A Catch of Consequence

by Diana Norman

  She said: ‘Clear enough, ain’t it? I should’ve handed him over. The Lord’s punished me through Aaron. Aaron’s the lamb in the thicket.’

  ‘That’d do it,’ Betty said. ‘That’s the Lord for you.’

  ‘Oh, go away.’ She was irritated. It was her fault. Aaron had lost his youth, would carry scars for ever. Her fault.

  Betty left her to her self-flagellation.

  Shock had left Aaron with little recall. Rowing back alone from Castle William, he had decided to tie up for a while at White’s Wharf, some four or five hundred yards north of the Roaring Meg. After all, he’d accomplished his task, soldiers were on their way to safeguard the tavern, he could afford a few minutes before he followed them.

  There’d been another boat tied up to the wharf with an unusual structure arranged between its thwarts; he’d registered its peculiarity but, with his mind on other things, had remained incurious.

  ‘It’d only been throwing fireballs at us,’ Makepeace told him. ‘The Meg was burning. Holy Hokey, you must’ve seen the flames.’

  He hadn’t. ‘There were bonfires all over.’

  After that his memory of events was fragmentary—a sack over his head, the smell of cordage as if he were in a rope-walk, a glimpse of whooping, painted men as they stripped him, searing pain. He’d heard screams, whether his own or of someone else subjected to the same treatment, he didn’t know.

  No, he hadn’t recognized any of the men’s voices—an omission that seemed to comfort him slightly. Random assault, perhaps because he resembled an Englishman, was less terrible to him than if it had been inflicted by people he knew.

  He had his own guilt.

  ‘What for did you stop off at White’s?’ Makepeace asked him. ‘You knew I’d be worrying.’

  He turned his head away. Answering took time. ‘There was a girl.’

  At first she didn’t understand and then she did and she was angry. ‘All those nights you said you was at Cambridge . . . ?’ She stood up to bend over and look into his face. Tears were squeezing from beneath his eyelids.

  ‘I’m sorry, ’Peace, I’m sorry. Wages of sin.’

  She sat back, suddenly appalled that she’d been cross with him. He’d only done with a girl what she so nearly had with a man. Betty was right; it would be a poor God who punished his creatures for being natural to the flesh He’d made for them.

  This, then, was the atrocity of atrocity; its victims looked for guilt in themselves, seeing some involvement of their own in the crime against them—and it was nonsense.

  ‘Wages of what?’ she said. ‘Wages of being young? Being human?’ By absolving Aaron, she was able to absolve herself. ‘I tell you this, Aaron Burke, there’s only one man owed the wages of sin and that’s Sugar Bart and one day I’m a-going to see he’s paid ’em.’ She hung Bart above a vat of boiling tar by his one leg and dipped him in it like a toffee apple. ‘That’s all we got to blame ourselves for—letting that shite stay free.’

  Aaron almost smiled. ‘I don’t think it was Bart with the tar,’ he said.

  ‘It was Bart with the fire.’ She knew that much.

  She felt cleaner after that; they both did. It was not enough, though, to help Aaron through the next stage of his hurt. While in delirium and pain, her brother had displayed considerable courage but as both lessened and he absorbed the extent of the permanent damage done to him, he declined into grief. It was mainly for his hair. He kept touching the back of his head to see if the chafed, helmet-like skin on it was producing anything to keep pace with the growth on his chin. It wasn’t.

  ‘I’m piebald.’ It was a howl of despair.

  ‘It’ll grow,’ soothed his sister.

  ‘No,’ Dr Baines told him, ‘it won’t.’

  Makepeace dragged the Scotsman outside. ‘Ain’t you got no pity?’

  ‘That I have, mistress, and may I say it’s greater than yours that’s accustoming the lad to pap.’

  Dr Baines went back into the cabin. Makepeace heard him say: ‘Young man, there’s bravery in battle and bravery for every day which, in my opinion and that of the Lord God, is the higher of the two. Now then, ye can throw the rest of your life to yon savages who tried to take it, or ye can bless yourself with walking, talking, using your wits and partaking of the Almighty’s many blessings—among them the love of a devoted sister. Which is it to be?’

  A mumble from Aaron.

