A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

it out to a tavern wench?

      ‘What do you want to do that for?’ It was a rhetorical question, not asking for marital detail but expressing amazement, as if he’d confessed to piracy.

      Being a Puritan, for whom marriage was a civil contract, Makepeace did not regard divorce, like a Roman Catholic would do, as an abomination of the sacred, but she was nevertheless horrified; the only person she knew of who’d committed it was Henry VIII. She said: ‘Is she American then?’

      ‘No, she’s English. In England.’ He wished he hadn’t started this. ‘I wanted to save her the publicity.’

      She didn’t understand. Publicity, whatever that was when it was at home, couldn’t surely be as bad as losing a husband. ‘Does she know?’

      He smiled. ‘She knows. She knows that’s why I came. She agreed before I set out. I sent her a letter some days ago, to say the deed was done.’

      Makepeace thought: You been saved, Makepeace Burke. He’s nothing but a heathen, a Mohammedan, turn round three times and be rid of the poor lady. In disapproving silence, she picked up the bible and began reading.

      Dapifer thought: Whom was I actually sparing? Her or myself?

      Was it that he couldn’t have borne the public vindication of those who’d warned him not to marry her? A swathe through your fortune, they’d said, a scandal to your house, viciousness and charm handed down through the blood of dissolute generations.

      And they’d been right. If she’d ever stopped menstruating, which she hadn’t, he’d have had to count to be sure the child was his.

      His passion for her had cooled into guilt; her father had forced the match on her, though she’d seemed willing enough and, probably, would have been no happier with anyone else. But indulgence had infuriated her. ‘Why do you let me? You let me. Why don’t you beat me?’

       A spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree,

       The harder you beat them the better they be.

      He wasn’t the beating sort; she could only cure herself. Tormented, she’d cast about for more exquisite ways to hurt him until it lighted on the most obvious objects by which to turn the screw, his friends. Ffoulkes had refused her, Conyers had not.

      Pink-flushed, she’d smiled up at him from the carpet under the plunging body of Conyers when he and Ffoulkes had walked in on them, bringing down the tree of his remembered past, all his schooldays, Cambridge, with an ease that proved one of its roots had been rotten all along.

      She’d engineered it, he saw that now, waited until he was due home, deliberately confronting him with a situation that, this time, he couldn’t ignore. Even then, in the midst of disgust, he’d experienced pity at her craze for self-destruction.

      No, he’d had to spare her; the world shouldn’t know what she was. And in doing so he’d had to spare Conyers; a duel would have been the delight of the gossip rags. Instead, he’d carried his cuckold horns quietly to America to be rid of her, with Ffoulkes along to give evidence. Very gentlemanly, Dapifer, very noblesse oblige. You should have shot the bastard.

      Christ, it rankled. He hadn’t realized how much. My own bloody carpet. Was that, in essence, what had taken him along the waterfront last night? Throwing out a challenge to the low-life of Boston that he hadn’t issued to the adulterer?

      Introspection brought him full circle. No point in going round again, it merely increased his headache. And the silence from his companion was becoming too pointed to ignore. He was aware he’d lost ground with her and must make it up; whatever else, he was dependent on the female to get him out of this place without being lynched. After a moment, he said: ‘And what of you, Miss Burke? Is there a lover on the horizon?’

      She wanted to maintain her silence in order to show her disapproval. Then she thought: He’ll think nobody’s asked. So she said: ‘I’m handfasted. To Captain Busgutt.’ The name blasted the trumpet of the Lord into the quietness.

      ‘Busgutt,’ he said.

      She took a breath. ‘Captain Busgutt. Has his own ship. Merchantman, the Gideon. A hundred and eighty tons. With an improved mizen.’

      ‘And where is Captain Busgutt and his improved mizen now?’

      She said: ‘Sailed for England six months gone. Should’ve been back in three.’

      ‘I’m sorry.’

      ‘No need,’ she said. ‘The Lord has him in His keeping.’ It was more a matter, she sometimes thought, that the Lord was in Captain Busgutt’s keeping; drowning that thunderous, righteous man would be more than even God could be prepared to do. Captain Busgutt was alive, she was assured; there were a thousand things other than disaster to account for the delay. Even Goody Busgutt was not overly perturbed by it. Both of them expected that one of the ships from England, now anchored out in the Bay until it was safe to come in, might have news of the Gideon.

      She said, viciously: ‘It’s your fault I’m still waiting.’

      He blinked. ‘Never met the gentleman.’

      ‘Your government, then.’ She was wagging her finger now, reproving this representative of the tyrant while he was at her mercy. ‘Captain Busgutt must go back and forth to London ‘stead of trading where he’d wish – and the Atlantic passage is fraught with dangers.’

      ‘Ah,’ Dapifer said. ‘Carries enumerated goods, does he?’

      ‘Captain Busgutt,’ she said, ‘trades in tar and pitch.’ He always smelled of them, one of the things she liked about him; other men smelled of sweat. ‘And has to sell to the Royal Navy – at a lower price’n elsewhere.’

      ‘Not a smuggler, then, our Captain Busgutt?’ He seemed to relish the name; on his tongue it gained tonnage.

      So he’d learned something in New England. Indeed, Captain Busgutt had been prepared to sell his tar to the French, even when they’d been the mother country’s official enemy during the Seven Years’ War. As he’d said, ‘They are both sacrilegious peoples and the Lord does not distinguish between them.’ But the Royal Navy’s patrols had grown as vigilant as the shite Customs and Excise, and Captain Busgutt had bowed to the inevitable.

      ‘Captain Busgutt’s an honourable man,’ she said, shortly.

      ‘What age is Captain Busgutt?’ he asked.

      She picked up the bible again. None of his business.

      There was a mutter from the bed, as if its occupant were speaking to himself. ‘I’ll lay he’s an old man.’

      ‘Captain Busgutt,’ said Makepeace, clearly, ‘is fifty years old and a man of vigour, a lay preacher famed throughout the Bay for his zeal. Let me tell you, Mister Dapifer, Captain Busgutt’s sermon on the Lord’s scourging of the Amorites caused some in the congregation to cry out and others to fall down in a fit.’

      ‘Pity I missed it.’

      Makepeace had not encountered this form of ridicule before but she was getting its measure. This Dapifer would go back to his painted palaces to present Captain Busgutt and herself to his painted women as figures from a freak show. She knew one thing: Captain Busgutt was the better man.

      When she’d told Aaron that Captain Busgutt had asked for her, he’d said with the coarseness he’d picked up from his Tory friends, ‘That old pulpit-beater? He wants to bed a virgin, the hot old salt. Really, ‘Peace, you’re not bad-looking, you know. You can do better. What d’you want to marry him for?’

      The answer was that Captain Busgutt’s was the best offer. There’d been other suitors but none had been a good economic proposition and the only one who’d made her heart race a little had, in any case, drowned before she could come to a decision. She wasn’t getting any younger and keeping the Roaring Meg’s shaky roof over all their heads was