A Catch of Consequence Read online

  Her bed was already a burning ghat. Flames licked the rest of the furniture and ran along the ceiling beams. The room was a copse of fire with new trees springing up every minute. She aimed the water at the bed which gave a futile sizzle and went on burning. Through the blaze she saw Tantaquidgeon at the window, looking down as he waited for another bucket, his face and bare chest glistening tawny against the intense light.

  Useless. They needed more buckets, more people.

  There was a whumph as another fire-tree exploded into being. She and the soldier ran down for more water, ran up, down, up, getting in each other’s way.

  They had to surrender the bedroom and shut its door, trying to stop the flames spreading, but wicked little red hydra-heads came flickering from under it and the corridor began to burn.

  In the midst of her panic, she still remembered to pluck the purse off the kitchen mantelshelf as she passed it. Fire wasn’t going to get that.

  There were people around now, through smoke and panic she saw faces, some of them dear to her, one very dear, but couldn’t have put a name to any of them. Down to the kitchen again, crowded now, Josh was on the pump, puffing, hanging on the handle to bring it down and reaching up on his little bare toes as it rose again. The bottom of her petticoat was smouldering, somebody picked her up, smothered the skirt against his coat and carried her out to the slipway to dump her in the shallow water at its bottom. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Dapifer and went back to the battle.

  The sea was cool on her blistered feet and an odd remoteness allowed her to stand in it for a few seconds longer. Very organized, she thought, looking at the Meg. There were figures on the part of the roof ridge that wasn’t burning, a rope had been slung round a chimney to take up buckets provided for it by a chain of people that led down to the slipway beside her. Half the Cut was here: Zeobab, Jack Greenleaf, Mr and Goody Saltonstall, Goody Busgutt, the Baler brothers. . . Very organized. And—she saw it quite clearly—hopeless as hell.

  The most immediate danger to the Meg’s downstairs was the jetty, already half consumed. Tantaquidgeon was attacking the end of it nearest the taproom door with an axe. He freed it and she went to help him push it away with a boathook. It came floating back on the incoming tide, aiming at them and the tavern like an attacking fire-ship.

  She pulled the coil of rope that always hung on a hook by the door and between them, she and Tantaquidgeon tied each of its ends round two spars of the jetty, then jumped into the water and towed the juggernaut out a few yards before dragging it sideways so that it was caught in a static corner between the slipway and the next-door wharf with only stone to burn against.

  She didn’t wonder how the Indian, with barely any mind of his own, managed to read hers in an emergency; she’d got used to that years ago.

  She joined the chain, finding herself next to Dapifer’s Robert on one side and Goody Saltonstall on the other.

  Praying Bostonians passed buckets to godamming English soldiers who passed them up to swearing, scorching British sailors who threw their contents on to the common enemy howling back at them. The Roaring Meg herself was on their side: her oak beams had weathered to virtual iron over the years; although fire ran along them, it couldn’t gain purchase, and her passages upstairs were narrow enough and crooked enough to seal off the section above the kitchen from draught so that, while the three bedrooms and meeting-room went up, much of the taproom’s ceiling held, allowing people below to stamp out such roof-shingle as came through in flames.

  God was on their side as well; He allowed no wind to fan the fire.

  So was poverty; there were no curtains, flounces or stuffed furniture to act as extra tinder, no tapestries, no oil paintings along the passages to become fire-fodder.

  A Cockney voice shrieked from a perch on the kitchen chimney: ‘She’s going out, we’re winnin’, the fucker’s going out.’

  Next to Makepeace, Goody Saltonstall merely sighed. ‘Never knew a sailor so much as pull on a rope without swearin’.’

  Makepeace stared at her, emerging from a tunnel of smoke and noise and bucket-passing that had been without future, an end in itself. She looked up at the sailor on the chimney, then at her misshapen tavern with its black, skeletal, smoking upper ribcage and was washed by a terrible gratitude, not so much for the miracle of its deliverance as for the even greater miracle of human grace by which the deliverance had been effected. She joined the other Puritans on their knees while Mr Saltonstall trumpeted a prayer of thanksgiving before she hobbled to the barrels to dole out ale and rum to her various saviours.

