Читать книгу A Catch of Consequence - Diana Norman - Страница 10

Church. Oh God, God, I should’ve been in church.

Behind Goody Busgutt was Goody Saltonstall; they hunted as a pair. Saltonstall being exceptionally fat and Busgutt thin, they resembled an egg and its timer in petticoats. In fact, they were the area’s moral police.

As Goody Busgutt was saying, still from the doorway: ‘I knew, I knew. Moment you wasn’t in church, Makepeace Burke, I smelled licentiousness. ’Twas my duty to sniff it out, even if you wasn’t my son’s intended.’

And it was. Though innocent, Makepeace did not question Goody Busgutt’s right, either as a future mother-in-law or as society’s licentiousness-sniffer, to invade her house. The goodwives might be an anachronism elsewhere but in this Puritan part of Boston they had the community’s authority to see that its women behaved like Puritans. They had the ear of the magistrates and could ensure that fornicators and adulterers received a public whipping, or at least a heavy fine – and had.

She was ruined. She’d been caught alone in a bedroom with a man – in flagrante delicto as far as the Goodies were concerned. No marriage to Captain Busgutt now. Waves of images battered her, one after another: herself standing before the congregation with Parson Mather’s castigations roaring from the pulpit; in front of the magistrates’ bench, condemned as a trull; the Roaring Meg closed by official seal as a house of ill repute …

Dapifer, glancing at her, saw her face age with defeat and became angry.

Goody Busgutt had no interest in him. Her lips distended and narrowed, spouting shame – all of it at Makepeace. Who hung her head. She deserved it. Bringing him here, sending Betty to bed instead of making her sit with him … worrying, even now, about what he thought of her humiliation. She was sick; she wanted to fall down.

He was sitting up, looking comically prim with the bedspread clutched to his neck. Uttering something unbelievable.

‘Thank the Lord,’ he was saying, and he was saying it to Goody Busgutt. ‘Thank the Lord for you, mistress. Rescue, rescue.’

Goody Busgutt’s mouth paused in a quirk. ‘Eh? Who are you?’

‘Madam, my name is Philip Dapifer. I was thrown into the harbour yesterday by rioters for being an Englishman. This woman and her Indian dragged me out and, since there was nowhere else, brought me here. Most unwillingly, I may add. You look a kindly soul, will you get me food?’

‘Eh?’

‘Mistress,’ said Sir Philip Dapifer, ‘I have been here all night and this female has done nothing but lecture me on my politics and my soul. She has read to me from the Good Book without ceasing …’ He pointed to the bible lying open on the little table. ‘Mistress, I am as eager for the Lord’s word as anyone but did not our Lord minister to the sick as well as preach? Not a morsel has she given me, not a sip.’

‘Not a sip?’ Goody Saltonstall’s wattle quivered sympathetically.

‘And my head aches most damnably. I’m ill.’

Saltonstall was already won; Goody Busgutt was holding out. ‘Thee talks fast enough for a sick ’un, Englishman.’

‘There you have it,’ Dapifer said, as if the two of them had struck agreement. ‘She holds it against me that I am from England. For some reason, she blames me that her fiancé has not yet married her. Since she learned that I have connections at the Admiralty, she has been on at me to find out what happened to his ship. I suspect he has sailed to the Tortugas to get away from her. I tell you, mistress, were I her fiancé, I wouldn’t marry her either.’ He fell back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

Goody Busgutt walked round the bed like a woman searching corners for cockroaches. In the morning light, Dapifer’s pallor looked deathly, a man without enough energy to raise his eyelids, let alone any other part of his anatomy.

‘Thee could have fed him some broth, miss,’ she said.

Makepeace’s wits were coming back. ‘’Tis the Sabbath,’ she sulked.

‘When did the Sabbath stop the Lord’s work? I tell thee, Goody Saltonstall and I should wish to be at our prayers instead of here, saving thy reputation. What were thee thinking of? Thee could have been the talk of the neighbourhood. Now fetch this poor soul some broth.’

‘An’ us,’ said Goody Saltonstall, ‘I’m moithered.’

