Kitabı oxu: «A Catch of Consequence»

CHAPTER ONE

The woman feathering her boat round the bend of the Charles River into Massachusetts Bay that early morning on August 15 1765 was about to save someone’s life and change her own.

Later on, in rare retrospective moments, she would ask herself: ‘What if I hadn’t?’ A useless question, suggesting there’d been a decision – and she made no decision; Makepeace Burke could no more watch a fellow-creature drown without trying to help it than she could stop the wind blowing.

That’s not to imply that Makepeace was a gentle woman. She wasn’t; she just hated waste, and unnecessary death was wasteful.

If her boat was dirty, she was clean in a scrubbed sort of way, or as clean as you can be when you’ve been hauling in lobster-pots since before dawn. A virgin who, by 1765 American standards, was like her boat in being ancient. At twenty-four years old, she should have been married with children but she’d been both unfortunate and picky.

The gangly figure in faded brown cotton, her skirt pinned up washerwoman style, a leather cap tied tightly under her chin to hide her hair giving her the look of an insect, propelled her boat with the professionalism of a sea-dog. Bobbing along in the sunlight, from far off she resembled a curiously shaped bit of wrack, a piece off a figurehead, something saltily wooden, astray on the glistening water.

About to have her life changed.

To Makepeace Burke, emerging into the great harbour’s North End, the damage that she saw had been done to her waterfront overnight was change enough. Some of the damage was old and caused by the English: empty warehouses, wharves sprouting weed. Boats that had once been proud, respected smugglers delivering cheap sugar to willing Bostonian customers lay demasted and upended on the hards, killed by the newly efficient, newly incorruptible British Customs and Excise. Only sugar from the English West Indies, the expensive English West Indies, could be imported now – and that was unloaded further down.

But last night, in protest against the English and their shite Stamp Tax and Navigations Acts, Boston had gone on the rampage and done damage in return. Hadn’t they, by Hokey! Even from this distance, she could see the depredations to the Custom House. The bonfires were dying down but the smitch of burning was everywhere, even out here on the water. Papers that had drifted off the bonfires spewed along the quay. And the new warehouse Stamp Master Oliver was having built was now no more than a pile of broken timbers. Serve the old bugger right.

Makepeace Burke disapproved of rioting – not good for trade – but she disapproved of the Stamp Tax, which had been the cause of last night’s mayhem, a mighty sight more. The tax fell heavily on taverns and she was a tavern-keeper.

The August heat had been near suffocating for a month, like a volcano grumbling under the town in sympathy with the discontent of its inhabitants. Last night – what triggered it nobody knew – the cone blew off and out rushed lava of white-heat fury against unemployment, the government, its colonial representatives, its damn taxes and interference, its press gangs and its assumption that Bostonians were going to take all these things lying down.

Customs officials, known English-loving Tories, lawmen: all had been hunted through the streets by Sons of Liberty smeared with war-paint and howling like Mohawks, bless ’em. The British garrison had too few soldiers to put down a ladies’ sewing circle, let alone an outbreak of these proportions. The town had been streaked with flame and pounded with the beat of drums until it seemed that light was noise and noise was light.

If that was riot, Lord knew what revolution’d be. Well, maybe it was revolution. Sam Adams was preaching something suspiciously along the lines of it being time Americans threw off the English yoke. Didn’t put it like that but every good Bostonian knew what he meant.

Customers had run into the Roaring Meg to pass on the latest news, down a glass of celebratory flip and rush off again to join in. ‘Don’t you go outside, now, ’Peace,’ Zeobab Fairlee’d said. ‘The Sons is lickered up. Got at a few cellars. No place for a respectable female in them streets tonight.’

So she’d stayed with her tavern in case they tried to get at her liquor stock – Sons of Liberty or no Sons of Liberty, she wasn’t in the business of free drinks – but, come the revolution, she’d get her father’s musket down from the roof and march against the British with the best of ’em. She’d give ’em taxes.

She liked these lovely mornings, collecting lobster-pots. Peaceful. Hot already. Further out, towards the islands, gulls floated against a sky like blue enamel. Two tundra swans passed low over her head as the squadron came from inland, enormous wings held bowed and still, outstretched feet ready to furrow the water, heavy as pieces of masonry hurtling through the air. They were settling, fluting to each other, their size dwarfing the rafts of snow geese and oldsquaws further out.

