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

will recognise you," he told himself, smiling wanly at his
reflection in the mirror.
    Ruffled a hand
through his hair - grown to his shoulders, now, and no longer so
indeterminately mouse as it had been when he'd worn it close-cropped, but
streaked fair and dark as a field of wheat when the wind blows through it. She
liked it so, worn long, and straight.
    He was scarred,
and worn, and weary, and his head hurt when the wind was in the north.
    All that was
true.
    But Thomazine
loved him. And further than that, he did not care. 
     
     
    2
     
    He turned his head to look at her as she
walked in under the dripping arch of leaves and everything Thomazine's mother
had been fiercely telling her about comporting herself with dignity - about
walking slowly, not loping like a dismounted cavalry trooper, she got that from
her father - about behaving with a becoming shyness and grace, on her wedding
day - she forgot most of it, in the sheer joy of seeing her own dear Russell
standing at the altar looking like himself, and not some courtly fashion-plate.
    Which she hadn't
thought he would, not really, but her fashionable sister, married these twelve
months and more, had been most insistent that he ought to at least make some
effort to look like a man of some import and not like a ragged provincial
sheep-farmer. To which Russell's uncharacteristically tart retort had been that
he was a provincial sheep-farmer, and intended to stay one since his
retirement from the Army, and that if Thomazine wanted to marry a periwigged
ninny like his future brother-in-law he might consider their engagement at an
end.
    She didn’t, and
they hadn't, and after some negotiation as to whether the modish Joyeux might
grace the countrified parish church that had been good enough for her
christening, with her shining countenance, a degree of compromise had been
reached.
    Thomazine stood
under the weeping trees, with her mother’s hand under her elbow, and felt the
chill wind lift her loose hair. Loose for the last time as a maiden, and she
was quite looking forward to not being one. Most of Russell's hair was
confined at the nape of his neck in a neat black silk ribbon bow, now that he
had seen sense and grown it long enough to tie back. It looked darker, in the
amber candlelight that lit the inside of the church on a wintry November day,
but the wisps that had worked loose to frame his dear, half-handsome face were
as bright and barley-fair as the first day she'd set eyes on him.
    This was the
crowning day of her womanhood, her bridal day. Oddly, she wasn't frightened,
not at all, not even when every eye in the church bent on her as she walked in
through the door into the mousy darkness. She heard the little catch of a
collective intake of breath. She hadn’t turned out in borrowed plumes, either.
In point of fact, both she and her mother had taken one look at the weeping
grey skies and decided that a plain, but decent, birch-green skirt and bodice
in a good warm wool were much more sensible than silks.
    No, Thomazine
wasn't afraid. He was, though, poor sweet. Even though that kind
candlelight gave his pallor a slightly healthier colour than perhaps it
merited, he was white to the lips, and although he was facing in her direction,
she had the rather unsettling impression that he was beyond seeing her, or
indeed anything at all. 
    "That
lad," her father said grimly down her ear, "that lad of yours is
about to keel over, Zee. Go and poke him, or summat." 
    And all those
well-meant instructions about dignity and deportment, all went out of her head,
and she went laughing to his side so hastily that the last candle in the aisle
guttered and went out in a wisp of acrid smoke in the draught of her passing. 
    "Thankful!"
she hissed, and he shook himself, and a little life came back into his eyes, a
very little sparkle.
    " Thomazine ?"
- wonderingly, as if he had not truly thought she'd come, the silly man.
    "You were
expecting someone else?" she said, and he