A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (40 page)

And
had struck wide, there, for Fairmantle was laughing now, sure of himself.
“Don’t be absurd, Major. I don’t
hate
you. You flatter yourself. But you
must admit, sir, you make a most convenient man to accuse. Always a little too
good to be true, as I recall. Always
too
pretty, in the old days,
weren’t you? – just a little
too
upright,
too
honourable, for my
way of thinking. I just knew you had to have feet of clay, in the end. I knew
it, for you could not be so – so bloody assured, all the time, as you seemed.”

He
wondered if he could shoot the man, like a mad dog. His aim was true enough,
surely, for Thomazine was on her knees –
aim for the head, Russell
– and
he raised his own pistol without speaking a word, sighting down the barrel to
the spot where Fairmantle’s eyebrows met –

“Not
quite so self-possessed now, Major, are you? ‘Twas a marvel how many other men
wanted you to be not quite so perfect as you seemed, too,” he added mockingly.
“The world was
very
keen to take you from your pedestal, sir. And your
accomplice, of course,” he said conversationally. “But then, I imagine she will
have burned to death before you can undertake any daring rescue, no?” He gave a
slow, mocking blink of his own, and kicked over the lantern, very deliberately.

For
a second of wonder Russell thought the hemp waste had extinguished the flame,
and that it would not catch.

And
then it leapt to a small flame, and a greater, and then it started to run like
water along the length of the ropewalk. “Now, you could shoot me,” Fairmantle
said, and his face was beginning to take on a cheerful, ruddy glow. “But then I
might shoot her first, mightn’t I? So what do you think, major?”

He
did not know
what
to think. “Let her go,” he said again. “I will do
whatever you ask of me. Just let her go.”

“Well,
that’s very kind of you.”

Thomazine
was sobbing now, silently, and her eyes never left his. A quarter-mile of
ropewalk, between them. A fire, that was starting to crackle, and starting to
spread, that would move faster than a horse could run: cold sweat starting to
run down his back, in spite of the heat, the hair standing up on his arms,
starting to shake –

“Frightened,
Major?” Fairmantle said mockingly. “Thomazine tells me you’re not an admirer of
fires, sir. There’s a pity. Though I believe your sister was already dead when
I lit a fire beneath
her
skirts.”

He
knew what it would feel like, and the boards beneath his feet were beginning to
grow warm, wisps of acrid smoke rising through the gaps in the planking. He
knew how it would feel when he burned. He could do nothing, he could say
nothing, his hands grown numb and useless with fear, he could not fire a pistol
with any accuracy –

He
did not care for himself, much. But he knew how it would feel for Thomazine.
And that he would not bear.

“Let
her go, Sir Charles,” he said, and his voice was his own again, above the
rising roar of the flames. And as Fairmantle’s head turned, Russell shot him.

He
went down, face first, into the flames, in a great shower of sparks. And then
he rose screaming, flaming, and threw his dreadful fiery wig into the flames,
where it burst like a comet with a smell of burning hair. He was swearing and
crying, horribly, and yet he was still on his feet though his face was burned
like meat and his clothes were burning, and he still held Thomazine’s hair, in
a long silken rope wrapped about his wrist, and she was trying to pull away
from him, though it meant she hung over the flames jerking most piteously.

The
smell of meat, scorching.

Smoke
thickening, choking, his eyes stinging and watering, and he would go to her,
though every breath was burning in his lungs, as if he were breathing in
embers. He had a second pistol. It was an act of humanity, to exterminate that
horrible, burned,
thing
that roared and stamped on the burning boards.

He
could hear voices, shouting, somewhere. Not far away.

She
was on her feet, God be thanked, she was on her own feet and she was upright
and she was fighting like an Amazon, and Fairmantle smacked her across the face
with one of those horrible black-pocked joints of meat that had been his hands,
and she went sprawling across the boards with a scream. Sweet Christ, would the
man
never
go down?

There
was another shot. It surprised him, actually, for he had not fired, and the
voices were yet too far away, but suddenly there was an agony in his shoulder,
just below his collar-bone, and he tasted blood in his mouth. He wanted to say
something, but he couldn’t. It hurt.