Makepeace got up, still astounded. He’d rescued her as surely as she’d rescued him. He’d worked the oracle on the two flintiest women in Boston.

‘Get to it, then,’ Saltonstall told her, sharply. ‘We’re seeing to ’un now.’

Makepeace got to it, carefully clicking her teeth and muttering resentfully about free broth for the undeserving. Downstairs she fell into Betty’s arms, babbling.

‘Never believed you was jus’ talkin’, did they?’ asked Betty.

‘They believed him. And it was true,’ Makepeace said. She sat down, puffing, and ran her fingers round her neck, still feeling the noose. ‘In a way.’

‘Oh-ah.’

‘Don’t you start. And get that fire going. Pop in a couple of lobster and I’ll run up some pastry for patties.’ She was exhilarated by escape.

‘On the Sabbath? What’ll they say?’

‘Betty, Sabbath or no, we could set up a maypole and caper round it. I tell you, he charmed ’em.’

‘They ain’t the only ones, I reckon.’

When the trays were ready, Betty stopped Makepeace from carrying them up. ‘I’ll take ’em, gal.’

She was right, of course; she usually was. The Goodies might be spellbound but they’d be watchful; she could hardly maintain a hostile front towards the Englishman by seeking his presence every few minutes. With a sense of loss, Makepeace watched Betty’s backside sway upstairs. The enchanted night was over.

She sobered. If he’d rescued her from one danger, another loomed for them both. Goody Busgutt had no interest in politics, her concern was righteousness, as was Saltonstall’s, but you could as well prevent either from gossiping as alter the weather. The Sons of Liberty and everybody else in the Cut would be aware of the Englishman’s presence in the Meg as soon as the Goodies left it; her marriage was saved but her custom was ruined.

Makepeace went upstairs and woke Aaron. He was to take Tantaquidgeon with him and go to Hutchinson’s house and tell the Lieutenant-Governor to send a sedan chair for Dapifer with an escort. ‘He ain’t fit for walking yet.’

‘A chair and escort? Why not trumpeters while they’re about it?’

Makepeace shrugged. ‘Might as well, there’ll be a crowd whatever we do. I want him safe through it.’

Aaron winked, as had Betty. ‘Ooh-er.’

She said wearily, ‘There wasn’t no ooh-er.’ She suspected that her exchanges in the dark with the magical fish she’d caught would be all she had to sustain her from now on. Were they worth it? They’d have to be.

For the rest of the day, he was the Goodies’ catch. Every so often one of them would come down to berate her for her neglect of him and command some recipe for his improvement. ‘Did thee not see how poorly he be? Now he’s coughing. Where’s the aniseed? And a plaster for his head.’

She gave them what they asked for, along with some of her best Jamaican rum for themselves, anxious to keep them in situ for as long as possible until she could form some plan for counteracting the damage they would necessarily inflict on the Roaring Meg when they departed.

The lobsters and patties had gone down well, the Goodies having included themselves in the Sabbath dispensation of hot food for the sick. Betty came down with trays on which no scrap was left. She frightened Makepeace with a high keening as she flopped onto the kitchen settle and put her apron over her head.

‘What is it? What is it? What did they say to you?’

The apron moved from side to side. ‘They’s snorin’. But he ain’t. He …’ Betty’s voice failed. Her hand pantomime indicated that the Englishman had called her over to the bed, putting a finger to his lips.

‘What did he want?’

Makepeace waited a full minute before Betty was able to answer. ‘Ladder.’

‘He wanted a ladder?’

Betty’s apron nodded. ‘Fetch a ladder for …’

Makepeace waited again, her own laughter on the simmer despite everything.

‘A ladder and not to tell nobody … for him and Goody Saltonstall is plannin’ to elope.’

Makepeace sat down beside her friend and wailed with her.

Aaron came back while they were both sweating over the next collation, lobscouse and flummery. His news lacked amusement; what he’d found in town had shaken him.

It was Sunday. Boston, as ever, was a ghost town, frozen under a boiling sun, gone into its smokeless, street-empty, curtain-drawn, diurnal hibernation, only a murmur of prayers through church windows and the clucking of neglected poultry breaking the silence. Sabbath Boston was always eerie, an echoing, hurrying footfall suggesting emergency – its perpetrator having to make explanation to the magistrates if there was none.

