A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (24 page)

Russell’s only comment was, “I’m
going to cut his heart out. And make him eat it.”

But she didn’t think he enjoyed
the play, even the bits with the princess in her feathery cloak and precious
little else. And Thomazine felt hot and miserable for the rest of the night, and
was sorry she had said it.

"I'm not," he said
grimly, without taking his eyes from Egmont laughing in his box. (Thomazine's
imagination, or was His Lordship's gaiety beginning to look slightly forced, as
if he knew very well that Russell was watching him with malice aforethought?)

"I'm not sorry I said it.
I'm sorry that I made you conspicuous. And now everyone is looking at us."

She squeezed his hand, and for
the first time he stopped looking at that shadowy box up above the stage, and
looked at his wife. "Are you? Sorry?"

"If it makes you unhappy,
love. Yes."

The princess onstage had flung
herself to her knees, clutching the villain's thighs and orating for all she
was worth. The theatre was hushed, as she approached her doom.

Russell dug his thumbnail into a
somewhat disreputable orange, and tore a great strip of peel loose. He claimed
to like the peel. If she didn’t stop him, he would eat the thing like an apple.
He cocked his head, and looked at her thoughtfully, and then dissected the wet
flesh neatly. (With intent, she thought.) Licked his fingers clean of the
bitter pith, and held a segment to her lips. "Well, they will continue to
look," he said with resignation. "So -"

And then bent his head and kissed
her, orange segment and all. "Let us give them something to watch."

And that was how it began.

It frightened her, a little, how
easily it happened; that one day, they had been a decent, new-married couple,
and looked on with indulgence, if not precisely warmth. And the next, they were
existing in an odd, shadowy half-world, where he was not quite a murderer, and
not quite a traitor, but definitely a villain, and where she was an accessory
to the fact, and neither of them were welcome, and doors that had been open to
them yesterday were barred and bolted in their faces today.

Money bought you nothing.

Money bought you food to go on
the table, and put a roof over your head and clothes on your back, but it did
not open doors that had been slammed shut, or compensate for friendships -
acquaintances - lost. You could not buy back honour. You could only try and
make up for the things that had been lost with the loss of it.

She had not known that the loss
of an intangible thing could be as physical as the loss of a limb. And all the
silk gowns, and all the jewels - which she did not have, but could have had for
the asking - in the world, did not make up for the fact that she was lonely.
She had Thankful, and he was all the world to her, but increasingly he was
bright and black by turns and she never knew which he would be.

She had the uncomplicated company
of Chas Fairmantle, and she thought without his good-humoured interventions she
would have run stark mad, for at least he did not take things to heart so. You
could have a civil conversation about a play, or talk of the illness that was
beginning to afflict the poor: they had buried the first poor lady who had died
of the new disease, not a week ago in Covent Garden, and there were rumours
that the contagion and the new comet that was seen very bright in the sky, was
a sign of God's having turned his face against them in this war against the
Dutch. Not the murders. He very carefully did not mention them, although there
were a multiplicity in the City, where life was cheap and death was cheaper.
Or, rather, he mentioned them once, with a horrible careful avidity, to see
what she would say; where Russell had been that night, or that afternoon, when
another life was snuffed out somewhere in their little circle of streets. And
she did not say he was in bed, or he was at the docks, working, setting all to
rights for the
Perse
, or finding work for some of the men who crewed the
burned ships that they and their families might not want for bread:
increasingly, she grew to appreciate her husband’s stubborn view that the more
credence you gave such contemptible stories by treating them seriously, the
more you appeared guilty. If someone wished you to be so.

And so they drifted, purposeless,
rootless, only existing when they were in the hard, glittering company of the
outcasts of Court. It was not, she thought, a life she could maintain
indefinitely. And nor could he.

But tonight, Thomazine smiled at
her raven-elegant, dangerous, gorgeous husband, and patted his hand with her
ivory fan. “You look lovely, Apple.” He still sulked, so she leaned sideways,
spread the fan over her lips, and whispered, “May I invite you to my bed, sir?”

