by M. J. Logue
And Russell was very thoroughly out of the way, and she was glad of it.
She thought she might have spent the next month weeping, and he had spent most of it flat on his back with his eyes closed, for the first thing he did when he stopped bleeding was to develop a recurrence of his old fever and almost die on her again.
The Earl of Rochester said he refused, absolutely refused, to set foot in that house in Fenchurch Street, and that his reputation would never stand it. The Widow Bartholomew, blooming into her position as housekeeper, had said that was fine by her because her reputation would not stand having him in the house either. So the Earl of Rochester and the rest of his Merry Gang were banned from visiting, even had they wanted to: they sent fruit, and carefully-scurrilous poetry to entertain, and the occasional basket of oranges with instructions that the invalid was not to consume them peel and all and give himself the gripes in addition to a low fever.
John Wilmot, though, was a fairly regular visitor, sans wig and sans silks. In a plain working man's suit of clothes he passed without comment amongst the working men of Aldgate, and he was in and out, running errands for the Widow, fetching and carrying quite without regard for his position in the world. It was a game to him, though, and he was tiring of it even as they were packing up the house around Russell's sickbed, and Thomazine suspected that after they left for Buckinghamshire they would not see him again. And that made her a little bit sad, because when he was not trying to be wild and shocking on purpose he was quite a decent, amusing, sensible young man, and he would make someone a good husband when he grew up. (Would be a pretty rotten husband presently, but that was almost by the by.)
No one mentioned Charles Fairmantle, and that was good, for she did not think she could think of him without flinching, yet. She had dreams, still, where he rose burning out of the darkness, his face as raw as a haunch of beef, his fingers still clawing blindly for her throat.
Dreams where she did not reach Russell in time, and he had died, there on the boards, with his life seeping out from between her fingers. Where she could hear Wilmot shouting, but he could not find them, and they burned together with the English fleet. She thought Russell had those dreams, too, for he clung to her in his sleep some nights, shaking and twitching.
But by May he was sitting up in bed and having conversations that were intelligent, if brief, due to a lamentable habit of falling asleep mid-sentence. And by Whitsun they were making their slow, feeble way home, because he said he was hanged if he was going home on a bloody hurdle, and he would ride home like a Christian or they could bloody well bury him with the rest of the plague-ridden of the City. And by June the first battle of the war had been fought and won.
It had been a near-run victory for the Duke of York as admiral of the fleet, with Prince Rupert commanding the centre, and she was glad for that ragged old raven of a hero, for now he would have new battles to replay and new tactics to talk over, and new admirers, and he might be happy.
But he wouldn't be talking them over with Thomazine's husband, she was adamant on that head. Because for the foreseeable future, Thankful was going to be on a diet of gruel and barley-water, and when he was able to go two hours together without falling asleep in his supper, she might consider going so far as Dr Willis's strengthening diet of beefsteak and claret, but up until then, he was going to behave himself like a very proper model invalid.
He said he hadn't bled that much, and that she was making over-much of what was no more than a scratch. Stunned, he said, no more, and he'd had worse, and what did she think he was, a child, to be babied? And Thomazine, who had ruined a handkerchief and a good collar and a petticoat stanching the blood from the hole in her husband's shoulder, and whose skirts would never be fit for wear again, had smiled politely at him and nodded and returned to her mending the great hole in his good coat.
He had been holding her hand so tight at the end that her wedding ring had bruised her fingers, and he had been so very afraid, and that was why he wouldn't admit that it had been so close. Wilmot had come racketing down the ropewalk with a half-dozen watchmen and warehousemen dragged untimely from their beds, and they had carried him clear, and she had gone with them, weak with the weeping and the relief of a woman who was not dead after all. They had put the fire out by dawn with bucket-chains from the mast-ponds and the river. It had not spread so far, in the end. Had not had the chance. Wilmot had heard the shots and raised the alarm, and by the time he had found them, the ropewalk was half-burned, but it was preserved, and it had been repaired. And the Dutch – if they had ever had such a plan – did not come, not for another six weeks, and by then it was so patently nothing to do with Thankful Russell and his wife that the gossip had faded to a hush, in the new excitement of war.
Thomazine would have stayed with him, though, if help had not come. She would have sat amidst the inferno and held Russell's hand and burned with him, if he could not have been brought to safety. She did not think she would ever forget his dark eyes holding hers at the last, as if she were a pole star by which he held his course. Not with softness, or love, but with an absolute fixed intensity, that she might pull him free of the jaws of death by the strength of her will.
He had been in a deal of pain, and not always lucid, and he had been very, very afraid, and so she had held his hand, and was afraid herself that even as the flames leapt below them his fingers grew cool in hers. She would have let go, to wad up more of her petticoats against that great pulsing hole above his collarbone, but he would not have it.
