Читать книгу A Catch of Consequence - Diana Norman - Страница 11

Nothing much to do,’ she said casually to Betty. ‘Why don’t you take Josh and go visit Hannah?’ Hannah was Betty’s close friend and lived along the waterfront.

‘You expectin’ trouble?’

‘No.’

‘Always could tell when you was lyin’.’

‘It’s just …’ It was difficult to clarify even to herself why she felt dread but she knew it wasn’t baseless. The nights of riot had created a palimpsest on which further havoc could be written, a ground for old and new scores to be settled in a way that Boston’s conformity had previously kept in check. Violence was in the air and she could smell it waiting outside her door. ‘… just if there’s trouble, if there’s trouble …’

‘Me and Josh family or not?’

‘You know you are, you old besom.’

‘’N’ so do every other soul ’round here. Want me ’n’ Josh caught strollin’ back from Hannah’s an’ chucked in the harbour? Thank you kindly, we’s stayin’ indoors an’ don’t nobody else ought to go visitin’ neither.’

‘It’s me they’re mad with.’

‘When people’s mad they ain’t picky.’

As an ex-slave Betty knew what she was talking about, but Makepeace was aware that she was just finding a good excuse to stay. How good an excuse was it, though? Would Aaron be safe going to Castle William?

Yes, she decided, he would, as long as he set out immediately. She was tempted to send the Englishman with him and then rejected the idea; there were people milling about the Cut who’d see them go; a crisis would be precipitated. Better for them all if the man made his escape under cover of darkness and with a force to protect him.

When Aaron came down from upstairs she apprised him of the situation. ‘You tell them soldiers to lie out from the jetty an’ keep quiet,’ she said. ‘We’ll row him to their boat.’

She accompanied her brother to the jetty. Aaron, too, had been enchanted by Dapifer who had offered to introduce him to the playhouses should he ever come to London. ‘Now there’s a true English gentleman.’

‘Ain’t he though,’ she said flatly, but her brother’s enthusiasm reminded her of how young he was and she became nervous for him. A few of the crowd from the Cut had ambled onto the spillway and were watching them. ‘Hold up,’ she said. ‘You can take Tantaquidgeon with you.’

He refused indignantly, affronted that she thought he couldn’t manage on his own. ‘Anyway, if there’s trouble, you’ll need him here.’

Quarrelling would have attracted more attention so she let him go. She called Tantaquidgeon and put him on guard at the jetty, then went upstairs to take out her anger and discomfort on a true English gentleman.

He was sitting by the window, looking tireder and gloomier than ever; a day with the Goodies could do that.

‘Well,’ she said, storming in, ‘you cost me my marriage. You gone and got Captain Busgutt pressed. Ain’t I lucky?’

He turned his head, blinking. ‘He’s been ironed?’

‘Pressed, pressed. Taken for the navy.’

‘I did that?’

‘Thy government, then.’ She was waving her fist. She’d give him press gang.

He had the sense to listen, giving a nod from time to time. When she finally ran out of breath, he said, ‘I can get him out, you know.’

The sheer omnipotence of the statement made her angrier. ‘And what about Matthew Bell and the rest of the crew?’

‘I’ll get them out as well.’

‘Oh.’ She paused. ‘Do it then.’ She still didn’t want to be placated. ‘But how long’ll that take? They could be aboard an East Indiaman by now. Or sailed to China. I’ll be in my grave before I’m a bride.’

‘Believe me, my dear Procrustes, marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’ Then he said: ‘Does Mrs Busgutt know?’

Makepeace sighed. ‘She knows.’

‘Ah. Yes. Poor soul. I thought I heard the voice of Mrs Saltonstall. She was using the words “English lord” in tones that suggested a blight on our former intimacy. She’s blaming me.’ He looked at her. ‘And you.’

He’s quick, Makepeace thought. She hadn’t meant him to know how much trouble she was in; that was her business. She said, more gently: ‘They got to blame somebody. It’ll pass.’

‘Will it?’ He shook his head at her. ‘You really should have let me drown, shouldn’t you, Makepeace Burke?’

‘You wanted to, di’n’t you? I saw.’ She advanced on him with another grievance. ‘You was letting slip. I saw you. You was letting it beat you.’

He shrugged and turned back to the window. ‘As I remember, my situation appeared unpropitious.’

‘There’s always propitions – whatever they are. You struggle ’til the Lord sounds the last trump. See him?’ She pointed out of the window to where Tantaquidgeon stood on the jetty below them. ‘He’d be dead now if he’d thought like you.’

She told him the story, partly so that he could profit from Tantaquidgeon’s example and partly because, when things were bad, as now, she encouraged herself with this triumph of Christian survival.

At the time John L. Burke had been playing at frontiersman, attempting to earn a living for himself, his wife and his small daughter – it was before Aaron was born – by trapping along the fur-rich edges of the Great Lakes. Another failure; the family’s only gain from that particular enterprise had been Tantaquidgeon. Makepeace, then four and a half years old, had found him lapping from the stream to which she’d gone for water. The wound in his skull was horrific.

The Burkes discovered later, from other sources, that an Iroquois war party had raided his settlement – he was a Huron – massacring everybody in it, including his wife and son, and as near as spit killing Tantaquidgeon himself. To reach the stream where Makepeace found him he’d crawled several miles. She’d run to fetch her mother.

‘His brains was coming out, Pa said he was a-dying, so did the other trappers’ families. But Ma said he di’n’t need to less’n he had a mind to it.’ Temperance Burke had prayed over him as she nursed him and become heartened by his repetition of ‘Jesus’, his only word.

