A Catch of Consequence. Diana Norman

Чтение книги онлайн.

       CHAPTER TWO

      The Roaring Meg’s kitchen doubled as its surgery, and the cook as its doctor, both skills acquired in the house of a Virginian tobacco planter who, when Betty escaped from it, had posted such a reward for her capture that it was met only by her determination not to be caught.

      She might have been – most runaway slaves were – if she hadn’t encountered John L. Burke leaving Virginia with wife, children, Indian and wagon for the north after another of his unsuccessful attempts at farming. John and Temperance Burke had little in common but neither, particularly Temperance, approved of slavery, and they weren’t prepared to hand Betty back to her owner, however big the reward. She’d stayed with the family ever after, even during her late, brief marriage, despite the fact that John Burke’s failures at various enterprises often necessitated her working harder than she would have done in the plantation house.

      She examined the body on the kitchen table, deftly turning and prodding. ‘Collarbone broke.’ She enclosed the head in her large, pink-palmed hands, eyes abstracted, her fingers testing it like melon. ‘That Mouse Mackintosh,’ she said, ‘he sure whopped this fella. Lump here big as a love-apple.’

      ‘I thought maybe we could redd him up a piece, then Tantaquidgeon row him to Castle William after dark,’ Makepeace said, hopefully, ‘Dump him outside, like.’

      Betty pointed to a meat cleaver hanging on the wall. ‘You’ve a mind to kill him, use that,’ she said. ‘Quicker.’

      ‘Oh … oh piss.’ Makepeace ran her hand round her neck to wipe it and discovered for the first time that her cap was hanging from its strap and her hair was loose. Hastily, she bundled both into place. Respectable women kept their hair hidden – especially when it was a non-Puritan red.

      Although the kitchen’s high windows faced north, the sun was infiltrating their panes. Steam came from the lobster boilers on a fire that burned permanently in the grate of the kitchen’s brick range, and the back door had to be shut not just, as today, to prevent intruders but to keep out the flies from the privy which, with the hen-house, occupied the sand-salted strip of land that was the Meg’s back yard.

      Makepeace went to the door. Young Josh had been posted as lookout. ‘Anybody comes, we’re closed. Hear me?’

      ‘Yes ’m, Miss ’Peace.’

      She bolted the door, as she had bolted the tavern’s other two. Tantaquidgeon was keeping vigil at the front. ‘Git to it, then,’ she said.

      They were reluctant to cut away the patient’s coat in order to set his collarbone – it had to be his best; nobody could afford two of that quality – so they stripped him of it, and his shirt, causing him to groan.

      ‘Lucky he keep faintin’,’ Betty said. She squeezed her eyes shut and ran her fingers along the patient’s shoulder: ‘Ready?’

      Makepeace put a rolled cloth between his teeth and then bore down on his arms. Her back ached. ‘Ready.’

      There was a jerk and a muffled ‘Aaagh’.

      ‘Oh, hush up,’ Makepeace told him.

      Betty felt the joint. ‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘I’m one sweet sawbones.’

      ‘Will he do?’

      ‘Runnin’ a fever. Them Sons give him a mighty larrupin’. Keep findin’ new bruises and we ain’t got his britches off yet.’

      ‘You can do that upstairs. He’s got to stay, I guess.’

      ‘Don’t look to me like he’s ready to run off.’

      Makepeace sighed. It had been inevitable. ‘Which room?’

      Betty grinned. The Meg was a tavern, not an inn, and took no overnight guests. The bedroom she shared with her son was directly across the lane from the window of the house opposite. Aaron’s, too, faced the Cut. The only one overlooking the sea and therefore impregnable to spying eyes was Makepeace’s.

      ‘Damnation.’ The problem wasn’t just the loss of her room but the fact that its door was directly across the corridor from the one serving the meeting-room used by the Sons of Liberty.

      Oh well, as her Irish father used to say: ‘Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it.’

      They put the bad arm in a sling of cheese-cloth and Tantaquidgeon lifted the semi-naked body and carried it up the tiny, winding back stairs, followed by Betty with a basket of salves. ‘And take his boot off afore it dirties my coverlet,’ Makepeace hissed after them.

      Left alone, she looked round the kitchen for tell-tale signs of the catch’s presence in it. Nothing, apart from a bloodstain on the table that had seeped from a wound on his head. Jehosophat, they’d cudgelled him hard.

      She was still scrubbing when Aaron came in, having rowed back from Cambridge after a night out with friends. ‘All hail, weird sister, I expect my breakfast, the Thaneship of Cawdor and a scolding. Why all the smoke in town, by the way? Did Boston catch fire?’

      ‘It surely did.’ He looked dark-eyed with what she suspected was a night of dissipation but she was so relieved he’d missed the rioting that he got an explanation, a heavy breakfast and a light scolding.

      He was horrified. ‘Good God,’ he said.

      ‘Aaron!’

      ‘Well … the idiots, the weak-brained, scabby, disloyal, bloody—’

      ‘Aaron!’

      ‘—imbeciles. I blame Sam Adams. What’s he thinking of to let scum like that loose on respectable people?’

      ‘You stop your cussing,’ she said. ‘They ain’t scum. And Sam’s a good man. Respectable people? Respectable СКАЧАТЬ