A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman
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Название: A Catch of Consequence
Автор: Diana Norman
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007404551
isbn:
She looked to the right; again, difficult to see but, yes, figures passing and repassing against the glow of a bonfire in the square beyond, carrying something on a rail, an effigy. As she squinted, trying to make them out, they tipped the rail so that the scarecrow they’d made slid off onto the ground.
Gone now. The effigy made an untidy heap in the mouth of the Cut against the bonfire’s aureole.
Dapifer was telling her to get back inside.
Makepeace kept her eyes on the effigy. They’d made it of hay, untidily; there were bits sticking out all over it, black hay that gleamed when it caught the light. She watched it rise to its feet and start stumbling up the Cut. She didn’t move.
The tarred and feathered thing was bowed so that the prickles along its back curved, like a hedgehog’s, and it zigzagged as it came, lumbering from one side of the lane to the other, mewing when it bumped into a wall.
I must go to it, she thought, it’s blind. And stood there. She heard Betty scream and the soldier say: ‘Oh Christ, dear Christ.’
In the end it was Tantaquidgeon who strode down the lane and carried Aaron home.
The landlady of the Roaring Meg, her brother and staff sailed for England aboard the Lord Percy on the evening tide.
Dapifer, finding himself in charge, had reasoned that a surgeon on a ship, where tar was used extensively, would be more used to treating its burns and therefore better qualified to help Aaron than a land-based doctor. In any case, Makepeace had to be taken out of danger; there was no guarantee that the assault on her brother didn’t presage another on her, and he could think of no safer refuge than a warship of His Majesty’s navy. Furthermore, the Percy was the only vessel on the quays with a surgeon – other large craft still lay further off in the harbour, waiting out the rioting – and her captain, charged with speeding Sir Thomas Hutchinson’s dispatches to London, would not delay sailing.
His own imperative was still to serve the memory of his drowned friend and support Ffoulkes’s son, a duty he couldn’t put off any longer. Neither could he desert Makepeace in her trouble.
Ergo: they must sail with Lord Percy together – and today.
This was explained to Makepeace who merely nodded – anything, anything. Dapifer had turned to Betty. ‘She can return later if she wants to but I’m not leaving her in Boston,’ he said. It didn’t seem strange to him that Betty accepted his right to arrange matters, nor that he was consulting an elderly, black, female cook. ‘The thing is, are you prepared to come with us?’ To separate the two women was unthinkable.
‘Ain’t leavin’ me behind in this place. Nor my boy neither.’ Betty’s face was drawn, though she was taking the horror of what had happened to Aaron better than his sister.
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