She’d named him Tantaquidgeon after an Indian familiar to the early Puritan settlers. ‘He was a praying Indian, see,’ Makepeace told Dapifer, triumphantly. ‘The Lord hadn’t sounded the trump for him yet and he knew it and he fought to stay living, spite of everything. He wouldn’t be beat.’

‘And you’ve kept him ever since?’

Makepeace was as surprised at the question as she had been when Dapifer had asked her why she’d saved him from drowning. ‘Couldn’t manage on his own, could he?’ The Indian’s devotion to her mother had been absolute; after Temperance’s death it had been transferred to herself. ‘He’s family.’

‘Can he say anything at all?’

‘He says “Jesus”. Ma said that was enough.’ Makepeace felt heartened, as she always did by recounting the story. ‘Ma was a remarkable woman and Tantaquidgeon’s a remarkable man. You want to be more like him.’

She means it, thought Dapifer. That overgrown doorstop down there is being held up as an example to me. He said, meekly: ‘I’ll try.’

There was that ravishing grin again; she was extraordinary. He said: ‘They’re going to punish you, aren’t they, Procrustes?’

The smile went. ‘It’ll pass.’

‘I’d better stay.’

‘That’d rile ’em more.’

‘What then?’

With hideous honesty, she said: ‘I was minded there’d be a reward.’

‘Good God.’ He’d been fooled by the relationship that had grown between them; he’d intended to send her some extravagant memento, a piece of furniture, a jewel; he’d forgotten she was a member of a class that grubbed everywhere for money. ‘And what are you minded my life’s worth?’ He added, with assumed calculation: ‘And don’t forget I saved you from the Goodies.’

‘Not for long, you didn’t.’ She pushed an errant red ringlet back into her cap as she reckoned the cost of him. There was the expenditure on the Goodies’ food and drink, there was undoubtedly the loss of her custom, she might be forced to close the Meg and open a tavern somewhere else, and the loss of Captain Busgutt. And – here she doubled the figure she’d first thought of – there was the cost of falling in love with an Englishman who was about to leave her, who must leave her, who would have left her whatever the circumstances – she had no illusions about that – the memory of whom would keep her incapable of loving another man for the rest of the days. That was worth something.

She took a deep breath. ‘Forty pounds?’

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, glimpsing 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 was 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.

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.

There was a grunt from Tantaquidgeon and they heard a call. It was nearer than the horn-blowing, howling, drumming component of the air, but not from the immediate vicinity. Somewhere in Cable Lane, perhaps. Clear, though.

‘Makepeace Burke.’

High, fluting, strange, not human. Birdlike, as if the name issued with difficulty from a beak. So frightening that, when Makepeace opened her mouth to answer, she couldn’t make any sound.

‘Inside.’ Dapifer pushed her into the taproom, then Tantaquidgeon. He drew his sword. Betty hurried to shut the doors behind them. Robert came running in from the kitchen; the sailor sat up. For a moment they stayed where they were. The chirruping awoke ancient terrors of bird-headed things in shadow; it hung on the air and had no right to be there.

From under its dust and cinders the grandmother clock whirred and began to chime five o’clock. In the blackness they waited for the strokes to die away. Dapifer opened the door to the Cut and stepped out. ‘What was that, corporal?’

‘Don’t know, sir. Can’t tell where it came from.’ The soldier had levelled his musket and was moving it in an arc that went from the slipway on his left and then right, down the silent lane.

Dapifer crossed the bridge to join him. The brook behind him gurgled cleanly towards the sea which was beginning to reflect a pearl-grey suggestion of dawn. The overhanging roofs at the far end of the Cut formed an archway of light from a bonfire beyond it.

Whatever it was, it came again.

‘Makepeace Burke.’

The soldier’s musket swung in the direction of the alley that ran into the Cut further down. Dapifer touched his arm. ‘No shooting yet.’

In the taproom Tantaquidgeon had begun a soft, incomprehensible chant. Robert was squeaking. Makepeace heard Betty hissing at him to hold steady. The sailor made an attempt at a joke. ‘He’ll be sorry when he’s sober, whoever he is.’

Was it a man, or a woman? Or neither?

‘Here’s your brother, Makepeace Burke.’

Somehow her legs walked her to the door and outside. Tantaquidgeon was behind her, still chanting, with a knife in his hand, and then Betty, gripping John L. Burke’s old blackthorn like a cudgel.

The Cut was empty of everything except an impression that it was watching her; shadows in the corner of Cable Lane could have been people but if they were they didn’t move; open shutters had only blackness between them.

She looked to the right; again, difficult to see but, yes, figures passing and repassing against the glow of a bonfire in the square beyond, carrying something on a rail, an effigy. As she squinted, trying to make them out, they tipped the rail so that the scarecrow they’d made slid off onto the ground.

Gone now. The effigy made an untidy heap in the mouth of the Cut against the bonfire’s aureole.

Dapifer was telling her to get back inside.

Makepeace kept her eyes on the effigy. They’d made it of hay, untidily; there were bits sticking out all over it, black hay that gleamed when it caught the light. She watched it rise to its feet and start stumbling up the Cut. She didn’t move.

The tarred and feathered thing was bowed so that the prickles along its back curved, like a hedgehog’s, and it zigzagged as it came, lumbering from one side of the lane to the other, mewing when it bumped into a wall.

I must go to it, she thought, it’s blind. And stood there. She heard Betty scream and the soldier say: ‘Oh Christ, dear Christ.’

In the end it was Tantaquidgeon who strode down the lane and carried Aaron home.