More peaceful than ever this morning. Usually, down at the business end of the harbour, angular heron-like cranes dipped and straightened with bulging nets in their bills as they emptied incoming merchantmen and filled the holds of those getting ready to set out. Men with bales on their heads were to be seen filing up some gangplanks and down others, looking at a distance like infestations of marcher ants. Sails were taken in, others hoisted, all flapping like pinioned birds; greetings, commands, farewells – sounds of human busyness floating across the water.

But not today. Captains, worried for their cargo, had stood their ships further off where the Sons of Liberty couldn’t board them. They were out in the bay now, like a huddle of white-shawled grannies, until it was safe to come back. Deserted quays waited for them, sticking out into the harbour in protruding, wooden teeth.

She had to feather so that, by standing in the prow, she could negotiate between the detritus that had been thrown in the water during the night: pieces of door, window-frames, the lid of a desk, all of it a hazard to little boats like hers as it was carried out to sea on a combination of current and ebb-tide. A waste. Later on, she’d get Tantaquidgeon to see what he could salvage. Dry it out for tinder.

Lord, it was quiet. As she passed Copp’s Quay, a couple of painted figures that had been lying on it staggered to their feet and slunk off like dogs who knew they’d been naughty. Don’t let the magistrates get thee, boys. From the look of ’em, she’d guess their heads were punishment enough.

And there was Tantaquidgeon waiting for her as he always did, standing on the Roaring Meg’s gimcrack jetty and staring out to sea like the statue of a befeathered Roman emperor.

She was heading towards him when a prickle of movement a hundred yards further on caught her eye. A knot of men on Fish Quay, three, maybe four – it was difficult to see against the reflection of sun on water – a suggestion of furious energy and striped faces. Not all the rioters had gone home to sleep it off, then. No sound from them that she could hear above the call of the swans. One was standing still, keeping watch, while the others threw objects into the harbour as if they hadn’t slaked their revenge even yet. Something heavy had just splashed in, something else now – a hat. Waste again.

With her free hand she shaded her eyes to see who the men were. The one acting lookout was Sugar Bart, recognizable at once by the crutch that did duty for his missing leg. Would be. Always in trouble against authority, Bart.

Mackintosh? What was that shite doing this far north of town? No mistaking his swagbelly, painted or not; she’d seen it too often parading at the head of the South End mob on Guy Fawkes’ Nights. Mackintosh was leader of one of the gangs which took flaming papal effigies and trouble onto Boston’s streets every November 5, indulging in bloody and, sometimes, mortal battles with each other to show their enthusiasm for the Protestant cause.

Couldn’t make out the others.

Sugar Bart had seen her; she saw him stiffen and point. She’d be a blur against the sun. She waved to show she was a friend. A good taverner kept in with her customers, whatever hell they were raising.

Now what? She looked behind her. From her vantage point, Makepeace saw what Sugar Bart couldn’t.

A patrol of armed redcoats from North End fort was marching down the wharves towards Fish Quay, heading for Bart and the Mohawks who, because of the overhang of warehouses, couldn’t see it. The stamp of military boots came crisply to her, carried by the water, but Bart wouldn’t hear that either.

Makepeace put two fingers in her mouth and whistled a warning. Bart looked. She nodded towards the redcoats – and saw their muskets being levelled at her. She whistled on: With a tow, row, row, row, row, row for the British Grenadiers – signal to Bart there were soldiers coming, desperate advice to the soldiers she was a loyal subject of King George III, the shite.

One of the soldiers advanced to the edge of the wharf, shading his eyes. The sun was in its stride now, fierce enough to bleach colour and form out of the view of those looking into it. ‘You. Seen anybody?’

She cupped her ear, wasting time. The Mohawks had legged it; Bart was hobbling off.

‘Seen. Any. Body, you deaf bitch.’

She held up one of her pots. ‘Lobster. Lob. Ster.’ And may you boil in the saucepan with him, thee red-backed bastard.

The soldier gave up, the patrol resumed its advance down the waterfront and there was no time for reaction because, whilst dealing with the problem, she had seen a body. An upturned table with broken legs entangled with rags, part of last night’s wreckage, twirled on the current. From the corner of her eye she’d noticed it separate, a piece slipping off from the rest. And the new bit of flotsam was a man.

Idly, in case the soldiers turned round, she feathered the boat to where the current would bring the fellow near it. He was alive; a hand moved before he was carried under.

