A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) (35 page)

"Then
I am glad you consider our friendship at an end, my lord, because
I
certainly do! How dare you - how
dare
you call him a traitor -"

"Because
he
isn't
, mistress, not in his head, can you not see that? That is what
I am saying to you! He is possibly the most fiercely loyal man I have ever
known, but he has
never
changed his loyalties, madam. Since - since
Edgehill,
I'll warrant! He is still loyal to his, his bloody puritanical,
Dissenting, republican roots - well, I cannot stand by and let him do it,
Mistress Russell, and I
will
not. I give you two days to make a decision:
he either leaves this country and takes refuge with his dubious political
friends on the Continent - and I will say no more of it, I owe you both that
much, in friendship - or he remains here and I hand over what I know to His
Majesty. I
know
he killed his sister, and I
know
he burned her
body to hide his crime, and God alone knows what else he might have done,
Thomazine, for I fear there may be no end to his hunger for – for vengeance,
mistress, I think he hates the world for what it has done to him, poor child
that he was, but I must see justice done, can you understand that? I cannot
keep this to myself any longer. For I fear - I very much fear, by the nature of
the crime at Wapping, that someone else knows it, too. And for his own sake -
and for your sake, dear, to save you from the shame of it - well, I must. And I
hope you will forgive me for it."

She
stood up. "You may do as you see fit, my lord. I will see myself
out." And without looking back, twitching her skirts aside that she might
not even have to touch the air around him, she stalked past the outraged
butler, and two scared footmen in the echoing marble hall, and out into the
street, with her head up, and Deb white and shaking behind her.

(They
must have heard every word of it, in the hall. The two young footmen looked
scared to death. The butler looked as if he'd like to choke the life out of
her.)

She
wasn't scared.

She
wasn't scared for about a quarter of a mile. And then she whirled and
collapsed, sobbing, into Deb's arms, and mistress and maid clung together
weeping in the street while London whirled about them.

62

They
passed it off as some foolish fancy of a breeding maid, and she sat in the
kitchen, forlornly nibbling on a crust, with her mind in a miserable turmoil.
Too fretful to think, even if she could have set her thoughts in order, and she
waited for him to come home because she knew it was not true, it was all a
horrible lie.

It
was a horrible lie that had been told to her by a man she had liked and
trusted, and who had called himself a friend, and who had been Russell's friend
all his life.

And
it was a lie that had its roots in what she knew to be truth, and so she did
not know what to think any more, except that nothing was what she had thought
it was, and it made her head ache.

The
Bartholomew-baby was on his feet, and she watched him idly, as he tottered
under the legs of the table, purposefully pursuing a ball of rags across the
kitchen. A nice little boy, sturdy, with fine dark hair that grew long enough
to curl to ringlets on the back of his neck, and little bracelets of fat at his
wrists. He could not have been less like tall, slight, fair Thankful, whose
pale hair was thick and as straight as a yard of pump water - whose features
were delicately bony, not blunt and snub-nosed - who looked, at first glance,
so frail and ascetic. (Which was deceptive. She'd seen her husband and a hot
pie locked in mortal combat before, many a time. The pie had not survived the
experience. It had been mercifully quick, though.)

An
appealing child, the Bartholomew-baby. A happy, unquestioning child, content
with his lot. Truly, Thomazine, you had ever thought that nice, unremarkable
little boy was your husband's by-blow?

She
looked at Jane Bartholomew, until the widow looked up from her mending.

"Sorry,"
she said ruefully, and Jane looked back at her for a moment and then nodded her
acknowledgement. She knew.

It
did not go a way to mending things between them, how could it? But there - it
was said, and she meant it, and the atmosphere in the fuggy kitchen lightened
from being that of the cock-pit to that of two strangers sharing a space for a
time with no desire to speak to one another.

"Thomazine-
" the street door flung open, quite unannounced, to admit her husband,
windblown and mud-spattered and radiating excitement like a banked fire. He was
aware of Jane Bartholomew's presence, he nodded politely to her and said
something suitable, but had no more registered her existence than he had
registered the existence of the furniture. "Zee, you'll never guess
-"

But
the person who took most notice of him was, God have mercy, the
Bartholomew-baby. Who had looked up, startled, his little round face crumpling
in dismay, as the door had opened; wobbling on his fat feet, rocking to and
fro, his starfish-hands splayed in a desperate entreaty for balance. Snatching
at the air, and finding no purchase, and gone sprawling into the flames
headlong.

His
mother screamed, once. Thomazine was out of her seat so quickly the stool
rocked and fell, but the child's skirts were already smouldering, the kitchen
full of the sickening smell of burned hair and meat, the little boy's screams
of agony rising to a piercing pitch -

Briefly.
Because even before the child's own mother had had a chance to respond, even
before Thomazine's seat had rocked back into its three legs, Thankful had dived
into the hearth and wrenched the child up from the embers, rolling the
convulsing little body in a fierce, stifling embrace. The note of the boy's
screams had changed almost immediately, from agonised to afraid and hurting.
Not good, but better. Beating with his fists against Russell's rain-wet
doublet, where the pair of them lay half-sprawled in the hot ashes, and
screaming fit to burst, wet and scarlet in the face, his curls and his skirts
sadly singed. But whole. 

Jane
Bartholomew was shaking. "Daniel," she said, in a small voice. "
Daniel."

