by M. J. Logue
And all those things he had said of Russell – that he had learned to dissemble, but that he could not love: that he was cold, and had no thought of any other but himself, that he craved approval, and belonging, but that they would not let him in – he had not been speaking of her husband at all. He had spoken of himself.
That was not a thing you could argue with. He was not mad. (She would have liked him better had he been mad. She might have pitied him.) He was absolutely, icily, selfishly sane.
She was afraid, in the dark, under that cloak.
And then it was a funny thing. Ever after she swore to it, she felt it. A strange rippling feeling – no more uncomfortable or strange than a fart – but a rather wonderful one, as if the child in her belly had quickened with joy.
She wept, silently, with tears running out of her eyes and soaking into her hair on the dusty floor of the carriage.
All would be well, and all manner of things would be well. For he was her rebel angel, and he would come for her.
She might wish he’d get on with it, though.
72
“It’s not the most romantic place I’d choose,” Wilmot said, and sounded quite reasonable, for a change. “For an assignation, I mean.”
It was unchancy, in Russell’s opinion, and it scared the hell out of him. All the black hulks of dismasted ships, looming up out of the darkness like great monsters of the deep. The creak and splash of the ships in the water, and the smell of the river, the smell of tar, and hemp, and cut wood.
It was a place that was like, and yet unlike, Wapping dock, and that scared him, too. For the docks thrummed with life, always, at Wapping: with noise and with laughter from the disreputable taverns, with sailors coming and going, with all sorts of maritime hangers-on and minor celebrity and cheerful, and not infrequently violent, chaos. This was dark. This was eerily still, for work on the great ships ceased at dusk, when the light went. You could not work here by lantern, or by candle; the combination of wood and hemp and tar made it like sitting on a great tinderbox.
And these were engines of war. Not cheerful fat matrons like his Perse, or sleek and beautiful like the Go And Ask Her, but huge, purposeful weapons of destruction, that were not meant to be beautiful, but were made for the purpose of crushing out life. “What the hell has he brought her here for?”
“Perhaps he was hoping she will be so impressed by the size of the weapons that she’ll overlook the paucity of his,” Wilmot said cheerfully, and Russell shot him a look of loathing.
It was too quiet. It was not a place that should be quiet, for he was sure that during the day it was a place of industry and noise, and the only sounds were those of wind and water, and of creaking wood. Which could be a man about some fell purpose, and might simply be a scuttling rat, shifting in a woodpile.
And no one had stopped them, either. And if they thought he was so entirely shattered by the disappearance of his wife that he did not think the dockyard where the pride of the English navy was being constructed, would be crawling with watchmen, someone thought he was dafter than he was.
Or someone was waiting for them. And that was not a thing he was choosing to dwell on, because that someone was a man he had known for thirty years, and cordially despised as possessing less sense than a feather pillow for most of that time. He suspected he might have underestimated Charles Fairmantle.
Which was fine, because Charles Fairmantle clearly underestimated him. He cocked his pistol unobtrusively, though Wilmot glanced over his shoulder.
He looked odd, without the great lustrous tumbling curls. Looked less like a mincing ninny, and more like a young man who knew exactly what he was doing with a sword in his hand. “You mean business, then, major?”
“If he’s touched Thomazine I’ll cut his balls off,” Russell said curtly.
“Temper, temper. Leave some for me, sir. I am very displeased with Master Fairmantle, I can assure you.” Stopped, sword in one hand, poised on the balls of his feet. “We have been quite deceived in that gentleman, I think. Not at all a fit and proper person to know. Now, where shall we start to look, do you suppose?”
Too many hiding places, here. Too many hulks he could have stowed in her in – oh, sweet Christ, he would not have killed her, he would have no reason to have done such a thing, but he had had no reason to take her, either –
If he had to look under every coil of rope, on every deck of every ship, in every barrel, he would do it.
Wilmot had wandered off, whistling. Far off, in the sleeping houses at Grange, a dog barked, just once.
- too still –
Russell stopped, flinging his head up, snuffing the air like a dog. Ridiculous. He could not scent her out, that would be absurd –
-he could smell tar. Tar, and new-cut wood, and the bitter green smell of new hemp from the ropery –
Listening. Footsteps, and he whirled, pistol ready –
- and he could smell smoke, faint, thready, distant. Not woodsmoke. Bitter smoke, bitter like new wood, or hemp –
It was nothing. It was a tiny amber gleam, out of the corner of his eye. He wondered what would happen if he went and presented himself at the Commissioner’s House, knocked on his door and demanded that they turn out a search for a missing girl.
He thought it would take more time than he had to explain. Even if they believed him.
Like sitting on a tinderbox.
He started to walk towards the Ropery.
73
She was sitting in the middle of the long, straight covered lane where they made the ropes, and she was alive.
In the warm amber glow of a lantern set on the walkway, there were great black bruises about her throat, and the gleam of tears and snot on her white face, but she was alive, and he had never seen anything lovelier. Her hair was hanging from its pins, her skirts and her bodice were crumpled and splotched with dark stains. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her cheeks bulged over a dirty rag that had been thrust into her mouth.
