A Catch of Consequence Read online

  Gritting his teeth against pain actual and mental, Dapifer concentrated. What had he done before venturing along the waterfront? That’s right, that’s right, he’d been saying goodbye to Ffoulkes. Dear, good Ffoulkes. They’d gone aboard the Aurora as she readied herself to sail and Ffoulkes had tried to persuade him to make the voyage as well.

  ‘For God’s sake, Pip, come back home with me. Don’t let her infect all England for you, old fellow. Nor him; they’re neither of them worth it.’

  Looking back on it now, Dapifer saw the restraint their upbringing—where insouciance was the order of the day—imposed on them. In all the weeks the two of them had spent in Massachusetts, that had been the first time either had broached with emotion the matter that had brought them there. Even then, Dapifer remembered, it had been difficult for him to respond to overt concern. He’d said lightly: ‘Odd, isn’t it? One almost regrets his defection above hers, friends being more difficult to acquire than wives.’

  The safety lantern had swung in its cradle, not from the movement of the sea, which was pressed flat by the heat, but from preparations on deck for embarkation. Bare feet had pattered overhead like heavy raindrops; there were commands to the rowers of the sweeps that would pull Aurora out of the quays to the open sea. They could hear the bosun rousting out the crew’s women from their rats’ nests below. ‘All ashore as is going ashore.’

  But in Ffoulkes’s cabin a silence had been enjoined by the ghost of Sidney Conyers demanding recognition of a past that went back to schooldays and the age of eight, which was when they’d acquired him or, more truly, he had acquired them. Not quite of their birth nor wealth but qualifying as a friend by his eagerness to be one and by the orphaned state they all shared, he’d joined them like a frisking, abandoned puppy until, puppylike, his escapades got them into trouble and they found themselves to be a trio in the eyes of their fellow Etonians.

  Debetur fundo reverentia: Conyers had adapted the Juvenal quotation for them, translating it into a battle-cry against such schoolmasters and older boys who wanted to beat or bugger their poor little backsides. ‘Respect is owed to our arses’.

  At university they’d drunk, gambled and whored together as befitted young gentlemen, gone on the Grand Tour together—on Ffoulkes and Dapifer money—cementing a friendship that had survived Conyers’s entry into the army.

  It was a ghost, a past, due some sort of salute and Dapifer had found himself honouring it. ‘Despite it all, you know, I believe he loved us.’

  ‘He loved what we were,’ Ffoulkes had said, less forgiving. ‘He always wanted what we had—and you were the first to marry.’

  ‘Well, he had her. On my own bloody carpet.’

  Ffoulkes hadn’t smiled. ‘Come back with me, Pip.’

  ‘Shall, old fellow,’ he’d said. ‘Intend to. Back in a year or less. But if you’d be good enough to lodge the papers or whatever it is you have to do and see she’s out of the place by the time I return. Embrace that boy of yours for me.’

  ‘He’s the only reason I’m leaving you now.’

  ‘Of course he is, you’ve got to go.’ His own marriage, thank God, had been childless. ‘Just thought, now I’m here, might as well squint at what lies beyond the Alleghenies.’

  ‘Scalping knives probably.’

  ‘More likely to be scalped in Boston. When they hear my accent nearly every Puritan looks at me as if I’d raped his mother.’

  ‘Exactly. A sullen and uncouth continent. And God knows it’s cost enough, why it should balk at a not unreasonable tax . . . Listen to it.’

  What had begun as confused and discordant noise in the centre of town, whistles, horns, war-whoops, was now rising into an orchestration of pandemonium with a relentless, underlying beat.

  ‘Will you be safe on the streets?’

  ‘Hutchinson’s sent an escort.’

  The Aurora’s captain had appeared in the doorway. ‘Sir Philip, I don’t wish to hurry you but we mustn’t miss the tide.’

  They’d said goodbye at the taffrail. He’d tried to thank this best of friends. ‘All you’ve done, Ffoulkes . . . over and above the call of.’

  They embraced stiffly, like true Englishmen, patting each other on the back.

  He’d stood on the quay, watching water widen between them, watched as the ship had suddenly flared out all sail to catch what breeze there was, kept on watching her until, in the distance, she resembled a cluster of shells. A slightest lightening of the sky beyond her had suggested the beginning of dawn.

