A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ If she handed him over to the authorities right now he could identify his attackers – and say what you like about Mouse Mackintosh and Sugar Bart, they were at least patriots and she’d be damned if she helped some Tory taxman get ’em hanged. ‘Ought to throw you back by rights.’

      Well, staying here would surely solve the problem because, from the look of the drownder, he was on his last gasp. And that, thought Makepeace Burke, was pure foolishness – a waste of the trouble she’d taken in the first place.

      She looked up at the quay and jerked her head at Tantaquidgeon to get into the boat. ‘The Meg. You row.’

      She covered the body at her feet with the tarpaulin to keep it warm. There was still nobody about. What had been an event of hours for her had been minutes of everybody else’s time. Boston kept the sleep of the hungover. Tantaquidgeon’s white eagle feather bobbed hypnotically back and forth as he rowed past the slipways on which stood anchors as big as whale-flukes, past the rope-walks, the cranes, the ships’ chandlers, the warehouses and boatyards, all parts of the machine that on normal days serviced the busiest port in America.

      Behind him, appearing to stand on an island, though actually on a promontory, was their destination, the Roaring Meg, two storeys of weatherbeaten boarding. Ramshackle maybe, like the rest of the waterfront, but an integral piece of the great ribbon of function which faced the Atlantic and provided incoming ships with their first view of the town. Here was Boston proper, not in its generous parks nor its wide, tree-lined streets and white-spired churches, not in its market places, bourses and pillared houses, but in an untidy, salt-stained, invigorating seaboard generating the wealth that sustained all the rest.

      Makepeace was proud that her tavern was part of it. But it was a matter of shame to her, as it was to all right-thinking citizens, that there was yet another Boston. In the maze of lanes behind the waterfront, out of sight like a segment of rot in an otherwise healthy-looking apple, lay gin houses and whoreshops providing different services, where the crab-like click of dice and a tideline of painted women waited for sinners in darkness of soul.

      The city fathers attempted to cleanse the area from time to time, but prevent it washing back they could not, nor did they entirely wish to; they were not only the town’s moral guardians but entrepreneurs in a port dependent on trade – and sailors from visiting merchant ships didn’t necessarily seek after righteousness.

      A voyager disembarking at Boston’s North End had a choice. If he were heedless of his purse, his health and his hope of salvation, he would disappear into those sinning, acrid alleys. If he were wise, he would make for the coastal beacon that was the Roaring Meg, with its smell of good cooking and hum of decent conversation.

      In winter, when light from whale-oil lamps shone through its bottle-bottomed windows to be diffused in snow, the Roaring Meg resembled a Renaissance nativity scene, a sacred stable. Named after the noisy stream that ran alongside it before entering the sea, the tavern deserved its halo. Makepeace kept it free of the Devil’s flotsam by perpetual moral sweeping, brushing harlots and their touts from her doorstep, plumping up idlers like pillows, ejecting bullies, vomiters, debtors and those who took the Lord’s name in vain.

      A little stone bridge led over the stream to its street door above which was displayed the information that John L. Burke was licensed to dispense ales and spirituous liquors. John L. Burke was in the grave these three years, having energetically drunk himself into it, but a man’s name above the door inspired more confidence in strangers than would a woman’s, so Makepeace kept it there.

      North End magistrates conspired in the fiction and, if asked, would say that the licensee was actually Makepeace’s young brother Aaron, but they knew, as did everybody else, who was the Roaring Meg’s true landlord and privately acknowledged the fact. ‘Makepeace Burke,’ one justice had been heard to say, ‘is a crisp woman.’

      An accolade, ‘crisp’: American recognition of efficiency and good Puritan hard-headedness. Makepeace took pride in it but knew how hard it had been to win and how easily it could be taken away. One word of scandal or complaint to the magistrates, one impatient creditor, one more storm to hole the Meg’s creaking roof – there was no money with which to replace it – and she would lose her vaunted crispness and her tavern.

      And now that she had a calm moment in which to consider the consequences of what she was doing – in Puritan society wise women always considered consequences – suspicion grew that she might be jeopardizing both merely by harbouring the drownder under her roof.

      The Cut, the lane at the sea end of which the Meg stood, was as respectable as the tavern itself, a narrow row of houses that passed through the surrounding wickedness like a file of soldiers in hostile Indian forest. Eyes at its windows watched for any falter in its rigid morality and one pair in particular was trained on herself.

      ‘Makepeace Burke’s picked up a man.’ She could hear the voices now. And, because the Cut was as patriotic as it was respectable, she could also hear the addendum: ‘A Tory man.’

      It hadn’t been easy, a woman running a tavern. One of the proudest moments of her life – and the most profitable – had been when, with the imposition of the Stamp Tax, the local lodge of the Sons of Liberty had chosen the Roaring Meg for their secret meetings. Good men most of ’em, like nearly all her customers, but, again like her other regulars, driven to desperation by an unemployment that was the direct result of British government policy.

      And among those very Sons was at least one of the group that had thrown the drownder into the harbour. Mighty pleased they’d be to find Makepeace Burke succouring the enemy. An enemy, what’s more, who’d report them to the magistrates quicker’n ninepence.

      ‘Who done it on us?’ Sugar Bart would ask, as he climbed the gallows’ steps.

      ‘Makepeace Burke,’ the Watch would reply.

      After that, no decent patriot – and all her clientele were patriots – would set foot in the Roaring Meg again.

      Oh no, she couldn’t trust the Watch not to give her away; apart from being as big a collection of incompetents as ever let a rogue slip through its fingers, it was hand in glove with the Sons of Liberty. Last night, when Governor Bernard had called on the Watch to drum the alarm, he’d discovered that its men had joined the mob and were happily destroying property with the rest.

      The nearer she got to her tavern, the more perturbed Makepeace became. ‘Lord, Lord,’ she prayed out loud, ‘I did my Christian duty and saved this soul; ain’t there to be no reward?’

      Like most Boston Puritans, Makepeace had a pragmatic relationship with the Lord, regarding Him as a celestial managing director and herself as a valued worker in His company. Until now she’d found no conflict between Christianity and good business. She obeyed the Commandments, most of ’em, and expected benefits and an eternal pension in return.

      And the Lord answered her plea this bright and hot August morning by skimming the last word of it across the surface of His waters until it hit a wharf wall and bounced it back at her in an echo: Reward, reward.

      Receiving it, Makepeace became momentarily beautiful because she smiled, a rare thing with her, showing exquisitely white teeth with one crooked canine that emphasized the perfection of the others.

      ‘You surely can hand it to the Lord,’ she told Tantaquidgeon. ‘He got brains.’

      The drownder was in her debt. There was no greater gift than that of life – and she’d just given his back to him. In return, he could reward her with a promise of silence. Least he could do.

      She СКАЧАТЬ