His
left arm would not serve. “Thomazine,” he said, and she could not hear him,
over the roaring flames, but her head turned, lifted. She was on her feet
again. The burned thing almost had her, reeling like a drunken man to wrap his
horrible arms about her waist.
“Thomazine!”

He
was on his knees. Burning meat. It did not matter. Blood on the boards, a spray
of it, and with the last strength that was in him he fired into the churning
clouds of acrid smoke and sparks.

He
would have liked to see her, for a last time. But he lay with his cheek against
the splintered wood, and felt it shake with footsteps, and thought that it was
enough.

74

She
saw the shoulder of his coat burst inwards in a great shower of black blood,
but there was nothing she could do, for she was teetering against the rails
herself now with Fairmantle’s dreadful raw fingers scrabbling for her again,
and his face was a pocked mask of leaking meat – a horrible, homely smell of
roasting, and then she was falling forward with a jerk as he grabbed her again,
her loose hair swinging in her face and blinding her.

“Die,
you little bitch,” he slurred in her ear, and his forearm was tight about her
throat, cutting off the last of the air.

The
smell of burning silk, as the last rags binding her wrists parted in the flame,
and a brief screaming pain as her skin scorched under it. The ends of her hair,
crisping and lifting in the hot air.

The
blood-heat of metal between her scrabbling fingers, as she caught one of her loosened
hairpins. Pretty. A little enamelled flower at one end, set with a pearl. And
three inches of sharp metal.

No
breath. Her eyes felt like sand. She gripped the hot metal between her fingers,
and drove it back, up over her shoulder, into what part of his face chance
willed. She did not think she would ever forget how it felt, the shock down her
shoulder as the tip penetrated his eyeball, or the amount of sheer strength it
took to ram her hairpin into his skull.

Or
the way he screamed when she did it.

And
then she was free, and she could hear voices.

75

His
eyes were open. She could see the flames reflected in their darkness.

Gleaming on the silver filigree of his waistcoat buttons. On the
darkness of the black brocade, which had not been black, but silver, when she
had run her hands up over his shoulders -

had that been only a few hours ago? -

black with blood, and pooling underneath him, spreading across the
splintered boards towards her.

And he blinked.

There was blood spilling from his mouth, and on his shirt - oh,
Apple, so much blood - in his hair, and darkening the plain respectable grey of
the breast of his good wool suit-

he had blinked, he was alive-

She did not care about Fairmantle, she did not even care enough to
not care about Fairmantle, he had simply ceased to exist and the world had
narrowed to six feet of swaying boards inside Hell for she would not let him
die alone, he was her dear love and she crawled sobbing across the boards, away
from the heart of the fire, feeling her loose hair lift and banner in the hot
air.

Sparks, now, stinging her face and her bare, scraped hands.

Close enough to see the ragged black hole just above his
collarbone where the life was pumping sluggishly out of him and she kicked like
a swimmer across those last feet of wood, tearing at her skirts, at her
petticoats, wadding great handfuls of cloth into the hollow of neck and
shoulder -

she had kissed him there, a hundred times, a thousand times -

begging and praying and crying that he might live, that it was not
fair, that he -

One handful of silk soaked through. It was growing hotter, harder
to breathe. The acrid smell of burning hemp. Tar. She did not mind dying with
him in her arms, truly she did not, but she gave a little sob and changed
hands, pressing down harder with her handful of sodden linen till she felt the
faint, thready skitter of life under her fingers.

Another - was it slowing, or was there simply no more blood in
him? His lips looked white -

“Tam’sin,” he said, and his voice was faint, and slurred, but
steady.

She almost took her hand from his wound. Remembered.

“Call,” he said. “Wilmot. Outside.”

“What?”

He closed his eyes, but it wasn’t in weakness. It was the old slow
happy-cat blink of a man who would smile and cannot. “Looking for you,” he
said, and his eyes filled with tears. “Wouldn’t leave you. Came with. Wilmot.
Call. Them.”

“I won’t -” Hers overflowed, too, and that was not helpful. “You
will come too.”

