A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) Read Online Free

place and another afterwards. Never quite settling, never quite at ease,
never quite finding his own place, and he'd thought he never would, actually. Not
till he'd had news of Fly's death and even then he’d always assumed if he lived
at Four Ashes at all, it would be alone.
    He'd never
dreamed that he might have a hearth of his own, one day, and a girl of his own
to sit at it.
    (Thomazine
Babbitt, sitting by the hearth and placidly spinning? Aye, right. Thomazine
Babbitt in one of her father's scruffy old coats walking the chalk hills with
him and muttering darkly about sheep, more like. She might be his dear love but
she was her own self first. That was fine. He suspected if he wished his hearth
to be populated by placid spinners, he might have to learn to use a distaff
himself.)
    His old
comrades, come for the day to see him married, that he'd not seen since the
wars. Young Luce, who had been skinny as a barn cat when Russell had last set
eyes on him - not so quite so little, now. Prosperous and sleek and not quite
as lithe or as golden as he had been, despite the elegant silver buttons on his
lovely embroidered waistcoat: still with most of his own hair, a little greyer,
a little faded, somewhat thicker in the waist and definitely more tired about
the eyes, with a sprawling brood of fair-haired babies tagging onto the skirts
of his coat.
    His new father
in law, half a head taller than just about anyone else in the room and for once
in his conspicuously russet-haired life wearing something other than grey or
black. Judging by the mutinous look on his old commander’s face, the slate-blue
silk was a source of some contention between Hollie Babbitt and his wife.
Russell would have given a good deal to overhear what Het was saying to her
notoriously-scruffy husband, but he was definitely being told off for
something. And Het - well, Het was what you'd expect, from any lady who had had
the misfortune to have been married to that engine of domestic destruction for
over twenty years - plump and placid and imperturbable, regardless of what
disasters and surprises her beloved husband dumped in her lap. Sturdy and round
and freckled as an egg, and since he doubted that Het had ever suffered much in
the way of the storms of passion, as comfortably devoted to her Hollie as she
had been when they married. Wearing a stubbornly-unfashionable gown, and
blissfully unaware that her husband had positioned himself in such a way behind
her that he could look straight down the front of her bodice, with an
expression of great personal satisfaction on his uncompromising features.
    None of that
mattered, of course, set against the glowing fire that was Thomazine Babbitt -
Thomazine Russell, now, with her amber hair glowing loose on her
shoulders and her rosemary-grey skirts kilted above her knee as he sat with her
poor little cold feet in his lap, scowling at her damp stockings and trying to
rub the feeling back into her toes after that cold, raw morning in the damp
stone church. In those daft, impractical, modish, high-heeled silk slippers, a
gift from her fashion-crazed sister, no doubt. "Those wretched
shoes," he muttered, " - must you suffer in the name of
vanity, sweeting?"
    And she lifted
her eyes and smiled up at him, brimful of joy and mischief and radiance.
"But I do like to be pretty for you, lamb. And," she leaned a little
forwards and whispered, "in heels, I am almost of a height to kiss
you."
    It wasn’t what
you'd expect a gently-reared nineteen-year-old virgin to say, but then his
bride had always had the trick of reducing him to helpless giggles in company.
He’d intended to say that Thomazine was as lovely and as warm as cream, and
needed no trinkets and baubles to make her lovelier; that he was still amazed
that this beautiful young woman was in love with – wanted to spend the rest of
her life with, in his bed and at his board – a scarred, disillusioned Puritan.
He’d started to say it. She’d looked up at him with