A Catch of Consequence Read online

Sir Philip Dapifer, born to an income of fifteen thousand pounds per annum, appeared to consider. ‘Cheaper to marry you,’ he said. ‘Will a draft on my Boston bank be acceptable?’

  ‘Cash,’ she said.

  ‘Cash.’

  She spat and they shook on it. He would have held onto her hand but she dragged it out of his and went abruptly out of the room.

  He returned to the view. A cormorant slouched on the prow of a boat, holding out its wings to dry in an attitude of crucifixion, as still and as blue-black as the top of the Indian’s head below.

  The pain inflicted by his drubbing was beginning to recede, though his shoulder still ached and he could hear the wheezing in his ears which tormented him when his heart skipped and then redoubled its beat as it often did nowadays.

  The moon was rising like a transparent disk in a sky still retaining some light. It was losing its perfect roundness as if a coiner had clipped it on one side, bringing with it a lessening of the heat and giving a sheen to the little islands in the Bay so that they looked like a school of curved dolphins arrested and pewtered in the act of diving.

  The view almost gave the lie to the violence enacted against it, as if the rioters were merely actors who had mistaken their lines and were capering cloddishly before a backdrop belonging to an altogether more elegant and peaceful play. It was difficult to believe they meant it.

  And in London, Dapifer thought, they don’t believe it.

  Before setting out for America he’d gone to Prime Minister Grenville, suggesting he take soundings of the situation in New England. George Grenville had been courteous—the two were friends—but dismissive, assured that he had complete understanding of the trouble already. ‘Mere grousing,’ he’d said. ‘That’s your Boston Whig for you. He may grumble against the Stamp Tax—he is grumbling—yet be assured, au fond he’ll do nothing to jeopardize his God, his King and his business.’

  But he will, George. He is.

  Dapifer had listened to many wealthy New Englanders in these past weeks and heard more than mere grousing. The painted, dancing figures who’d set the town’s fires might not be businessmen but they had the businessmen’s sympathy. The whole colony, perhaps the entire continent, was angry. This beautiful scene held danger: immediately for himself, as his broken head and bruises could testify, but, more importantly and in the longer term, for England.

  From here he was vouchsafed a view of the government as the Americans saw it: complacent, arrogant, demanding obedience and taxes, snatching Captain Busgutts from their rightful employment as if they were of no account.

  And here, again as he could witness, was a nation that wouldn’t stand for it. These, its lesser people, had an energy, a newness he hadn’t encountered before. The fat, black cook, the two grotesque old women, even the stage-struck boy Aaron, had addressed him with a directness and familiarity that nobody but an equal would have done in England, as if they were his equal.

  Most extraordinary of all was Makepeace Burke, dominating not only this stage but, now, the one he had left behind in England, bustling irreverently onto it, provincial, unpolished, brave, smelling of fresh air, and with a validity that made the painted scenery of London Society appear stale in contrast.

  You struggle ’til the Lord sounds the last trump.

  What was amazing was that she’d invested him with the will to do it. The lassitude induced by sickliness and, later, his marriage, left him when she entered the room. Life, purpose, bustled in with her.

  Even more surprisingly, God knew how, that gawky body of hers had revived the old Adam in his. Just as he’d begun to think he’d lost the lust for women, a tavern-keeper in appalling clothes was concentrating his mind on what lay underneath.

  Dapifer gritted his teeth. The best return for what she’d done for him was to leave her alone. The lemans introduced to Society by some of his fellow bucks embarrassed themselves and everybody else; unfair to do that to her.

  What could he do for her? More a matter, he supposed, of what she would allow him to do. Wait and see what transpired; he wasn’t returning to England yet, he could stay on in Boston for a while, keep an eye on her, make sure . . .

  The feather on the Indian’s headband, livid in the twilight, had suddenly twitched. The fellow was growling softly, looking to his right across the slipway to the neighbouring quay, to where a shape had waited and listened in last night’s shadows. Somebody was there again.

  Dapifer lost his temper. He leaned out of the window. ‘I’m going. D’you hear me? In the name of God, leave her alone!’

  Two boatloads of soldiers arrived at the jetty just before midnight, packed upright and rigid, like bottles in a crate, until an officer’s shouted order set up a clatter of disembarkation that could have been heard at Cape Cod.

