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

buried.
    Thomazine
stirred, and pushed her knee against his, and her hand tightened on his
backside in a proprietorial fashion, which was startling, but nice.
    He wanted to
take her home as soon as may be. Their home. He closed his eyes, and
snuffed the clean scent of her hair, and thought of Four Ashes. Not as it had
been, a stark ruin black against a scarlet dawn, with burned rafters sticking
up into the sky and a thin grey rain falling. Even almost six months after the
fire, when he had first seen it: the house black and ashen, yet with the first
pale shoots of new grass starting to poke through the fallen wreckage of the
western side of the house. Still smelling like the ruins of a city under siege,
which had made him gag, imagining the greasy taste of burned meat at the back
of his throat.
    The whole west
wing had gone down, and he had stood knee-deep in charred timbers and shattered
stone, the dawn gleaming wet and red on shards of broken glass where the
windows had burst through in the blaze. It was not a thing he could help: he'd
been a supply officer, and a good one. He was trained to assess what needed to
be done, and how to do it as efficiently as possible. He’d looked at it,
thinking of the bright girl he'd left half-promised behind him, and for
possibly the first time in his life his head had counted the cost of making
Four Ashes right, but his heart had accounted how he might make it good :
more than a shelter, a home.
    It had been an
odd thing, to even dare to dream of the future. At first he had considered good
plain furnishings for a house that didn’t yet exist, fitting for a middle-aged
retired soldier of quiet tastes. And then, given free rein, he had discovered
rapidly that his tastes in furnishings were neither subdued nor quiet, but
inclined somewhat shockingly towards the magpie. Standing in warehouses in
Wapping, up and down the stinking river docks, stroking silks and holding
trinkets up to the light, talking of his impending marriage casually. Of a
young bride who might care for fashionable blue and white china from the Low
Countries, or who might prefer porcelain of China, and so, unable to decide, he
thought she might like a little of both. A Turkey carpet. A bolt of green-gold
silk, the colour of her eyes. Pearls. (She had liked the pearls. She'd
pretended not to - she'd called him fond and foolish and said he'd spent far
too much money on her - but she had liked them. He would have covered her bed
with pearls and precious rubies, if she'd asked it of him.)
    No, he wanted
her to see Four Ashes, and she would, and they would be happy. And Fly-Fornication's
joyless spirit would turn in its grave, and there was a little of malice in it
too, that his sister would have gibbered in godly fury at his vanity and
vainglory.
    Roses, he
thought drowsily. He would fill their garden with roses, with the most fragrant
roses his pocket might command, that Thomazine might always have rose petals
beneath her feet. Well, might fill one of those rather nice Chinese porcelain
jars with them, to scent the air with summer all the year round, because lovely
though they were he could see damn-all use to the things else. They had been
too pretty to leave in a warehouse on the rancid Thames, though it had cost him
most of an afternoon drinking very nasty coloured water that claimed to be
China tea with the merchant, being flattered into parting with a scandalous sum
of money. Wondered what Thomazine would make of tea. He thought it was
horrible, actually, no matter what the great and the good might think, and it
deserved to be kept in its elaborate gilt cabinet with the locked doors. Nobody
in their right minds would want to drink the damnable stuff, and he had
promptly slipped off back to his shabby lodgings in Aldgate for a mutton pie
and a sensible mug of ale that tasted of something. And had not been asked back
into polite society twice, which had not troubled him.
    A future filled
with warmth, and joy, and