A Catch of Consequence

by Diana Norman

  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.

  Chapter Six

  THE landlady of the Roaring Meg, her brother and staff sailed for England aboard the Lord Percy on the evening tide.

  Dapifer, finding himself in charge, had reasoned that a surgeon on a ship, where tar was used extensively, would be more used to treating its burns and therefore better qualified to help Aaron than a land-based doctor. In any case, Makepeace had to be taken out of danger; there was no guarantee that the assault on her brother didn’t presage another on her, and he could think of no safer refuge than a warship of His Majesty’s navy. Furthermore, the Percy was the only vessel on the quays with a surgeon—other large craft still lay further off in the harbour, waiting out the rioting—and her captain, charged with speeding Sir Thomas Hutchinson’s dispatches to London, would not delay sailing.

  His own imperative was still to serve the memory of his drowned friend and support Ffoulkes’s son, a duty he couldn’t put off any longer. Neither could he desert Makepeace in her trouble.

  Ergo: they must sail with Lord Percy together—and today.

  This was explained to Makepeace who merely nodded—anything, anything, Dapifer had turned to Betty. ‘She can return later if she wants to but I’m not leaving her in Boston,’ he said. It didn’t seem strange to him that Betty accepted his right to arrange matters, nor that he was consulting an elderly, black, female cook. ‘The thing is, are you prepared to come with us?’ To separate the two women was unthinkable.

  ‘Ain’t leavin’ me behind in this place. Nor my boy neither.’ Betty’s face was drawn, though she was taking the horror of what had happened to Aaron better than his sister.

  Makepeace, dry-eyed but oblivious of everything else, clutched a pan of butter as their boat was rowed along the wharves to King’s Quay and kept dabbing handfuls from it on the form that lay on the stretcher between its thwarts.

  Tantaquidgeon was not consulted but strode up the Percy’s gangplank anyway with his usual impregnable serenity.

  The ship’s doctor was youngish, Scottish, irritable and attributed blame for his patient’s condition on those who’d brought him aboard. ‘Will ye see this? Have ye revairted to savagery on this continent?’ He was examining Aaron as he spoke, prodding and peering in the light of a lantern that hung in a cradle from the bulkhead. ‘Why not scalp the lad and be done?’

  Aaron lay face down on the cot in the surgeon’s own cabin on the Percy’s orlop deck, semi-conscious and moaning. He’d been naked and in a foetal position when the hot tar had been poured on him so that most of it had been retained by his upper back, head and arms. His thin young legs sticking out from under his carapace emphasized the resemblance to a helpless porcupine. Makepeace hung over him, still trying to smear the monstrosity with butter and coming between the doctor and the lantern.

  An open door in the cabin’s thin partition led to a dispensary where the surgeon’s ‘boy’, a crewman considerably older than himself, was responding to clicks from his master’s fingers to reach for bottles from a cupboard. Dr Baines glanced up. ‘Will ye remove this female?’

  Dapifer, who’d already tried, shook his head. ‘Can you help him?’

  ‘How can I tell? It’s depaindent on the depth of the burns and that I’ll not know until they’re uncovered. And on how many useless questions I’m paistered by in the meantime.’

  The man’s rudeness was oddly reassuring and some measure of his competence penetrated Makepeace’s brain enough for them to get her outside to the companionway, though she refused to go further.

  Dapifer went up on deck to make arrangements for the passage with the captain.

  The Percy was one of the navy’s new frigates, small for a man-of-war, carrying an armament of only thirty-six guns, but fast. Most of her time was spent shuttling between London and Boston, carrying dispatches and, occasionally, a passenger or two on official business. This trip her captain was stretching the point and obliging the Governor of Massachusetts Bay by giving passage to England to one of his female relatives and her maid.

  Captain Strang was happy to stretch the point even further and oblige Dapifer and his connections in the Admiralty, despite that gentleman’s curious and multi-coloured entourage. He was prepared to relinquish his own quarters as well as that of his lieutenant in order to do so. ‘I can’t offer you comfort, Sir Philip, but I can guarantee speed. With a following wind we should make England in six weeks, perhaps less.’

  The conversation was shouted over the sc
urry to revictual the Percy. Cows bellowed as they were lowered in their slings into the hold, goats roamed the quarterdeck in front of Strang’s cabin door and fowls clucked miserably from the coops stacked behind the wheel.

  Dapifer went below to report. Makepeace hadn’t moved; her eyes were on the surgeon’s door. When he told her it was settled they should sail for England that evening, she made no comment. He asked Betty: ‘Does she know what’s happening?’

