A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (16 page)

The
wind was moaning again, and a flung handful of hail rattled against the dark
glass. “I pity him,” he said, suddenly wide-awake, “and I can conceive of
little worse than to wake every day and know yourself to be the object of every
man’s pity. I thank God for Sir Charles’ admirable talent for self-deception,
for were he to know how utterly he is held in contempt by his peers as a
tattling, lickspittle popinjay - he should put a period to his existence, I
think.”

“And
you think of him with such contempt? And call him your friend?”

“Oh,
no, tibber.
He
would call himself
my
friend. Presently. Be assured
we had precious little to say to one another when I was an unfashionable young
lieutenant.”

“Twenty
years ago.“

“Twenty
years ago,” he agreed, and they were quiet for a while. The window rattled, and
a nasty little finger of wind prodded its way under the door where it shifted
in its frame. He let her shift and nuzzle against him, wondering, still, at the
marvel of a warm body in your bed, in your arms, in your heart, on such an
uncharitable night. (A warm body with cold feet, intent on warming those icy
digits against your own warm flesh. No matter. It was a small price to pay for
the joy of her company. He gave a resigned sigh, and hooked his own foot over
her shin, and rubbed it till she warmed a little.) “Tibber. 'S like being in
bed with a
frog,
wench." She laughed sleepily, and rubbed her head
against his chest, but did not speak. "You ‘wake, still?”

“Mm.”

“I
think – I
think
- I do not like Charles because I pity him. And I pity
him because I see in him what I could be. Might have been. So desperate to be
liked he will permit any indignity, any abuse –“

“Not
you,” she said firmly, and he closed his eyes in the dark. No. Not him. Not
now.

But
once.

He
had been that lonely, once, when he had been that damaged young lieutenant who
could not bear to see the ruin of his once-lovely face in a shaving-glass.
Lonely, and unable to bear his own company, and he would have borne any
humiliation if he could have only
belonged
to someone. But then, Fly had
taught him well; he had not known how to belong, then, only that he craved it.

Fairmantle
had a place, and people about him. A wife, back in Buckinghamshire. Were there
children? He did not know. But a wife, and a home, and a place that wanted him
in it, and missed him when he was not in it.

To have
that, and for it not to be enough? No, Russell did not understand that. And it
made him uneasy.

30

He had thought, the next morning, that
his headache was the result of an unaccustomed lack of sleep, and now he was
sure it was not. He blinked hard, and discreetly rubbed his eyes, but the
elegant back-slanting scrawl remained as wavering.

The room was too
warm, and it smelt of exotic spice. He rather suspected that everything about
Clarence di Cavalese was expensive, and subtly fragranced with the breath of
the Indies. The only sign of his country of birth was a very small, dark,
portrait of a young woman in an unfastened, fur-lined jacket, putting on her
stockings the edge of an unmade bed.

Russell had very
recently left a young woman with very similar breasts, putting on her
stockings, sitting on the edge of an unmade bed that he and she had unmade.
Dear God, but he found that painting erotic, even when he felt like death. He
wondered if Cavalese would consider parting with it, and then he felt guilty
for even wondering such a thing, for it was not inconceivable that in Amsterdam
- den Haag, wherever the man hailed from - that the pretty girl was sitting on
the edge of her bed alone, and waiting for her man to come home from his
trading in a hostile foreign land.

Across the
well-polished inlaid table, Mijnheer di Cavalese’s profile remained as
impassive as ever, as white and unreadable as a Roman emperor on an old coin.
He wondered what would happen if he told Cavalese he was sick. Wondered if
Cavalese ever got sick, although looking at that impeccable figure in its dark
wool suit, he doubted it. Couldn’t imagine Cavalese with a hair out of place –

“Major Russell,
sir, I await your answer?” he said crisply.

And Russell
couldn’t do it. His head was stuffed with wool, fit only for spinning fancies
around this man's inscrutable domestic arrangements. He simply could not gather
his thoughts together sufficient, not only to work through that bloody stupid
code of spice and silk and monopoly and export, but that impenetrable code of
circuitous courtesies. Of what might offend the Dutch, or might not, and what
formalities must be observed in one’s personal dealings –

“I can’t,” he
said simply, and Cavalese blinked at him.

“Cannot? But
sir, we expect to reach some kind of settlement this morning?”

He wondered how
many other men there were across London this morning, engaged in this polite
fiction of trade. Like spiders, all spinning their own little webs, with the
great fat white spider of that erstwhile regicide George Downing in the middle
of it, manipulating all those sticky little strings –

“I cannot,” he
said again, more firmly.

“Perhaps you
should spend a little less time in debauchery, sir, and a little more time at
your work?” Cavalese snapped, and that was so unlikely as to make Russell laugh
out loud. (Which hurt.)

“Possibly,
mijnheer.
”
And then, because all the bones in his head were hurting, and his skin ached,
he said with more asperity than was professionally discreet, “And perhaps you
should spend a little less time listening to slanderous rumour, and a little
more time in gathering intelligence, or you would know that I have suffered
from a recurrent fever for the better part of ten years.”

“A most
convenient fever,” Cavalese said. “Will you to business, or no?”

He should. He
must.

By rights this
man was his enemy: England was declared at war with the Dutch, again. He owed
it to his country – he owed it to his wife’s safety, and his family’s, Russell,
you
have
a family, you have an obligation to look to their safety, that
they might not be hurt or distressed in a further great war –

He was a very
small, very sick spider, and he wanted to limp away to a dark corner and be ill
in peace.