Today, to Aaron who had missed both riots, it was shocking, haunted by the daubed, shrieking poltergeists who had rampaged through it the night before, the wounds they’d inflicted pointed up by the stillness, as if a fine face had turned slack and dribbling in open-mouthed sleep. Because no work should be done on the Lord’s Day, avenues were still littered with the black scatterings of bonfires. Fences and flowerbeds lay trampled; broken glass winked in the gutters.

In Hanover Square the huge, hundred-year-old oak tree that stood in its middle had sprouted new fruit. A figure was hanging from one of its branches.

Close to, it turned out to be an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the Stamp Master of Massachusetts Bay. Last night the old man had been made to stand before it and apologize for his offence of administering the Stamp Act.

Where Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson’s white, pillared mansion had stood among trees there was no mansion. An empty shell gaped in its place surrounded by wreckage as if it had vomited semi-digested furniture onto the lawns. Birdsong from the motionless trees seemed out of place in the devastation. A statue was headless, urns broken. Over everything, like demented snow, lay paper and, here and there, the leather binding it had been ripped from – Hutchinson had owned the best library in New England.

‘Will you look here?’ Aaron held out the torn frontispiece of a hand-written manuscript to Makepeace. ‘He was writing this, that good man, and they tore it up. Look.’ The title was in beautiful copperplate: A History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Makepeace’s only interest was the present; Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinsons’s virtues and omissions were ground she and her brother had fought over too often. ‘Well, where is he now?’

Aaron shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s taken refuge with Governor Bernard out at Castle William.’

‘Run, run, fast as you can,’ said Makepeace nastily. If there was no authority left in town, what safety was there for Dapifer? Or herself, for that matter?

‘Stay and be killed, is that it?’ Aaron was equally upset. ‘They got at his cellars, I tell you. Drunken madmen they must have been.’

‘They was patriots,’ she yelled at him, hitting out because she was frightened. ‘Hutchinson and his yes King George, no King George, let me lick your boots, King George … don’t matter if good Americans is starving and all his relatives is living in palaces paid for out of poor people’s taxes.’

‘Hutchinson advised against the Stamp Tax, you know he did, you stupid female.’

And they were back on their ancient battlefield, made more bitter by the knowledge that both had truth on their side. Sir Thomas Hutchinson’s love of English upper-class mores and his nepotism were notorious – Stamp Master Oliver was his brother-in-law and between them the two families monopolized most of the Bay’s government offices – but he was also erudite and for over twenty years had devoted himself to the betterment of the colony into which he’d been born.

Aaron was right – Hutchinson was a good man. Makepeace was right – Hutchinson wasn’t a good American.

Betty stepped between them. ‘This ain’t buyin’ baby a new bonnet. What we goin’ to do with him upstairs?’

‘Get him away by boat,’ said Aaron. ‘I’ll row to Castle William and get them to send an escort for him tonight.’

‘Take him with you,’ Betty said. ‘Save time.’

Aaron shook his head. ‘Too risky. The Sons ain’t observing the Sabbath that religiously. Looks like they’re in charge. One of them stopped me and Tantaquidgeon coming home and asked what we were doing. I said we had sickness in the house and had gone for a doctor. If they’re patrolling the water like they’re patrolling the streets, your fella’ll get tipped back in the harbour – and me with him.’

Makepeace groaned. Her brother, usually incautious, was showing common-sense, an indication of how seriously he’d been scared by the situation. Nobody would question him alone in a boat – watchers who knew him would assume he was making another of his visits to Harvard friends across the river – but if Sugar Bart saw him with Dapifer …

What Aaron didn’t realize, because even now his fingers couldn’t take the pulse of the neighbourhood like hers, was how disastrous it was going to be for the Roaring Meg’s local reputation when a bunch of redcoats, invited redcoats from the loathed garrison at Castle William, turned up to rescue an Englishman from its midst. As well run up the Union Jack and be done with it. The Sons would never drink here again. Probably nobody else either, she thought. But what else to do? Nothing.

