A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

resemblance emphasized on the walls where Betty’s shadow loomed and diminished like that of a beladled, shape-changing harpy whose sweat, sizzling onto the tiles when she bent over them, formed a contrapuntal percussion with the hit-hit of mutton fat falling into the dripping well and the shriek of another lobster meeting its end.

      ‘Do you know who he is?’ Aaron was excited.

      ‘Philip Dapifer,’ she said.

      ‘Sir Philip Dapifer. They reckon he’s a cousin of the Prime Minister. He’s staying at the Lieutenant-Governor’s house. There’s a search on – he ain’t been seen since before dawn.’

      ‘Hokey! Is there a reward for him?’

      ‘Don’t know, but they reckon if he ain’t found soon the British’ll send in troops.’

      ‘Holy, holy Hokey.’

      There was no time to pursue the matter; voices were calling from the taproom for service. With Aaron, she entered a wheeling dance between kitchen, casks and customers, carrying pots of ale, six at a time, balancing trays of trenchers like a plate-twirling acrobat, twisting past the barrel tables. The air grew thick with tobacco smoke, sweat and the aroma of lobscouse and became almost intolerably warm.

      Sugar Bart caught at her skirt as she went by. ‘Where’s Tantaquidgeon tonight?’

      ‘Poorly,’ she said. There it was again, that instinct he had. For all the heat, she felt chill.

      ‘Thought I couldn’t smell him.’

      Conversation was reaching thunder level, pierced by the hiss of flip irons plunging into tankards.

      And stopped.

      Sam Adams was in the doorway. He stood aside, smiling, threw out a conjuring hand and there, shambling, was the self-conscious figure of Andrew ‘Mouse’ Mackintosh.

      Little as North Enders had reason to love the South End and its gang, Mackintosh had become an instant and universal hero with them. The taproom erupted, boots stamped planking, fists hammered table-tops, cheering brought flakes of plaster from the ceiling. Even Makepeace was pleased; it was a bad precedent for Sons of Liberty to be in jail, and anyway, she loved Sam Adams.

      Everyone loved Sam Adams, Whig Boston’s favourite son, who’d run through his own and his father’s money – mainly through mismanagement and generosity – who could spout Greek and Latin but preferred the speech of common Bostonians and the conversation of cordwainers, wharfingers and sailors, and who frequented their taverns talking of Liberty as if she were sitting on his knee.

      Ludicrously, in the election before last he’d been voted in as a tax collector, a job for which he was unfitted and at which he’d failed so badly – mainly because he was sorry for the taxed poor – that there’d been a serious shortfall in his accounts. The authorities had wanted him summoned for peculation but, since everybody else knew he hadn’t collected the taxes in the first place, he’d been voted in again.

      He marched to the carver Makepeace always kept for him by the grate, his arm round Mackintosh’s shoulders, shouting for ‘a platter of my Betty’s lobscouse’.

      ‘How’d ye do it, Sam? How’d ye get Mouse out?’

      Aaron took his hat, Betty came tilting from the kitchen with his food, Makepeace tied a napkin tenderly round his neck – though Lord knew his shirt-front was hardly worth saving – and, less willingly, offered the same service to Mackintosh. As she did it, she saw one of his hands had a grubby bandage that disappeared up his sleeve and seeped blood. ‘You hurt, Mr Mackintosh?’

      ‘Rat bit me.’ It was a squeak. Large as he was, Andrew Mackintosh’s voice was so high that when he spoke cats looked up with interest.

      An English rat, she thought. Her drownder hadn’t gone down without a fight.

      The room was silent, waiting for Adams’s answer.

      ‘Told ’em,’ he said, spraying lobscouse, ‘I told the sheriff if Andrew wasn’t released, there’d be general pillage and I wouldn’t be able to stop it.’

      ‘That’d do it, Sam,’ somebody called out.

      ‘It did.’ He stood and clambered up on his chair to see and be seen. ‘That did it, all right, didn’t it, General Mackintosh?’ He looked around. ‘Yes, there must be no more North End versus South End. We’re an army now, my Liberty boys, a disciplined army. By displaying ourselves on the streets like regular troops, we’ll show those black-hearted conspirators at Government House—’

      ‘’Scuse me, Sam.’ It was Sugar Bart, struggling up on his crutch. ‘Seems to me you’re talkin’ strategics.’

      ‘Yes, Bart, I am.’

      ‘Then I reckon as how you should do it upstairs so’s we shan’t be overheard.’ The man was looking straight at Aaron.

      Sam Adams regarded the packed taproom. ‘Looks like there’s too many of us for the meeting-room, Bart.’

      ‘And it’ll be hot,’ Makepeace put in desperately. Visions of the Englishman moaning, a passing hand lifting the latch of her door to find that it was bolted from the inside …

      ‘Maybe,’ Sugar Bart said, not taking his eyes off Aaron, ‘but there’s some as don’t seem so bent on liberty as the rest of us.’

      Now Sam got the implication. He crossed to Aaron and put his arm round the young man’s shoulders. ‘I’ve known this lad since he was in small clothes and a good lad he is. We’re all good patriots here, ain’t we, boys?’

      The room was silent.

      It was Aaron, with a grace even his sister hadn’t suspected, who resolved the situation. ‘We’re all patriots right enough, Sam, but this one’s going to bed early.’ He bowed to Sam, to Sugar Bart, to the company, and went upstairs.

      ‘That’s as may be,’ Bart said, ‘but how d’we know he ain’t listenin’ through the floorboards?’

      Makepeace was in front of him. ‘You take that back, Bart Stubbs, or you heave your carcase out of this tavern and stay out.’

      ‘I ain’t sayin’ anything against you, Makepeace Burke, but your brother ain’t one of us and you know it. Is he, Mouse?’

      The appeal to his ally was a mistake; Mackintosh was a newcomer not au fait with the personal interrelationships of the Roaring Meg and its neighbours; indeed would have been resented by those very neighbours if he’d pretended that he was. Wisely, he kept silent.

      Bart, finding himself isolated, surrendered and began the process of sitting down again. ‘I ain’t sayin’ anythin’ about anybody betrayin’ anybody, I’m just saying we got to be careful.’

      ‘Not about my brother, you don’t.’

      Sam Adams stepped between them. ‘We are going to be careful, gentlemen, careful we don’t quarrel among ourselves and spoil this happy day when Liberty arose from her long slumber …’

      While he calmed the room down, Makepeace went angrily back to her barrels and resumed serving. Wish as I could betray you, you one-legged crap-hound.

      She wondered if she could solicit Sam’s help in the matter of the Englishman. Obviously, he was in ignorance of the assault on the man by his new ‘general’. Wouldn’t countenance violence, would Sam.

      With that in mind, in between dashes to the kitchen, she listened carefully to what Bart had called the ‘strategics’. Sam and Andrew Mackintosh were playing the company between them.

      Sam’s rhetoric was careful, reiterating the need for caution in case the British government reacted by sending an army to quell its American colony.

      ‘No,’ agreed Mackintosh, ‘we ain’t ready for war agin’ the redcoats.’ And then: ‘Not yet,’ an addendum which