Downing pulled
the sticky strings. Downing had known Russell in Scotland, ten years ago: had
trusted him with autonomy in this tiny matter of negotiating some trade leeway
with the Dutch merchants –

George Downing
would sell the souls of his unborn children for profit, so long as he retained
his mercantile links with the Low Countries and the gold continued to flow
unchecked into his pockets. Which was, possibly, what His Majesty wanted in an
ambassador, a man whose nose for self-interested profit was legendary. That
matter of a day, two days’ delay in cementing those tiny fragile links of
commerce – it was of no great significance. A few guineas lost, to men on both
sides of the North Sea. No more.

It was a tiny
fragile link that underpinned a bigger thing. He had a duty.

“My apologies,
Mijnheer di Cavalese,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster. “I will
attend you tomorrow. By your leave, sir?”

Outside, the
fresh air made him feel a little better. A very little. He closed his eyes and
put his hand on the nearest wall, grateful for the warm, rough feel of the
plaster under his fingers. It was solid, and real. It made him feel less as if
he might fall on his face. He could smell the river, the salt mud and the tide
and the debris that washed up there with every turn of the moon, and the damp
wood and water of the big ships moored up, and the tar and rope.

Spices of the
Indies, where one of the big ships was unloading, and that made him smile a
little, for perhaps tomorrow he might be well enough to talk to Mijnheer di
Cavalese of peppercorns and nutmegs and bastard cassia. The gulls were
laughing, high up over his head in a rain-washed sky, and he could hear the
slow, faint slap of the water against the hulls of the moored ships. It was
chill, but the cold salt felt good against his sweaty skin.

He thought he
might have slept for a while, sitting on a coil of rotting rope with his back
up against the harbourmaster’s wall. The sun had moved, between the ragged
clouds, and the water shimmered, although he thought that was perhaps just in
his head. He felt steadier. Hungry – well, perhaps that was what ailed him, a
lack of food and no more. They were still unloading the big ship, though down
to the last bales, bringing them up out of the darkness in their oiled silk
wrappers. (He wondered what Thomazine would make of this, this business in deep
waters: if it would fascinate her and excite her as much as it did him. He
wanted, suddenly, very badly, to take her a gift of this – not a packet of
peppercorns or a bolt of silk, but the smell of hemp and tar and sweat and
sunlight, and the sound of men hammering and boot-heels thumping on wood -)

But he could
not. And he had been here too long already, and she would be worried for him,
and he missed her. He stood up, swaying a little.

“Y’all right,
major?”

They knew him,
here. Some of them. He was here often enough that he went unmolested, though he
rather suspected they spun yarns about how he had come by his scarred face that
were considerably less romantic than the reality. “
Persephone
due in by
the end o’ the week, I reckon. Provided the bloody butterboxes didn’t put a
hole in her.”

He had something
of a soft spot for the
Perse
, too. Would not have chose her for his
enterprises else, she being a good forty years old and as comfortably
unfashionable and wide in the beam as a little country goodwife. He’d been fond
of the
Perse
since the first time he’d set foot on her rackety
splintered deck, and the first time he’d gone to the Low Countries it had been
in her comfortable, wallowing embrace, and he had come home safe. “I trust so,”
he said, and turned his face up to the sun. “Though on the wings of the storm,
I fear.”

31

She had just drawn a horse, on the
hearthstone, for the amusement of the Bartholomew-baby. The child’s mother had
not been as impressed, and had huffed at Thomazine’s dirtying her clean hearth
with such daubery, but the baby was delighted, and –

“Man shall not
live by bread alone,” Thomazine said tartly, “but some roses, also.”

“You are
clever,” the widow said grudgingly. “With your hands. It is a good drawing.”

“Well, it
doesn’t look like a dog, at least.” She looked out of the window, then, out
into a street that was touched by sun for the first time since she had been in
London, and it lifted her heart. “May I do any errands for you, mistress?”

“I have no
errands for you to run. And even if I had, Mistress Russell, I am quite sure
the major would not think it fitting for his wife to be running his errands,
like a maid.”

“But –“ she was
bored, she came from a house where there was always work to be done, where the
labourer was worthy of his hire, and a man was not judged on what work he did
but the quality of it. They had not been in London for any of his linen to
require her attention, and his stockings were all but intact. (He had been
mending his own for so long that they were as lumpy as walnuts, the poor sweet.
Perhaps she might go out and get him some more, not elegant silk ones, but
sensible wool, that he might wear at home, when he was out about his day-to-day
business on such cool, brisk spring days as this.)

“Major Russell
has his position to think of, madam,” she said, and the street door opened on a
gust of lovely cool fresh air and Major Russell’s considered position was
immediately declared to be hard by the fire.

It was not so
cool that he ought to be shivering, and she looked up at him sharply.

“’M all. Right,
tibber,” he said, and there was that little break in his speech that she only
ever heard when his ruined cheek had locked stiff on him. He did not like her
to speak of it – to be pitied - and so she did not, but she put her hand on his
scars in passing, because sometimes warmth would ease the stiffness, and the
widow would think it no more than a foolish display of affection.

His skin was
hot, though, and slightly damp to the touch.

The
Bartholomew-baby made a happy noise, and shuffled on his bottom to snuggle into
Thomazine’s skirts whilst his mother busied herself warming ale and fetching food
that Russell did not want.

“Mistress, my
husband wishes to be left in peace,” she said, and enjoyed saying it. “He needs
his bed. Can you not see as much?”

“Sound like your
mother,” he murmured, and that made her laugh, even though she was worried about
him.

He was
sufficiently biddable as to frighten her. He lay down – he did not try and
incite her to lie down with him – and she pulled the blankets over his
shoulders, and tried to smile at her though his teeth were chattering. (And
that was why he had sounded so odd.) “Be all right, Zee,” he said. “Been so
before. Come about.”