A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

think you should come to England with me,’ he said.

      ‘What for?’

      ‘You know what for.’ Her own appalling honesty deserved better than the taffeta phrases he used on other women. After all, he thought, when he’d scrupled at making her his mistress he hadn’t known how important she’d become to him, nor what disaster his presence would bring to her life in Boston.

      ‘A kept woman?’

      ‘It’s about time somebody kept you,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think marriage to Captain Busgutt is going to come off.’

      ‘Holy Hokey,’ she said, ‘a kept woman.’ It took her breath away. If Jack Greenleaf or one of the Baler brothers had made the suggestion, she’d have slapped his face. That this man, who set her blood fizzing, had made it was, in his terms, the greatest compliment he could pay her. He wanted her.

      Makepeace was no democrat; she believed in justice, but the precept that men, much less women, were equal one to another outside of Heaven was not one she’d ever heard seriously voiced – nor would she have believed it if she had. That he could marry her didn’t occur to Makepeace any more than it occurred to Dapifer. As it was, she understood this offer from a scion of the ruling class to be Olympian; she’d cherish it for the rest of her life.

      But she’d be damned if she accepted it. Not from prudery; the Puritan corseting of years had been shaken loose during the last two days. If, earlier, when they’d kissed, they’d been alone in the house, she would have let him take her, whimpered for him to take her, copulated with him on the floor like an animal in heat.

      That was one thing; to be kept was another. To be kept, by however exalted a protector, was prostitution. She thought better of herself – and him – than that.

      ‘I know you mean well—’ she began.

      ‘No, I don’t,’ he said.

      She almost smiled. ‘Wouldn’t be right. Got to keep my independence.’

      ‘Oh Jesus. Very well, I’ll set you up in the biggest inn in England, Betty, the boy, Aaron, the Indian, all of you. You can work until you drop. Just come with me.’ England would be a lonely place for him now.

      She’d felt England’s contempt for its colonials from three thousand miles away; she could imagine how it would treat the ignorant Yankee mistress of a favoured son, the derision she’d attract from his friends …

      ‘Wouldn’t they just love me,’ she said. Here, she was confident on her own territory; there, he’d be ashamed of her within the week.

      ‘I’ve got to go, Procrustes. Ffoulkes’s boy inherits the title, the lands – vultures will be gathering. Ffoulkes would expect me to look out for him.’

      ‘Then go,’ she said.

      ‘You realize you’re driving me back into the arms of Goody Saltonstall?’

      He was sitting on the doorway sill, elbows on knees, chin in hands, morose. Lord, she loved him. ‘I know,’ she said.

      The noise of riot from the town had become part of the night. It fretted nerves even while they’d become accustomed to it, occasionally breaking into a clash that had the effect of a curry-comb scraped over a wound, now and then pierced by a scream – always Aaron’s.

      She clutched at her head suddenly. ‘Where is he? Where d’you think he is?’

      He put his arm round her and felt the surface of her hair scorched and frizzy against his cheek; at some point during the fire she’d taken her cap off to beat at the flames.

      The moon was seeping colour now and hung like a huge, Chinese lantern over an empty sea.

      There was a grunt from Tantaquidgeon and they heard a call. It was nearer than the horn-blowing, howling, drumming component of the air, but not from the immediate vicinity. Somewhere in Cable Lane, perhaps. Clear, though.

      ‘Makepeace Burke.’

      High, fluting, strange, not human. Birdlike, as if the name issued with difficulty from a beak. So frightening that, when Makepeace opened her mouth to answer, she couldn’t make any sound.

      ‘Inside.’ Dapifer pushed her into the taproom, then Tantaquidgeon. He drew his sword. Betty hurried to shut the doors behind them. Robert came running in from the kitchen; the sailor sat up. For a moment they stayed where they were. The chirruping awoke ancient terrors of bird-headed things in shadow; it hung on the air and had no right to be there.

      From under its dust and cinders the grandmother clock whirred and began to chime five o’clock. In the blackness they waited for the strokes to die away. Dapifer opened the door to the Cut and stepped out. ‘What was that, corporal?’

      ‘Don’t know, sir. Can’t tell where it came from.’ The soldier had levelled his musket and was moving it in an arc that went from the slipway on his left and then right, down the silent lane.

      Dapifer crossed the bridge to join him. The brook behind him gurgled cleanly towards the sea which was beginning to reflect a pearl-grey suggestion of dawn. The overhanging roofs at the far end of the Cut formed an archway of light from a bonfire beyond it.

      Whatever it was, it came again.

      ‘Makepeace Burke.’

      The soldier’s musket swung in the direction of the alley that ran into the Cut further down. Dapifer touched his arm. ‘No shooting yet.’

      In the taproom Tantaquidgeon had begun a soft, incomprehensible chant. Robert was squeaking. Makepeace heard Betty hissing at him to hold steady. The sailor made an attempt at a joke. ‘He’ll be sorry when he’s sober, whoever he is.’

      Was it a man, or a woman? Or neither?

      ‘Here’s your brother, Makepeace Burke.’

      Somehow her legs walked her to the door and outside. Tantaquidgeon was behind her, still chanting, with a knife in his hand, and then Betty, gripping John L. Burke’s old blackthorn like a cudgel.

      The Cut was empty of everything except an impression that it was watching her; shadows in the corner of Cable Lane could have been people but if they were they didn’t move; open shutters had only blackness between them.

      She looked to the right; again, difficult to see but, yes, figures passing and repassing against the glow of a bonfire in the square beyond, carrying something on a rail, an effigy. As she squinted, trying to make them out, they tipped the rail so that the scarecrow they’d made slid off onto the ground.

      Gone now. The effigy made an untidy heap in the mouth of the Cut against the bonfire’s aureole.

      Dapifer was telling her to get back inside.

      Makepeace kept her eyes on the effigy. They’d made it of hay, untidily; there were bits sticking out all over it, black hay that gleamed when it caught the light. She watched it rise to its feet and start stumbling up the Cut. She didn’t move.

      The tarred and feathered thing was bowed so that the prickles along its back curved, like a hedgehog’s, and it zigzagged as it came, lumbering from one side of the lane to the other, mewing when it bumped into a wall.

      I must go to it, she thought, it’s blind. And stood there. She heard Betty scream and the soldier say: ‘Oh Christ, dear Christ.’

      In the end it was Tantaquidgeon who strode down the lane and carried Aaron home.

       CHAPTER SIX

      The landlady of the Roaring Meg, her brother and staff sailed for England aboard the Lord Percy on the evening tide.

      Dapifer, finding himself in charge, had reasoned that a surgeon on a ship, where tar was used extensively,