid, and she had been brought up in blood and fire with the New Model Army and she was not afraid.

  She was bloody livid.

  “You.” She gagged, choked, hawked a great clot of dried blood out of her raw throat, and slumped back on the velvet cushions, panting. “You know he will kill you for this. Don’t you?”

  “I do hope so, dear.”

  That was the dreadful thing. That he sounded no different - he still sounded cheerful, and friendly, and nice. And he had just put his hands around her throat and choked her unconscious, and put her in his coach - no bloody wonder he liked his
staff po-faced, she thought wildly, if they often saw such things!

  “You. Hope?”

  “Thomazine, dear, I have every intention of your husband meaning to kill me. I do not mean that he should succeed, of course. But I do mean that he should try. So, you know, do please feel free to scream and struggle a little when he arrives at our destination. If you would be so obliging? It would add such a lovely touch, I think.”

  She lunged from her seat, and snatched at the window-blind -

  And then fell back with a sob because the rushing dark outside was just that: dark. The carriage was rocking and swaying, the team crashing on into the moonless night at what she knew was no more supernatural than a team of four fit, rested, high-bred blood horses at a full gallop. She knew that.

  It felt as frightening as riding behind the North Wind, though, and even if she could have recognised where she was, even if the anonymous darkness put her beyond the bounds of the City of London, and out into the leafy commons beyond, and Thomazine did not know them. Save as the haunt of highwaymen and footpads, and she did not think, very much, that she could rely on highwaymen and footpads to rescue her.

  She did not think she could rely on Russell to rescue her this time, either, and that made her want to cry. Because she might never see him again, and -

  “I wouldn’t jump, dear,” he said lazily. “Break your neck at this speed.”

  “What is it to you, you -”

  “Well, I don’t want you dead, Thomazine. You’re no use at all to me dead, are you? I imagine that even your husband would balk at rescuing a dead woman.” He pursed his lips, and reached out and lifted her chin with his horrible dry-scabbed knuckle, and she cringed back in her seat. “Although it is entirely the kind of foolishness he might countenance, of late. I’d never have thought it of him, the silly boy. I should never have imagined him to be capable of such romantic foolery.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “He never was before, dear. And I have known him for thirty years and more, and d’you know what? It seems I barely knew him at all.”

  It hurt her to speak, and to swallow, and yet she had to ask, because it made no sense. “Why me? Are you carrying me off?”

  He stared at her in comical shock for a second, as if she had made a lewd suggestion. “Mistress Russell!” he said, bridling. “I have a wife in Buckinghamshire, madam, what do you take me for?”

  “Murder. Does not trouble you. But adultery. Does?” She wanted to laugh, and instead she had to pant like a dog with her mouth open, because laughter hurt, but she felt it bubbling up in her anyway. This was a bad dream. She would wake up. It was a bad, silly, unreal dream, in which her mouth was coppery with blood and her head hurt and her raw throat thumped in time with her heart.

  “Had you done as I asked, madam, we would not be in this position,” he said primly. “I gave you the option of simply leaving the country. I was nothing but fair, Thomazine, you have brought this on yourself.”

  She shook her head – why should we? Why should I have to fly the country of my birth at your whim? – and he pursed his lips at her.

  “I am very disappointed in you, dear. In both of you, actually. The boy I knew would have just gone away. Even when he was a little boy he would rather have hidden away than been exposed to every scrutiny. Which would have been considerably easier on all of us, I may assure you. Why else do you think I looked to Thankful to oblige me in this enterprise, dear? Because up until your arrival, he was the one man I knew who would rather perish than draw attention to himself! Always quite the little Spartan, even as a boy. And the man I knew would have taken his punishment - he would have taken anyone's punishment, dear, he deserves it, in his head, all of it. Well, you have changed him, madam, and I do not like this course of action, but you have made it quite unavoidable. You have been a malign influence on Major Russell, Thomazine. He has grown perfectly reckless, since you married him.”

  She stared at him, and he shook his head. “Well, I’m sure we have no time for that, dear. I would estimate we will be arriving at Chatham, shortly, and I have much to prepare.”

