A Catch of Consequence Read online

  So he was enemy. Customs, excise, taxman, Tory, British-boot-licker: whatever he was she’d rescued him. ‘Should’ve let you drown,’ she grumbled at him, knowing she could not.

  What to do? If she handed him over to the authorities right now he could identify his attackers—and say what you like about Mouse Mackintosh and Sugar Bart, they were at least patriots and she’d be damned if she helped some Tory taxman get ’em hanged. ‘Ought to throw you back by rights.’

  Well, staying here would surely solve the problem because, from the look of the drownder, he was on his last gasp. And that, thought Makepeace Burke, was pure foolishness—a waste of the trouble she’d taken in the first place.

  She looked up at the quay and jerked her head at Tantaquidgeon to get into the boat. ‘The Meg. You row.’

  She covered the body at her feet with the tarpaulin to keep it warm. There was still nobody about. What had been an event of hours for her had been minutes of everybody else’s time. Boston kept the sleep of the hungover. Tantaquidgeon’s white eagle feather bobbed hypnotically back and forth as he rowed past the slipways on which stood anchors as big as whale-flukes, past the rope-walks, the cranes, the ships’ chandlers, the warehouses and boatyards, all parts of the machine that on normal days serviced the busiest port in America.

  Behind him, appearing to stand on an island, though actually on a promontory, was their destination, the Roaring Meg, two storeys of weatherbeaten boarding. Ramshackle maybe, like the rest of the waterfront, but an integral piece of the great ribbon of function which faced the Atlantic and provided incoming ships with their first view of the town. Here was Boston proper, not in its generous parks nor its wide, tree-lined streets and white-spired churches, not in its market places, bourses and pillared houses, but in an untidy, salt-stained, invigorating seaboard generating the wealth that sustained all the rest.

  Makepeace was proud that her tavern was part of it. But it was a matter of shame to her, as it was to all right-thinking citizens, that there was yet another Boston. In the maze of lanes behind the waterfront, out of sight like a segment of rot in an otherwise healthy-looking apple, lay gin houses and whoreshops providing different services, where the crab-like click of dice and a tideline of painted women waited for sinners in darkness of soul.

  The city fathers attempted to cleanse the area from time to time, but prevent it washing back they could not, nor did they entirely wish to; they were not only the town’s moral guardians but entrepreneurs in a port dependent on trade—and sailors from visiting merchant ships didn’t necessarily seek after righteousness.

  A voyager disembarking at Boston’s North End had a choice. If he were heedless of his purse, his health and his hope of salvation, he would disappear into those sinning, acrid alleys. If he were wise, he would make for the coastal beacon that was the Roaring Meg, with its smell of good cooking and hum of decent conversation.

  In winter, when light from whale-oil lamps shone through its bottle-bottomed windows to be diffused in snow, the Roaring Meg resembled a Renaissance nativity scene, a sacred stable. Named after the noisy stream that ran alongside it before entering the sea, the tavern deserved its halo. Makepeace kept it free of the Devil’s flotsam by perpetual moral sweeping, brushing harlots and their touts from her doorstep, plumping up idlers like pillows, ejecting bullies, vomiters, debtors and those who took the Lord’s name in vain.

  A little stone bridge led over the stream to its street door above which was displayed the information that John L. Burke was licensed to dispense ales and spirituous liquors. John L. Burke was in the grave these three years, having energetically drunk himself into it, but a man’s name above the door inspired more confidence in strangers than would a woman’s, so Makepeace kept it there.

  North End magistrates conspired in the fiction and, if asked, would say that the licensee was actually Makepeace’s young brother Aaron, but they knew, as did everybody else, who was the Roaring Meg’s true landlord and privately acknowledged the fact. ‘Makepeace Burke,’ one justice had been heard to say, ‘is a crisp woman.’

  An accolade, ‘crisp’: American recognition of efficiency and good Puritan hard-headedness. Makepeace took pride in it but knew how hard it had been to win and how easily it could be taken away. One word of scandal or complaint to the magistrates, one impatient creditor, one more storm to hole the Meg’s creaking roof—there was no money with which to replace it—and she would lose her vaunted crispness and her tavern.