  By that time the town had developed a patchy flush as if it had become feverish, which it had. A copse of white church spires, usually just silvered by the moon, were orange in the reflected glow of flames from the streets below them. Beacon Hill twinkled with a necklace of torches. Boston was burning to the beat of drums.

  And yet, knowing the danger, he’d dismissed the Lieutenant-Governor’s escort, told him he’d walk back alone and, against his advice, turned along the quays, meandering away from the bonfires along a waterfront that grew meaner and quieter as he passed empty warehouses, their open interiors smelling of guano and urine. The depression at this end of the harbour equalled his own.

  Good God, he thought now, it was suicide. He’d been gambling, casting his life over those dirty stones like dice, baring his neck to a cut-purse’s knife as surely as to an executioner’s axe.

  The thought shocked him. Had she brought him to this? That he wanted to die? How hideously gothick, how very Castle of Otranto—not that he’d read the damn book—how . . . commonplace.

  Bloody nearly succeeded, too.

  Yet he remembered fighting the bastards who’d set on him. Illogical, that. Fought like a madman. Wounded a couple at least. After that . . . nothing.

  Yes, yes, remembered clinging to the wreckage in the water and wondering if survival was worth it and deciding it wasn’t.

  And then the God he didn’t believe in had sent a boat and a red-haired, interfering tavern harpy to whom, it seemed, his life had mattered.

  Couldn’t argue with God . . . Christ, his damn head hurt . . . couldn’t argue with harpies . . .

  Sir Philip Dapifer fell asleep.

  Downstairs, Makepeace lay down on one of the taproom settles, closed her eyes, opened them, got up, went to the jetty door, flung it wide and went out, breathing like a creature deprived of air.

  The tide was on its way in, creeping up the little beach of silt that had formed under and around the jetty piers. She climbed down the steps until it reached her bare feet and let it cool them while she looked out to sea.

  She was not a fanciful woman. Her father had provided enough fancy to stuff a crocodile: some of it had rubbed off on Aaron, none on her. ‘D’ye not hear the mermaids singing, daughter?’ Standing on this very jetty, staring out at the islands. ‘Like the sirens of Odysseus. I hear them, I hear them.’

  In the bad times he’d also seen pink spiders coming for him through the walls.

  But tonight, on such a night, his daughter too was hearing a siren voice and it wasn’t included in the noise of the town and it didn’t come from the sea and it disturbed her. ‘Stop it, Lord,’ she begged. ‘Stop this.’

  When she finally fell asleep on the settle, she dreamed that a creature with spider legs was clawing its way into Aaron’s room. She heard a thump and sat up, rigid, looking at the ceiling. Movement again; her room, not Aaron’s. She snatched up the rushlight and raced upstairs.

  The Englishman was on the floor, trying to get up. ‘Shaky on the pins,’ he said. ‘Where’s the bloody receptacle?’

  She got the chamber pot from under the bed and steadied him while he pissed into it; she’d done the same for her father at the last.

  He clambered back, querulously. ‘Who constructed this bed, Procrustes? And where are my damn clothes?’

  She fetched his clothes, dry now but wrinkled, and his one surviving boot. He fumbled through the coat, grumbling. ‘Good boots, those; purse gone, of course; where’s the
time-piece, wedding present so they can have that—oh, they’ve got it, how charming. Didn’t save my sword, I suppose?’

  She recognized this stage: irritability, full realization, frightened by their weakness. She said, consolingly: ‘Them imaginary men. You pinked one of ’em.’

  He seemed gratified, as far as his moroseness could show gratification. ‘And the others?’

  ‘Ain’t seen ’em.’

  He nodded sadly.

  She sat down on the stool. Get ’em to talk about themselves: first rule of tavern-keeping. ‘And why was you on Fish Quay, Philip Dapifer?’

  ‘I’d been bidding farewell to a good friend, Makepeace Burke. He was sailing back to England on the Aurora.’

  ‘Why’d you come to Massachusetts Bay in the first place?’

  Gloomily, he said: ‘To divorce my wife.’

  There was an appalled silence.

