A Catch of Consequence

by Diana Norman

  ‘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 of 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.

  Chapter Four

  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 Lor
d 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 Hutchinson’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 Ber
nard 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 . . .