“New England? New England?”
Elizabeth Pepys’s round face flushed pink with outrage. Her ringlets jerked and bounced in rhythm with her outbursts. During scenes like this—not uncommon in the Pepys ménage—her French blood dominated the English. “But Baltee cannot support ’imself in old England. No. Non. It is completement absurde. I forbid!”
She’d been going on now for hours.
“Nonsense,” Pepys said. “It’ll be good for him. Don’t you want him to make something of himself? Other than a beggar?”
“You are a ’orrible person, Samuel Pepys.”
“Well, there’s gratitude, I must say. Have I not been the sole support of your brother all these years? To say nothing of other members of your helpless family? And for this Christian charity I am called ’orrible. I ought to box your ears.”
Elizabeth had seized one of his lutes, a particular favorite for which he paid the sum of ten pounds. She held it by the neck, brandishing it as if it were a club.
“Woman,” Pepys commanded, “put that down. This instant. Or you’ll be hearing church bells for a week!”
She collapsed onto a chair, sobbing. Pepys went to his wife, knelt, and held her and kissed her hand. “My love. What a silly girl you are.”
“ ’E will never return,” she whimpered.
Pepys averted his face so she would not see what unalloyed joy this prospect brought him.
“Tush. Really, what a to-do my sweet darling makes. Why, you make it sound as though he’s going off to war.” Pepys thought, Hm. “There’s talk of war with Holland, you know. If you would really prefer, I could get him a billet tomorrow on one of our warships. Perhaps that would be best. Nothing turns a boy into a man like a good, raging sea battle. Cannonballs smashing through the hull, rigging crashing down on the deck, bits of wood and iron flying through the air like knives. Smoke everywhere. Fires raging. Grappling hooks, the cries of the dying . . .”
Pepys seized a poker from the fireplace and began slashing at imagined boarders. “The cut and thrust with cutlass and pistol and axe.” Pepys paused in his bellicose miming and said pensively, “Perhaps in the end that would be better for Balty. To be blooded in battle, rather than tromping about forests, marking trees to cut down.”
“No!” Elizabeth said, weeping anew.
“All right. If you say. You might be a bit happy for him. It’s a job, darling. How long has it been since your brother had one? The reign of Charlemagne?”
“Esther is not ’appy about this.”
“Perhaps. But neither, as it happens,” Pepys said with a trace of acerbity, “is she pregnant. She bloody well ought to be thankful.”
Elizabeth wiped her tears with her sleeve.
“Where is New England?”
“Oh, not far. Just, you know, other side of the water.”
“Baltee ’ates boats. Always he is vomiting.”
“Darling, in the Navy, we call them ships. And my job is to help the Navy build them. Which is how I rose to be Clerk of the Acts. Which is how we can afford such a fine home, and servants, and your petticoats, and your baubles and all the rest. As for Baltee’s mal de mer, until I assume the powers of Neptune and am able to calm the waters with a wave of my triton, there’s not bloody well much I can do about that. Maybe a sea voyage will cure him of seasickness. And of his other chronic affliction.”
“What affliction?”
“Poverty.”
Before she could remonstrate, Pepys leaned forward over her lap and kissed her between her breasts, inhaling sweet perfume. “Now, come, my strumpet. Put on that lovely pearl necklace I bought you and see how it hangs on this delectable neck. It was very expensive, you know. What an extravagant husband you have!”