  She would have said more. But the carriage was slowing, a little, and he reached across the carriage and grabbed her shoulders and yanked her roughly so that she fell sprawling across his thighs, and while she was struggling with the jerking of the vehicle to get her feet underneath her, he caught her hand – one hand, then the other, in those strong white hands, gripping her wrists twisted behind her back so that the bones ground together. Off-balance, she could only heave and buck, she could not get her legs under her to fight. Her face was pressed into the meat of his thigh and she could not even bite, her teeth could not get a purchase in the rough, loose wool of his breeches. He tasted of sweat, sweat and unwashed male and layer on layer of stale scent. She ground her face against the flabby muscle, wanting to set her jaws in like a terrier. Caught. Held. His knee caught her a stunning smack in the face as his body convulsed with pain and she tasted blood, but she held on, meaning to tear, to rend – - bite your bloody balls off, you murderous swine -

  And then he was wrestling her arms up behind her back and he was brutal, he was cruel and he was meaning to hurt her, the muscles in her shoulders straining in screaming protest as he pinioned her wrists in the small of her back. Something soft wrapping about them, a sudden throbbing burn as he yanked it tight, whatever it was, and the flow of blood to her fingers was cut short.

  “Not one of your ribbons, this time,” he said, and she felt his belly heaving with breathlessness against her flank and she hoped the bastard would die of an apoplexy from it, “pity, for I thought it was a nice touch.”

  She would have screamed, then, when she was able to free her face from the cloying press of his thigh, she threw her head back and ignored the stab of pain in her bruised neck and she opened her mouth and dragged in a breath –

  And he stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth, a dry, stinking, dirty handkerchief that sucked all the spit from her mouth and left her choking and fighting to breathe through her bloody nose.

  And then he threw her on the floor of the carriage, and she saw his teeth flash in a cheerful smile above her before he threw a cloak over her body.

  And then he set his boot heel on her belly.

  “We approach the dockyard, Mistress Russell. Make a sound, dear, and I will crush the life out of that rebel’s whelp you have in there.”

  71

  “Sir.”

  The watchman knew him, then. Greeted him as if he were a regular visitor. Possibly, by the tone of his voice, not a popular one. “There a problem, my lord?”

  “There might be, Bennett. There might be.” And there was an avidity in Fairmantle’s voice that she had never heard, a horrible slavering greed that made her think of the people who gather around overturned carts and burning houses with their eyes on stalks, feeding on misfortune. “Who else is here?”

  One of the horses snorted, the carriage swaying and backing a little, and she imagined them standing in the chill spring air – had the coachman got down? She didn’t think so – steaming, the sweat drying on their well-bred coats. She tried to ease her position, she was too tall for this, her legs too long to be bent under her –

  His foot pressed down on the curve of her belly again, so that she felt the crescent of his heel bite into the unprotected swell of her flesh.

  “What’s amiss, my lord?”

  “Expecting guests, Bennett. Unwanted guests. A gentleman of my acquaintance – a tall man, fair haired, with a great scar to his face, an ugly customer – I have received intelligence that he plans to set a fire here this night.”

  Thomazine could not help but squawk in protest, and the boot heel came down with such a force that she thought she felt something break, and all the breath came out of her.

  “D’you hear a noise?” Fairmantle demanded, “have they come already?”

  “No one passed this gate but you, my lord, not since the ropers finished work and that’ll
be, what, a good three hours past?”

  “He is a spy,” Fairmantle breathed, “he is in the pay of the Dutch and he means to destroy the ships laid up here so that his masters may walk in uninterrupted. You have seen no one?”

  “Not a soul, my lord, are you sure of this?”

  “We have talked of nothing in the House for weeks but the imminent coming of the Dutch, Master Bennett. Believe me. War is coming. Traitors like him –“

  “Won’t get past this gate, my lord.”

  She felt the boot press down again, as Fairmantle leaned forward in ponderous eagerness. “On the contrary, Master Bennett. Let him pass. Let him and any that he might bring with him pass. I will be waiting for them, and believe me, they will feel England’s wrath.”

  She could hear him breathing. She thought, by the creak of wood and leather, and the sudden lurch of the carriage as one of the team shifted its position, that Bennett might have moved closer to the carriage. “Let them in, Bennett, but be vigilant. Alert your fellows. For if we fail, our country fails with us. But if we thwart them, Master Bennett, we are England’s heroes. Mark them well, but do not raise the alarm, for he is a slippery fellow, this Russell. He will spin you tales. Don’t believe a word of it. We’ll catch the rogue red-handed, see if we don’t.”

  She could not move, even if she was not frozen with witless horror. They chatted for a while, and the man Bennett’s cool disinterest thawed by the heartbeat with tales of rewards, of recognition, of what horrible fates awaited a traitor.

  And that was what it was, wasn’t it? That was all it was, to Fairmantle. A masque, a way to be noticed: a childish, pettish desire to be the centre of attention. To finally be acknowledged as a man of wit and daring, by the men whose approval he craved and could never have. Thomazine gagged, choking on her handkerchief, and was determined not to be sick for she knew she would die if she choked and he would not lift a finger to help her, not if she lay strangling on her own vomit under his feet.