  And now that she had a calm moment in which to consider the consequences of what she was doing—in Puritan society wise women always considered consequences—suspicion grew that she might be jeopardizing both merely by harbouring the drownder under her roof.

  The Cut, the lane at the sea end of which the Meg stood, was as respectable as the tavern itself, a narrow row of houses that passed through the surrounding wickedness like a file of soldiers in hostile Indian forest. Eyes at its windows watched for any falter in its rigid morality and one pair in particular was trained on herself.

  ‘Makepeace Burke’s picked up a man.’ She could hear the voices now. And, because the Cut was as patriotic as it was respectable, she could also hear the addendum: ‘A Tory man.’

  It hadn’t been easy, a woman running a tavern. One of the proudest moments of her life—and the most profitable—had been when, with the imposition of the Stamp Tax, the local lodge of the Sons of Liberty had chosen the Roaring Meg for their secret meetings. Good men most of ’em, like nearly all her customers, but, again like her other regulars, driven to desperation by an unemployment that was the direct result of British government policy.

  And among those very Sons was at least one of the group that had thrown the drownder into the harbour. Mighty pleased they’d be to find Makepeace Burke succouring the enemy. An enemy, what’s more, who’d report them to the magistrates quicker’n ninepence.

  ‘Who done it on us?’ Sugar Bart would ask, as he climbed the gallows’ steps.

  ‘Makepeace Burke,’ the Watch would reply.

  After that, no decent patriot—and all her clientele were patriots—would set foot in the Roaring Meg again.

  Oh no, she couldn’t trust the Watch not to give her away; apart from being as big a collection of incompetents as ever let a rogue slip through its fingers, it was hand in glove with the Sons of Liberty. Last night, when Governor Bernard had called on the Watch to drum the alarm, he’d discovered that its men had joined the mob and were happily destroying property with the rest.

  The nearer she got to her tavern, the more perturbed Makepeace became. ‘Lord, Lord,’ she prayed out loud, ‘I did my Christian duty and saved this soul; ain’t there to be no reward?’

  Like most Boston Puritans, Makepeace had a pragmatic relationship with the Lord, regarding Him as a celestial managing director and herself as a valued worker in His company. Until now she’d found no conflict between Christianity and good business. She obeyed the Commandments, most of ’em, and expected benefits and an eternal pension in return.

  And the Lord answered her plea this bright and hot August morning by skimming the last word of it across the surface of His waters until it hit a wharf wall and bounced it back at her in an echo: Reward, reward.

  Receiving it, Makepeace became momentarily beautiful because she smiled, a rare thing with her, showing exquisitely white teeth with one crooked canine that emphasized the perfection of the others.

  ‘You surely can hand it to the Lord,’ she told Tantaquidgeon. ‘He got brains.’

  The drownder was in her debt. There was no greater gift than that of life—and she’d just given his back to him. In return, he could reward her with a promise of silence. Least he could do.

  She looked down fondly at the richly clad bundle by her feet. ‘And maybe some cash with it,’ she said.

  Having settled on a conclusion she’d actually reached at the moment the drownder opened his eyes, she felt better; she was a woman who liked a business motive.

  Also
she was intrigued—more than that, involved—by the man.

  As someone who’d fought for survival all her life, Makepeace was affronted by apathy. Never having accepted defeat herself, this drownder’s ‘Does it matter?’ had excited her contempt but also her curiosity and pity. Look at him: fine boots—well, he’d lost one but the other was excellent leather; gold lacing on his cuffs. A man possessed of money and, therefore, every happiness. So why was he uncaring about his fate?

  The boat bumped gently against the Meg’s tottering jetty. Makepeace looked around with a surreptitiousness that would have attracted attention had there been onlookers to see it.

  Bending low, she climbed the steps and looked into the taproom. Nobody there. She went through and opened the front door to peer into the Cut for signs of activity. Nothing again.

  She returned to the boat and told Tantaquidgeon all was clear. She threaded her lobster-pots together and dragged them up and through the sea entrance to her tavern with Tantaquidgeon behind her, the tarpaulined Englishman draped over his forearms like laundry.

