A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

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      She was right, of course; she usually was. The Goodies might be spellbound but they’d be watchful; she could hardly maintain a hostile front towards the Englishman by seeking his presence every few minutes. With a sense of loss, Makepeace watched Betty’s backside sway upstairs. The enchanted night was over.

      She sobered. If he’d rescued her from one danger, another loomed for them both. Goody Busgutt had no interest in politics, her concern was righteousness, as was Saltonstall’s, but you could as well prevent either from gossiping as alter the weather. The Sons of Liberty and everybody else in the Cut would be aware of the Englishman’s presence in the Meg as soon as the Goodies left it; her marriage was saved but her custom was ruined.

      Makepeace went upstairs and woke Aaron. He was to take Tantaquidgeon with him and go to Hutchinson’s house and tell the Lieutenant-Governor to send a sedan chair for Dapifer with an escort. ‘He ain’t fit for walking yet.’

      ‘A chair and escort? Why not trumpeters while they’re about it?’

      Makepeace shrugged. ‘Might as well, there’ll be a crowd whatever we do. I want him safe through it.’

      Aaron winked, as had Betty. ‘Ooh-er.’

      She said wearily, ‘There wasn’t no ooh-er.’ She suspected that her exchanges in the dark with the magical fish she’d caught would be all she had to sustain her from now on. Were they worth it? They’d have to be.

      For the rest of the day, he was the Goodies’ catch. Every so often one of them would come down to berate her for her neglect of him and command some recipe for his improvement. ‘Did thee not see how poorly he be? Now he’s coughing. Where’s the aniseed? And a plaster for his head.’

      She gave them what they asked for, along with some of her best Jamaican rum for themselves, anxious to keep them in situ for as long as possible until she could form some plan for counteracting the damage they would necessarily inflict on the Roaring Meg when they departed.

      The lobsters and patties had gone down well, the Goodies having included themselves in the Sabbath dispensation of hot food for the sick. Betty came down with trays on which no scrap was left. She frightened Makepeace with a high keening as she flopped onto the kitchen settle and put her apron over her head.

      ‘What is it? What is it? What did they say to you?’

      The apron moved from side to side. ‘They’s snorin’. But he ain’t. He …’ Betty’s voice failed. Her hand pantomime indicated that the Englishman had called her over to the bed, putting a finger to his lips.

      ‘What did he want?’

      Makepeace waited a full minute before Betty was able to answer. ‘Ladder.’

      ‘He wanted a ladder?’

      Betty’s apron nodded. ‘Fetch a ladder for …’

      Makepeace waited again, her own laughter on the simmer despite everything.

      ‘A ladder and not to tell nobody … for him and Goody Saltonstall is plannin’ to elope.’

      Makepeace sat down beside her friend and wailed with her.

      Aaron came back while they were both sweating over the next collation, lobscouse and flummery. His news lacked amusement; what he’d found in town had shaken him.

      It was Sunday. Boston, as ever, was a ghost town, frozen under a boiling sun, gone into its smokeless, street-empty, curtain-drawn, diurnal hibernation, only a murmur of prayers through church windows and the clucking of neglected poultry breaking the silence. Sabbath Boston was always eerie, an echoing, hurrying footfall suggesting emergency – its perpetrator having to make explanation to the magistrates if there was none.

      Today, to Aaron who had missed both riots, it was shocking, haunted by the daubed, shrieking poltergeists who had rampaged through it the night before, the wounds they’d inflicted pointed up by the stillness, as if a fine face had turned slack and dribbling in open-mouthed sleep. Because no work should be done on the Lord’s Day, avenues were still littered with the black scatterings of bonfires. Fences and flowerbeds lay trampled; broken glass winked in the gutters.

      In Hanover Square the huge, hundred-year-old oak tree that stood in its middle had sprouted new fruit. A figure was hanging from one of its branches.

      Close to, it turned out to be an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the Stamp Master of Massachusetts Bay. Last night the old man had been made to stand before it and apologize for his offence of administering the Stamp Act.

      Where Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson’s white, pillared mansion had stood among trees there was no mansion. An empty shell gaped in its place surrounded by wreckage as if it had vomited semi-digested furniture onto the lawns. Birdsong from the motionless trees seemed out of place in the devastation. A statue was headless, urns broken. Over everything, like demented snow, lay paper and, here and there, the leather binding it had been ripped from – Hutchinson had owned the best library in New England.

      ‘Will you look here?’ Aaron held out the torn frontispiece of a hand-written manuscript to Makepeace. ‘He was writing this, that good man, and they tore it up. Look.’ The title was in beautiful copperplate: A History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

      Makepeace’s only interest was the present; Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinsons’s virtues and omissions were ground she and her brother had fought over too often. ‘Well, where is he now?’

      Aaron shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s taken refuge with Governor Bernard out at Castle William.’

      ‘Run, run, fast as you can,’ said Makepeace nastily. If there was no authority left in town, what safety was there for Dapifer? Or herself, for that matter?

      ‘Stay and be killed, is that it?’ Aaron was equally upset. ‘They got at his cellars, I tell you. Drunken madmen they must have been.’

      ‘They was patriots,’ she yelled at him, hitting out because she was frightened. ‘Hutchinson and his yes King George, no King George, let me lick your boots, King George … don’t matter if good Americans is starving and all his relatives is living in palaces paid for out of poor people’s taxes.’

      ‘Hutchinson advised against the Stamp Tax, you know he did, you stupid female.’

      And they were back on their ancient battlefield, made more bitter by the knowledge that both had truth on their side. Sir Thomas Hutchinson’s love of English upper-class mores and his nepotism were notorious – Stamp Master Oliver was his brother-in-law and between them the two families monopolized most of the Bay’s government offices – but he was also erudite and for over twenty years had devoted himself to the betterment of the colony into which he’d been born.

      Aaron was right – Hutchinson was a good man. Makepeace was right – Hutchinson wasn’t a good American.

      Betty stepped between them. ‘This ain’t buyin’ baby a new bonnet. What we goin’ to do with him upstairs?’

      ‘Get him away by boat,’ said Aaron. ‘I’ll row to Castle William and get them to send an escort for him tonight.’

      ‘Take him with you,’ Betty said. ‘Save time.’

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