But she was whole, and alive, and her eyes widened when she saw him, and then another great fat tear glinted down her cheek and she blinked at him, slowly. Which was an expression he knew, and he blinked back at her – love you, tibber – and stepped out onto the ropewalk.
“Let her go, Fairmantle,” he said.
The man he had always considered – no, not a friend. A man he had always thought he knew. An annoyance, a vexation, a witless lackey, a hanger-on – gave him a polite smile. “See, dear? I told you he’d come, didn’t I?” he said, and twisted his hand into Thomazine’s hair so that she reared back, choking.
And with his free hand, pressed a duelling-pistol against her temple.
“I don’t think so, Thankful.”
“What do you want from me?” – for he could have had it, for her, any of it –
“You? Nothing. Nothing at all. What on earth do you think I might want from you?”
“Then why –“
“Because you’re a spy, Major, a nasty little traitorous spy, and I’m going to catch you in the act of burning the King’s ships laid up here. All the watchmen know you’re here. They’re just waiting for me to give the signal, and then we will catch you red-handed.”
She was shaking her head, no, and he wondered if Fairmantle actually believed what he was saying. “I am a – what?” Russell said warily.
“Oh, come now! A spy! You know it, I know it, all the world knows it. You are a spy and a filthy deceiver and I am the man to give you your just deserts.”
“Since when have you been a patriot, Chas?” he said, without thinking, and Fairmantle’s face twitched –
“Since I – I – since –“
“Since I ceased to be so obliging a target for your gossip?” he guessed, and knew by the way the man’s head jerked that Russell had touched him on the quick. Which was a frightening thought, for he did not understand it. “Why? Why do you hate me so much? How have I harmed you, that -”
And had struck wide, there, fo
r Fairmantle was laughing now, sure of himself. “Don’t be absurd, Major. I don’t hate you. You flatter yourself. But you must admit, sir, you make a most convenient man to accuse. Always a little too good to be true, as I recall. Always too pretty, in the old days, weren’t you? – just a little too upright, too honourable, for my way of thinking. I just knew you had to have feet of clay, in the end. I knew it, for you could not be so – so bloody assured, all the time, as you seemed.”
He wondered if he could shoot the man, like a mad dog. His aim was true enough, surely, for Thomazine was on her knees – aim for the head, Russell – and he raised his own pistol without speaking a word, sighting down the barrel to the spot where Fairmantle’s eyebrows met –
“Not quite so self-possessed now, Major, are you? ‘Twas a marvel how many other men wanted you to be not quite so perfect as you seemed, too,” he added mockingly. “The world was very keen to take you from your pedestal, sir. And your accomplice, of course,” he said conversationally. “But then, I imagine she will have burned to death before you can undertake any daring rescue, no?” He gave a slow, mocking blink of his own, and kicked over the lantern, very deliberately.
For a second of wonder Russell thought the hemp waste had extinguished the flame, and that it would not catch.
And then it leapt to a small flame, and a greater, and then it started to run like water along the length of the ropewalk. “Now, you could shoot me,” Fairmantle said, and his face was beginning to take on a cheerful, ruddy glow. “But then I might shoot her first, mightn’t I? So what do you think, major?”
He did not know what to think. “Let her go,” he said again. “I will do whatever you ask of me. Just let her go.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you.”
Thomazine was sobbing now, silently, and her eyes never left his. A quarter-mile of ropewalk, between them. A fire, that was starting to crackle, and starting to spread, that would move faster than a horse could run: cold sweat starting to run down his back, in spite of the heat, the hair standing up on his arms, starting to shake –
“Frightened, Major?” Fairmantle said mockingly. “Thomazine tells me you’re not an admirer of fires, sir. There’s a pity. Though I believe your sister was already dead when I lit a fire beneath her skirts.”
He knew what it would feel like, and the boards beneath his feet were beginning to grow warm, wisps of acrid smoke rising through the gaps in the planking. He knew how it would feel when he burned. He could do nothing, he could say nothing, his hands grown numb and useless with fear, he could not fire a pistol with any accuracy –
He did not care for himself, much. But he knew how it would feel for Thomazine. And that he would not bear.
“Let her go, Sir Charles,” he said, and his voice was his own again, above the rising roar of the flames. And as Fairmantle’s head turned, Russell shot him.
He went down, face first, into the flames, in a great shower of sparks. And then he rose screaming, flaming, and threw his dreadful fiery wig into the flames, where it burst like a comet with a smell of burning hair. He was swearing and crying, horribly, and yet he was still on his feet though his face was burned like meat and his clothes were burning, and he still held Thomazine’s hair, in a long silken rope wrapped about his wrist, and she was trying to pull away from him, though it meant she hung over the flames jerking most piteously.
The smell of meat, scorching.
Smoke thickening, choking, his eyes stinging and watering, and he would go to her, though every breath was burning in his lungs, as if he were breathing in embers. He had a second pistol. It was an act of humanity, to exterminate that horrible, burned, thing that roared and stamped on the burning boards.
He could hear voices, shouting, somewhere. Not far away.