She kept whistling, for continuity’s sake in case the redcoats could still hear her, and to let the man know he didn’t have far to swim for rescue.

Jehosophat, wouldn’t you know it? The fool couldn’t swim. He was being sucked under again, only his clawing fingers visible above the surface.

Keep feathering? It was slower than rowing but to take the oar from the bow, find the other and put both in the rowlocks would lose minutes the drowning man couldn’t spare.

Makepeace kept standing, waggling her oar through the water like a giant mixing spoon with a friction that took the skin off even her toughened hands. Passing her jetty, where Tantaquidgeon still contemplated the horizon, she shouted: ‘Git, will you?’ angling her head towards Fish Quay, and saw him start off in the right direction in his infuriatingly unhurried stride.

The current, fierce at this corner of the harbour, was against her and taking the drownder further and further away from the quay. As he rolled, she saw a face white as cod, eyes closed in acceptance of death. Frantically, she feathered harder and closed the gap between them. She yelled: ‘Hold up,’ unshipped her oar and ran it forward under his left arm, which rose aimlessly to let it slip. She lunged again, this time towards the right arm and the blade was caught between waistcoat and sleeve, held by the pressure of water.

With all her weight, Makepeace pressed down on her end of the oar so that the man’s upper body came up, lopsided like a hunchback, hair trailing across the surface, nose and mouth blessedly free.

There was never anything so heavy but if she let go she’d lose him. The boat tilted wickedly. The body began to swing astern where, if it got behind the boat, it would wriggle itself off the oar. She let the blade dip and then, with a pull that shot pain up her back, jerked her end of the oar into the starboard rowlock. Even so, to bear down against the body’s weight demanded almost more than she had.

She cricked her neck, looking for help. Tantaquidgeon was on the quay. ‘Boathook. Fast.’ He strolled off to find one. They could drift to Portugal by the time he got back. Nothing to be done; she couldn’t control the boat and keep this bastard out of the water at the same time; he wasn’t helping, just hung there, dipping under, coming up, eyes half closed. ‘Wake up,’ she screamed, ‘wake up, you crap-hound! D’ye want to die?’

The shout jagged through nothingness to the last cognitive area of the drowning man’s brain and found a flicker of response.

Not actively die, he thought, and then: But life’s not worthy of effort either. His neck hurt. Plummets of glaucous water swam with the image of two naked bodies writhing on a floor, neither of them his own. Wounded long before the sea decided to kill him, he was slowing to languor. Not worth effort, not worth it.

But there were rises when he felt warmth on the back of his head and shoulders and caught glimpses of lacquer-blue and was disturbed by an appalling voice chiselling him awake.

As always when frightened, Makepeace became angry. Fury helped her haul in the oar until the body was against the boat starboard, a process that dipped it under again.

Holding the blade with one hand – buggered if she’d lose a good oar – she grabbed at the man and hooked his jacket over the rowlock so that he hung from it, head lolling. ‘An’ you stay there.’

Somehow, keeping her weight to port, she feathered back to where Tantaquidgeon was kneeling, boathook in hand. She caught the hook’s business end and, none too gently, shoved it under the man’s coat which wrinkled up to the shoulders. She directed it as the Red Indian pulled. A long, wet body slithered onto her lobster-pots and flopped among waving, reaching claws.

Then she sat down.

After a while she stirred herself and, wincing, dragged at the man’s coat so that he was turned onto his back. Using her foot – it was less painful to her back than bending down to it – she nudged his face to one side then pressed her boot on his bread-basket, released it, pressed again. She pedalled away, as if at an organ, until water began dribbling onto the lobsters from the man’s mouth and he coughed.

Makepeace Burke and her catch looked at each other.

Through a wavering veil of nausea, the man saw bone and freckles, a pair of concerned and ferocious blue eyes, all framed by hair the colour of flames that had escaped from its cap and which, with the sun shining through it, made an aureole. It was the head of a saint remembered from a Flemish altarpiece.

Makepeace saw a bloody nuisance.

Here was not, as she’d thought, a lickered Son of Liberty who’d whooped himself into the harbour; the Sons didn’t sport clothes that, even when soaked and seaweeded, shouted wealth. Here was gentry.

‘Who are you? What happened to you?’

He really couldn’t be bothered to remember, let alone answer. He managed: ‘Does it matter?’

‘Matters to me.’ She’d expended a lot of effort.