He closed his eyes again. No.

“Thankful you have a son, damn you, you can’t die yet, you bloody
fool!”

And then she did take her hand from the hole above his collarbone,
and she grabbed him by both shoulders and lifted his body from the boards, but
she could not drag him and so she shook him instead, and sat defeated with his
head against her thigh and wept awful tears of rage and shame and loss while
Chatham docks burned around her.

And that was when the Earl of Rochester came bounding onto the
boards, and stopped, looking like one of the minor demons, all backlit rose and
gold.

“Dear me, it’s like the end of ‘Hamlet’ up here - bodies
everywhere,” he said tartly. “That’s not how
this
performance ends,
Penthesilea.”

75

He
had almost died, though he said afterwards that she was being silly and that he
hadn't any such thing. He had almost died, and they had, in the end, not
averted any battle at all. Six weeks later, on the thirteenth of June the war
began in earnest, in the great sea battle at Lowestoft, off the coast of Suffolk.

And
Russell was very thoroughly out of the way, and she was glad of it.

She
thought she might have spent the next month weeping, and he had spent most of
it flat on his back with his eyes closed, for the first thing he did when he
stopped bleeding was to develop a recurrence of his old fever and almost die on
her again.

The
Earl of Rochester said he refused, absolutely refused, to set foot in that
house in Fenchurch Street, and that his reputation would never stand it. The
Widow Bartholomew, blooming into her position as housekeeper, had said that was
fine by her because her reputation would not stand having him in the house
either. So the Earl of Rochester and the rest of his Merry Gang were banned
from visiting, even had they wanted to: they sent fruit, and
carefully-scurrilous poetry to entertain, and the occasional basket of oranges
with instructions that the invalid was not to consume them peel and all and
give himself the gripes in addition to a low fever.

John
Wilmot, though, was a fairly regular visitor, sans wig and sans silks. In a
plain working man's suit of clothes he passed without comment amongst the
working men of Aldgate, and he was in and out, running errands for the Widow,
fetching and carrying quite without regard for his position in the world. It
was a game to him, though, and he was tiring of it even as they were packing up
the house around Russell's sickbed, and Thomazine suspected that after they
left for Buckinghamshire they would not see him again. And that made her a little
bit sad, because when he was not trying to be wild and shocking on purpose he
was quite a decent, amusing, sensible young man, and he would make someone a
good husband when he grew up. (Would be a pretty rotten husband presently, but
that was almost by the by.)

No
one mentioned Charles Fairmantle, and that was good, for she did not think she
could think of him without flinching, yet. She had dreams, still, where he rose
burning out of the darkness, his face as raw as a haunch of beef, his fingers
still clawing blindly for her throat.

Dreams
where she did not reach Russell in time, and he had died, there on the boards,
with his life seeping out from between her fingers. Where she could hear Wilmot
shouting, but he could not find them, and they burned together with the English
fleet. She thought Russell had those dreams, too, for he clung to her in his
sleep some nights, shaking and twitching.

But
by May he was sitting up in bed and having conversations that were intelligent,
if brief, due to a lamentable habit of falling asleep mid-sentence. And by
Whitsun they were making their slow, feeble way home, because he said he was
hanged if he was going home on a bloody hurdle, and he would ride home like a
Christian or they could bloody well bury him with the rest of the plague-ridden
of the City. And by June the first battle of the war had been fought and won.

It
had been a near-run victory for the Duke of York as admiral of the fleet, with
Prince Rupert commanding the centre, and she was glad for that ragged old raven
of a hero, for now he would have new battles to replay and new tactics to talk
over, and new admirers, and he might be happy.

But
he wouldn't be talking them over with Thomazine's husband, she was adamant on
that head. Because for the foreseeable future, Thankful was going to be on a
diet of gruel and barley-water, and when he was able to go two hours together
without falling asleep in his supper, she might consider going so far as Dr
Willis's strengthening diet of beefsteak and claret, but up until then, he was
going to behave himself like a very proper model invalid.

