A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

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Название A Catch of Consequence
Автор произведения Diana Norman
Жанр Историческая литература
Серия
Издательство Историческая литература
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007404551



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      A CATCH OF CONSEQUENCE

      Diana Norman

       COPYRIGHT

      HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2002

      Copyright © Diana Norman 2001

      Diana Norman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007105441

      Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007404551

      Version: 2016-02-09

       DEDICATION

      To my cousin, Aeron

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Chapter Seven

       Book Two: London

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Book Three: Newcastle

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Author’s Note

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

BOOK ONE Boston

       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