She was on her feet, God be thanked, she was on her own feet and she was upright and she was fighting like an Amazon, and Fairmantle smacked her across the face with one of those horrible black-pocked joints of meat that had been his hands, and she went sprawling across the boards with a scream. Sweet Christ, would the man never go down?
There was another shot. It surprised him, actually, for he had not fired, and the voices were yet too far away, but suddenly there was an agony in his shoulder, just below his collar-bone, and he tasted blood in his mouth. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t. It hurt.
His left arm would not serve. “Thomazine,” he said, and she could not hear him, over the roaring flames, but her head turned, lifted. She was on her feet again. The burned thing almost had her, reeling like a drunken man to wrap his horrible arms about her waist. “Thomazine!”
He was on his knees. Burning meat. It did not matter. Blood on the boards, a spray of it, and with the last strength that was in him he fired into the churning clouds of acrid smoke and sparks.
He would have liked to see her, for a last time. But he lay with his cheek against the splintered wood, and felt it shake with footsteps, and thought that it was enough.
74
She saw the shoulder of his coat burst inwards in a great shower of black blood, but there was nothing she could do, for she was teetering against the rails herself now with Fairmantle’s dreadful raw fingers scrabbling for her again, and his face was a pocked mask of leaking meat – a horrible, homely smell of roasting, and then she was falling forward with a jerk as he grabbed her again, her loose hair swinging in her face and blinding her.
“Die, you little bitch,” he slurred in her ear, and his forearm was tight about her throat, cutting off the last of the air.
The smell of burning silk, as the last rags binding her wrists parted in the flame, and a brief screaming pain as her skin scorched under it. The ends of her hair, crisping and lifting in the hot air.
The blood-heat of metal between her scrabbling fingers, as she caught one of her loosened hairpins. Pretty. A little enamelled flower at one end, set with a pearl. And three inches of sharp metal.
No breath. Her eyes felt like sand. She gripped the hot metal between her fingers, and drove it back, up over her shoulder, into what part of his face chance willed. She did not think she would ever forget how it felt, the shock down her shoulder as the tip penetrated his eyeball, or the amount of sheer strength it took to ram her hairpin into his skull.
Or the way he screamed when she did it.
And then she was free, and she could hear voices.
75
His eyes were open. She could see the flames reflected in their darkness.
Gleaming on the silver filigree of his waistcoat buttons. On the darkness of the black brocade, which had not been black, but silver, when she had run her hands up over his shoulders -
had that been only a few hours ago? -
black with blood, and pooling underneath him, spreading across the splintered boards towards her.
And he blinked.
There was blood spilling from his mouth, and on his shirt - oh, Apple, so much blood - in his hair, and darkening the plain respectable grey of the breast of his good wool suit-
he had blinked, he was alive-
She did not care about Fairmantle, she did not even care enough to not care about Fairmantle, he had simply ceased to exist and the world had narrowed to six feet of swaying boards inside Hell for she would not let him die alone, he was her dear love and she crawled sobbing across the boards, away from the heart of the fire, feeling her loose hair lift and banner in the hot air.
Sparks, now, stinging her face and her bare, scraped hands.
Close enough to see the ragged black hole just above his collarbone where the life was pumping sluggishly out of him and she kicked like a swimmer across those last feet of wood, tearing at her skirts, at her petticoats, wadding great handfuls of cloth into the hollow of neck and shoulder -
she had kissed him there, a hundred times, a thousand times -
begging and praying and crying that he might live, that it was not fair, that he -
One handful of silk soaked through. It was growi
ng hotter, harder to breathe. The acrid smell of burning hemp. Tar. She did not mind dying with him in her arms, truly she did not, but she gave a little sob and changed hands, pressing down harder with her handful of sodden linen till she felt the faint, thready skitter of life under her fingers.
Another - was it slowing, or was there simply no more blood in him? His lips looked white -
“Tam’sin,” he said, and his voice was faint, and slurred, but steady.
She almost took her hand from his wound. Remembered.
“Call,” he said. “Wilmot. Outside.”
“What?”
He closed his eyes, but it wasn’t in weakness. It was the old slow happy-cat blink of a man who would smile and cannot. “Looking for you,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears. “Wouldn’t leave you. Came with. Wilmot. Call. Them.”
“I won’t -” Hers overflowed, too, and that was not helpful. “You will come too.”
He closed his eyes again. No.
“Thankful you have a son, damn you, you can’t die yet, you bloody fool!”
And then she did take her hand from the hole above his collarbone, and she grabbed him by both shoulders and lifted his body from the boards, but she could not drag him and so she shook him instead, and sat defeated with his head against her thigh and wept awful tears of rage and shame and loss while Chatham docks burned around her.
And that was when the Earl of Rochester came bounding onto the boards, and stopped, looking like one of the minor demons, all backlit rose and gold.
“Dear me, it’s like the end of ‘Hamlet’ up here - bodies everywhere,” he said tartly. “That’s not how this performance ends, Penthesilea.”
4
ASH
75
He had almost died, though he said afterwards that she was being silly and that he hadn't any such thing. He had almost died, and they had, in the end, not averted any battle at all. Six weeks later, on the thirteenth of June the war began in earnest, in the great sea battle at Lowestoft, off the coast of Suffolk.