Russell
was also shaking, holding the struggling child far too tight. "You’re
hurting him," the widow said wildly. "He is afraid, the lambkin, he
wants his mammy -"

And
she plucked him from Russell's hands, both of them sobbing now. The little boy
was holding up his blistered fingers, not wanting them to be kissed better,
still screaming. Hurt and frightened, inconsolably so, but - whole. "Thank
you," she wept, "oh, you silly little boy - thank you so very much -
you foolish infant, I have told you and told you, not so
close
!"
And she whirled from the room in a flurry of skirts, to fret over the most
precious thing left in the world

Leaving
Thomazine with her husband: white-faced and stunned and shaking, blinking as if
he did not believe himself what had just happened. He stared at her for a
minute, and then was suddenly and noisily sick into the embers of the fire.

She
wanted to say any number of things. Instead, she took hold of his wrists,
careful of his poor burned hands, and helped him out of the ashes. She brushed
his hair back from his face, and did not mind that the ends of it were singed
off, or that his poor scarred cheek was pockmarked with burns. For he, too, was
afraid, and in sore need of comfort, and she put her arms around him and held
him against her breast and rocked him and said silly nothing-words until he
stopped shaking. And then she called him a few choice names, for surely his
life was more important than that of some witless toddling infant with no more
sense than to tumble into a perfectly evident kitchen fire. And then he wept
against her shoulder, not in any elegant manner, but the horrible, dribbling
tears of someone who is gone beyond knowing or caring how unlovely tears make
him.

He
was afraid of fire.

He
did not have an ordinary man's healthy respect for the flames, he was
miserable, sick-afraid of it - of burning. He had nightmares of it. She knew
that, then. He had still thrown himself across the kitchen to pull that little
boy clear. She had no words to ask why he might do that, and yet he looked up
at her through his ragged hair, with eyes that were puffy and black-smeared,
and he said, "She burned me, Zee. Not much older than him." He
gagged, retched, sat shaking again, panting with his mouth open. "Fly held
my hands in the fire. To punish me. I was - " he had to stop, his teeth
chattering, "was a little boy like that. And she huh-
hurt
me."

Fly
Coventry had taken her little brother's hands, and held them in the kitchen
fire, in punishment for some childish sin. So that he might know what the
flames of hellfire were like, and mend his ways.

That
thought made Thomazine's own mouth go dry, and she could not speak for rage
against a woman who had been dead and buried this twelve months and more, who
had died in the most horrible way imaginable. (Who deserved it, for what she
had done. It was a dreadful thing to think. But Thomazine thought it, most
passionately.) Russell buried his head in the curve of her shoulder and wept
again, but not hopelessly, now. "How could I let that happen to another
child?" he said indistinctly, and sniffed. "It
hurt
. It hurt
so
much
. How could I?"

In
the room next door, in that little, overstuffed room where Jane Bartholomew's
married life was squeezed into half her house, her son was settling. Through
the thin plaster his screams were dying to pitiful sobs, to hiccups. (Through
the plaster Jane was singing to him, the words inaudible.)

"It
hurts," Russell said again, in that same shaky, frightened voice. “I
couldn’t –“  and she touched her lips to his forehead.

"I
love you," Thomazine said, and the tears ran down her own cheeks unheeded,
for that long-ago little boy, who had been hurt, and uncomforted, and who had
not been loved. And she hoped it would be enough.

63

She
would have told him, she probably would have told him what had happened, but
first of all he was grey and shaking and she didn't want to distress him any
further. The Widow was weeping not-quite-silently on the other side of the
wall, and Thomazine took her man in her arms and rocked him against her breast
as if he was her child, murmuring nonsense-words to him.
(Like he had done for her, not so very long ago. The world turned.)

"Thomazine,"
he said, after a while. He still sounded shaky, but better. Steadier. Slightly
muffled. "I'm sorry."

"Don't
be sorry." - he smelt of burnt hair, a little, and she bent and put her
cheek against the top of his head. "It's not your fault."

"No.
But I'm sorry you saw it."

He
sat up, and scrubbed his hands through his hair, wincing a little at the frayed
ends. "Well. Now you know."

It
would have been the perfect time, she thought afterwards. She knew. She had
always known some of it, now she knew all of it. And it did not feel like a
triumph, or a vindication, that now she knew why he had never spoken of his
childhood. It made her sad. And it made her determined that
their
child
should grow up happy, and loved.

And
then the Widow came out of her own rooms with the Bartholomew-baby wobbling at
her side, all red and tearstained but cheerful with a childish ability to
forget hurt almost straightaway, and Russell got to his feet and stood looking
at the child with his hands behind his back.

"Well,
sir, how do you fare?" he said. He sounded awkward and shy and her heart
quite turned over in her chest for loving him, for he had no idea how to be
easy with the child, and he was trying so very hard. (And how would he, she
thought, and her heart squeezed again – for what children had he ever
known?)"Are you quite mended?"

The
little boy looked at him suspiciously, and Thomazine crossed to his side
quickly before there were more tears - from either party, for she suspected
that her strained, over-weary husband might be minded to weep too, if the child
was afraid of him. "Show me your hands, sweeting," she said,
"show Zee?"

He
put his little chubby fingers up, and said, "Burn," solemnly.

And
Russell huffed, and sat on his heels beside Thomazine, and peered at the boy
with more intensity than was possibly comforting for an infant, for he shrank
against his mother's skirts with his poor blistered fingers in his mouth.
"What d'we mean to do about it then, hm?"

"Daniel,
do not trouble the Major -"

"I'd
like to be troubled, mistress," he said. And then glanced up at Thomazine,
as though she might be angry with him for saying so, "I need the practice,
you see."

And
of course that suddenly diverted that fearful gathering into celebration, with
Deb and the kitchen-girl pressed into service to run out and get feasts of fat
things, and the Bartholomew-baby bundled into Russell's lap whilst his mother
and Thomazine whirled into impromptu gaiety, and the evening ended with
Thomazine's health drunk in good homely lambswool and wedges of bread and
toasted cheese.