  Chapter Two

  THE Roaring Meg’s kitchen doubled as its surgery, and the cook as its doctor, both skills acquired in the house of a Virginian tobacco planter who, when Betty escaped from it, had posted such a reward for her capture that it was met only by her determination not to be caught.

  She might have been—most runaway slaves were—if she hadn’t encountered John L. Burke leaving Virginia with wife, children, Indian and wagon for the north after another of his unsuccessful attempts at farming. John and Temperance Burke had little in common but neither, particularly Temperance, approved of slavery, and they weren’t prepared to hand Betty back to her owner, however big the reward. She’d stayed with the family ever after, even during her late, brief marriage, despite the fact that John Burke’s failures at various enterprises often necessitated her working harder than she would have done in the plantation house.

  She examined the body on the kitchen table, deftly turning and prodding. ‘Collarbone broke.’ She enclosed the head in her large, pink-palmed hands, eyes abstracted, her fingers testing it like melon. ‘That Mouse Mackintosh,’ she said, ‘he sure whopped this fella. Lump here big as a love-apple.’

  ‘I thought maybe we could redd him up a piece, then Tantaquidgeon row him to Castle William after dark,’ Makepeace said, hopefully, ‘Dump him outside, like.’

  Betty pointed to a meat cleaver hanging on the wall. ‘You’ve a mind to kill him, use that,’ she said. ‘Quicker.’

  ‘Oh . . . oh piss.’ Makepeace ran her hand round her neck to wipe it and discovered for the first time that her cap was hanging from its strap and her hair was loose. Hastily, she bundled both into place. Respectable women kept their hair hidden—especially when it was a non-Puritan red.

  Although the kitchen’s high windows faced north, the sun was infiltrating their panes. Steam came from the lobster boilers on a fire that burned permanently in the grate of the kitchen’s brick range, and the back door had to be shut not just, as today, to prevent intruders but to keep out the flies from the privy which, with the hen-house, occupied the sand-salted strip of land that was the Meg’s back yard.

  Makepeace went to the door. Young Josh had been posted as lookout. ‘Anybody comes, we’re closed. Hear me?’

  ‘Yes ’m, Miss ’Peace.’

  She bolted the door, as she had bolted the tavern’s other two. Tantaquidgeon was keeping vigil at the front. ‘Git to it, then,’ she said.

  They were reluctant to cut away the patient’s coat in order to set his collarbone—it had to be his best; nobody could afford two of that quality—so they stripped him of it, and his shirt, causing him to groan.

  ‘Lucky he keep faintin’,’ Betty said. She squeezed her eyes shut and ran her fingers along the patient’s shoulder: ‘Ready?’

  Makepeace put a rolled cloth between his teeth and then bore down on his arms. Her back ached. ‘Ready.’

  There was a jerk and a muffled ‘Aaagh’.

  ‘Oh, hush up,’ Makepeace told him.

  Betty felt the joint. ‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘I’m one sweet sawbones.’

  ‘Will he do?’

  ‘Runnin’ a fever. Them Sons give him a mighty larrupin’. Keep findin’ new bruises and we ain’t got his britches off yet.’

  ‘You can do that upstairs. He’s got to stay, I guess.’

  ‘Don’t look to me like he’s ready to run off.’

  Makepeace sighed. It had been inevitable. ‘Which room?’

  Betty grinned. The Meg was a tavern, not an inn, and took no overnight guests. The bedroom she shared with her son was directly across the lane from the window of the house opposite. Aaron’s, too, faced the Cut. The only one overlooking the sea and therefore impregnable to spying eyes was Makepeace’s.

  ‘Damnation.’ The problem wasn’t just the loss of her room but the fact that its door was directly across the corridor from the one serving the meeting-room used by the Sons of Liberty.

  Oh well, as her Irish father used to say: ‘Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it.’

  They put the bad arm in a sling of cheese-cloth and Tantaquidgeon lifted the semi-naked body and carried it up the tiny, winding back stairs, followed by Betty with a basket of salves. ‘And take his boot off afore it dirties my coverlet,’ Makepeace hissed after them.

  Left alone, she looked round the kitchen for tell-tale signs of the catch’s presence in it. Nothing, apart from a bloodstain on the table that had seeped from a wound on his head. Jehosophat, they’d cudgelled him hard.