  ‘Och, b-barley-cakes,’ shouted the doctor, exasperated, ‘for why do ye think the Lord invented wigs?’

  It was almost terrible to see Aaron’s response. He summoned up a fortitude he didn’t know he had. Before his sister’s eyes he changed into a different soul, pitifully determined not to utter a word that wasn’t optimistic.

  She knew him, knew he saw himself playing a part as much as he had played at soldiers when he was little or, later, at being the complete young-Tory-around-town, but this was the finer role and if he wanted admiration for his portrayal he certainly had hers. There were dreadful relapses but the progress towards mending himself was made by him alone and had nothing to do with her. Baines was right; she hadn’t helped him, he had grown beyond her. She drew in a deep breath and let him go.

  The wig was a success. Robert, who had been almost tearfully attentive throughout, produced it from Dapifer’s wardrobe. ‘We don’t wear it except when we’re going powdered but I’ve washed it and brushed it and, oh, won’t we look lovely.’

  Aaron was dejected. ‘Now it’s fashionable to wear one’s own hair, I must lose mine.’

  ‘Master Aaron, time I’ve finished, they won’t know this ain’t yours.’ They would if they’d been acquainted with red-headed Aaron before the tarring because the wig was the exact, sad colour of Dapifer’s hair, but it was well wrought. ‘See,’ Robert said, ‘we tie it at the back with a bow and the queue is nice and loose to cover our poor neck.’

  Once Makepeace had lined its hessian interior with a silk handkerchief so that it would not rub the still-raw flesh, Aaron put it on and was transformed. Robert clasped his hands: ‘Oh, yes. Pale and interesting, just like Hamlet after he’s seen his poor pa.’

  A shirt of softest linen, a cor de soie coat and breeches were selected for the patient’s first sortie to the quarterdeck. Aaron was helped up the companionway but he shrugged off assistance when he reached the deck, walking stiffly, his arms bent and unmoving like an old man’s, to the chair set for him under the tarpaulin next to Miss Susan Brewer.

  Dapifer set another for Makepeace on her opposite side, then strolled away unthanked.

  Susan Brewer began a pleasant but determined questioning.

  Aaron’s replies were revealing. ‘It flares up from time to time but is much improved now, I thankee. An Indian attack, best left unmentioned . . . and you, Miss Brewer, why do you go to England? . . . Oh, a mere actor off to seek my fortune in London’s theatres.’

  Makepeace’s horror at the tarring and feathering had overlooked its humiliation yet, obviously, Aaron felt it deeply. Since the men who’d perpetrated it had been attired as Mohucks, he wasn’t departing far from the truth in calling it an Indian attack. Oh, bless him. But an actor? In London?

  One of the Rev Mather’s better sermons had pronounced actors as ‘the very filth and off-scouring, the very lewdest, basest, worst and most perniciously evil sons of men’. While Makepeace didn’t go as far as that, her Puritan upbringing had nevertheless trained her to regard the theatre as a form of whoring and she had prayed that Aaron’s fascination with it would be something he’d grow out of, like pimples.

  For a second, his glance met hers with a challenge.

  She nodded back. If that particular ambition returned the spark to her brother’s eye, then amen to it. Boston prejudices must remain in Boston. But she was overcome by a wave of depression; she controlled nothing any more. She was being sailed to a country she didn’t know, didn’t like and had little idea what to do when she got to it.

  Furthermore, she had fallen out of love
with the man taking her there. She didn’t blame him but, innocent or not, Dapifer was the cause of her disasters.

  It was as if the cataclysm that had overwhelmed her household had swept away with it such feeling as she’d once had for him. Mainly, she wasn’t used to powerlessness; she had become his dependent and resented it.

  He needn’t think I’ll be his doxy just because there ain’t any other living for me.

  Being Makepeace, she had to tell him so right away. She found him in the stern, gloomily watching the ship’s wake cream away behind them.

  ‘Thank you for what you’ve done for Aaron, Sir Philip,’ she said, ‘but matters ain’t changed. I still won’t be your mistress.’

  She had his hundred guineas. Maybe she’d buy an English tavern with it, get her own boat, trade with the natives, something.

  He seemed reluctant to leave his contemplation of the waters, but eventually looked at her. ‘Mistress Burke, believe me, the situation you mention will not arise.’