Long time, thought Sir Philip Dapifer. Long time since I mattered to a woman. He drifted off, oddly consoled, into unconsciousness.

Makepeace sat and considered, unaware she was still whistling ‘The British Grenadiers’ or that her foot tapped in time to it on the drownder’s chest.

If the bugger hadn’t fallen, he’d been pushed and she’d seen it done. Watched by Bart and others, Mackintosh had thrown the poor bastard in like he was rotten fish. And left him – admitted, they couldn’t dally – not caring if he drowned or floated. And worked on him first from the look of him – his face might be the moon fallen into her boat, so livid and bruised it was.

So he was enemy. Customs, excise, taxman, Tory, British-bootlicker: whatever he was she’d rescued him. ‘Should’ve let you drown,’ she grumbled at him, knowing she could not.

What to do? If she handed him over to the authorities right now he could identify his attackers – and say what you like about Mouse Mackintosh and Sugar Bart, they were at least patriots and she’d be damned if she helped some Tory taxman get ’em hanged. ‘Ought to throw you back by rights.’

Well, staying here would surely solve the problem because, from the look of the drownder, he was on his last gasp. And that, thought Makepeace Burke, was pure foolishness – a waste of the trouble she’d taken in the first place.

She looked up at the quay and jerked her head at Tantaquidgeon to get into the boat. ‘The Meg. You row.’

She covered the body at her feet with the tarpaulin to keep it warm. There was still nobody about. What had been an event of hours for her had been minutes of everybody else’s time. Boston kept the sleep of the hungover. Tantaquidgeon’s white eagle feather bobbed hypnotically back and forth as he rowed past the slipways on which stood anchors as big as whale-flukes, past the rope-walks, the cranes, the ships’ chandlers, the warehouses and boatyards, all parts of the machine that on normal days serviced the busiest port in America.

Behind him, appearing to stand on an island, though actually on a promontory, was their destination, the Roaring Meg, two storeys of weatherbeaten boarding. Ramshackle maybe, like the rest of the waterfront, but an integral piece of the great ribbon of function which faced the Atlantic and provided incoming ships with their first view of the town. Here was Boston proper, not in its generous parks nor its wide, tree-lined streets and white-spired churches, not in its market places, bourses and pillared houses, but in an untidy, salt-stained, invigorating seaboard generating the wealth that sustained all the rest.

Makepeace was proud that her tavern was part of it. But it was a matter of shame to her, as it was to all right-thinking citizens, that there was yet another Boston. In the maze of lanes behind the waterfront, out of sight like a segment of rot in an otherwise healthy-looking apple, lay gin houses and whoreshops providing different services, where the crab-like click of dice and a tideline of painted women waited for sinners in darkness of soul.

The city fathers attempted to cleanse the area from time to time, but prevent it washing back they could not, nor did they entirely wish to; they were not only the town’s moral guardians but entrepreneurs in a port dependent on trade – and sailors from visiting merchant ships didn’t necessarily seek after righteousness.

A voyager disembarking at Boston’s North End had a choice. If he were heedless of his purse, his health and his hope of salvation, he would disappear into those sinning, acrid alleys. If he were wise, he would make for the coastal beacon that was the Roaring Meg, with its smell of good cooking and hum of decent conversation.

In winter, when light from whale-oil lamps shone through its bottle-bottomed windows to be diffused in snow, the Roaring Meg resembled a Renaissance nativity scene, a sacred stable. Named after the noisy stream that ran alongside it before entering the sea, the tavern deserved its halo. Makepeace kept it free of the Devil’s flotsam by perpetual moral sweeping, brushing harlots and their touts from her doorstep, plumping up idlers like pillows, ejecting bullies, vomiters, debtors and those who took the Lord’s name in vain.

A little stone bridge led over the stream to its street door above which was displayed the information that John L. Burke was licensed to dispense ales and spirituous liquors. John L. Burke was in the grave these three years, having energetically drunk himself into it, but a man’s name above the door inspired more confidence in strangers than would a woman’s, so Makepeace kept it there.

North End magistrates conspired in the fiction and, if asked, would say that the licensee was actually Makepeace’s young brother Aaron, but they knew, as did everybody else, who was the Roaring Meg’s true landlord and privately acknowledged the fact. ‘Makepeace Burke,’ one justice had been heard to say, ‘is a crisp woman.’