He gave her a wry look. “You’re
the third one tonight to make that offer, my tibber. “

She swapped the fan for an
equally elegant fork. “Oh, am I, now. Who was she?”

“Lady Talbot,” he said, and
laughed, rather wildly. “Asked if I’d wear a highwayman’s mask and put my hands
about her neck whilst - this is not a nice conversation to have with my wife,
Zee. The answer was no. To either.”

“Oh, dear, Russell!”

“As in - oh dear, Russell, or oh,
dear Russell? The pause is significant - to me, at any rate.”

“Very dear, and very silly,
Russell.” Behind the fan again, she blew him a kiss, and his dark eyes lit with
warmth.

It was a momentary fire.
Fairmantle said she was cruel, and she supposed she was, for the world said she
was leading Russell a merry dance of her own. He a murderer, and she a whore;
another thing they whispered, behind fans, on the edge of his hearing,
apparently. That the Puritan’s bride was too young and too gay to be happy with
her dour Caliban. That the Puritan’s bride might, perhaps, be persuaded to seek
amusement elsewhere. She had not known they thought
he
was fair game,
though, poor lamb. And had not known how he must feel when they spoke so of her
in his hearing until she had just now learned of Lady Talbot’s unusual offer,
and felt as if she had swallowed a fish-bone.

Lady Talbot had rather remarkable
grey-green eyes, wide and long-lashed and slightly bulbous. Thomazine laid the fan
on the table, took the heavy chased silver fork in her right hand, and stabbed
the pale green, slightly bulbous grape on her plate with venom. Then she met
Lady Talbot’s gaze: smiled sweetly, and bit the grape in two.

“And your teeth are your own, tibber,”
her husband breathed in her ear, and she nearly inhaled the damned thing.

“Russell,” she said, without
taking her eyes from the notorious whore who had importuned her man, “who was
the second?”

“Her husband,” he whispered back,
and then she did, in truth, choke. “Asked if he might be allowed to watch.”

“Oh, dear God.”

Because these were the
invitations they received, now. The rakes, the whores, the hangers-on. The
daring, who wanted to see if he was in truth a murderer, would spring snarling
across the table with a knife between his teeth, and commit horrible acts on
the assembled party. They wanted him to. That was the worst of it, that the
same ladies and gentlemen who had mocked him as prim and ordinary previous,
were so quick to believe his guilt. Not quite one of us, you see. Always knew
there was something.

One or two of the bolder women
had asked Thomazine outright - in a motherly, concerned manner, of course,
seeing Thomazine’s pearls and the way she smiled at her husband across a room
when she caught his eye and everyone else stopped existing for that one lovely
heartbeat. Seeing how she blushed, and stopped to watch him, and how that
dangerous and vicious brute glowed as if someone had lit a candle inside him –
well, obviously, Thomazine had been coerced into her marriage.

Well, she shouldn’t have done it,
but she had.

She had shaken her head, and said
sorrowfully that yes, it was all true, all of it.

But he was
ever
so good in
bed.

(Well, bless him, he was, he did
not snore more than was acceptable, and although he was prone to rolling
himself up in the blankets, he was quite civil about it, and not did not
complain about her warming her cold feet on his.)

And if they were going to whisper,
at least let them whisper something true.

The green-eyed trollop who was
whore to the Duke of Buckingham was eyeing Thomazine’s husband again like a dog
eyeing a meaty bone, and Thomazine twirled the fork thoughtfully in her
fingers. And if the bitch thought she’d get him in her bed drunk, she had
another think coming - and she slipped her hand under Russell’s elbow and
switched her meagre glass for his full one.

He was drinking more than he
should, lately, but he was wretched. Why should he not? Sometimes it lightened
his mood sufficient to forget the whispers. Sometimes it made him irritable.

Tonight was one of his black
nights. Lady Talbot had not improved his mood.

