Hollie sat on the edge of the bed with a thump.
“I want a word with you - is it still Lieutenant Russell, boy, or have you lost that dignity again long since?”
Russell sighed, and fixed his eyes on some dust in a shaft of chill sunlight. “Not lieutenant. Not for this many a long year.”
It was a daft thing to have said, and he was sorry he’d put it quite like that as his old commander took a long breath and then listed every wrong thing Russell had done in ten years of service, with a few that he didn’t remember and some which he didn’t even think were physically possible. But. He had sown the wind and now he was reaping the whirlwind.
He waited till he was fairly sure Hollie wasn’t going to kill him, and then said - with, he thought, remarkable restraint - “It’s Major. Now.”
(And Hollie did yelp, at that point, and cuff Russell sharply about the ear, but he considered it to be well-deserved by then. To his deep shame, he seemed to have acquired a talent for theatrical revelation that would have shamed a Drury Lane orange-girl.) “What. The. Hell?”
“It’s Major Russell. Has been for -” he thought about it, “six years, thereabouts. I’m on Monck’s staff.”
“You infernal whited sepulchre.”
“Sr, I must protest! I -”
And Hollie gave him a cuff round the other ear, which hurt, it being the damaged side and his hearing somewhat impaired in that direction “You’re putting me on, you sneaking little skellum, you’re no more an officer than I’m a bishop! You’re nowt better than a broken-down hedge-creeper, skulking round my house making up to my wife, I ought to have you horsewhipped!”
“I have nothing but respect and affection for you, Colonel Babbitt,” he said primly, struggling upright in the bed, and then he snapped “ - but miscall me again sir and I will knock your teeth down your throat!”
“Bring it on, boy!” Hollie yelled back at him, shoving his sleeves up in a meaningful fashion, “I been kicking your backside for twenty years and I can still take you!”
Possibly it was slightly comical, for neither of them were what they once were: Hollie greying and Russell stiff, snarling and glowering at each other across a rumpled bed -
“Officer to His Majesty my left foot!”
“A senior one at that, sir, hang it all!”
“Doing what, then? - d’they give out commissions for drunkenness and theft these days?”
“Theft? Theft, sir, how dare you call me a thief? I’ve called men out for less!”
“Oh, have you, Russell, the cut of you! Derelict drunk in a ditch, you’d be dead by now if it hadn’t been for my girl’s kindness, and this is how you repay her!”
And that stopped him like a curb-bit. “A what? You call me a what?”
“Come off it, Russell,” Hollie said contemptuously. “Skulking round Essex wi’ your hair cropped like a convict and a bag o’sedition? And sixty gold guineas in your purse, and not a whole shirt to your back? What - you serve His Majesty for t’good of your health, do you? For if you look like this on a senior officer’s pay, I’d hate to see what the plain troopers look like!”
He stared at his erstwhile commander blankly. “Sixty -? What? What are you talking about?”
“Found it, did you? Just returning it to its rightful owner?”
“No,” he shook his head, “no, I had paid in advance for a month’s lodging in Maldon, at the Spotted Dog. The which you can check with the landlord, if you are so minded. I was taken ill - you know I was, I ended up here, though how - they turned me out. For fear of the contagion. Which I don’t have. I - “ he shook his head again because it made no sense, “they must have returned it to me. I’d not have known any different, they could have - well, that was honest.”
“You what? You meant to stay at the Dog for a month?”
“It has a reputation as a place of quiet,” he said.
“Aye, but you could - Russell, you couldn’t -”
“I enjoy a senior officer’s pay,” he said, and sniffed indignantly, “and I may do with it as I see fit, sir.”
“Not married, then, I see,” Hollie said dryly. “And the pamphlets my wife found in your pockets, sir? Inflammatory material, printed by a woman printer, and talking of a new Jerusalem? I know the Fifth Monarchy-men, Russell, and I had my fill of insurrection eleven years past –“
“May I not read?” he said mildly.
“Not when it’s like to end with you drawn and quartered at Tyburn, you fool!”
“Oh – that. Oh, I doubt it, Hollie. Knowing things is my work. I work for His Majesty in the business of, ah, knowing things.”
Hollie sat bolt upright with his mouth open. “You’re a spy?”
“Not in so many words. The Fifth Monarchy-men are a matter of personal interest, but no, I doubt if anyone would wink at my having such literature in my possession. I’ve had worse, in my professional capacity.” He felt a slow blush rise from the collar of his borrowed nightshirt. “Um. Have you – um – your wife did not, I hope, did she? - looked all through that, uh, packet?”
With a fierce scowl, Hollie emptied the saddlebag out onto the bed, and poked the papers gingerly. The look on his face would have been almost comical, had it not been quite so humiliating to behold. It started angry, and faded, slowly, into amusement and disbelief as his eyes flicked from one worn pamphlet to another. “Russell,“ he said faintly. “Good God, Hapless, what – ‘A Lover's Joy Compleat’ ?– Russell, you whelp, this stuff is scandalous!”
“And illustrated,” he said wretchedly, before Hollie did.
“What the - ? “The School of Venus”? What the – Russell, what is the matter with you? Wandering the countryside with a saddlebag full of dirty books and sedition – and what’s going on with the hair, in all charity? Did you do it for a bet, or summat?”
“It –“ He did not like to look in a mirror, still. Did he still have to say that aloud to Hollie Babbitt, who had known him when the rags of his cheek were still as pink and twisted as grave-worms? “Expedient,” he finished, and looked away quickly.