  ‘It won’t?’

  He shook his head. ‘I am your servant in everything. That particular offer, however, has been withdrawn.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s all right then.’

  He turned to watch her walk away. She’d bound her hair in a piece of sailcloth and topped it with a ragged straw hat more suitable for keeping flies out of a horse’s eyes. Small wonder Susan Brewer had taken her for one of the lower orders. Well, so she was.

  Dapifer shook his head. He’d suffered his own revulsion. Her hostility to him since coming aboard had been unreasonable, not to say unattractive. God dammit, he hadn’t asked to be thrown into her bloody harbour. Nor that she should fish him out of it. Yet here he was, burdened with sole responsibility for a bad-tempered American scarecrow and her entire entourage.

  He returned to watching the wake. He’d set her up, of course, and the family, but it was a relief to find she was holding him to nothing more.

  Betty, who was plucking a chicken while sitting on the hen coop—she’d formed an alliance with the ship’s cook—saw them part, two people leeched by life’s unkindness. Give ’em time, she thought.

  Aaron, tired from his first outing, had been taken back to his cabin by Robert. Makepeace sat herself down in his chair. Miss Brewer turned to her. ‘I hope you will forgive that I mistook you, Miss Burke. Auntie always says, “Susan, your tongue’s too long for your teeth,” and I didn’t know ’til Sir Pip told me you’d lost all your clothes in the riots but I said to your brother, “Sakes, she can borrow some of mine, I’ve brought plenty.” A proper cloth market Auntie calls me . . .’

  ‘Mistook me for what?’

  Susan reddened. ‘Well . . . but Sir Pip says you’re a businesswoman, like Auntie, and it’s terrible that these savages can reduce such to rags.’

  Susan Brewer’s own rags were of glossy white lace-edged lutestring over which rampaged pink and green flowers. She could have attracted butterflies. She had certainly attracted Aaron; Makepeace had seen her brother reanimated by the girl’s interest.

  Makepeace glanced down. Her clothes had been laundered and her skirt darned by Betty; the hat she had borrowed from Boocock, Dr Baines’s assistant, to keep the sun off. In Puritan eyes she fulfilled the requirement of cleanliness and decency. In Miss Brewer’s she was a fright. And another thing—with only a difference of perhaps four years in their ages, this miss beside her was addressing her as if she were a much older woman.

  Abruptly she excused herself and went off in search of a looking-glass. A pocket mirror was supplied eventually by the invaluable Robert. She took it to the cabin she now shared with Betty and Josh, a space known as the ‘coach’ that led out onto the quarterdeck. Putting herself full in a shaft of afternoon sun coming through the door, she held the thing up.

  After a while she put it down again. Of course he’d been relieved by her rejection. Amazing he hadn’t run away and hid when he saw her coming. The way she looked now would stop clocks.

  She was suddenly frightened. Aaron didn’t need her any more, Betty had found congenial company in the galley. Young Josh had been adopted as ship’s mascot and was being introduced to the nautical mysteries of rigging-climbing and swinging the lead. Tantaquidgeon had become a living and appreciated figurehead, spending his hours in the prow contentedly watching the curl of the Percy’s bow wave.

  Unwanted by anyone, what was she? Ballast. Ageing ballast.

  Before dinner that evening there was a tap on Miss Brewer’s cabin door . . .

  ‘Aagh. Are you sure?’

  ‘Certain,’ puffed Susan, her foot on Makepeace’s backside. ‘I can’t think how you went without one.’

  ‘Wore my, ow, mother’s. Can’t breathe.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to.’

  Miss Susan had accepted the challenge with the enthusiasm of a matador out to win a bull’s ears. Makepeace had been immersed in a canvas bath of tepid sea water, scrubbed with soap and unguents and her head held out of the porthole to dry her hair. Now, with a nineteen-inch waist and her arms crossed in embarrassment over her breasts, she was hooped into a contraption like a fruit cage while Susan Brewer considered the next stage. ‘It should be green of course but it’ll have to be blue. Green curdles my complexion and I shun it like the plague. Now then—this blue or this blue?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘That, if I may say so, is your error; you should care.’ Susan was circling. ‘Look at you: Aphrodite up from the waves of wherever. Such hair . . . sakes, I have to wear curlpapers for a month for that effect and you’ve hidden it like a miser.’

