A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (26 page)

I am not a
child, Thankful, I am a grown woman, and your wife –

Hooked it closed
and tugged it straight with the cool efficiency of a man who has had a lot of
practice. And Thomazine had never seen one of these jackets before –

“Most women wear
them in the Low Countries,” he said absently, and she looked up into his face,
startled – when had he grown so experienced in the matter of Dutchwomen’s
dress? – but he didn’t look back. Not once. His eyes were fixed on the closing
of her jacket. “As undress,” he added, sounding quite critical about it. “Not
in a public place.”

“Well, if I had
not your –“

And she stopped
herself. Because it was not a thing to share like this, in anger, and she would
not use their unborn child as a weapon. (She was in truth a grown woman, it
seemed. She learned a little of a woman’s dignity, and not a child’s
impulsivity.) “Temper,” she finished, which did not make sense, but was a
little
needle. “May we return to supper?” she said stiffly, and held out
her arm, and he nodded equally stiffly, and took it.

45

No one laughed, and no one was surprised
to see them return, only perhaps there was a little ripple of what you might
call astonishment, if you were sensitive to such things. She returned to her
place at the foot of the table, with the groundlings, and he resumed his, where
he could be baited like a bear, and he knew it. But he could see her from here,
and that steadied him a little, though if he kept his head down she would not
know he was looking.

Even in that dreadful ill-fitted
jacket she was radiant, though the pale amber colour did not flatter her, much.
(And, he suspected, Lady Talbot knew it. It had not been a charitable attempt
to make Thomazine comfortable. It had been meant to make her look pallid and
dowdy. It had failed. She looked pale and dishevelled - he gave Her Ladyship a
false smile, across the table - but seating her next to Mistress Behn had been
a blessing, for he had never known that lady other than a heartening influence
and a lift to the spirits.)

He heard Thomazine's giggle again
- his foolish, doting ear was tuned to both her laughter and her tears, over
twenty years of loving, in one way or another.

He hoped Aphra was not filling
her head with
total
fabrication. She meant well, and there was a brain
in that ringletted head that many of the men around this table would have
wondered at, but she had a history of - well, romanticising her friends. But
she had had a time of it, with the late Master Behn. He had not been kind,
always: certainly not kind enough to leave her in a position of independence,
and she had been in a sorry way when Russell had first known her. He had not
rescued her, he had not been her protector, he had certainly never done any
more than lend her money for rent and food in Antwerp. She liked to
imply
that he had, though. She reckoned people understood her relationship with the
world, if they thought she was a whore.
"We're
all
whores, chick."

- It was her catchphrase. They
laughed at her for it - thought it was a woman of the world's world-weary wit.
It wasn't. She was a funny lass, Mistress never-quite-legally-Behn. She was
possibly the most loving, generous spirit he had ever met, with the two
possible exceptions of his wife and his mother-in-law. One day it was always
going to be wine and roses with Aphra. But it was always going to be
tomorrow
,
and she lurched from crisis to crisis cheerfully living on her wits till then.
Because like St Martin, what she had, she had a habit of giving away.

She had never, ever, in the -
what? ten years? - he had known her, sold her body. A lot of people called her
a whore. (A lot of people were wrong, too.) But she
had
sold her wits, a
good deal. That was what she meant. They all did that, to a greater or lesser
degree: sold our gifts to people who did not deserve them, in order to live.

She was, though, a
bugger
for trying to make things nicer for her friends. And that was not always
helpful. There were a number of people in Antwerp who were under the impression
that plain Thankful-For-His-Deliverance Russell was a noble scion of the House
of Stuart, and that he had been of the King's household when he'd come by his
scar at Edgehill. She had meant well, bless her. She had thought he wanted for
society, and she meant that he should have none but the best.

He had a dark suspicion that
going by the laughter, she was telling Thomazine some similar faddle about
exactly what he had been doing in the Low Countries: thinking, no doubt, that a
pretty, gay young woman should rather believe in her husband as a tragic figure
of romance than a rather plain information-gathering merchant. Which he had
been. Which he had told Thomazine he had been.

And that Thomazine, because she
was her plain-dealing father's daughter, would not see it as a rosy-tinted
fiction, but think that he had lied to her.

Oh, bloody
hell
, Aphra,
can you not turn your imagination to something more useful than making up
exciting stories about your friends?

"How soon one whore knows
another," he heard Talbot sneer, just on the edge of his hearing. "Birds
of a feather, eh?"

Kettering, the nasty little
bastard, passed some remark about plucking. He saw Talbot look his way. He saw
it. He
knew
he was being baited. "The little red wench has been
plucked by just about every man in the 'Gang, don't you know? Plays the whore
for Fairmantle, every man knows it -"

"I grow tired of that
word," Russell said, very clearly, and all of a sudden it was very quiet
about that table.

"I understand you are not
comfortable with the truth in any of its guises....
Mijnheer
Russell."

Someone giggled.

He looked at Talbot, and
continued to look at Talbot, till His Lordship flushed and looked away.

Charles Sedley smirked.
"Care to pass the
butter,
sir?"

He said nothing. Precisely
nothing. He could feel his wife's eyes on him, and he did not dare look at her,
because he suspected she would be frightened - aye, and she would be hurt too,
to think what they made of her honour, in the name of laughter. (Take offence,
sir? Then you have no sense of humour, do you?)

He picked up his delicate wine
glass, twirling the twisted stem between his fingers. Between a rock and a hard
place.

Then he shrugged, and threw the
contents in Talbot's face. "You. Outside. Choose your seconds."

46

Hell
broke loose.