  At which point the miracle faded. The people from the Cut melted away; even Goody Saltonstall whose figure was not melting material, disappeared before she could be thanked. Makepeace called, pleading, to Zeobab Fairlee and Jack Greenleaf as they were going out of the door together: ‘It’s on the house.’

  Greenleaf shook his head; old Zeobab looked sadly at the rum glass in Makepeace’s hand. ‘Cain’t drink here no more, ’Peace,’ he said. ‘You let us down.’

  She poured bumpers for the servicemen of the British army and navy who sat slumped among the detritus of her taproom. Moonlight, coming through gaps in the ceiling, no longer found reflection in their uniform or even skin: both were dulled to matt black by smoke. Only eyeballs and teeth were white.

  She realized the tears trickling down her cheeks would be clearing little paths through the soot on her own face and she smeared them away.

  ‘Didn’t need to light a fire to welcome us, miss,’ one of the men said. ‘We was warm enough.’

  She peered at him. He was holding his hands away from his body. ‘Was that you up on the chimney? Could have killed your fool self.’

  He raised scorched eyebrows. ‘Was that a chimbley? Gor damn, thought I was back up the crow’s nest.’

  They ain’t so different from us, Makepeace thought as she kissed him. She led them into the kitchen to give them some food and treat their burns. Dapifer was already there. Betty was resetting the collarbone which had been dislocated once more by, he said, ‘carrying lumps of women around’. Robert was moaning and ineffectually trying to brush soot off his breeches but he brightened as the sailors came in.

  ‘Back again, then,’ Makepeace said to Dapifer, pumping cold water into bowls to cool the chimney sailor’s hands.

  ‘I was passing. Thought I’d drop in.’ He’d seen the flames and made the rowers turn the boat round.

  Betty heaped the table with what food she could find and Makepeace added her largest jug filled with best Jamaican. One of the soldiers raised his beaker to Tantaquidgeon standing in the shadows. ‘Give him some rum an’ all, poor bastard. He’s worked hard enough tonight.’

  ‘No, and don’t you go givin’ him any.’ She was too weary to go into the explanation about Indians and spirituous liquor. ‘He drinks ale.’ The few occasions on which the unwary or malicious had plied Tantaquidgeon with rum had scarred the tavern as well as her memory.

  Dapifer took her into the taproom. ‘Don’t get them drunk either. When they’ve rested I want those sailors searching the Bay in case the boat that did this is still out there.’

  ‘What boat? Did what?’ In all the confusion and fear of the last hours, it hadn’t occurred to her that the fire had been deliberately started. The missiles she’d seen heading towards her, would always see, were too unearthly to connect with human agency; they were more the unfocused malevolence of Nature, pieces from the tail of a comet or a shooting star. But of course they were not. ‘Meteors,’ she said dully. ‘I thought they was meteors.’

  ‘There was a boat,’ he said. ‘We saw it as we turned back. It had some sort of catapult rigged up in it, like a siege engine.’

  ‘God have mercy.’ Only five years before Boston had been devastated by one of the worst town fires in colonial history but Sugar Bart—she knew it was Bart—had risked starting just such another in his haste to injure one small tavern and its keeper.

/>   She realized something else. ‘Aaron,’ she said. ‘Aaron.’ They’d got her brother, her little brother, the responsibility her mother had left her; she’d sent him out to face the enemy on his own.

  ‘We’ll look for him,’ said Dapifer gently, ‘but there’s no reason yet to believe he’s come to harm. Isn’t he a Harvard man? He could have gone to see friends in Cambridge.’

  Yes, he’d gone to Harvard—she’d slaved to send him there. No, he wouldn’t have gone tonight without letting her know.

  There was no comfort he could give her so he left her standing in the doorway looking rigidly out to sea as if by mind and body she could will her brother home, and went to organize the boat party. The hands of the sailor who’d fought the fire from the chimney were too burned to handle an oar without pain and he was replaced by one of the soldiers.

