Free A Broom at the Masthead (The Drowned Books Book 1) by M J Logue Page B

talk of
it. How d'ye come by the money?"
    "Army
pay," he said innocently. "I am a senior officer."
    "Oh,
bollocks are ye! A retired half-pay one, sir, and well I know it - d'ye take me
for a fool together! There was no money in this estate when she - when the
mistress died here, and well ye know that, too. She couldn't keep a
servant in the house for more than a week, given that the old besom was living
on bread and scrat. Ye know verra well she failed to thrive under your masters
in Parliament, Russell, wi' no man to stand her corner under Cromwell. I'd not
say you put them up to it, but I know what ye are on your mettle, and I don't
say ye'd have lifted a finger to help her. This estate was on its knees, major,
and suddenly the mistress of it dies and ye turn up from nowhere throwing gold
about like there's no tomorrow? Well, truly, what d'ye think they’re
saying?"
    "The wages
of sin is death?" he suggested, and felt, but did not see, the bailiff's
exasperated glare.
    Most of the
King's intelligence work was dull, painstaking, line-by-line accounting, of the
sort that only a clerk could appreciate. Requisition lists that did not add up,
quite, or added up to more than they should. Deliveries to occasional places
where deliveries should not go, or too many names on a muster roll, or the same
names in different places. Men who should not have been where they were, or who
should not have known each other, mentioned in dispatches.
    It was also
almost entirely voluntary, and that suited him well enough, for his name
would be appearing on no pay-lists. But Thomazine's porcelain was beautiful,
and fragile, and it had been worth every penny of the money he hadn’t paid for
it. As had been the bolt of gold-green silk, the colour of her eyes, that he'd
bought the same day. In Amsterdam, a year ago to the day almost. He remembered
seeing it packed in the great wooden chest - remembered the smell of the sea,
and the salt wind coming up off it, bringing with it the romance of tar and
hemp from the great ships rocking on the bosom of the North Sea. Also brought
with it the slight rotten tang of the Kalverstraat flesh-market, and he'd
laughed with the merchant about how he should get a discount for having to buy
his bride's wedding gifts downwind of the winter beast sales.
    The King did not
pay Thankful Russell's wages, in any real sense. His Majesty did, however, make
a very real and practical contribution to fostering the foolishness of one
ageing Puritan, trying to bribe his way into the heart of a pretty young girl.
Russell passed without comment in the Low Countries, just one more plain,
stern, middle-aged discontented Protestant of unremarkable habits. A fool and
his money were soon parted. He was well-known, a contemptible dupe, to be
flattered into buying unicorn's horns and silks and gold lacquer cabinets.
    Killigrew had
called him out on the cabinet, mind. It was not often that you heard that most
urbane of royal spymasters squawk in outrage – apart from anything else, Master
Killigrew’s own tastes ran more than a little to the expensive, and what he
spent on his mistresses alone would have kept Four Ashes for a twelvemonth -
but he'd looked at the bill of lading from that little gilded lacquer box and
his hand had been trembling, a little. " How much, Russell?"
    "It was
needful," Russell said coolly, which was true. It had been needful. It had
been black, and glossy, and it had had a little, beautiful, house and trees on
the doors, and a man and a woman standing on either side of it, painted in gold
with a brush that must have been finer than an eyelash.
    "Do not. Ever .
Pull a stunt like that again, sir."
    And he had been
able to say with a comfortable degree of honesty that he wouldn't. For he was
retired, he had handed in his note of resignation as an intelligencer along
with his commission. Done his duty, for the last time, and had not met a single
one amongst the men and women he had come across in his times in