Buckingham – what fool had
invited both of them to the same supper anyway? - was playing silly buggers,
idly baiting Lord Talbot about his horns.

Lady Talbot, the stupid bitch,
was in her twittering element, thinking she might play one off against the
other and display her overripe charms to the company as she did it.

Thomazine was tired, and bored,
and had heard nothing tonight more than the same lacklustre rumour than she had
heard from a hundred lips for the last fortnight, and the long-boned waist of
her bodice was uncomfortably tight around her overstuffed middle. (Getting poddy,
my tibber, he had said contentedly to her in bed last night, folding his hands
over the little pot she was acquiring. All this rich living. And he’d buried
his face in her loose hair, snuffed her like a dog, and gone to sleep.)

He looked icy and stone-cold furious as she left his side, to take
her own place at the outcast end of the table. They had seated Russell near to
Lord Talbot - between Francis Talbot and Lord Kettering, and opposite the Duke
of Buckingham – the better to observe him, she thought, like a wild animal in a
menagerie. And set
her
with the undesirables, where a girl of no account
from a quiet Essex bywater might be conveniently ogled and propositioned, but
not be expected to participate.  There was a woman she did not know, a chubby,
happy wench with a giggle that jiggled her fat white breasts like a half-set
blancmange, to her right, - “Mistress Behn,” she said, beaming at Thomazine.
“And you’re my Crophead’s squeeze, then?”

“His wife,” she corrected coldly.

“How very unfashionable, bringing a wife to such a gathering! We
are all whores together,” she finished, and there was a little round of
applause from the rather gaunt, poetic-looking gentleman at her elbow. Who did,
in fact, turn out to be a poet, and who was quietly tucking fruit up the
voluminous sleeve of his shirt as fast as he could without attracting
attention. She must have been staring, because Mistress Behn nudged her hard
under the table. “Nat is a whore of fortune,” she said, and looked at Thomazine
with brown eyes as soft and protuberant as a spaniel’s. “Fortune’s not paying
well, this week. “

“No doubt, but in any decent household we do not talk of whores at
table!” Thomazine snapped, all too aware of Lady Talbot’s white hand on her
husband’s midnight sleeve, and his fair head bent towards hers.

“Surely,” Mistress Behn agreed, following her gaze. ”We have to
sit with them, in this company. And in
this
household, madam, the honest
ones steal, and the arrant ones pander. But we never
talk
of it, of
course.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m wondering what manner of whore you are, my lady. Poor,
honest, and desperate, as this end of the table, or simply desperate, like
that. Your good man was honest, when I knew him -” her eyes rested on
Thomazine, thoughtfully, “in Den Haag. Though I think he did not know you,
then, for he is much changed, I think?”

“Married,” Thomazine said though shut teeth, as if that might
account for it.

“Sad. No man of sense should marry.”

“Or woman,” Nat the poet said softly, and looked at Mistress Behn
with liquid sympathy till she stroked his dark curls, like a lapdog.

“Marriage is a noble institution, sir. But who wants to exist in
an institution?”

“You knew my husband in the Low Countries?” Not that Thomazine did
not understand this flighting wit, but she happened to rather like the
institution of marriage, and she did not consider herself a whore, Fortune’s or
otherwise.

“He was very kind to me,” Mistress Behn said, and dipped her
lustrous eyes with a sigh. “Had he not worn his hair cropped like a yard-brush
at the time, I might have let him be kinder.
So
unflattering.”

“You had an
affaire
with my husband?” She flattened her
hand on the table cloth, where the starched linen had crumpled in her grip, and
patted it smooth.

“No, mistress, I
owe
him - something in the region of two
hundred pounds, I imagine, for six months’ rent and keeping. Living is dearer
at Court, you know. One is obliged to keep up a pretence -” and she grimaced.
“As you see. Smoke and glittering mirrors. I imagine I should have been cheaper
to keep as his mistress. And I imagine the world should have understood it the
better if he had.”