  However, as the men were clambering down into the boat from the stump of the jetty that remained, Makepeace reached for Dapifer’s sleeve. ‘Not you,’ she said, ‘I ain’t losing you both.’ She was shaking.

  One of the oarsmen said: ‘Best leave it to the navy, me lord. We’ll find the lad.’

  The sailor who was staying behind said: ‘And them fire-slinging bastards, you find them an’ all. Give ’em my regards, the fuckers.’

  When the boat had gone, the remaining soldier resumed his sentry duty, Betty cleared rubble off one of the settles for the sailor to sleep on and came to the doorway to inspect Makepeace; the soles of her feet were blistered where the slippers had burned through. ‘Want to lie down or fall down?’ Betty asked.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  The cook shrugged and fetched a chair for Makepeace to sit in while she did some salving and bandaging. ‘Best talk to her,’ she said to Dapifer. ‘Keep her mind off it.’

  ‘Take some rest yourself,’ Dapifer said. ‘You deserve it.’

  Betty shook her head. ‘Reckon I’ll wait ’til he come home. His mamma, she said to me when she lay dyin’, she said: “You guard him, Bet, you guard ’em both.” An’ I’m guardin’.’ She went indoors and soon Dapifer heard the sound of a brush sweeping up debris.

  Tantaquidgeon established himself in the doorway behind them, his arms crossed, like a dowager chaperone.

  ‘What will you and your brother do about the Roaring Meg? Rebuild?’ Assume the boy was coming back in one piece, keep her diverted. He had to ask twice.

  She tried to concentrate. ‘Sell,’ she said. ‘We’ll move on.’

  ‘You’ll get your customers back,’ he reassured her. ‘One insane arsonist can’t stand for a community. The neighbourliness tonight was heartening. And people forget.’

  ‘Not round here.’ The insanity of Sugar Bart was not the issue; if he stood for anything it was for those who enjoyed hatred and joined a cause in order to find a conduit for it. It was Zeobab Fairlee who was spokesman for the common, decent Bostonians suffering under the British crown and it was Zeobab who’d condemned her. You let us down.

  So she had. While they’d been discussing protest, thinking they were in a safe house, she’d concealed a representative of the very rule against which they were to take action. Tonight an English soldier had stood outside her door, musket at the ready. Others had left here to occupy the town.

  To Zeobab and his ilk, reliability was everything, from the oak they shaped into ships’ hulls, to the cordage they twisted to face arctic ice and tropical hurricanes, and to the anchors they forged to hold off raging leeshores: all these things must be true or they were useless.

  Such men were as demanding of their leisure. They had to know their tavern wouldn’t bilk them and their blurted secrets would be kept. The trust between the Roaring Meg and its regulars had to be absolute and any betrayal of that trust on Makepeace’s part was to betray it absolutely. They wouldn’t drink here again.

  Ain’t that punishment enough, Lord? Don’t take Aaron as well.

  The Englishman was talking; the sound of his slow, rueful voice was a comfort but she could not attend to what he was saying.

  Dapifer was thinking of his wife and wondering how she would have borne the afflictions being visited on the woman by his side.

  ‘A spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree’ . . . Makepeace Burke was being beaten if any woman was, and with every buffet showed more quality.

  Perhaps, he thought, it was Catty’s affliction that she had never loved anybody or anything sufficiently to be wounded by its loss. Had he loved her? He supposed so—until she’d run through his affection as carelessly as she wasted everything else and the only emotion she’d left to him was pity.

  ‘I should have divorced her in England,’ he said, ‘but the process is akin to a public hanging—I couldn’t inflict that on her, though, God knows, Ffoulkes urged me to. He was with me when we walked in on them both. I think he was more shocked than I was. Conyers, the man, was his friend as well as mine, you see. I could have told him Conyers was by no means the first. But obviously there was going to be no end unless I finished it. Better for everybody, I thought, if it were done discreetly three thousand miles away—and the Massachusetts courts are more pliable in these matters. She signed her consent readily enough; she’s set her sights on Conyers to be her next husband, poor devil. So Ffoulkes came with me to New England to give the necessary evidence—because I decided it was easier. Easier, by Christ.’