  ‘She don’t care,’ Betty said. ‘What we goin’ to do about the Meg?’

  ‘I’ll write a note now to Hutchinson. He’ll keep an eye on it for you.’

  Makepeace looked round at that and spoke for the first time. ‘Sam Adams.’

  Betty nodded. ‘Yep. She trust Sam’s eye more’n Hutchinson’s.’

  ‘Very well.’

  In the event Dapifer wrote an explanatory note to both gentlemen and left them, along with two shillings, with the harbour master to be delivered.

  A net of lemons was being slung aboard. Captain Strang nodded at it. ‘Pray God that satisfies Baines; he demands lemons against the scurvy.’

  ‘He seems a good man.’

  ‘I doubt he’d go down well in London Society but I’ve never had so few men in the sick bay as since he joined us.’

  Satisfied, Dapifer left the captain to his preparations and waited on deck for the doctor to report. Apart from the activity centred on this ship, King’s Quay was quiet and the wide street that extended from it into the centre of town quieter yet. With the coming of day, Boston had once again sunk into an abashed calm. Along the waterfront, warehouses lay in ruins as silent as Pompeii’s, providing new perches for seagulls.

  ‘Wail,’ said a voice at his side, ‘we can thank the Almighty it’s not as extensive as might be and it was his back rather than his front which received the brunt. I’d not have liked those burns too near the vital organs.’

  ‘He’ll live?’

  ‘I’ll not say that. My worry is infection, there’s penetration of the skin here and there . . . but, aye, we were fortunate the lad was unclothed at the time and the quills didn’t take cloth in with them.’

  ‘A full recovery?’

  The Scotsman shook his head. ‘The scarring will torment him the days of his life, nor will he aiver grow hair on the back of his haid. And I did not tell the lady . . . his sister, is it? . . . the genitals received tairrible bruising from the rail they carried him on. I ask ye, what sort of people? Medieval, so it is, used in the Crusades, so they tell me, Richard the Lionheart ait cetera. Much beloved of London mobs. Aye, well, that’s the English for ye but Amairicans I’d thought better of.’

  The smitch of dying bonfires was giving way to the fresh air of morning. The doctor drew in a breath of it. ‘Is there a reason they punished the boy?’

  ‘His sister happened to save me from attack by so-called Boston patriots the day before yesterday. She and her brother paid the price.’

  ‘A spirited young lady,’ Dr Baines said, thoughtfully. ‘Were ye acquainted afore this?’

  ‘No.’

  They went down to the cabin to see the patient. The surgeon had taken the tar off but it had pigmented areas of Aaron’s scalp and skin so that they lay in black petals on raw flesh which showed pinkly through the gauze Baines had put over it. The tiny cabin smelled of tar and laudanum and the boy slept on his front, breathing loudly, his head turned to one side, his arms hanging over the cot edge. Makepeace sat on a stool beside him, basketing his one uninjured hand in her own. She didn’t take her eyes off her brother when Dapifer came in. He glanced at Betty, who shook her head. They went up on deck together.

  ‘Is she blaming me?’

  ‘Herself more like,’ Betty said. ‘No reason for neither.’

  ‘I should have stayed in England.’

  ‘Didn’t, though. You just treat her right, is all.’

  An entranced Josh joined them. ‘Think they’ll let me up that riggin’?’

  ‘If they kill me first,’ Betty said.

  As the ship drew out into the Bay, the sun glistened on the prim, white-painted steeples of Boston’s churches, accentuating the messy, blackened tideline of its waterfront. It shone through the bared beams of the Roaring Meg’s roof and the open door of its taproom. The watchers on the Lord Percy saw her wash dislodge the remnant of jetty floating against the slipway so that it came bobbing after them on the tide like an abandoned dog trying to catch up with its master. Betty sobbed then. Makepeace remained below with her brother and didn’t see it.

  Since Makepeace refused to leave Aaron, her food was taken to the surgeon’s cabin. Betty stayed with her. Josh and Robert—to their mutual but different delight—were to eat with the crew on the gundeck on tables slung on ropes from the deckhead. Tantaquidgeon, who disliked eating in company, was given a plate and disappeared with it.

  Dapifer was invited to dine with the officers in the wardroom, a coffin-shaped space which he had to enter at a stoop. There’d been no time to light the galley’s fires and that first evening’s dinner was a cold collation, but it was cheered by the presence of Susan Brewer, the niece of Elizabeth Murray, owner of Boston’s smartest ladies’ outfitters, who was on her way to study metropolitan shop-keeping and send back the latest London fashions to her aunt’s establishment.