  Makepeace moaned; there went secrecy. She met them on the jetty, looking for Aaron. A graceful civilian in a feathered hat was being bowed up the steps; the Lieutenant-Governor himself had come to recover his errant guest. For a man whose gubernatorial estate, like his own house, was in ruins, he retained a statuesque calm.

  She tried to waylay him: ‘Excuse me, sir . . .’ but was pushed aside by a soldier’s musket. The men were tense at having to land on what the last couple of nights had proved to be hostile territory. Nor did Makepeace’s face—which suggested she was welcoming the Mongol hordes—reassure them.

  She stood back until the last man had tramped past her. There was no sign of Aaron. She went inside, pushing her way through a taproom used to natural dyes and comfortable conversation and now ablaze with red and blue and metalled with gun barrels and iron-tipped boots. There was a new and harsher smell, gilt braiding, sweat, the wax they used on their belts and the sausage rolls of hair above each ear. Sir Thomas Hutchinson was embracing Dapifer like a returned prodigal son, ‘Sir Philip, we have been most concerned,’ and behind him, shifting from foot to foot, impatiently waiting to do some greeting of his own, was a sinuous little man clutching a hamper of clothes.

  She managed to struggle through the soldiery. ‘Excuse me. Where’s my brother?’

  The Lieutenant-Governor looked down. ‘Ale for these men, my good woman.’

  ‘Sir Thomas,’ Dapifer said, ‘I should like to present my saviour and our hostess, Miss Burke.’

  Instantly there was a bow. ‘Miss Burke, we owe you a debt of—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Makepeace. ‘Where’s my brother?’

  Dapifer explained. Sir Thomas declared himself at a loss; so did the officer in charge. A sergeant eventually said, ‘The lad as fetched us? Still rowing, I reckon. Came back in his own boat. We passed him.’

  Makepeace was comforted; it would take Aaron longer to cover the stretch of water from Castle William than for the swift launches of the army.

  ‘May the company be provided with the wherewithal to drink your health, Miss Burke?’ Sir Thomas was all charm.

  ‘Who’s paying?’

  He blinked. ‘I suppose I am.’

  While she, she supposed, ran a public house and was obliged to serve paying customers. Grumbling, she called Betty and the two of them went to the barrels.

  The writhing little man with the hamper saw his chance. ‘Now then, Sir Pip, we managed to rescue some of our habiliments from the ruin those savages made of poor Sir Thomas’s house. What a night, I thought our last hour . . . The whole town turned into cyclopses and swine! The language, my dear, and the nastiness . . . How I saved our things I’ll never know . . . and what have we been doing to our poor arm? And that coat? Never mind, I’ve brought—’

  ‘Not now, Robert,’ Dapifer said.

  Sir Thomas was explaining the size of the contingent he’d brought with him. ‘I’m deploying armed men round the town but if trouble breaks out again tonight, I shall have to ask London for troops. The Lord Percy is standing by to take my dispatches to England tomorrow. The first I sent went down with the Aurora, of course, but—’

  ‘ What did you say?’

  Makepeace, glimpsin
g Dapifer’s face from the other side of the room, shoved a tankard into a waiting hand, and elbowed her way towards him.

  ‘ . . . tactless and unthinking,’ Sir Thomas was saying. ‘My dear fellow, I’m so sorry. I should have told you at once. Yes, I fear she went down almost as soon as she got out of the bay—heat causes unexpected squalls in this part of the ocean and they say she was over-canvassed. They’ve found only wreckage, I fear, no survivors . . .’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Makepeace said, moving in, but the man Robert was before her.

  ‘This way, Sir Pip.’ He looked round for an escape route, nodded as Makepeace pointed to the kitchen and guided his master to it.

  Sir Thomas, elegantly sad, watched them go. ‘Such a loss, Lord Ffoulkes. They were great friends, great friends.’

  ‘Broke it to him gentle, though, di’n’t you?’ snapped Makepeace and returned to the task of drawing and handing out ale pots, seriously considering the possibility that she and the Roaring Meg had been magicked into Hell. The last normality she could remember was pulling up lobster from the waters of the Bay forty-odd hours ago, as if her subsequent action had caused the earth to jump and shake disasters down on her head like rocks from an eruption. Day before yesterday her life had been neatly patterned, not happy perhaps—whose was?—but bearable, useful. Tonight, because she’d acted the Good Samaritan, she stood stripped of everything she’d previously counted good.