He
said he hadn't bled that much, and that she was making over-much of what was no
more than a scratch. Stunned, he said, no more, and he'd had worse, and what
did she think he was, a child, to be babied? And Thomazine, who had ruined a
handkerchief and a good collar and a petticoat stanching the blood from the
hole in her husband's shoulder, and whose skirts would never be fit for wear
again, had smiled politely at him and nodded and returned to her mending the
great hole in his good coat.

He
had been holding her hand so tight at the end that her wedding ring had bruised
her fingers, and he had been so very afraid, and that was why he wouldn't admit
that it had been so close. Wilmot had come racketing down the ropewalk with a
half-dozen watchmen and warehousemen dragged untimely from their beds, and they
had carried him clear, and she had gone with them, weak with the weeping and
the relief of a woman who was not dead after all. They had put the fire out by
dawn with bucket-chains from the mast-ponds and the river. It had not spread so
far, in the end. Had not had the chance. Wilmot had heard the shots and raised
the alarm, and by the time he had found them, the ropewalk was half-burned, but
it was preserved, and it had been repaired. And the Dutch – if they had ever
had such a plan – did not come, not for another six weeks, and by then it was
so patently nothing to do with Thankful Russell and his wife that the gossip
had faded to a hush, in the new excitement of war.

Thomazine
would have stayed with him, though, if help had not come. She would have sat
amidst the inferno and held Russell's hand and burned with him, if he could not
have been brought to safety. She did not think she would ever forget his dark
eyes holding hers at the last, as if she were a pole star by which he held his
course. Not with softness, or love, but with an absolute fixed intensity, that
she might pull him free of the jaws of death by the strength of her will.

He
had been in a deal of pain, and not always lucid, and he had been very, very
afraid, and so she had held his hand, and was afraid herself that even as the
flames leapt below them his fingers grew cool in hers. She would have let go,
to wad up more of her petticoats against that great pulsing hole above his
collarbone, but he would not have it.

It
wasn't until Wilmot tried to have him taken up, and he swore that he wasn't
dead yet and he would walk free of this place on his own feet, that she wept.
(And then he'd put his good arm round her and bled all down her decent grey
bodice so that it had to be cut up for cleaning rags, and then he'd fainted.
And Wilmot, of all people, had looked as if he would like to bang the pair of
their silly heads together for sheer wilful stubbornness, and then he'd gone
and put Fairmantle's horses to his carriage with his own hands, rather than
wait for the Commissioner to be roused from his bed and give his authority, and
gone in search of a surgeon who might not ask unhelpful questions.

She
had only been able to think of Willis, and he had been somewhat less than
delighted at being called from his bed in the early hours of a spring dawn to
deal with such a medical emergency. Not
that
kind of surgeon, he'd said
grumpily. He had looked at Russell, though, limp and bloodied and lolling
against Wilmot's fine linen despite the Earl's attempts to gingerly hold him
away from the costly fabric, and Thomazine swore that the doctor's eyes had lit
up with anticipation.

They'd
had to move the previous incumbent from the table in his surgery, although,
being dead, the gentleman did not mind. Something had leaked from his flabby
carcass, and Russell's bright, blood-drabbled hair had stuck to it on the stained
marble. That had made Thomazine retch, and the good doctor had rather peevishly
told her that if the sight of blood made her squalmish perhaps this was no
place for her after all.

He
had cut Russell's coat from him, and the blood-dark shirt underneath it, and
Thomazine had made a little promise to God that if He brought her husband
safely through this, she would see to it with her own hands that he had a good
shirt to replace it She would be a good wife to him: no more adventuring. She
would be a proper, womanly wife, she would –

Russell’s
eyes were open, if not precisely brilliant with intelligence. His lips were
parted, and very pale, and a little runnel of blood ran out of the corner of
his mouth. He said something, too faint to catch, and Willis bent low to hear
him, and her husband raised his head. "This is the only chance you get,
sawbones," Russell said, panting slightly. "Make the most of
it."      

And
then he'd fainted again, and Willis, whose fingers had been fluttering
longingly over a bottle of the new tincture of opium that a gentleman called
Sydenham had recently claimed such efficacy for, sniffed, thwarted.
"Mistress, are you still squalmish?"

