We’re about 100k words into Of Faith & Flame, or, as you might say, Russells 0.5.
I must admit, having finished writing Entertaining Angels (in which nothing, and everything, happens) I originally thought that was it, that was them nicely tied up as an item. Which, of course, it was. It’s just that pesky history keeps getting in their way. (This time? The collapse of the Swedish Banco, the Anglo-Dutch Wars, and the expansion of the East India Company. Well, you wouldn’t want him to start married life with anything less than style, would you?)
February 1661
It had rained all night, and the dappled grey sky was reflected in the silver puddles between the ruts of mud in Seething Lane, and the world that had been full of colour a month ago was slowly fading back to dusk.
A month was not so very long to wait for a private letter. You had to remember that – when the roads were so bad as they were, and the weather so inclement. He had waited longer for official correspondence, from a government courier on a good horse, sent with all dispatch. You could not expect a love-letter to find its recipient with such urgency.
But even London managed to smell like the promise of spring, in between the sea-coal and the shit, and Thankful For His Deliverance Russell forgot that he was in a public place and put his head up and snuffed like a quartering hound. Woodsmoke, a little, and sea-coal, a little, and rain, a lot. Horses. Salt, from the river, and someone frying bacon in one of the alleys near at hand – elderly bacon, or he missed his mark altogether, and more than somewhat past its prime. Something that had been dead for long enough to almost not smell, but not quite. That was the City for you – unlike Aldgate, where he lodged, they moved the dead things on with alacrity here, lest the great and the good be reminded of their own mortality.
Then it started to rain again, that cold thin wetting rain that soaked through even the thickest of cloaks, and he tucked his scarf up against the chill. An ageing gallant in a cloak like a horse-blanket scuttled past from the Palace at White-Hall and looked at the scarf sidelong, and Russell turned his head slowly and gave the fopling a hard stare over the top of the thing; for – yes, it was long enough that it would have reached as a carpet from the Cockpit Gate to St James’s Park, and yes, it was a particularly stunning shade of red, but it had been knitted with affection. And, he suspected, a degree of merriment – that, or the lady in question imagined that there were no such things as bed-covers in Aldgate – but it might have looked like a dish-clout for all he cared of it. He would have worn it with the same pride had it been the most threadbare rag in Christendom, for it was an outward seeming of her loving. And elderly popinjays did not need to know that.
A Sweet Disorder 