Читать книгу A Catch of Consequence - Diana Norman - Страница 9

Tantaquidgeon opened the door at her rap; he’d been in darkness, she realized, she’d forgotten to leave him a rushlight, and Betty, who didn’t believe in fresh air for her patients, had closed the shutters. She opened them. The room was an oven that, from the smell of it, had been cooking Tantaquidgeon and vomit. ‘Dammit, what’d you let him do that for?’

The Englishman had been sick on his pillow, his head nestled in it. He was still asleep.

She pushed Tantaquidgeon from the room, fetched a basin of water and a cloth, dragged the pillow from under, propped the Englishman’s head while she sponged his hair and face clean, and found a fresh pillow. He slept all through, with no care for the extra washing he was giving her, let alone that someone – she – must now sit up with him all night in case he be sick again and choke on it.

Her eyes pricked with tears of fatigue and self-pity. Night was precious, an escape from seventeen daily hours on a treadmill of work. ‘And now you,’ she said to the bed. ‘Ain’t I lucky?’

The wharves were quiet tonight – the rioting was centred on the middle of the town and its noise reached her room reduced and compacted, like the buzzing of an exceptionally angry hive.

She lit a lamp – the oil in it was insufficient but damned if she’d pour in more; he was costing her enough already – put out the rushlight, snatched up her bible and sat on a stool beside the bed, opening the book at Matthew 25 for some encouragement from the Mount of Olives.

‘For I was hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick’ – all over your pillow – ‘and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.’

As always, it calmed her. She fell asleep.

She woke up in darkness to find the top half of her body slewed on the bed, her head resting sideways on something hard. It came to her that she had been asleep across the drownder’s body, her cheek against his knee. Knee? Christ have mercy. She jumped up as if on springs.

‘Pity,’ a voice said, sadly, ‘I was enjoying that.’

Shocked, disgusted, Makepeace walked to the window. Her cheeks were hot with embarrassment, so was her ear where it had lain on his …

A view of the jetty’s mooring post down below, sheeny in the moonlight, did little to restore her composure, but for her own sake she must pretend she didn’t realize what his pleasure had consisted of. Her fault for lying on it. Sick as he was, he was a man. ‘Still in Boston, am I?’ the voice asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Still your tavern?’

‘Yes.’

‘And to whom am I indebted for my delivery from Boston’s waters?’

‘Name’s Makepeace Burke.’

‘Thank you again, Miss Burke.’

His voice was a pleasing tenor and, despite his questions, suggested an intimacy she found unsettling, as if he’d met her before. Her answers came like a crow’s caw in contrast.

‘It’s been a curious day, Miss Burke … has it been a day?’

‘Fished you out early this morning.’

‘Difficult to distinguish fact from dreams. Did I at some point gather that my presence in your hostelry is a cause for concern?’

She said: ‘English ain’t welcome here.’

‘Ah.’

She was ready for him now. She turned round, went back to the bed and sat on the stool, leaning forward and positioning the lamp so that she could see him. ‘How’d you come to fall in the harbour?’

‘I was set on, belaboured and, presumably, thrown in while unconscious.’ He squinted in order to read her frown carefully. ‘Or did I imagine it?’

He was no fool. ‘You imagined it,’ she said. There was no point in pit-patting around. ‘That’s my price for pulling you out.’

‘Ah.’ He thought about it for a minute. ‘Do the imaginary ruffians who hypothetically threw me in know that you pulled me out?’

‘Not ruffians,’ she said, ‘patriots. Like me. No, they don’t.’

‘And would not rejoice that you did?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘they wouldn’t.’

‘Presumably they are not aware that I am at this moment, ah, in residence in … what’s the name of your tavern?’

‘The Roaring Meg,’ she said. ‘No, they ain’t.’ She added: ‘And mustn’t.’

‘Why did you pull me out, Miss Burke?’

She frowned again, surprised at the question. ‘You was drowning.’

‘I see.’

Awake, his eyes, which were brown, took away from the plainness of his face. She saw they were studying both her room and her person. A rectangular attic of lumpy whitewashed plaster cushioned between oak stanchions, bare floorboards supporting a chest, a three-legged washstand with a canvas bowl, a candlestick, a set of drawers on which were placed a small but select pile of books. A sparse woman of twenty-four years.

Makepeace saw no reason to be ashamed of either, both were homely, clean, serviceable and free of fleas. Indeed, in that she had the bedroom to herself and didn’t share it with siblings or servants, here was Puritan luxury but, for sure, this man would prefer his rooms painted. Like his women.

He was silent for a minute, then said plaintively: ‘I’ve got a hellish imaginary headache.’