  The dress decided on was of deep blue and its décolletage even deeper. ‘You sure?’ Makepeace asked again, hoisting the front so that her feet nearly left the ground.

  ‘Trust me.’ Susan yanked it down. ‘Are we or are we not out to catch the eye of a certain gentleman?’

  ‘We ain’t.’

  But Miss Brewer wasn’t listening. ‘Only a little set of the cap should do it, I think, the good doctor already spends his time singing your praises, it’ll but take a—’

  ‘Dr Baines?’

  ‘Certainly Dr Baines. Sir Pip apart, he’s the most eligible creature on board, your dear brother being too young and in any case your brother and he was telling me only last night he intends to find a wife and settle on land as soon as may be and brilliant as he is he’ll soon have patients a-flocking . . .’

  Makepeace was distressed; Alexander Baines was an angel of healing from Heaven but, for her, he had the sexual appeal of a bottle of physick. And she prayed, for his sake, that he did not love her.

  She noticed that Susan did not suggest she set her cap at Dapifer—an omission she found irritating. Presumably he was excluded as too aristocratic for her or because Miss Brewer was setting her own pretty headgear at him. Makepeace, having no idea of the gradations of class above her own, instantly decided she was being laced into a bodice by a suitable candidate for the post of the second Lady Dapifer and felt a constriction round her ribs that wasn’t caused by the corset.

  Good luck to you, she thought, grimly. It was impossible to dislike the kindly Miss Brewer, but at that moment Makepeace was seized by an inclination to knock her down.

  They had a difference of opinion over the matter of rouge. ‘I ain’t trying for a husband,’ Makepeace insisted, appalled.

  ‘Every woman’s trying for a husband,’ Miss Brewer said, dabbing anyway.

  ‘Your auntie’s done well enough single.’ Elizabeth Murray had famously attracted—and refused—proposals from male Bostonians assured that both she and her successful business needed the guiding hand of a man.

  ‘Auntie’s a widow, which is the proper thing to be. Now the cap.’ This was a mere headband of lace that allowed Susan to trick Makepeace’s curls around it in what she called ‘wink-a-peeps’.

  ‘There.’ Miss Brewer handed over a fan. ‘Ye-es, if we could walk a little less like we were bringing the cows home, we should blow this boat out of the
water.’

  Arm-in-arm they stepped out of the cabin onto the deck and Captain Strang, emerging from his, rushed to open the door of the wardroom for them, just beating his lieutenant to it. The purser, who had formerly eaten with the non-commissioned officers, changed his usual practice and followed them in.

  Makepeace found the meal unnerving. Her opinion on his ship was sought by Captain Strang, on the weather by Lieutenant Horrocks. Was she comfortable in her cabin? Was her poor brother—Aaron was dining in bed—on the mend? Her plate was piled higher with pickled beef than anyone else’s by a steward who tenderly apologized for the lack of fresh vegetables. Dr Baines directed the conversation so that it could display his familiarity with her.

  This, then, was what curls and a dab of rouge could do; men responded to the wrapping, not the content.

  Only Dapifer, his attention monopolized by Susan Brewer, remained aloof, though Dr Baines’s tenderness did not escape his attention. He thought: Wants her, does he? And an excellent match for them both. Dammit.

  The warm, indigo current of the Gulf Stream pushed the Lord Percy lazily eastwards towards the coast of Europe and the heat followed it. At night the sea was illuminated by phosphorescence, sometimes glittering with a thousand pinpricks of light, like a swarm of fireflies, sometimes causing accompanying fish and dolphins to be clothed in it so that they appeared as racing flames through the water.

  It was a phenomenon of such beauty that the inclination was to stay late on deck to watch it but Makepeace would sense Dr Baines, moved by its romance, edging towards her with a proposal on his lips and was forced back to her cabin before he could make it.

  ‘But he’s so worthy, poor man,’ protested Susan Brewer.

  ‘You have him then.’

  Susan shook her head in apparent sadness. ‘In Dr Baines’s opinion and therefore, of course, that of the Lord God, I am too giddy.’