She smoothed down her apron. That bridge would have to be burned when she got to it. ‘Go up and tell the Goodies we got lobscouse and brandy for their supper in the taproom,’ she said to Aaron. ‘You can tell the English your plan while they’re down.’

Free lobscouse and brandy. She shook her head at her own open-handedness. ‘This rate,’ she said to Betty, ‘we’ll be ruined before we’re ruined.’

While the Goodies gorged in the taproom, Zeobab Fairlee came to the kitchen door asking for them. Makepeace pounced on him, he was her oldest customer and friend, sat him down and began gabbling her tale of wounded, rescued Englishmen – ‘What else could a Christian body do, Zeobab? Eh? Eh? Couldn’t let ’un drown, could I?’ – and, having done it, how could she appease the Sons?

He was preoccupied and barely listened to her. ‘There’s news, ‘Peace,’ he said, ‘I come to tell Goody Busgutt.’

His brown nut of a face showed no expression – a bad sign; imparting and receiving disastrous news was done in this community with a stoicism that bordered on the comatose. ‘It’s the Gideon.’

Betty paused over the fire, Makepeace sat down, gripping the knife with which she’d been cutting bread until her knuckles showed white. Her own face was impassive. Don’t let him be drowned, Lord, she prayed, don’t let Captain Busgutt be drowned. Batting your eyelashes at Englishmen and your fiancé drowns – it’s the Lord’s punishment. ‘Dead?’

Zeobab shook his head. ‘Pressed.’ The word tolled through the kitchen like a passing bell. It was almost as dreadful, it was almost the same.

Among the incoming ships piling up in the Bay, unwilling to risk their cargo and passengers while there was rioting in town and, in any case, last night barred from docking by Boston’s laws against Sunday working, was a pursuit boat from the Moses, a whaler recently returned to Nantucket full of blubber. Commanding the boat was the Moses’ first mate, Oh-Be-Joyful Brown, anxious to renew his acquaintance with the young Boston woman he’d been courting now that he had money enough to marry her. Impatient of the delay, Oh-Be-Joyful had irreligiously rowed ashore early this morning though, being nevertheless a dutiful man, he had not gone straight to his lady but had first sought out Goody Busgutt. ‘Couldn’t find her, see,’ Zeobab said, ‘so he comes to me.’

‘Will you get to it?’ snapped Betty.

What Oh-Be-Joyful wanted to tell Goody Busgutt was that while hunting on the Grand Banks, the Moses had met another whaler, a homeward-bound Greenlander. Since neither was in competition at that stage of their voyages, they had stopped to chat in the middle of the Atlantic like two housewives over a fence.

‘An’ the Greenlander,’ said Zeobab, ‘she says three months previous she come across the Gideon sinkin’, rammed by a whale, see, and takes off the crew. But she was bound for Liverpool to discharge her oil, so that’s where she takes ’em. And at Liverpool, so her master told Oh-Be, the press comes on board an’ takes Cap’n Busgutt and his men for the navy.’

‘They can’t.’ Makepeace was standing. ‘They can’t press him. He’s protected.’

In order for Britain’s trade to flourish, certain classes of seafarers necessary for its success had to be kept safe from the Royal Navy’s press gangs, always greedy for sailors to man its ships, and were therefore granted ‘protection’ in certificates of exemption. Captain Busgutt and his crew, providing the navy with essential tar, came into this category.

Zeobab shook his head. ‘He don’t have a ship no more, ‘Peace. The Gideon’d went down, see.’

She saw. With the Gideon sunk, Captain Busgutt’s certificate was useless. The English press gang had found valuable booty, a crew of trained men without protection, and thought it was its lucky day.

The knife in Makepeace’s hand stabbed into the loaf and stabbed it again. She was so angry. How dare they, how dare they? King George and his shite Admiralty. Kidnap your own men but you leave ours alone. Here it was again – British tyranny. Stab. It was an old grievance, another of the reasons for Boston’s disaffection and a better one even than the Stamp Tax for tearing down Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson’s house. Stab. Pity he weren’t in it.