Makepeace lit a rushlight from the lamp and went downstairs to the kitchen. The inn was silent except for the rip of Betty’s snores and the occasional creak as beams contracted from a barely perceptible cooling of the air. Aaron’s room was quiet – he’d slept through the ruckus before closing time; he’d sleep through the Last Trump. There was neither sign nor sound of Tantaquidgeon; he chose odd corners for a bed. Come to that, she’d never caught him asleep at all, as if some memory of the forest made it necessary for him to be seen only with his eyes open.

She poured a dose of physick into a beaker, ladled still-warm chowder into a bowl and pumped up a jug of water. Before she went back upstairs, she made sure no tendril of hair escaped her cap and smoothed down her apron.

She slipped an arm under the Englishman’s neck to lift his head for his dosing. ‘Betty’s Specific against pain and bruises,’ she told him when he made a face. ‘Also kills worms.’

He swallowed. ‘I don’t wonder.’

She gave him some water, then the chowder, spooning it into his mouth for him.

‘You’ve got children,’ he said.

‘Ain’t married yet,’ she said. ‘You got childer?’

‘No.’

‘Used to feed my brother like this when he was little,’ she said. ‘Our ma died when he was born.’

‘Where is your brother now?’

‘Works in marine insurance,’ she told him. ‘He’s educated.’

‘Who set my collarbone? You?’

‘Betty.’

‘A large black lady?’

She nodded.

‘And was there, or did I dream him, an even larger, red gentleman?’

‘Tantaquidgeon.’

‘His pomade is … unusual.’

She grinned. ‘Bear’s grease.’

The lamp guttered and went out and Dapifer was left with the memory of an astonishing smile. Her arm was instantly withdrawn from his neck and he heard the stool scrape back. She was retreating, as if physical contact with him was improper in the dark.

He saw her go to the window, her head in its dreadful cap outlined against the moonlight, like a carapace. He recalled from the kaleidoscope of the day’s feverish images that she had equally astonishing hair.

Out of habit, he began a seduction. He sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was a saint in that boat. She had a halo round her head – like an autumn bonfire. I distinctly remember a saint rescuing me from the harbour.’

Instead of going into a flutter, she snapped: ‘Don’t I wish it had been.’

So much for seduction.

He said gravely: ‘It appears, Makepeace Burke, that I overindulged last night. With great carelessness I stumbled into a ditch thereby breaking my collarbone.’ Well, he owed her – not merely for his life, which was hardly worth the asking price – but because, just then, she’d made him want to laugh, something he’d not been inclined to do for a long time.

‘That’s what you’ll tell ’em?’

‘Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, who is my host in this town, will be so informed. The matter will proceed no further.’

‘Swear on the Book?’ She turned swiftly, picked up her bible and placed it on the counterpane.

He took it, swore, then, since it seemed expected, kissed its battered leather.

She was holding out her hand. Moonlight showed wet on the palm. God, she’d spat on it. He held out his good hand and they shook on it, making him wince.

She went to the door, carrying the dirty plate and spoons. ‘Go to sleep now,’ she said.

He heard the stairs creak as she went down them.

Resisting the pain in his head, his shoulder, everywhere, he tried to take stock. No need for oaths on the Bible; if Mistress Burke thought he was about to broadcast the ridiculous position he found himself in she was much mistaken. He didn’t know which was the more embarrassing: Sir Philip Dapifer thrown into Boston harbour by colonial bullies or Sir Philip Dapifer fished out again, like a halibut, by a tavern wench. He imagined the laughter if they heard of it at Almack’s. Another humiliation, his least and latest, for the delectation of London society.

A waterfront? At night? In a town already in turmoil? What had he been thinking of, walking it, exposing himself to such risk?

What he always thought of, he supposed: two entwined naked bodies, one of them his wife’s, the other – its arse bobbing up and down like a ball bounced by an invisible hand – his friend’s.

Ludicrous image, all the more ludicrous that it was set against his own drawing-room carpet; he’d almost laughed. But it had hooked itself into his brain like some flesh-burrowing insect and festered so that it pounded there with the energy of an abscess, debilitating him, making him careless of life in general, his own in particular …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Scalping knives probably.’

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

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

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

‘Will you be safe on the streets?’

‘Hutchinson’s sent an escort.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloody nearly suceeded, too.

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

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

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

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

Sir Philip Dapifer fell asleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ain’t seen ’em.’

He nodded sadly.

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

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

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

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

There was an appalled silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree,

The harder you beat them the better they be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Busgutt,’ he said.

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

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

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

‘I’m sorry.’

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

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

He blinked. ‘Never met the gentleman.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What age is Captain Busgutt?’ he asked.