  A lively young thing, Miss Brewer, of bouncing laugh and bosom, excited by this, her first voyage, and the presence of so many eligible men—though, for propriety’s sake she had asked that her black maid, Jubilee, be allowed to join her for meals—and she entertained the company with a second-hand account of the rioting.

  ‘Aunt Bess does not live above the shop, of course, so she was spared, but one shudders to think what might have happened if she did—every window in Cornhill was broken and rifled. Auntie cried buckets, but after a bit we made ourselves amused to imagine those Mohucks dressed in sprigged hoop petticoats. Why they think Auntie is an enemy to her country just because she brings in fashion from London, though, sakes, when you consider, where else can fashion come from? Auntie says it’s a political laugh but it’s forced her to think of moving the shop to Queen Street where there is more tone.’

  After the meal there was a rush to invite the young woman to promenade with the officers on the quarterdeck. Dapifer, tired, excused himself. Miss Brewer was disappointed and on the way up to the deck she turned to whisper: ‘Sir Philip, I hope you ain’t offended that Jubilee is eating with us? She ain’t my maid as such, she’s going into service with some friends of Auntie’s when we get to England.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Because I wondered if you did not approve. I saw the other two maids on board are having to eat below and—’

  ‘Two maids?’

  ‘White one and another black one, and I wondered—’

  Gently, Dapifer explained Makepeace’s situation and Miss Brewer was momentarily silenced with embarrassment.

  New England heat extended far into the Atlantic and there was less a prevailing wind than a prevailing draught on which, despite the wetting of her sails, the Lord Percy bobbed in a laziness which threatened to extend the crossing from six weeks to at least seven.

  Tarpaulins were slung for the passengers to sit under and watch the frisking of porpoises in a sapphire sea, but Makepeace still sat by Aaron’s side in near darkness, a single candle in the safety lantern above her head contributing to the cabin’s heat, fanning her patient until her arms ached with strain. She relinquished her place only to Betty and only then when she had to.

  Dapifer called every morning to enquire after the patient but Makepeace kept her eyes averted from his and did not talk to him.

  Aaron’s pain was kept at bay for the first two weeks by laudanum but it came snarling in as the doses were gradually reduced.

  ‘Give him more,’ Makepeace demanded.

  ‘Now, now, ye’ll not want the lad depaindent on it?’

  There was an argument, not their first. Aaron’s agony lacerated Makepeace as if
it was her flesh that lay in open strips; she prowled a jungle of pain, prepared to rend those who threatened more hurt on the wounded creature in it. Baines used his prim, Edinburgh accent to soothe her as he would a defensive dog until she saw sense. That she made trouble did not exasperate him, it seemed to increase his admiration. ‘A strong-willed lassie,’ he reported to Dapifer, ‘but from true concairn for her brother.’

  He was her only concern. She was vaguely aware that home, acquaintances, occupation, the lichened stone marking her parents’ grave in North End churchyard, all the things that had anchored her life were being left behind. And it didn’t matter.

  Even if the choice hadn’t been made for her, she would have left Boston anyway. Overnight every memory it held for her had become smirched with tar. People she knew had disfigured a seventeen-year-old boy, people she knew.

  Because of me.

  She thought of the times when she and Betty had sat at Aaron’s bedside during his childhood illnesses, of money expended, time spent and sacrifice made to keep this young body whole and healthy. Of the pain that still awaited it.

  Because of me.

  The orlop was the quietest place on board. Air circulated along its passage from open gun ports; the only sound by day was the slap of sea against the side of the ship and the occasional murmur from the doctor’s dispensary next door.

  ‘No good torturin’ yourself.’ Betty sat down beside her. ‘I know you. It weren’t your fault.’

  ‘Yes it was.’

  ‘Held him down whilst they poured the pitch, did you? No, an’ you didn’t cut off Sugar Bart’s spare leg neither. Nor you di’n’t sell the Sons down the river. There wasn’t anythin’ you did as asked for this. It’s them’ll boil in Hell, not you.’

  ‘I brought the Englishman to the Meg.’

  That was it, the one needless action. She should have landed him along the quays and sent for the magistrates to fetch him. At the time there had seemed good reason to take him back to the tavern: she’d wanted to ensure that he didn’t inform the authorities of his attackers; she’d seen the chance of reward. But now, tracing the causes of her brother’s suffering, these motives looked suspect. Had she been attracted to Dapifer from the first? Had her sin of lusting after him fallen on Aaron?