  She was still scrubbing when Aaron came in, having rowed back from Cambridge after a night out with friends. ‘All hail, weird sister, I expect my breakfast, the Thaneship of Cawdor and a scolding. Why all the smoke in town, by the way? Did Boston catch fire?’

  ‘It surely did.’ He looked dark-eyed with what she suspected was a night of dissipation but she was so relieved he’d missed the rioting that he got an explanation, a heavy breakfast and a light scolding.

  He was horrified. ‘Good God,’ he said.

  ‘Aaron!’

  ‘Well . . . the idiots, the weak-brained, scabby, disloyal, bloody—’

  ‘Aaron!’

  ‘—imbeciles. I blame Sam Adams. What’s he thinking of to let scum like that loose on respectable people?’

  ‘You stop your cussing,’ she said. ‘They ain’t scum. And Sam’s a good man. Respectable people? Respectable lick-spittles, respectable yes-King-Georgers, no-King-Georgers, let me wipe your boots with my necktie, your majesty. I wished I’d been with ’em.’

  ‘It’s a reasonable tax, ’Peace.’

  ‘You don’t pay it.’ Immediately, she was sorry. She didn’t want him indebted; she’d gone without shoes and, sometimes, food to raise and educate him and done it gladly. What she hadn’t reckoned on was that he’d become an English-loving Tory.

  She broke the silence. ‘Aaron, there’s a man up in my room—’

  He grinned. ‘About time.’

  ‘You wash your mouth out.’ She told him the story of her dawn catch. He thought it amusing and went upstairs to see for himself.

  Makepeace turned her attention to the lobsters which, neglected, had begun to tear each other’s claws off.

  ‘Reckon he’s English,’ was Aaron’s verdict on his return. ‘A lord to judge from his coat. Did you see how they cut the cuffs now? When he marries you out of gratitude, remember your little brother.’

  ‘Sooner marry the Pope,’ Makepeace said. Aaron could be trusted on fashion; he made a study of it. An Englishman, by Hokey, worse and worse. ‘That important, somebody’ll be missing him, so keep your ears open today and maybe we’ll find out who he is. But don’t ask questions, it’d seem suspicious. And, Aaron . . .’

  ‘Yes, sister?’

  ‘I want you home tonight. But, Aaron . . .’

  ‘Yes, sister?’

  ‘No argifying and no politics. The Sons is getting serious.’

 
‘Ain’t they, though?’ He kissed her goodbye. ‘Just wait ’til I tell ’em you’re marrying the Pope.’

  She waved him off at the door.

  The Cut was awake now, shutters opening, bedclothes over windowsills to be fumigated by the sun, brushes busy on doorsteps, its men coming up it towards the waterfront—even those without jobs spent the day on the docks hoping, like rejected lovers, that they would be taken on again. Only Aaron went against the flow, heading towards the business quarter with an easy swagger.

  Few wished him good morning and she suspected he didn’t notice those who did. Already he’d be lost in the role of Romeo or Henry V or whatever hero he’d chosen for himself today; he was mad for Shakespeare. The Cut, however, didn’t see youthful play-acting, it saw arrogance.

  From a doorway further down came a sniff. ‘You want to tell that brother of yours to walk more seemly.’ Goody Busgutt was watching her watch Aaron.

  ‘Morning, Mistress Busgutt. And why would I do that?’

  ‘Morning, Makepeace. For his own good. He may think he’s Duke Muck-a-muck but the Lord don’t ’steem him any higher’n the rest of us mortals. A sight lower than many.’

  Makepeace returned to her empty kitchen. ‘I’ll ’steem you, you bald-headed, bearded, poison-peddling, pious . . .’ In place of Mistress Busgutt, two lobsters died in the boiler, screaming. ‘ . . . you shite-mongering, vicious old hell-hag.’

  Cursing was Makepeace’s vice, virtually her only one. John L. Burke, master of profanity, lived again in the Irish accent she unconsciously adopted when she indulged it. She allowed no swearing in others but, as with the best sins, committed it secretly to relieve herself of tension, with an invective learned at her father’s knee. Today, she reckoned, having sent her both a dangerous, unwanted guest and Goody Busgutt all in one morning, the Lord would forgive her.