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

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

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

‘Pity I missed it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘For a man of his age, Captain Busgutt seems to believe in long engagements,’ said the voice from the bed. ‘Why are you still waiting, Miss Burke?’

‘None of your business.’ Then, because, despite everything, conversation with this man was curiously luxurious, she said, ‘Goody Busgutt.’

‘Another of the Captain’s wives?’

‘His mother.’

Goody Busgutt had strongly objected to the marriage, pointing out its disadvantages to a man with a position to maintain and, like the good son he was, Captain Busgutt had agreed to delay the wedding until his return from England – the hiatus to be a term of trial during which his mother could assess Makepeace’s fitness for the position of Mrs Busgutt.

Makepeace did not tell the Englishman this. She said, ‘Goody Busgutt is a woman of righteous character and forceful opinions. She thinks Captain Busgutt could make a safer choice of wife. Maybe he could.’

Makepeace had forceful opinions of her own and at first the thought of being tested by Goody Busgutt had very nearly led her to break off the engagement. Then she’d thought: Why let that canting, lip-sucking old sepulchre ruin your future, Makepeace Burke? She can’t last for ever.

Plums like Captain Busgutt didn’t drop from the tree every day.

Suddenly, Makepeace was angry and frightened by the intimacy being established between her and the man in the bed. ‘And if she hears of it … if Goody Busgutt knew you was here …’

‘She wouldn’t look kindly on the wedding?’

‘She would not.’

‘What would she think we’d got up to?’ he said mournfully.

Unsettled, she got up and went to the window. The moon was setting; it would be dawn soon. The shadows of ribbed hulls in Thompson’s boatyard across the slipway reminded her of Captain Busgutt’s creased, liver-spotted hands, their nails misshapen by a hundred shipboard accidents.

Dapifer, watching her from his bed, smelled air fresher than any of the night and whatever hideous line in soap she used. She was … unusual, he thought, with her unexpected answers in flat ‘a’s; like this damn continent, new and disrespectful. Too good for Captain Busgutt, he knew that.

He saw her stiffen. ‘What …?’ he began but she hissed at him to keep quiet.

Carefully, Makepeace eased the shutter further forward so that she could peer out under its cover. An unaccountable shadow had moved in Thompson’s boatyard. She gestured behind her for the Englishman to snuff the rushlight.

Dapifer pinched out the flame, struggled out of bed and limped across the floor to her. ‘What is it?’ He kept his voice low.

She shook her head and pointed, at the same time putting a hand out to stop his access to the window. He caught hold of her shoulder to steady himself and felt the tension in there, the skin of it only separated from his hand by a thin layer of material which stopped at the curve of her neck. All at once they were conspirators, allies against whatever was out there threatening them both.

After a while they both heard the tip-tap of movement, like a raven’s hopping, receding from the quay down an alley. She let out a breath and the muscle of her shoulder under his hand relaxed as tension went out of her – to be replaced by the awareness of how close he was. She stood still for another second and then turned. He didn’t move. ‘Are they watching us?’ he asked.

She nodded.

Us.

He was taller than she was, her nose was level with his chin, the tip of her breasts almost against his ribs; Makepeace could smell his skin and Betty’s Specific. She knew he’d said something, his mouth had moved, but there was another conversation in progress between their bodies and she found difficulty in attending to anything else.

‘What you say?’

‘Is it trouble?’

Trouble.

She pushed past him. ‘We got to get you away,’ she said. Away from me. But the damage was done, there’d been an acknowledgement, something had been established.

He used her as a crutch to climb back into bed, his arm a yoke across the back of her neck. He didn’t need to lean that heavily, they both knew it.

‘I’m still a sick man,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I said, my dear Procrustes, I am too ill to move.’

‘Sabbath,’ she said. ‘It’s the Sabbath today. The Sons won’t be on the streets tonight. We’ll smuggle you away then. Now get your sleep and let me get mine.’ Determinedly, she plumped herself on her stool, crossed her arms and leaned her back on the wall. She should leave, she knew, go down to the taproom and its settle, but the weird enchantment of the night insisted she stay out its last moments.

Dapifer closed his eyes obediently, wondering at a rioting mob which left off rioting on Sundays – and at a shared moment in a window with a tavern-keeper that had proved as erotic as any in his life.

Two hours went by.

Downstairs there was a rap on the door. A yawning Josh, readying himself to escape the boredom of a Boston Sabbath by going on an illegal fishing trip with friends, unguardedly opened it. A squall of camphor and propriety swept by him and up the stairs to Makepeace’s bedroom, awakening the two sleepers in it with a voice that could have clipped hedges.

‘And what is this?’ asked Goody Busgutt.