by M. J. Logue
There was a brief, horrible moment when he thought he could not, just as he had always thought he might break and run the heartbeat before he had the order to charge, in battle.
And then her fingertips brushed his, and caught, and held, and the miserable sick shakiness was replaced by a different sort of sick shakiness: the sort of sick shakiness of a man who hasn’t eaten for most of a day, and is assailed, suddenly, by a thousand good smells all vying for his attention.
Thomazine gripped his hand, and grinned up at him. “Well, then, so,” she said, “here you are, and you are not dead, and no one has noticed you. I did tell you so much. Sit down. We can dance later, when you are not so likely to faint away from a want of nourishment.”
“I shall burst, instead,” he said, and she looked at him thoughtfully, and very deliberately put another slice of brawn on his plate.
“Thomazine, if I eat another thing!”
She cut it into two. Four. “Mustard?” she said sweetly, and he was about to protest, and she quite matter-of-factly inserted a forkful of spiced meat into his open mouth.
And no one minded. No one laughed. No one even looked. It was dark, and everyone was talking and laughing all at once, and passing food up and down the trestle tables -
He had not eaten so much in years. He had not seen so much food in years, in so much pleasant company. Had not played snapdragon in ten years, and had not, it seemed, forgot how, to Hollie’s enormous amusement.
“Now Het you’ll be putting him to bed in a wheelbarrow, you keep encouraging him with that!”
And Het - rosy and rumpled and laughing, with her hair in unaccustomed ringlets about her bright face and her spectacles misty with the warmth of a third bowl of flaming brandy - laughed like a girl and took her husband’s hand between hers, quite unashamed.
Russell looked at his plate again. It appeared to have grown a helping of the light apple cream that he’d eaten most of a dish of already. “Cheep,” he said to Thomazine, and she handed him the spoon with a look of comic resignation.
“You can feed yourself, sir. Since we seem to be reduced to scraping the bowl.”
She was slender, the white fingers that curled possessively around her own bowl were elegant and narrow. Which was deceptive, because the maid - like the rest of the Babbitt household - was an impressive trencherman. She leaned across the table to talk to Nell, and he took the opportunity to remove the last spoonful of apple snow from the bowl at her elbow. (Het saw. Het gave him a conspiratorial grin, but edged the half-eaten ember tart closer to Hollie, for its own protection.)
She was talking to Nell, but every now and again her eye would slide sideways and check that his plate wasn’t empty, and once she put her finger on the bone of his wrist. It wasn’t a caress. It was an assessment, and it made him smile. It made him feel a little like a Martinmas goose, but that was all right.
He would go away. Not tomorrow, not the day after, but he would go away, back to London. Back to a place that set no value on what he was inside his head and in his heart, but only on what he looked like, and what he did.
And that was, he thought, maybe also all right, now. It didn’t mean that was what he was.
He was not stupid. He had positioned himself as carefully as Het would allow him to, so that the scarred side of his face was in shadow. People still looked. It still hurt.
Het still looked, but she looked to see if he was enjoying himself.
Hollie still looked, to see if his ale-mug needed refilling.
Thomazine still looked - to see that he was still paying her attention, and that made him smile. (And yes, it was ugly, and twisted, but he was drunk enough and well-fed enough and happily weary enough not to care. Tomorrow – well. That was going to be tomorrow, wasn’t it?)
She was still holding his hand, and he liked that, too, for it was like there being two of them. Wherever he went tomorrow, whatever he did, they could not take that out of his heart – that for this one night, in all his life, he had been a man like other men, and unremarkable, and easy.
And when he was back in his ill-fitting harness in London, when he was no longer allowed to feel or think in case it scared the horses, he could remember this night and be comforted.
He was not so conspicuous as he feared, sometimes. He was a middle-aged, unremarkable, grim old soldier, so far as anyone knew, fit only to sit with the greybeards and mumble over his ale. And that was all right, too, if unflattering. Like many lonely men, he thought the world revolved around himself, and it did not.
Something was digging into his side, and he looked down. Thomazine’s elbow.
“Hm?”
“I said – were you paying attention, sir, which you were not, being too busy predicting the future in the dregs of your ale-mug – I said, I have a pocket full of gingerbread, and a piece of cheese, if you chose to make your excuses and leave.” Her eyes were sparkling. He could not help smiling back at her.
“I am not twenty-one any more, my tibber. I am too old for midnight feasts.”
“You will never be too old for midnight feasts, Apple. Not while I’m alive.”
“You should be in bed. It grows late.”
“As should you. Invalid.”
He gave her a reproving look, and she laughed at him, and said it made him cross-eyed. “Will you come, or will you no?”
He sighed. “Cheese and gingerbread, you say?”
“And raisins. They may be sadly jumbled.”
He touched the pocket of his coat. His own coat, not Hollie Babbitt’s good silk, which was a relief, for he suspected Hollie’s finery would not be improved by the acquaintance of a half-dozen deliciously buttery mutton pies, and a chicken breast. “Have we apples, my tibber?”
“I have an Apple,” she said, and her elbow touched his flank again, in a lovely conspiracy. “What did you have in mind?”
“Christmas,” he said, and smiled to himself. “Where else should we keep Christmas, but in a stable?”
She looked at him in brief incomprehension, and then intelligence dawned, for he and she had always thought alike. “With the black colt?”
He nodded, and they grinned at each other – two apples, apiece – and then she yawned mendaciously behind her hand and said she was tired and going to bed, and off she trotted.
And a respectable time later, he put his coat on, and claimed a similar destination.
He was a middle-aged, unremarkable, grim old soldier, and maybe tomorrow – next week – next month – he would remember that.
But for tonight, he was twenty-one again, and the dearest friend he had in all the world, and a half-gentled black colt, were waiting for him in a warm stable under an arch of stars.
And a taster of the second book to feature the Russells, An Abiding Fire – out summer 2017.