It wasn't until Wilmot tried to have him taken up, and he swore that he wasn't dead yet and he would walk free of this place on his own feet, that she wept. (And then he'd put his good arm round her and bled all down her decent grey bodice so that it had to be cut up for cleaning rags, and then he'd fainted. And Wilmot, of all people, had looked as if he would like to bang the pair of their silly heads together for sheer wilful stubbornness, and then he'd gone and put Fairmantle's horses to his carriage with his own hands, rather than wait for the Commissioner to be roused from his bed and give his authority, and gone in search of a surgeon who might not ask unhelpful questions.
She had only been able to think of Willis, and he had been somewhat less than delighted at being called from his bed in the early hours of a spring dawn to deal with such a medical emergency. Not that kind of surgeon, he'd said grumpily. He had looked at Russell, though, limp and bloodied and lolling against Wilmot's fine linen despite the Earl's attempts to gingerly hold him away from the costly fabric, and Thomazine swore that the doctor's eyes had lit up with anticipation.
They'd had to move the previous incumbent from the table in his surgery, although, being dead, the gentleman did not mind. Something had leaked from his flabby carcass, and Russell's bright, blood-drabbled hair had stuck to it on the stained marble. That had made Thomazine retch, and the good doctor had rather peevishly told her that if the sight of blood made her squalmish perhaps this was no place for her after all.
He had cut Russell's coat from him, and the blood-dark shirt underneath it, and Thomazine had made a little promise to God that if He brought her husband safely through this, she would see to it with her own hands that he had a good shirt to replace it She would be a good wife to him: no more adventuring. She would be a proper, womanly wife, she would –
Russell’s eyes were open, if not precisely brilliant with intelligence. His lips were parted, and very pale, and a little runnel of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. He said something, too faint to catch, and Willis bent low to hear him, and her husband raised his head. "This is the only chance you get, sawbones," Russell said, panting slightly. "Make the most of it."
And then he'd fainted again, and Willis, whose fingers had been fluttering longingly over a bottle of the new tincture of opium that a gentleman called Sydenham had recently claimed such efficacy for, sniffed, thwarted. "Mistress, are you still squalmish?"
She was not - or rather, she was, but she dared not be, as she held
his head and Willis had probed and snipped and parted rags of flesh. He had left her darling delivered, God willing, from the mouth of the dog, crumpled and bloody and with a neat seam throughout the fist-sized hole that was torn clear through his shoulder, but breathing. And there was, then, only one question she might ask.
"Will he recover?" She caught a sight of herself in the polished glass of one of Willis's specimen jars - her hair disordered, her eyes huge and ashy-black in a dirty, pointed face - and then she had wept, for shame. The doctor pinched his nose, looking embarrassed.
"I imagine on my previous acquaintance with the Major, madam, nothing short of chain-shot would finish him off." There was a solid, metallic chink as Willis dropped the misshapen ball of lead, wrapped about with shreds of flesh and torn linen, into a dish. "Which is no guarantee of anything, mind, except to say that he is a gentleman of a remarkably resilient constitution. I may give a cautious indication of his return to health, in time."
Mistress Bartholomew had wept horribly, and that had set the Bartholomew-baby off, and that had set Thomazine to weeping again, and eventually poor Wilmot had had to find a pair of stout and sensible link-boys to carry Russell to bed, for there was not another living soul in their lodgings not nigh-insensible with grief and weariness. Her husband had, however, opened his eyes as she settled the pillow under his poor head. She had caught her breath, expecting tender words of gratitude. He told her to bloody well stop fussing.
Which had made her laugh, and then made her cry again, and he had made a noise like a pot of water boiling over and flung his good arm out for her to weep on his chest.
It had been almost a month until he was fit to travel, and then he managed to acquire himself an inflammation of the lungs on the way home and they had arrived back at Four Ashes unannounced on a wet, chilly May afternoon. Russell was in a foul temper, coughing up blood and phlegm and muttering feverishly into a sodden handkerchief, and Thomazine was tired and stiff and hungry, limping on ahead into the parlour to find no fire lit and the celebratory supper she'd tempted him into travel with, yet unprepared.
"No supper!" he said irritably, and sneezed, and tried in vain to try and find a dry patch on that overworked handkerchief to blow his nose. "You've been strict on that head for nigh on a month, wench, and I'm perished for want of solid food! And pox on it, Thomazine, have we no spare linen in this house that I might -" he broke off and sneezed again. "Stop fussing!"
She ignored him, of course. He was at his testiest when he felt poorly, and she grew accustomed to it, after a month of him at his invalid worst. And, truly, better Thankful irascible and panting for a mutton pie, than Thankful wan and limp and quiescent.
