A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

      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