She
was not - or rather, she was, but she dared not be, as she held his head and
Willis had probed and snipped and parted rags of flesh. He had left her darling
delivered, God willing, from the mouth of the dog, crumpled and bloody and with
a neat seam throughout the fist-sized hole that was torn clear through his
shoulder, but breathing. And there was, then, only one question she might ask.

"Will
he recover?" She caught a sight of herself in the polished glass of one of
Willis's specimen jars - her hair disordered, her eyes huge and ashy-black in a
dirty, pointed face - and then she had wept, for shame. The doctor pinched his
nose, looking embarrassed.

"I
imagine on my previous acquaintance with the Major, madam, nothing short of
chain-shot would finish him off." There was a solid, metallic chink as
Willis dropped the misshapen ball of lead, wrapped about with shreds of flesh
and torn linen, into a dish. "Which is no guarantee of anything, mind,
except to say that he is a gentleman of a remarkably resilient constitution. I
may give a cautious indication of his return to health, in time."

Mistress
Bartholomew had wept horribly, and that had set the Bartholomew-baby off, and
that had set Thomazine to weeping again, and eventually poor Wilmot had had to
find a pair of stout and sensible link-boys to carry Russell to bed, for there
was not another living soul in their lodgings not nigh-insensible with grief
and weariness. Her husband had, however, opened his eyes as she settled the
pillow under his poor head. She had caught her breath, expecting tender words
of gratitude. He told her to
bloody well stop fussing.

Which
had made her laugh, and then made her cry again, and he had made a noise like a
pot of water boiling over and flung his good arm out for her to weep on his
chest.

It
had been almost a month until he was fit to travel, and then he managed to
acquire himself an inflammation of the lungs on the way home and they had
arrived back at Four Ashes unannounced on a wet, chilly May afternoon. Russell
was in a foul temper, coughing up blood and phlegm and muttering feverishly
into a sodden handkerchief, and Thomazine was tired and stiff and hungry,
limping on ahead into the parlour to find no fire lit and the celebratory
supper she'd tempted him into travel with, yet unprepared.

"No
supper!" he said irritably, and sneezed, and tried in vain to try and find
a dry patch on that overworked handkerchief to blow his nose. "You've been
strict on that head for nigh on a month, wench, and I'm perished for want of
solid food! And pox on it, Thomazine, have we no spare linen in this house that
I might -" he broke off and sneezed again. "
Stop fussing
!"

She
ignored him, of course. He was at his testiest when he felt poorly, and she
grew accustomed to it, after a month of him at his invalid worst. And, truly,
better Thankful irascible and panting for a mutton pie, than Thankful wan and
limp and quiescent.

"Do
you have a fever?" she said sweetly, and he glowered at her. "Would
you
like
one, dear? Because if you do not mend your tone, husband, you
will be eating that supper in the sheep-pasture.
In the rain
.”

His
lips twitched unwillingly. "Tibber, I am tired, and wretched, and all my
bones hurt. I am not feeling playful."

The
Widow - encumbered, as ever, with much care - was up to the elbows in the
week's baking, not having expected them until the morrow, and Thomazine was
half minded to take her husband into the kitchens and wrap him in travelling
cloaks and tuck him into the corner of the chimney-breast till he stopped
shivering, but instead she ignored the Widow's squeaks of protest and made him
a mug of mulled ale with her own hands and raided the buttery for cheese and
cold pigeon pie.

She
was, yet, her mother's daughter. She had seen the King and she was married to
an intelligencer and she had killed a man, and yet she was at heart a stout
Essex goodwife who valued her hearth and home above all else, and who believed
in the twin panaceas of good feeding and loving.

Russell
- well, if somewhat informally, fed, stretched his legs out to the parlour
fire, which was beginning to crackle. She suspected much more feeding, and any
more ale, and her husband would be asleep where he sat, and she looked around
at her lovely magpie-room: at the firelight glistening on delicate porcelain
and well-polished wood, the deep jewel colours of the Turkey-work carpet, the
blue-and-white Delftware bowl on the coffer.