  And what in exchange? An ecstasy so acute that she suffered for the man who’d just been stricken as if they were twinned.

  ‘And now having to serve you buggers,’ she said, slopping another tankard into another fist. ‘Ain’t I lucky?’

  ‘I hope you are, miss,’ the redcoat said, fervently. ‘We was goddam thirsty.’

  ‘Don’t you swear in this house,’ she snapped at him.

  As soon as she could she made for the kitchen. He’d managed to get himself in hand and was putting his good arm into a coat that angels had tailored. Robert stood by, holding a sword and its belt. ‘I’m taking ship for England right away,’ Dapifer said, briskly. ‘Robert, give us a moment and then fetch Sir Thomas in here.’

  Robert minced back to the taproom, eyebrows working.

  They faced each other in the firelight. Tension had replaced Dapifer’s normal assumption of dejection, making him appear better looking and less familiar to her. ‘There you have it,’ he said after a moment. ‘I have to go back. Ffoulkes’s wife is dead and he has . . . had a young son. I’m the boy’s guardian, I’m responsible.’ There was a cleaver on the table and he lifted it and drove it deep into the pine. ‘I’m responsible for every bloody thing—Ffoulkes’s death. You. All this.’

  ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I’m responsible for me.’

  ‘But I’ll wager you don’t fish any more men out of the harbour.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They can stay there.’

  He nodded. He pointed to a purse on the mantel. ‘The reward,’ he said. ‘Forty pounds as agreed, and a bit extra.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There wasn’t much else to say. She busied herself trying to pull the cleaver out of the table. It was still quivering. ‘Look what you done.’

  ‘Look what I’ve done. Would you do me a favour before I go?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take that bloody cap off your head.’

  She thought about it for a moment, then pulled the strings at her chin and took the cap off, knowing it was the most sensual and abandoned thing she had ever done or would ever do.

  The curls came warm onto her neck. His arm reached for her and the Meg’s kitchen twirled into a vortex that centred on the two of them, bodies absorbing into each other in its centrifugal force.

  Somebody from another dimension was coughing. Robert in the doorway was a-hem, a-hemming. Behind him, the Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts Bay watched them with the benignity of a man used to seeing gentlemen kissing tavern-maids.

  Dapifer was unconcerned. He kept his arm round her. ‘I want this woman protected, Tom. An armed guard, if you please. For as long as may be necessary.’

  ‘I don’t want a guard.’ But neither of the men paid attention to her.

  ‘Of course,’ said Sir Thomas.

  ‘And I shall need a passage on the Lord Percy. I have urgent business in England.’

  ‘Certainly. One of the boats can take you out to the ship. My dear fellow, I feel this has been a most inauspicious visit but I trust . . .’

  Makepeace wrenched herself free and Dapifer strolled away from her to the taproom, chatting.

  She began bundling her hair back into her cap, wondering what string connected lips to labia that both those parts of her were twanging. She sat down to calm herself, then sat up. The man Robert was still in the doorway. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ He quirked a hand towards the mantelshelf, his little face twisted. ‘There’s a hundred guineas in gold in that purse, did you know?’

  She was suddenly very tired. ‘Is there?’

  ‘There is. What did you do to earn it?’

  The taproom was emptying as soldiers left to take up guard duty at points around town likely to be attacked once the Sabbath lull was over; other reinforcements were being sent from the garrison at South End. The Cut vibrated from the stamp of marching boots.

  Two men were being detailed to stay at the Roaring Meg, one of them the soldier who’d said he was thirsty. She saw them have a last swig of ale, shoulder their muskets and take up position on the bridge outside the front door. ‘They can’t stay there.’ She went up to their sergeant as he ordered the last contingent out. ‘I don’t want those redcoats there.’

  He shrugged. ‘Orders, miss.’

  ‘But . . .’ She looked for Hutchinson; he was talking to an officer: She went up to him and tugged his sleeve. ‘I don’t want men guarding this place.’