“And that scruffy horrible suit, I presume, is the better to avoid comment, despite being two yards high and conspicuously fair-haired – what hair you’ve left yourself? Russell! Henrietta’s had you marked down as some kind of itinerant insurrectionist, you silly lad!”
“She did what?” Russell said blankly.
“My wife had her suspicions of you, you whelp. She reckoned your hands were too clean to be as down on your luck as you seemed –“
“I never meant to seem anything! I – in all charity, Hollie, how would you like to be marked by every eye so soon as you set foot out of the house? I wished to pass for ordinary, so much as I might, and to be left in peace for a time – no more than that!”
Hollie was looking at him as if he’d started speaking in tongues. “So let me get this straight. You cut your hair like a convict, you’re wearing a suit wi’ bloodstains all down the breast –“
“Nosebleed,” he admitted. “When I was first sick. I fainted in the inn, smacked my head on the bedpost, and bled all down my coat. I imagine the handkerchief is worse, if you care to look at it –“
“I don’t,” Hollie said, wrinkling his nose. “I reckon even salt water won’t get the stains out o’ that, after a fortnight. Roaming the county off your head wi’ fever, frightening the maidservants into fits, with your saddlebags rammed full wi’ dirty books – and you reckon that’s inconspicuous? What d’you do if you want to make a grand entrance, lad?”
“I spend my days in a professional capacity reading other men’s lives,” he snapped, not smiling. “Might I not have some of my own?”
“Russell.” Hollie closed one eye, and suddenly Russell was twenty again, and caught out in some petty humiliating misdemeanour. Especially when Hollie was evidently trying not to laugh, and doing that awful, well-remembered thing where he was covering up the trying not to laugh with scratching the back of his neck under his ponytail.
“Russell, you had sixty guineas in that purse, and what you had in your pockets. Um, the missis didn’t go through your breeches. If you’ve got worse in them pockets, now’s the time to own up to it. Sixty guineas is a, a, how do I put this? You could probably make the acquaintance of a number of cleanly ladies of negotiable virtue with sixty guineas, instead o’ spending a month reading about it in the garrets of the Spotted Dog?”
“I did not care to,” he said through gritted teeth, and suddenly understanding, and sympathy, dawned on his old commander’s face, and Hollie put his fingers to his own cheek and raised his eyebrows in question.
And Russell – stiff and boiling with mortification – nodded, shortly, just the once.
And Hollie understood. And it was shameful, but it wasn’t going to kill him, and Hollie wasn’t laughing. “Aye,” the big redhead said, with an unaccustomed gentleness. “I can see how that might be. And the rest of it?”
“I imagine I know more about the Fifth Monarchy-men than you do, Hollie. I am not one of them. And nor, indeed, will they be by the end of the year, I suspect.” He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly very limp indeed, for all this unexpected emotion. “I could not bear it all again, you know. I am too old for any more – insurrection. I should rather have order again, such as it is.”
“And so you are an intelligencer?”
“And so I am an intelligencer. Which is a – well, since I am my own man, the shame or otherwise of being a King’s man and a spy is none but my own to bear.”
There was a long silence. He rather thought it was raining again, and his throat was tickling horribly, and it didn’t seem right to cough, somehow. They were talking of serious, weighty things, it seemed wrong for Russell to be hacking his lungs up into a square of stiff and bloodstained linen. He choked it back for as long as he could, but once he started he could not stop, and he coughed till black spots danced in the corners of his sight and his ribs hurt. And Hollie was unexpectedly gentle again – when had he grown gentle? Ten years ago he’d have been likely to cuff Russell about the back of the head and tell him to stop malingering and get back to his duties, and now he was settling pillows at Russell’s back as if he were quite accustomed to such work.
But Hollie had daughters, though, did he not? He had children, who would have suffered childish ills when they were young, and would have been comforted by the loving touch of a father’s hand. And Russell, who had never been expected to comfort any child living save for this man’s daughters, wanted to weep.
He was lying with his eyes closed, and the room settled to stillness again, and he just wanted Hollie to leave him in peace with his shame and his misery, and –
“Pay well, does it?” Hollie said curiously, and it made his mouth twitch suddenly in spite of himself, for the idea of the conspicuously outspoken and cinnamon-haired Hollie Babbitt as an intelligencer made him giggle, in his head.
“Sufficient for my needs.”
“Aye. Well. Tha doesn’t take much feeding, I see?”
He had not the energy to laugh, and so he did not, but only breathed out a little huff of amusement. “You haven’t eaten at Court, then, I take it.”
“Neither have you, by the look of you, Hapless!”
“Can’t say’s I fancy it, much. I don’t care for the food, there.”
“Ah? Why, what’d they give you?”
“God alone knows. Too rich for my tastes, though – French messes, and cream, and none of it fresh, in the City. Prefer plain cooking –“
“I’m wearing you out, aren’t I?” Hollie said briskly. “Get your head down for a bit, Hapless. I’ll send one of the girls by later, with a bite of breakfast.”
He wanted to say that he’d had his breakfast, and that what he had had would suffice, and that he would not put the girls to trouble. Instead his belly made a horrible enthusiastic growling noise at the prospect of sensible food, and his heart gave a little shy skip at the thought of company.
His eyes wouldn’t open again, though, and he heard Hollie laugh. “Oh, bless you, Russell. You have not changed a bit. I reckon me and Het were both right.”
Which made no sense at all. But it didn’t matter, and most things didn’t matter, now, because he was –
Asleep, again.