An accolade, ‘crisp’: American recognition of efficiency and good Puritan hard-headedness. Makepeace took pride in it but knew how hard it had been to win and how easily it could be taken away. One word of scandal or complaint to the magistrates, one impatient creditor, one more storm to hole the Meg’s creaking roof – there was no money with which to replace it – and she would lose her vaunted crispness and her tavern.

And now that she had a calm moment in which to consider the consequences of what she was doing – in Puritan society wise women always considered consequences – suspicion grew that she might be jeopardizing both merely by harbouring the drownder under her roof.

The Cut, the lane at the sea end of which the Meg stood, was as respectable as the tavern itself, a narrow row of houses that passed through the surrounding wickedness like a file of soldiers in hostile Indian forest. Eyes at its windows watched for any falter in its rigid morality and one pair in particular was trained on herself.

‘Makepeace Burke’s picked up a man.’ She could hear the voices now. And, because the Cut was as patriotic as it was respectable, she could also hear the addendum: ‘A Tory man.’

It hadn’t been easy, a woman running a tavern. One of the proudest moments of her life – and the most profitable – had been when, with the imposition of the Stamp Tax, the local lodge of the Sons of Liberty had chosen the Roaring Meg for their secret meetings. Good men most of ’em, like nearly all her customers, but, again like her other regulars, driven to desperation by an unemployment that was the direct result of British government policy.

And among those very Sons was at least one of the group that had thrown the drownder into the harbour. Mighty pleased they’d be to find Makepeace Burke succouring the enemy. An enemy, what’s more, who’d report them to the magistrates quicker’n ninepence.

‘Who done it on us?’ Sugar Bart would ask, as he climbed the gallows’ steps.

‘Makepeace Burke,’ the Watch would reply.

After that, no decent patriot – and all her clientele were patriots – would set foot in the Roaring Meg again.

Oh no, she couldn’t trust the Watch not to give her away; apart from being as big a collection of incompetents as ever let a rogue slip through its fingers, it was hand in glove with the Sons of Liberty. Last night, when Governor Bernard had called on the Watch to drum the alarm, he’d discovered that its men had joined the mob and were happily destroying property with the rest.

The nearer she got to her tavern, the more perturbed Makepeace became. ‘Lord, Lord,’ she prayed out loud, ‘I did my Christian duty and saved this soul; ain’t there to be no reward?’

Like most Boston Puritans, Makepeace had a pragmatic relationship with the Lord, regarding Him as a celestial managing director and herself as a valued worker in His company. Until now she’d found no conflict between Christianity and good business. She obeyed the Commandments, most of ’em, and expected benefits and an eternal pension in return.

And the Lord answered her plea this bright and hot August morning by skimming the last word of it across the surface of His waters until it hit a wharf wall and bounced it back at her in an echo: Reward, reward.

Receiving it, Makepeace became momentarily beautiful because she smiled, a rare thing with her, showing exquisitely white teeth with one crooked canine that emphasized the perfection of the others.

‘You surely can hand it to the Lord,’ she told Tantaquidgeon. ‘He got brains.’

The drownder was in her debt. There was no greater gift than that of life – and she’d just given his back to him. In return, he could reward her with a promise of silence. Least he could do.

She looked down fondly at the richly clad bundle by her feet. ‘And maybe some cash with it,’ she said.

Having settled on a conclusion she’d actually reached at the moment the drownder opened his eyes, she felt better; she was a woman who liked a business motive.

Also she was intrigued – more than that, involved – by the man.

As someone who’d fought for survival all her life, Makepeace was affronted by apathy. Never having accepted defeat herself, this drownder’s ‘Does it matter?’ had excited her contempt but also her curiosity and pity. Look at him: fine boots – well, he’d lost one but the other was excellent leather; gold lacing on his cuffs. A man possessed of money and, therefore, every happiness. So why was he uncaring about his fate?

The boat bumped gently against the Meg’s tottering jetty. Makepeace looked around with a surreptitiousness that would have attracted attention had there been onlookers to see it.

Bending low, she climbed the steps and looked into the tap-room. Nobody there. She went through and opened the front door to peer into the Cut for signs of activity. Nothing again.

She returned to the boat and told Tantaquidgeon all was clear. She threaded her lobster-pots together and dragged them up and through the sea entrance to her tavern with Tantaquidgeon behind her, the tarpaulined Englishman draped over his forearms like laundry.