Talbot reared up, dripping and
stuttering, with his bitch-wife squawking in outrage at the side of him, and
Russell suggested that she might care to hold her scold's tongue also, lest she
join her benighted husband on the point of his sword.

"Are you going to let a - a
murderer
talk to me like that, Francis?" she yelped, and the murderer
swung
his head and grinned at her - not pretty, he could feel it, the muscle going
taut on the scarred side so that all his teeth showed.

"Your husband is too much of
a coward to allow else.
My lady
. And on the matter of
whores
, my
lord, you are not sufficient of a man for Lady Talbot, either, I understand. Or
else why should she choose to bed Buckingham - who's not much of a man,
either?" He pushed his chair back, and there was part of him that wished
Thomazine did not see this; and there was a part of him that thought it was
about time she saw what they truly said about her - about
both
of them.

Like a pack of apes, he thought
bitterly, and tossed his head. "Anyone
else
wish to claim to have
slept with my lady Talbot, or are we keeping tally at two, so far? I understood
her to have been like Newmarket races -
everyone's
been there?"

"Oh,
I
have,"
Sedley said cheerfully. "There's an echo, you know. Or maybe that was her
husband, got lost?"

"You dare!" Talbot
screamed. "You dare to -"

"Of course he bloody dares,
Talbot, you just called his wife a whore. Which is, if you ask me, the kettle
calling the pot black, for I'm not sure
your
lady's not even taken
Strephon to her bed," the Earl of Rochester said from the head of the
table. Threw a grape, with deadly accuracy, at Russell. Who caught it,
unsmiling.

"Don't poke Caliban,
Francis," the Earl said, and raised his eyebrows. "He don't like
it."

"I demand
satisfaction!"

"Good for you. I suggest
Mistress Abrams, in Covent Garden. Very reasonable rates, clean girls, I'm sure
they won't mind your little
habits
, Francis." And then he smiled at
Lady Talbot, ever so sweetly. "There you go, madam, no need to defend
something that's as fictional as one of Master Dryden's plays."

Her face blanched, just her
slightly bulging grape-green eyes turning in his direction, shiny with
loathing.

"Try it," Rochester
said pleasantly, and the ape leapt into his lap at the sound of its name, and
he fed it another grape. "Just try it, madam, and I will see your name
ruined. Imagine. No parties. No games. No intrigue. You might be forced to
rusticate, my lady, somewhere dull, where they would not tolerate your little
games." he smoothed the rough little grey head, and Strephon chittered,
showing sharp yellow teeth. A deceptively dangerous little beast, that one.
Russell didn't trust the monkey much, either. "You know I could, as
well."

"Francis -" she said faintly.

"Is going to sit down, and
behave like a man of sense. And Caliban,
you
are going to do likewise.
You will apologise to my lord Talbot and his good lady for that lamentable
misunderstanding, major, and you will put your sword away -
right
away,
there's a good man - and go and sit elsewhere. Go on. Banished, major."

And gladly so, for he was shaking
so hard he must sit down or fall, and his heart was choking him.

He would have killed Talbot,
here, in front of them all -

"No you wouldn't,
Caliban."

That poor frail wine glass
wouldn't take such treatment, and the stem broke in two as his fingers closed
on it in astonishment. Wine and blood spattered the pristine linen tablecloth,
and the Earl of Rochester sighed and handed his napkin over with a flourish.
"Dear me, you
are
determined to see blood shed this evening, aren't
you?"

"Why?"

"Well, one might say that
under that rather unpromising exterior you are a seething hotbed of unresolved
passions, sir. One
might
.”

Russell sat with his mouth open
and said precisely nothing, possibly because he was presently incapable of
speech. Which gave him the opportunity at least to suck his bleeding fingers,
and look at the Earl for some clue as to what the bloody hell -

"No, I didn't think so,
either," Wilmot said blandly. "Because you didn't do it, of course.
And I wonder why
someone
is at such pains to make it seem as if you
did."

"I am a man of blood, sir,
did you not know -"

"Oh, come off it! I am not
so new-fledged as that, major. You haven’t been a man of blood for some time –
if, Major Russell, you ever
were,
and that not merely a tale put about
to explain your somewhat
individual
charms. You intrigue me strangely,
you know. You will persist in being stubbornly who you are, despite it making
you the butt of every man's wit. Which is interesting, because you share that
fair
mantle. And we mock
him
, because he is precisely nobody. A desperate,
scrabbling, encroaching person of no significance whatsoever. How very strange,
wouldn't you say?"

"That your little coterie
seek to destroy that which they do not understand?"

"No, Caliban, for so far as
Chas is concerned there is precious little substance
to
understand. Were
he forty years younger I should send him to bed with no supper and tell him to
stop pestering the grown-ups. As he is, we can only ignore him and hopes that
he goes away. Which he does not. You are always quick to see offence, sir,
aren't you?"

The ape put its hairy little hand
on Russell's knee and he looked down at it and smiled in spite of himself.

Wilmot leaned his elbow on the
table and rested his chin in his hand. "Now I wonder, sir. I wonder. If
you were always so hot at hand, or if it is a thing that comes with being so -
marked
- that you think yourself the object of every eye, when you are not?"

"Perceptive."

"Oh, no, sir. I don't pay
you
the least mind. I like to watch your wife - see, there you go again, major,
stiffening up - I like to watch people. To see how they work, and -" he
shrugged his elegant shoulders, "to meddle, perhaps, a little. She is
hardly the serpent of the Nile, your Thomazine. She doesn't trouble to hide her
feelings. See - she is worried for you, see her look this way, and trying to
pretend she isn't, in case you don't look back. You may as well, major. She
has
seen you. She's smiling. I don't think she means to, but - look."