  He smiled vaguely; he had other things to think of. ‘Sir Philip is worried for you, my dear. He thinks his presence may have made this inn unpopular with the rabble.’

  ‘Will be if it’s got lobster-backs outside the door.’ But he’d already gone to make final arrangements with the officer in charge.

  And it’s tavern, not inn, and they ain’t rabble. No doubt he thought he was protecting her. He didn’t understand; a guard on her door put her on the same footing as the Tories, as Stamp Master Oliver and the Lieutenant-Governor—and look what happened to them. She’d be lucky if it was only her effigy the Sons of Liberty strung up.

  She could have appealed to Dapifer but she didn’t; they’d said their goodbyes.

  She and Betty stood hand in hand on the jetty to watch the embarkation. Dapifer’s boat was to head south along the waterfront to the Lord Percy, the Lieutenant-Governor’s north to Castle William. Besides the navy’s rowers, each had a guard with them.

  As Dapifer went down the steps with Hutchinson behind him a drum began to beat somewhere on Beacon Hill. At first the two women thought it some military signal but the reaction of the men told them it was not. Each sailor’s head went up and they readied their oars. Hutchinson flinched for a moment, like a man who’d been punched.

  The beat was answered by another in the east, then west, then south, then others joined in, more, until Boston palpitated as if infested by a thousand giant, deep-toned, stridulating crickets. They could hear whistling now, and the crackle of fire. The Sabbath was over.

  Hutchinson managed an admirable shrug. ‘These Bostonians,’ he said.

  Makepeace didn’t look at Dapifer as he was rowed away, nor he at her; she kept her head turned in the direction Sir Thomas’s boat was taking, watching for Aaron. Behind her the silence that had fallen over the Roaring Meg was filled by the distant roar of the town where the glow of bonfires matched the tangerine of an extraordinary moon.

  ‘Boat out there,’ Betty said. Her deep shout carried across the water: ‘That you, Aaron?’

  No reply, but she w
as right. Makepeace could see a light floating on the sea directly opposite, impossible to judge its distance from the jetty; somebody appeared to be fishing with the use of a fire-pot—a dangerous and, she thought, futile activity at this time of the year.

  ‘Ain’t Aaron,’ she said.

  The projectile came at them almost lazily, not seeming so much to get nearer as to grow in size, a bit of comet spinning out of control with fire at its centre, getting bigger and bigger.

  There was a splatter against the end of the jetty and little trills of flame began running along the grooves of planking, so incomprehensibly that Makepeace stepped back a little, no more than she would have done to keep her skirt hem away from a burning log falling from the grate.

  Another point of light from the darkness widened into a ball, a plate, then into a cartwheel of fire spinning towards them. Another splatter, this time from above them and sparks came down in a shower.

  Batting at her head and shoulders, Makepeace looked up. There was no fire, just the open shutters of her unlighted bedroom breaking the plain gable end of the Meg’s upper storey. It was all right.

  It wasn’t. Now there was a pale glow and a movement of shadows in the bedroom where none had been before, as if someone were dancing in it with a candle. ‘Fire,’ she said gently to herself and then shrieked, ‘JOSH!’

  Betty was already lumbering into the inn; Makepeace passed her. ‘I’ll get him.’ She’d be faster up the stairs. ‘You get them bloody redcoats.’

  It’ll go up, the Meg’ll go up. In this heat . . .

  The boy was asleep on his small bed. She could hear crackling through the partition between this room and hers. As she snatched the child up and took him downstairs she tried to think. What to do? What to do? The end of the jetty was burning but the immediate danger was inside. Water from the kitchen to upstairs? From the harbour and throw it in by a ladder? She carried Josh through the kitchen and dropped him outside in the garden. ‘Stay out the way.’

  For a moment she stood where she was, rocking with indecision, but the sight of Tantaquidgeon, stalking past her from the jetty to fetch the ladder and bucket by the privy wall, brought back her senses. She went to the corner of the house and yelled that Josh was safe. One of the soldiers was trying to stamp out the flames on the jetty, she could hear the other, the thirsty one, in the kitchen and found him looking for buckets. She showed him where they were and fell on the pump. He disappeared upstairs with one bucketful, she followed him with another.