  He wondered why he’d told her. Apart from Hutchinson, who’d expedited the matter for him and managed to ensure its privacy, the judges—granters of the decree—were the only Americans who knew. In England, just Catty and, presumably, Conyers. Why blurt it out to a tavern wench?

  ‘What do you want to do that for?’ It was a rhetorical question, not asking for marital detail but expressing amazement, as if he’d confessed to piracy.

  Being a Puritan, for whom marriage was a civil contract, Makepeace did not regard divorce, like a Roman Catholic would do, as an abomination of the sacred, but she was nevertheless horrified; the only person she knew of who’d committed it was Henry VIII. She said: ‘Is she American then?’

  ‘No, she’s English. In England.’ He wished he hadn’t started this. ‘I wanted to save her the publicity.’

  She didn’t understand. Publicity, whatever that was when it was at home, couldn’t surely be as bad as losing a husband. ‘Does she know?’

  He smiled. ‘She knows. She knows that’s why I came. She agreed before I set out. I sent her a letter some days ago, to say the deed was done.’

  Makepeace thought: You been saved, Makepeace Burke. He’s nothing but a heathen, a Mohammedan, turn round three times and be rid of the poor lady. In disapproving silence, she picked up the bible and began reading.

  Dapifer thought: Whom was I actually sparing? Her or myself?

  Was it that he couldn’t have borne the public vindication of those who’d warned him not to marry her? A swathe through your fortune, they’d said, a scandal to your house, viciousness and charm handed down through the blood of dissolute generations.

  And they’d been right. If she’d ever stopped menstruating, which she hadn’t, he’d have had to count to be sure the child was his.

  His passion for her had cooled into guilt; her father had forced the match on her, though she’d seemed willing enough and, probably, would have been no happier with anyone else. But indulgence had infuriated her. ‘Why do you let me? You let me. Why don’t you beat me?’

  A spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree,

  The harder you beat them the better they be.

  He wasn’t the beating sort; she could only cure herself. Tormented, she’d cast about for more exquisite ways to hurt him until it lighted on the most obvious objects by which to turn the screw, his friends. Ffoulkes had refused her, Conyers had not.

  Pink-flushed, she’d smiled up at him from the carpet under the plunging body of Conyers when he and Ffoulkes had walked in on them, bringing down the tree of his remembered past, all his schooldays, Cambridge, with an ease that proved one of its roots had been rotten all along.

  She’d engineered it, he saw that now, waited until he was due home, deliberately confronting him with a situation that, this time, he couldn’t ignore. Even then, in the midst of disgust, he’d experienced pity at her craze for self-destruction.

  No, he’d had to spare her; the world shouldn’t know what she was. And in doing so he’d had to spare Conyers; a duel would have been the delight of the gossip rags. Instead, he’d carried his cuckold horns quietly to America to be rid of her, with Ffoulkes along to give evidence. Very gentlemanly, Dapifer, very noblesse oblige. You should have shot the bastard.

  Christ, it rankled. He hadn’t realized how much. My own bloody carpet. Was that, in essence, what had taken him along the waterfront last night? Throwing out a challenge to the low-life of Boston that he hadn’t issued to the adulterer?

  Introspection brought him full circle. No point in going round again, it merely increased his headache. And the silence from his companion was becoming too pointed to ignore. He was aware he’d lost ground with her and must make it up; whatever else, he was dependent on the female to get him out of this place without being lynched. After a moment, he said: ‘And what of you, Miss Burke? Is there a lover on the horizon?’

  She wanted to maintain her silence in order to show her disapproval. Then she thought: He’ll think nobody’s asked. So she said: ‘I’m handfasted. To Captain Busgutt.’ The name blasted the trumpet of the Lord into the quietness.

  ‘Busgutt,’ he said.

  She took a breath. ‘Captain Busgutt. Has his own ship. Merchantman, the Gideon. A hundred and eighty tons. With an improved mizen.’

  ‘And where is Captain Busgutt and his improved mizen now?’

  She said: ‘Sailed for England six months gone. Should’ve been back in three.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No need,’ she said. ‘The Lord has him in His keeping.’ It was more a matter, she sometimes thought, that the Lord was in Captain Busgutt’s keeping; drowning that thunderous, righteous man would be more than even God could be prepared to do. Captain Busgutt was alive, she was assured; there were a thousand things other than disaster to account for the delay. Even Goody Busgutt was not overly perturbed by it. Both of them expected that one of the ships from England, now anchored out in the Bay until it was safe to come in, might have news of the Gideon.