That the Royal Navy was even-handed and took any nationality it could lay its hands on did nothing to mollify an American seaboard which suffered badly from its predation. Men went missing with dreary regularity. Women and children were left waiting for husbands and fathers who’d been trawled like fish. Most never returned. Having been legally kidnapped, the few who escaped were hunted as deserters.

Makepeace’s knife cut the Board of Admiralty’s brains into breadcrumbs. Betty leaned over and took it away from her. ‘Did Oh-Be say if they was all saved?’ Most of Gideon’s crew consisted of local men.

‘He di’n’t know.’

Silence closed in on the kitchen with another question. Eventually Betty asked it. ‘Who’s goin’ to tell her?’

‘I ain’t,’ Makepeace said. Guilty of attraction to another man, she couldn’t look Captain Busgutt’s mother in the face.

But in the end she accompanied Zeobab into the taproom and held Goody Busgutt’s hand while he told her. The old woman diminished before her eyes; there was none of the anger that consumed Makepeace, not yet at any rate, though Saltonstall, on behalf of her friend, supplied enough for all of them. Goody Busgutt kept pleading for reassurance – ‘I’ll not see my boy again, will I?’ – a question to which, terribly, she knew the answer as well as they did.

They helped her back to her house.

The evening was giving a rare mellowness to the Cut; to the left, the tide lapped softly at the cobbles of its ramp and along its narrow, north-east facing terrace houses were soft-hued shadows, but there was still ferocity in the light that turned the walls and windows of the Roaring Meg’s side into amber.

Oh-Be-Joyful’s news had spread and further down the lane was a large cluster of women which hurried towards Zeobab and surrounded him with anxious questions. ‘Was my man pressed along of the others?’ ‘Did the press take Matthew?’ ‘Pressed.’ ‘Pressed.’

‘Ask her.’ Saltonstall established herself on Goody Busgutt’s steps and her voice rose above the clamour. She was pointing. ‘Ask Makepeace Burke. She’ll know. She’s took in a English lord as is a friend to them as steals our poor lads. Ask her what she’s a-doin’ with him in her bedroom.’

Unbelieving faces in unison turned towards Makepeace, the women’s go-to-meeting caps like the frill of spume on an advancing wave. She began gabbling as she had to Zeobab: Drowning. What else to do? Where else to take ’un? Every hurried word an apology and admission of guilt – and unheard. It seemed to her the wave was coming at her and she backed defensively into the Meg’s doorway.

But it was still absorbing shock. Almost the whole of the Cut was involved with the Gideon in one way or another; the men’s loss was not only personal grief but rents that now couldn’t be met, unpaid debts, little businesses that had been planned and wouldn’t transpire.

Mary Bell from Number 25 shifted her baby more firmly onto her hip. She came up so that she stood on one side of the little bridge that led to the tavern, Makepeace, with her back to the door, faced her on the other. They were friends. Mary’s young husband was second mate on Gideon and had sailed before his child was born. ‘What’s she sayin’, Makepeace?’ Her face crumpled. ‘Where’s my Matthew?’

Wordless, Makepeace stared at her. Useless, useless to say she’d saved a man from drowning not knowing who he was; her actions had no relevance to this woman.

Had Gideon gone down with all hands, Mary could have grieved and recovered. She came of a coastal people; the sea gave, the sea took away, she understood it, her church had prayers to rejoice or mourn the caprice of its profit and loss. But there was no formula for putting to rest the victim that disappeared into the jaws of His Majesty’s authorized monster. Though he didn’t come back, he remained the man who might or might not be dead, the husband of a wife who couldn’t remarry; he was a disembodied scream that went on and on.

These things had to be comprehended; Makepeace knew it because she too had to come to terms with an altered future.

But once they were – and Makepeace saw this too – somebody would have to pay for them, pain must be subsumed in revenge, a shriek of protest go up against the distant, arrogant, little island that inflicted such suffering.

And this time, there was a scapegoat to hand, trailing blood. Not a governor, not a stamp master – hirelings who took their orders from three thousand miles away – but a real, live Englishman who, on his own admission, had connections with the Admiralty, the same Admiralty that commanded the stealing of men. And he was here on their doorstep.

Helplessly, Makepeace went into the Roaring Meg, shut the door, bolted it and began preparations for a siege.