"Do you have a fever?" she said sweetly, and he glowered at her. "Would you like one, dear? Because if you do not mend your tone, husband, you will be eating that supper in the sheep-pasture. In the rain.”
His lips twitched unwillingly. "Tibber, I am tired, and wretched, and all my bones hurt. I am not feeling playful."
The Widow - encumbered, as ever, with much care - was up to the elbows in the week's baking, not having expected them until the morrow, and Thomazine was half minded to take her husband into the kitchens and wrap him in travelling cloaks and tuck him into the corner of the chimney-breast till he stopped shivering, but instead she ignored the Widow's squeaks of protest and made him a mug of mulled ale with her own hands and raided the buttery for cheese and cold pigeon pie.
She was, yet, her mother's daughter. She had seen the King and she was married to an intelligencer and she had killed a man, and yet she was at heart a stout Essex goodwife who valued her hearth and home above all else, and who believed in the twin panaceas of good feeding and loving.
Russell - well, if somewhat informally, fed, stretched his legs out to the parlour fire, which was beginning to crackle. She suspected much more feeding, and any more ale, and her husband would be asleep where he sat, and she looked around at her lovely magpie-room: at the firelight glistening on delicate porcelain and well-polished wood, the deep jewel colours of the Turkey-work carpet, the blue-and-white Delftware bowl on the coffer.
"Oh, Thankful," she said softly, and her eyes prickled again. "We are so lucky."
He had his hand to his shoulder, massaging the scar, at that moment, and he looked at her with that wry smile in his eyes. "Oh? I'll let you know when the wind is out of the east quarter, tibber. Hurts like hell at the minute." Then he'd closed his eyes with a sigh of contentment. "Aye, we are lucky, though I should count myself a fortunate man to live in a cottage, so long as you were with me. Though I hope the next set of neighbours are a little less prone to arson than the last."
Lady Birstall, five miles hence, had retired to live with her married daughter after the tragic death of her husband, and the house put up to let. It was understood that he had been carried off by the plague, poor man, like so many of the other citizens of the capital - like poor Major Russell almost had been, poor dear, and he coming home so wan and thin and weak - quite unexpected, and they had buried him in London. Very sad. They did not talk of it here – by mutual agreement, that was how it was. Poor, dear Chas Fairmantle was an innocent victim of the sweating sickness, and not a murderer with the morals of a hunting stoat who would have killed all of them – all three of them – with less thought than he would have given to crushing a flea, with no better reason than because he craved John Wilmot’s undivided attention.
It seemed such a paltry reason to murder. But then, Wilmot himself had been sent to the Tower of London in disgrace for the boisterous abduction of a young woman, at the end of May. A young woman he had intended to marry, by all accounts, but the King did not approve of his methods of proposal. Wild, all of them, and growing wilder, unchecked – and, yes, Thomazine thought murder was a little extreme, but on their current showing it seemed about the only vice the Merry Gang had not yet seized on with both hands, and so – well, it was a thing that perhaps a logical mind might look to, as the only thing they had not yet tried, to fix their wandering notice.
Russell had given her one of his wry looks at that. “Logical,” he said. “You suggest that the late Lord Fairmantle was possessed of a logical mind?”
“If disordered,” she said firmly.
“Indeed. A charitable perspective, my tibber.”
The which she had to be, for if she was not – if she allowed herself to think that a man might murder another out of a childish desire for attention, because he could not bear that a fellow creature might be decent in truth, and would have had him smeared with the same libertine slime as Fairmantle and his friends were themselves –
Well, then, she would be no better in her heart than the late and unlamented Master Fairmantle, and that she could not bear. "I think we might be a little more popular than your sister," she said gently, "someone might miss us." For it seemed that in the end Fly-Fornication's only claim to significance to anyone in this world was that she would not be missed, for Fairmantle to try out his new-found capacity to murder. And that was a little tragedy all by itself.
"So if Prince Rupert his own self were to write to us, to both of us, and ask if we might consider a post - in an informal capacity, you understand - to carry on with our valuable intelligence work -"
"I should tell Prince Rupert his very own self to go to hell," she said, and closed her eyes, and settled her hands over her belly. (He was restless again in there, and she felt an elbow, or a knee, shift under her ribs.)
"I imagine you could buy a deal of baby clothes, with the consideration he is offering," he said, and set it on the inlaid table at his side with a soft chink, in its fine soft leather purse.
She opened her eyes again. "Thankful-"
"Both of us. He asks that both of us consider it. Together."
"Together? Well. That might be different." She put his hand on the violent activity of his offspring. "Do you think we might put off making any decision for a while, though?"
"What shall I tell him, then?"
"Tell him he can wait the same nine months as everyone else, dear," she said.