  She said, viciously: ‘It’s your fault I’m still waiting.’

  He blinked. ‘Never met the gentleman.’

  ‘Your government, then.’ She was wagging her finger now, reproving this representative of the tyrant while he was at her mercy. ‘Captain Busgutt must go back and forth to London ’stead of trading where he’d wish—and the Atlantic passage is fraught with dangers.’

  ‘Ah,’ Dapifer said. ‘Carries enumerated goods, does he?’

  ‘Captain Busgutt,’ she said, ‘trades in tar and pitch.’ He always smelled of them, one of the things she liked about him; other men smelled of sweat. ‘And has to sell to the Royal Navy—at a lower price’n elsewhere.’

  ‘Not a smuggler, then, our Captain Busgutt?’ He seemed to relish the name; on his tongue it gained tonnage.

  So he’d learned something in New England. Indeed, Captain Busgutt had been prepared to sell his tar to the French, even when they’d been the mother country’s official enemy during the Seven Years’ War. As he’d said, ‘They are both sacrilegious peoples and the Lord does not distinguish between them.’ But the Royal Navy’s patrols had grown as vigilant as the shite Customs and Excise, and Captain Busgutt had bowed to the inevitable.

  ‘Captain Busgutt’s an honourable man,’ she said, shortly.

  ‘What age is Captain Busgutt?’ he asked.

  She picked up the bible again. None of his business.

  There was a mutter from the bed, as if its occupant were speaking to himself. ‘I’ll lay he’s an old man.’

  ‘Captain Busgutt,’ said Makepeace, clearly, ‘is fifty years old and a man of vigour, a lay preacher famed throughout the Bay for his zeal. Let me tell you, Mister Dapifer, Captain Busgutt’s sermon on the Lord’s scourging of the Amorites caused some in the congregation to cry out and others to fall down in a fit.’

  ‘Pity I missed it.’

  Makepeace had not encountered this form of ridicule before but she was getting its measure. This Dapifer would go back to his painted palaces to present Captain Busgutt and herself to his painted women as figures from a freak show. She
knew one thing: Captain Busgutt was the better man.

  When she’d told Aaron that Captain Busgutt had asked for her, he’d said with the coarseness he’d picked up from his Tory friends, ‘That old pulpit-beater? He wants to bed a virgin, the hot old salt. Really, ’Peace, you’re not bad-looking, you know. You can do better. What d’you want to marry him for?’

  The answer was that Captain Busgutt’s was the best offer. There’d been other suitors but none had been a good economic proposition and the only one who’d made her heart race a little had, in any case, drowned before she could come to a decision. She wasn’t getting any younger and keeping the Roaring Meg’s shaky roof over all their heads was becoming a losing battle—a heightened pulse rate was no longer a factor in her deliberations.

  Captain Busgutt was that unique phenomenon, a rich man—or what passed for rich in Makepeace’s world—who was also a good man. She thought now: Captain Busgutt didn’t divorce his wife, though she was sickly and gave him no children. At her death he’d been left with no one on whom to bestow his riches and goodness, except his mother. He’d promised Makepeace a house, a brick house, near the Common, with an orchard and, most importantly, a place in it for Betty, young Josh and Tantaquidgeon. It was a considerable offer—the prospect of ending up a childless old maid and a burden on Aaron had given Makepeace sleepless nights—and she had accepted it.

  True, he was twice her age and didn’t set the mermaids singing but Makepeace had seen the unwisdom of her parents’ union—Temperance Burke had been made old before her time by her husband’s shiftlessness—and did not consider passion a good foundation for marriage.

  Captain Busgutt, above all, was admired in the community. The drunken reputation of Makepeace’s father, her trade, the colour of her hair, the dislike accorded her brother: all these had kept her clinging onto the edge of social acceptance by her fingertips. Captain Busgutt would cloak all of them in his own respectability and Makepeace, after a lifetime of the unusual, longed for the mundane with the desire of a vampire for blood.