A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ I said we had sickness in the house and had gone for a doctor. If they’re patrolling the water like they’re patrolling the streets, your fella’ll get tipped back in the harbour – and me with him.’

      Makepeace groaned. Her brother, usually incautious, was showing common-sense, an indication of how seriously he’d been scared by the situation. Nobody would question him alone in a boat – watchers who knew him would assume he was making another of his visits to Harvard friends across the river – but if Sugar Bart saw him with Dapifer …

      What Aaron didn’t realize, because even now his fingers couldn’t take the pulse of the neighbourhood like hers, was how disastrous it was going to be for the Roaring Meg’s local reputation when a bunch of redcoats, invited redcoats from the loathed garrison at Castle William, turned up to rescue an Englishman from its midst. As well run up the Union Jack and be done with it. The Sons would never drink here again. Probably nobody else either, she thought. But what else to do? Nothing.

      She smoothed down her apron. That bridge would have to be burned when she got to it. ‘Go up and tell the Goodies we got lobscouse and brandy for their supper in the taproom,’ she said to Aaron. ‘You can tell the English your plan while they’re down.’

      Free lobscouse and brandy. She shook her head at her own open-handedness. ‘This rate,’ she said to Betty, ‘we’ll be ruined before we’re ruined.’

      While the Goodies gorged in the taproom, Zeobab Fairlee came to the kitchen door asking for them. Makepeace pounced on him, he was her oldest customer and friend, sat him down and began gabbling her tale of wounded, rescued Englishmen – ‘What else could a Christian body do, Zeobab? Eh? Eh? Couldn’t let ’un drown, could I?’ – and, having done it, how could she appease the Sons?

      He was preoccupied and barely listened to her. ‘There’s news, ‘Peace,’ he said, ‘I come to tell Goody Busgutt.’

      His brown nut of a face showed no expression – a bad sign; imparting and receiving disastrous news was done in this community with a stoicism that bordered on the comatose. ‘It’s the Gideon.’

      Betty paused over the fire, Makepeace sat down, gripping the knife with which she’d been cutting bread until her knuckles showed white. Her own face was impassive. Don’t let him be drowned, Lord, she prayed, don’t let Captain Busgutt be drowned. Batting your eyelashes at Englishmen and your fiancé drowns – it’s the Lord’s punishment. ‘Dead?’

      Zeobab shook his head. ‘Pressed.’ The word tolled through the kitchen like a passing bell. It was almost as dreadful, it was almost the same.

      Among the incoming ships piling up in the Bay, unwilling to risk their cargo and passengers while there was rioting in town and, in any case, last night barred from docking by Boston’s laws against Sunday working, was a pursuit boat from the Moses, a whaler recently returned to Nantucket full of blubber. Commanding the boat was the Moses’ first mate, Oh-Be-Joyful Brown, anxious to renew his acquaintance with the young Boston woman he’d been courting now that he had money enough to marry her. Impatient of the delay, Oh-Be-Joyful had irreligiously rowed ashore early this morning though, being nevertheless a dutiful man, he had not gone straight to his lady but had first sought out Goody Busgutt. ‘Couldn’t find her, see,’ Zeobab said, ‘so he comes to me.’

      ‘Will you get to it?’ snapped Betty.

      What Oh-Be-Joyful wanted to tell Goody Busgutt was that while hunting on the Grand Banks, the Moses had met another whaler, a homeward-bound Greenlander. Since neither was in competition at that stage of their voyages, they had stopped to chat in the middle of the Atlantic like two housewives over a fence.

      ‘An’ the Greenlander,’ said Zeobab, ‘she says three months previous she come across the Gideon sinkin’, rammed by a whale, see, and takes off the crew. But she was bound for Liverpool to discharge her oil, so that’s where she takes ’em. And at Liverpool, so her master told Oh-Be, the press comes on board an’ takes Cap’n Busgutt and his men for the navy.’

      ‘They can’t.’ Makepeace was standing. ‘They can’t press him. He’s protected.’

      In order for Britain’s trade to flourish, certain classes of seafarers necessary for its success had to be kept safe from the Royal Navy’s press gangs, always greedy for sailors to man its ships, and were therefore granted ‘protection’ in certificates of exemption. Captain Busgutt and his crew, providing the navy with essential tar, came into this category.

      Zeobab shook his head. ‘He don’t have a ship no more, ‘Peace. The Gideon’d went down, see.’

      She saw. With the Gideon sunk, Captain Busgutt’s certificate was useless. The English press gang had found valuable booty, a crew of trained men without protection, and thought it was its lucky day.

      The knife in Makepeace’s hand stabbed into the loaf and stabbed it again. She was so angry. How dare they, how dare they? King George and his shite Admiralty. Kidnap your own men but you leave ours alone. Here it was again – British tyranny. Stab. It was an old grievance, another of the reasons for Boston’s disaffection and a better one even than the Stamp Tax for tearing down Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson’s house. Stab. Pity he weren’t in it.

      That the Royal Navy was even-handed and took any nationality it could lay its hands on did nothing to mollify an American seaboard which suffered badly from its predation. Men went missing with dreary regularity. Women and children were left waiting for husbands and fathers who’d been trawled like fish. Most never returned. Having been legally kidnapped, the few who escaped were hunted as deserters.

      Makepeace’s knife cut the Board of Admiralty’s brains into breadcrumbs. Betty leaned over and took it away from her. ‘Did Oh-Be say if they was all saved?’ Most of Gideon’s crew consisted of local men.

      ‘He di’n’t know.’

      Silence closed in on the kitchen with another question. Eventually Betty asked it. ‘Who’s goin’ to tell her?’

      ‘I ain’t,’ Makepeace said. Guilty of attraction to another man, she couldn’t look Captain Busgutt’s mother in the face.

      But in the end she accompanied Zeobab into the taproom and held Goody Busgutt’s hand while he told her. The old woman diminished before her eyes; there was none of the anger that consumed Makepeace, not yet at any rate, though Saltonstall, on behalf of her friend, supplied enough for all of them. Goody Busgutt kept pleading for reassurance – ‘I’ll not see my boy again, will I?’ – a question to which, terribly, she knew the answer as well as they did.

      They helped her back to her house.

      The evening was giving a rare mellowness to the Cut; to the left, the tide lapped softly at the cobbles of its ramp and along its narrow, north-east facing terrace houses were soft-hued shadows, but there was still ferocity in the light that turned the walls and windows of the Roaring Meg’s side into amber.

      Oh-Be-Joyful’s news had spread and further down the lane was a large cluster of women which hurried towards Zeobab and surrounded him with anxious questions. ‘Was my man pressed along of the others?’ ‘Did the press take Matthew?’ ‘Pressed.’ ‘Pressed.’

      ‘Ask her.’ Saltonstall established herself on Goody Busgutt’s steps and her voice rose above the clamour. She was pointing. ‘Ask Makepeace Burke. She’ll know. She’s took in a English lord as is a friend to them as steals our poor lads. Ask her what she’s СКАЧАТЬ