A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

hands.

      ‘I was passing. Thought I’d drop in.’ He’d seen the flames and made the rowers turn the boat round.

      Betty heaped the table with what food she could find and Makepeace added her largest jug filled with best Jamaican. One of the soldiers raised his beaker to Tantaquidgeon standing in the shadows. ‘Give him some rum an’ all, poor bastard. He’s worked hard enough tonight.’

      ‘No, and don’t you go givin’ him any.’ She was too weary to go into the explanation about Indians and spirituous liquor. ‘He drinks ale.’ The few occasions on which the unwary or malicious had plied Tantaquidgeon with rum had scarred the tavern as well as her memory.

      Dapifer took her into the taproom. ‘Don’t get them drunk either. When they’ve rested I want those sailors searching the Bay in case the boat that did this is still out there.’

      ‘What boat? Did what?’ In all the confusion and fear of the last hours, it hadn’t occurred to her that the fire had been deliberately started. The missiles she’d seen heading towards her, would always see, were too unearthly to connect with human agency; they were more the unfocused malevolence of Nature, pieces from the tail of a comet or a shooting star. But of course they were not. ‘Meteors,’ she said dully. ‘I thought they was meteors.’

      ‘There was a boat,’ he said. ‘We saw it as we turned back. It had some sort of catapult rigged up in it, like a siege engine.’

      ‘God have mercy.’ Only five years before Boston had been devastated by one of the worst town fires in colonial history but Sugar Bart – she knew it was Bart – had risked starting just such another in his haste to injure one small tavern and its keeper.

      She realized something else. ‘Aaron,’ she said. ‘Aaron.’ They’d got her brother, her little brother, the responsibility her mother had left her; she’d sent him out to face the enemy on his own.

      ‘We’ll look for him,’ said Dapifer gently, ‘but there’s no reason yet to believe he’s come to harm. Isn’t he a Harvard man? He could have gone to see friends in Cambridge.’

      Yes, he’d gone to Harvard – she’d slaved to send him there. No, he wouldn’t have gone tonight without letting her know.

      There was no comfort he could give her so he left her standing in the doorway looking rigidly out to sea as if by mind and body she could will her brother home, and went to organize the boat party. The hands of the sailor who’d fought the fire from the chimney were too burned to handle an oar without pain and he was replaced by one of the soldiers.

      However, as the men were clambering down into the boat from the stump of the jetty that remained, Makepeace reached for Dapifer’s sleeve. ‘Not you,’ she said, ‘I ain’t losing you both.’ She was shaking.

      One of the oarsmen said: ‘Best leave it to the navy, me lord. We’ll find the lad.’

      The sailor who was staying behind said: ‘And them fire-slinging bastards, you find them an’ all. Give ’em my regards, the fuckers.’

      When the boat had gone, the remaining soldier resumed his sentry duty, Betty cleared rubble off one of the settles for the sailor to sleep on and came to the doorway to inspect Makepeace; the soles of her feet were blistered where the slippers had burned through. ‘Want to lie down or fall down?’ Betty asked.

      ‘Leave me alone.’

      The cook shrugged and fetched a chair for Makepeace to sit in while she did some salving and bandaging. ‘Best talk to her,’ she said to Dapifer. ‘Keep her mind off it.’

      ‘Take some rest yourself,’ Dapifer said. ‘You deserve it.’

      Betty shook her head. ‘Reckon I’ll wait ’til he come home. His mamma, she said to me when she lay dyin’, she said: “You guard him, Bet, you guard ’em both.” An’ I’m guardin’.’ She went indoors and soon Dapifer heard the sound of a brush sweeping up debris.

      Tantaquidgeon established himself in the doorway behind them, his arms crossed, like a dowager chaperone.

      ‘What will you and your brother do about the Roaring Meg? Rebuild?’ Assume the boy was coming back in one piece, keep her diverted. He had to ask twice.

      She tried to concentrate. ‘Sell,’ she said. ‘We’ll move on.’

      ‘You’ll get your customers back,’ he reassured her. ‘One insane arsonist can’t stand for a community. The neighbourliness tonight was heartening. And people forget.’

      ‘Not round here.’ The insanity of Sugar Bart was not the issue; if he stood for anything it was for those who enjoyed hatred and joined a cause in order to find a conduit for it. It was Zeobab Fairlee who was spokesman for the common, decent Bostonians suffering under the British crown and it was Zeobab who’d condemned her. You let us down.

      So she had. While they’d been discussing protest, thinking they were in a safe house, she’d concealed a representative of the very rule against which they were to take action. Tonight an English soldier had stood outside her door, musket at the ready. Others had left here to occupy the town.

      To Zeobab and his ilk, reliability was everything, from the oak they shaped into ships’ hulls, to the cordage they twisted to face arctic ice and tropical hurricanes, and to the anchors they forged to hold off raging leeshores: all these things must be true or they were useless.

      Such men were as demanding of their leisure. They had to know their tavern wouldn’t bilk them and their blurted secrets would be kept. The trust between the Roaring Meg and its regulars had to be absolute and any betrayal of that trust on Makepeace’s part was to betray it absolutely. They wouldn’t drink here again.

       Ain’t that punishment enough, Lord? Don’t take Aaron as well.

      The Englishman was talking; the sound of his slow, rueful voice was a comfort but she could not attend to what he was saying.

      Dapifer was thinking of his wife and wondering how she would have borne the afflictions being visited on the woman by his side.

      ‘A spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree’… Makepeace Burke was being beaten if any woman was, and with every buffet showed more quality.

      Perhaps, he thought, it was Catty’s affliction that she had never loved anybody or anything sufficiently to be wounded by its loss. Had he loved her? He supposed so – until she’d run through his affection as carelessly as she wasted everything else and the only emotion she’d left to him was pity.

      ‘I should have divorced her in England,’ he said, ‘but the process is akin to a public hanging – I couldn’t inflict that on her, though, God knows, Ffoulkes urged me to. He was with me when we walked in on them both. I think he was more shocked than I was. Conyers, the man, was his friend as well as mine, you see. I could have told him Conyers was by no means the first. But obviously there was going to be no end unless I finished it. Better for everybody, I thought, if it were done discreetly three thousand miles away – and the Massachusetts courts are more pliable in these matters. She signed her consent readily enough; she’s set her sights on Conyers to be her next husband, poor devil. So Ffoulkes came with me to New England to give the necessary evidence – because I decided it was easier. Easier, by Christ.’

      Makepeace was aware he was stripping his soul for her sake; such a marriage was beyond her social experience, she couldn’t identify with it. But when it came to his friend, she could imagine what he imagined and hear, as he must be hearing, the voices of men calling on God to save them from an empty sea. She could hear Aaron’s.

      She turned to him. ‘A squall’s quick,’ she said. ‘Chaos, they say. No time to think, everything blotted out. It would’ve been all over for him in seconds.’

      It wasn’t much, all she could offer, but he was grateful for it; he’d been haunted by the image of Ffoulkes clinging to a wreck for hours, praying for help until his strength failed. There’d