Entertaining Angels: A Christmas Novella
Page 17
Four Ashes, Buckinghamshire, 1666
He looked absurd, and rather sweet, sound asleep braced crosswise across the big black settle in the kitchen. He always slept with his mouth open slightly crookedly anyway, and she could see the gleam of his teeth in the soft amber glow of the kitchen fire. Thomazine Russell was rather proud of her husband's teeth, which made him sound somewhat like a horse, but for a man of two score years they were remarkably straight and remarkably whole. Excepting the back ones on the left side, which had not been there since the battle of Edgehill, some twenty years ago, when a pike had shattered them - and most of the flesh and muscle of his cheek with them.
Which was why he slept with his mouth open slightly crookedly, and why Thomazine padded across the kitchen to brush her fingers across the ragged scarring, in tenderness. He must have been lovely enough to stop the breath in your throat once, she thought, before Edgehill, and there was a part of her that was glad he was not now. If he had still been beautiful - if he had not learned pity, and humility, and kindness, in his hurt - she would have been afraid of him, for Thomazine was not entirely beautiful herself. If he had been perfect, she should not have loved him so much.
He murmured at her touch, and smiled in his sleep, but he did not stir, and that made her heart hurt a little, too, for the reason for his ridiculous slantwise repose was their son, sprawled head-down and blowing spit bubbles on his father's shoulder. They looked much like each other in sleep, save that Thankful did not have the habit of sleeping with his backside stuck in the air like some kind of flannel-swaddled caterpillar, but both had the same trick of sleeping intently, eyes screwed shut in fierce dreaming concentration. And Small Nathaniel had considerably less hair than his father, though it was of a similar fairness. (They both dribbled, though. She thought it might be kinder to her husband's dignity not to tell him that.)
He had one hand squarely on his firstborn's well-padded bum, fingers splayed to hold the child secure in place, and the other held a well-travelled letter.
Which wasn’t the worst thing in the world, after all.
Major Russell was retired from his service to the Admiralty, in either a formal or an informal capacity: his time was his own, to spend in the bosom of his family, or in the meaningful study of sheep. Any intelligence-gathering that took place now in his world, was the garnering of meaningful information for his loving wife. Thankful Russell had condemned gossip, once, when he was the topic of it. He still didn’t care for it, but he had come to understand the value of it as social currency, particularly when information received from his loving wife led to the acquisition of twenty acres of good pasture at a particularly satisfactory price - although that had been more investigation than gossip, truly. It simply happened that the eldest Insley daughter was said to be on the verge of finalising an understanding with the middle Paull boy, and Thomazine happened to come by that information, and happened to be also in receipt of information that the Insleys were perhaps slightly financially pressed, this quarter. And she just happened to drop the information into Thankful’s ear, with a suggestion that really, he would be doing them a kindness were he to offer to buy that twenty acres that marched alongside Four Ashes – after all, Margaret Insley was in need of her dowry now, not in a twelvemonth’s time – and obviously, he would be offering them slightly less than the going rate for land that really, did require some labour to bring it back into heart –
He had nodded, looking slightly stunned. “And this is what you talk about, over your stitching?” he said faintly, and she’d smiled at him.
“No, dear,” she said. “We sometimes talk about our husbands, as well.”
Which had left him minding his manners for weeks, bless the lamb, as if he wasn’t one of the best and kindest husbands in the Chilterns: when not getting himself shot, burned, taken up as a traitor, stabbed, or thrown out of racing carriages.
Well, there would be no more of that, thank you.
There was Small Nathaniel to consider, for one thing, and there was the issue of the Insley land, and the price of wool, and the apple crop, and –
“You’re thinking, tibber,” he said drowsily. “I can hear you from here. You’ve been stood there a good five minutes by the clock peering at me, and you’re plotting something.”
“Taking over the world, darling,” she said. “Was it so dull a letter that it sent you to sleep?”
He swung his feet to the stone-flagged floor and sat up carefully, holding his son secure with both hands. (Nathaniel did not wake, but Nathaniel was suffering, rather badly, from Teeth at the moment, and he took his repose where he could find it, since it often did not come at night. For him or for anyone else.) “Not desperately exciting,” he admitted. “Mistress Bean –“
“Bean?”
“The poeting lady. You know. Brings limp young men to dinner parties, giggles a lot. Not well received in polite company. You know the lady!”
“I – do I?” She did not recall – “Oh! Behn!”
“Looks like Bean to me,” he said, unmollified, and she kissed him on the top of his head quite without thought for which of the staff might see them and be shocked at this display of public tenderness. (None, in all probability. The Russells and the shocking openness of their affection – aye, and more than affection – for each other, were last year’s news.)
“You need spectacles.”
“Due to my declining years, no doubt?”
She peered down at the crumpled paper held against her son’s back. “No, due to Mistress Behn’s appalling handwriting.”
“Badly-cut pens, and cheap ink,” he said, sounding a little too knowledgeable for Thomazine’s tastes. “The story of Aphra’s life, I fear, tibber.”
“Ah,” Thomazine said, nodding intelligently and refusing to be diverted. “So what does she have to say for herself?”
Nathaniel quacked, grunted, and heaved his backside further into the air, and Nathaniel’s father looked narrowly at the child’s palpating hinder portions. “Thomazine. Thomazine, can you – “ he was a most doting father, and a tender one, but the possibility of dealing with infant bodily emissions still scared him witless – “would you, ah – help!”
It wasn’t really funny, of course. A man who had faced rank upon rank of the King’s soldiers, unflinching; who had suffered dreadful privation and pain in his soldiering days – been all but tortured, as a little boy, by his horrible godly sister – and he was terrified of his own son. No. That was unfair. He was afraid of getting it wrong. She hefted the child over her shoulder, avoiding the soggy areas, and avoiding the way Russell flinched when she did it – you can’t pick him up like that! He is the most precious child in the world! – and went in search of Small Nathaniel’s nurse.
And then, having handed over their son to a very competent nurse who was almost – almost – as fond of the child as his parents were, and being possessed of a terrier-like tenacity where her husband and other women were concerned, she came back and sat down and smiled at him very sweetly.
“So, dear. You were saying about Mistress Behn?”
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