  Makepeace was aware he was stripping his soul for her sake; such a marriage was beyond her social experience, she couldn’t identify with it. But when it came to his friend, she could imagine what he imagined and hear, as he must be hearing, the voices of men calling on God to save them from an empty sea. She could hear Aaron’s.

  She turned to him. ‘A squall’s quick,’ she said. ‘Chaos, they say. No time to think, everything blotted out. It would’ve been all over for him in seconds.’

  It wasn’t much, all she could offer, but he was grateful for it; he’d been haunted by the image of Ffoulkes clinging to a wreck for hours, praying for help until his strength failed. There’d been no Makepeace Burke to lift Ffoulkes from the sea.

  ‘I ain’t losing you both,’ she’d said. He felt the same; he mustn’t lose her as well.

  ‘I think you should come to England with me,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You know what for.’ Her own appalling honesty deserved better than the taffeta phrases he used on other women. After all, he thought, when he’d scrupled at making her his mistress he hadn’t known how important she’d become to him, nor what disaster his presence would bring to her life in Boston.

  ‘A kept woman?’

  ‘It’s about time somebody kept you,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think marriage to Captain Busgutt is going to come off.’

  ‘Holy Hokey,’ she said, ‘a kept woman.’ It took her breath away. If Jack Greenleaf or one of the Baler brothers had made the suggestion, she’d have slapped his face. That this man, who set her blood fizzing, had made it was, in his terms, the greatest compliment he could pay her. He wanted her.

  Makepeace was no democrat; she believed in justice, but the precept that men, much less women, were equal one to another outside of Heaven was not one she’d ever heard seriously voiced—nor would she have believed it if she had. That he could marry her didn’t occur to Makepeace any more than it occurred to Dapifer. As it was, she understood this offer from a scion of the ruling class to be Olympian; she’d cherish it for the rest of her life.

  But she’d be damned if she accepted it. Not from prudery; the Puritan corseting of years had been shaken loose during the last two days. If, earlier, when they’d kissed, they’d been alone in the house, she would have let him take her, whimpered for him to take her, copulated with him on the floor like an animal in heat.

  That was one thing; to be kept was another. To be kept, by however exalted a protector, was prostitution. She thought better of herself—and him—than that.

  ‘I know you mean well—’ she began.

  ‘No, I don’t,’
he said.

  She almost smiled. ‘Wouldn’t be right. Got to keep my independence.’

  ‘Oh Jesus. Very well, I’ll set you up in the biggest inn in England, Betty, the boy, Aaron, the Indian, all of you. You can work until you drop. Just come with me.’ England would be a lonely place for him now.

  She’d felt England’s contempt for its colonials from three thousand miles away; she could imagine how it would treat the ignorant Yankee mistress of a favoured son, the derision she’d attract from his friends . . .

  ‘Wouldn’t they just love me,’ she said. Here, she was confident on her own territory; there, he’d be ashamed of her within the week.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Procrustes. Ffoulkes’s boy inherits the title, the lands—vultures will be gathering. Ffoulkes would expect me to look out for him.’

  ‘Then go,’ she said.

  ‘You realize you’re driving me back into the arms of Goody Saltonstall?’

  He was sitting on the doorway sill, elbows on knees, chin in hands, morose. Lord, she loved him. ‘I know,’ she said.

  The noise of riot from the town had become part of the night. It fretted nerves even while they’d become accustomed to it, occasionally breaking into a clash that had the effect of a curry-comb scraped over a wound, now and then pierced by a scream—always Aaron’s.

  She clutched at her head suddenly. ‘Where is he? Where d’you think he is?’

  He put his arm round her and felt the surface of her hair scorched and frizzy against his cheek; at some point during the fire she’d taken her cap off to beat at the flames.

  The moon was seeping colour now and hung like a huge, Chinese lantern over an empty sea.