A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 becoming a losing battle – a heightened pulse rate was no longer a factor in her deliberations.

      Captain Busgutt was that unique phenomenon, a rich man – or what passed for rich in Makepeace’s world – who was also a good man. She thought now: Captain Busgutt didn’t divorce his wife, though she was sickly and gave him no children. At her death he’d been left with no one on whom to bestow his riches and goodness, except his mother. He’d promised Makepeace a house, a brick house, near the Common, with an orchard and, most importantly, a place in it for Betty, young Josh and Tantaquidgeon. It was a considerable offer – the prospect of ending up a childless old maid and a burden on Aaron had given Makepeace sleepless nights – and she had accepted it.

      True, he was twice her age and didn’t set the mermaids singing but Makepeace had seen the unwisdom of her parents’ union – Temperance Burke had been made old before her time by her husband’s shiftlessness – and did not consider passion a good foundation for marriage.

      Captain Busgutt, above all, was admired in the community. The drunken reputation of Makepeace’s father, her trade, the colour of her hair, the dislike accorded her brother: all these had kept her clinging onto the edge of social acceptance by her fingertips. Captain Busgutt would cloak all of them in his own respectability and Makepeace, after a lifetime of the unusual, longed for the mundane with the desire of a vampire for blood.

      ‘For a man of his age, Captain Busgutt seems to believe in long engagements,’ said the voice from the bed. ‘Why are you still waiting, Miss Burke?’

      ‘None of your business.’ Then, because, despite everything, conversation with this man was curiously luxurious, she said, ‘Goody Busgutt.’

      ‘Another of the Captain’s wives?’

      ‘His mother.’

      Goody Busgutt had strongly objected to the marriage, pointing out its disadvantages to a man with a position to maintain and, like the good son he was, Captain Busgutt had agreed to delay the wedding until his return from England – the hiatus to be a term of trial during which his mother could assess Makepeace’s fitness for the position of Mrs Busgutt.

      Makepeace did not tell the Englishman this. She said, ‘Goody Busgutt is a woman of righteous character and forceful opinions. She thinks Captain Busgutt could make a safer choice of wife. Maybe he could.’

      Makepeace had forceful opinions of her own and at first the thought of being tested by Goody Busgutt had very nearly led her to break off the engagement. Then she’d thought: Why let that canting, lip-sucking old sepulchre ruin your future, Makepeace Burke? She can’t last for ever.

      Plums like Captain Busgutt didn’t drop from the tree every day.

      Suddenly, Makepeace was angry and frightened by the intimacy being established between her and the man in the bed. ‘And if she hears of it … if Goody Busgutt knew you was here …’

      ‘She wouldn’t look kindly on the wedding?’

      ‘She would not.’

      ‘What would she think we’d got up to?’ he said mournfully.

      Unsettled, she got up and went to the window. The moon was setting; it would be dawn soon. The shadows of ribbed hulls in Thompson’s boatyard across the slipway reminded her of Captain Busgutt’s creased, liver-spotted hands, their nails misshapen by a hundred shipboard accidents.

      Dapifer, watching her from his bed, smelled air fresher than any of the night and whatever hideous line in soap she used. She was … unusual, he thought, with her unexpected answers in flat ‘a’s; like this damn continent, new and disrespectful. Too good for Captain Busgutt, he knew that.

      He saw her stiffen. ‘What …?’ he began but she hissed at him to keep quiet.

      Carefully, Makepeace eased the shutter further forward so that she could peer out under its cover. An unaccountable shadow had moved in Thompson’s boatyard. She gestured behind her for the Englishman to snuff the rushlight.

      Dapifer pinched out the flame, struggled out of bed and limped across the floor to her. ‘What is it?’ He kept his voice low.

      She shook her head and pointed, at the same time putting a hand out to stop his access to the window. He caught hold of her shoulder to steady himself and felt the tension in there, the skin of it only separated from his hand by a thin layer of material which stopped at the curve of her neck. All at once they were conspirators, allies against whatever was out there threatening them both.

      After a while they both heard the tip-tap of movement, like a raven’s hopping, receding from the quay down an alley. She let out a breath and the muscle of her shoulder under his hand relaxed as tension went out of her – to be replaced by the awareness of how close he was. She stood still for another second and then turned. He didn’t move. ‘Are they watching us?’ he asked.

      She nodded.

      Us.

      He was taller than she was, her nose was level with his chin, the tip of her breasts almost against his ribs; Makepeace could smell his skin and Betty’s Specific. She knew he’d said something, his mouth had moved, but there was another conversation in progress between their bodies and she found difficulty in attending to anything else.

      ‘What you say?’

      ‘Is it trouble?’

      Trouble.

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