A CATCH OF CONSEQUENCE
Diana Norman

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2002

Copyright © Diana Norman 2001

Diana Norman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007105441

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007404551

Version: 2016-02-09

DEDICATION

To my cousin, Aeron

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Book One: Boston

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Book Two: London

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Book Three: Newcastle

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Keep Reading

About the Author

Author’s Note

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

BOOK ONE Boston

CHAPTER ONE

The woman feathering her boat round the bend of the Charles River into Massachusetts Bay that early morning on August 15 1765 was about to save someone’s life and change her own.

Later on, in rare retrospective moments, she would ask herself: ‘What if I hadn’t?’ A useless question, suggesting there’d been a decision – and she made no decision; Makepeace Burke could no more watch a fellow-creature drown without trying to help it than she could stop the wind blowing.

That’s not to imply that Makepeace was a gentle woman. She wasn’t; she just hated waste, and unnecessary death was wasteful.

If her boat was dirty, she was clean in a scrubbed sort of way, or as clean as you can be when you’ve been hauling in lobster-pots since before dawn. A virgin who, by 1765 American standards, was like her boat in being ancient. At twenty-four years old, she should have been married with children but she’d been both unfortunate and picky.

The gangly figure in faded brown cotton, her skirt pinned up washerwoman style, a leather cap tied tightly under her chin to hide her hair giving her the look of an insect, propelled her boat with the professionalism of a sea-dog. Bobbing along in the sunlight, from far off she resembled a curiously shaped bit of wrack, a piece off a figurehead, something saltily wooden, astray on the glistening water.

About to have her life changed.

To Makepeace Burke, emerging into the great harbour’s North End, the damage that she saw had been done to her waterfront overnight was change enough. Some of the damage was old and caused by the English: empty warehouses, wharves sprouting weed. Boats that had once been proud, respected smugglers delivering cheap sugar to willing Bostonian customers lay demasted and upended on the hards, killed by the newly efficient, newly incorruptible British Customs and Excise. Only sugar from the English West Indies, the expensive English West Indies, could be imported now – and that was unloaded further down.

But last night, in protest against the English and their shite Stamp Tax and Navigations Acts, Boston had gone on the rampage and done damage in return. Hadn’t they, by Hokey! Even from this distance, she could see the depredations to the Custom House. The bonfires were dying down but the smitch of burning was everywhere, even out here on the water. Papers that had drifted off the bonfires spewed along the quay. And the new warehouse Stamp Master Oliver was having built was now no more than a pile of broken timbers. Serve the old bugger right.

Makepeace Burke disapproved of rioting – not good for trade – but she disapproved of the Stamp Tax, which had been the cause of last night’s mayhem, a mighty sight more. The tax fell heavily on taverns and she was a tavern-keeper.

The August heat had been near suffocating for a month, like a volcano grumbling under the town in sympathy with the discontent of its inhabitants. Last night – what triggered it nobody knew – the cone blew off and out rushed lava of white-heat fury against unemployment, the government, its colonial representatives, its damn taxes and interference, its press gangs and its assumption that Bostonians were going to take all these things lying down.

Customs officials, known English-loving Tories, lawmen: all had been hunted through the streets by Sons of Liberty smeared with war-paint and howling like Mohawks, bless ’em. The British garrison had too few soldiers to put down a ladies’ sewing circle, let alone an outbreak of these proportions. The town had been streaked with flame and pounded with the beat of drums until it seemed that light was noise and noise was light.

If that was riot, Lord knew what revolution’d be. Well, maybe it was revolution. Sam Adams was preaching something suspiciously along the lines of it being time Americans threw off the English yoke. Didn’t put it like that but every good Bostonian knew what he meant.

Customers had run into the Roaring Meg to pass on the latest news, down a glass of celebratory flip and rush off again to join in. ‘Don’t you go outside, now, ’Peace,’ Zeobab Fairlee’d said. ‘The Sons is lickered up. Got at a few cellars. No place for a respectable female in them streets tonight.’

So she’d stayed with her tavern in case they tried to get at her liquor stock – Sons of Liberty or no Sons of Liberty, she wasn’t in the business of free drinks – but, come the revolution, she’d get her father’s musket down from the roof and march against the British with the best of ’em. She’d give ’em taxes.

She liked these lovely mornings, collecting lobster-pots. Peaceful. Hot already. Further out, towards the islands, gulls floated against a sky like blue enamel. Two tundra swans passed low over her head as the squadron came from inland, enormous wings held bowed and still, outstretched feet ready to furrow the water, heavy as pieces of masonry hurtling through the air. They were settling, fluting to each other, their size dwarfing the rafts of snow geese and oldsquaws further out.

More peaceful than ever this morning. Usually, down at the business end of the harbour, angular heron-like cranes dipped and straightened with bulging nets in their bills as they emptied incoming merchantmen and filled the holds of those getting ready to set out. Men with bales on their heads were to be seen filing up some gangplanks and down others, looking at a distance like infestations of marcher ants. Sails were taken in, others hoisted, all flapping like pinioned birds; greetings, commands, farewells – sounds of human busyness floating across the water.

But not today. Captains, worried for their cargo, had stood their ships further off where the Sons of Liberty couldn’t board them. They were out in the bay now, like a huddle of white-shawled grannies, until it was safe to come back. Deserted quays waited for them, sticking out into the harbour in protruding, wooden teeth.

She had to feather so that, by standing in the prow, she could negotiate between the detritus that had been thrown in the water during the night: pieces of door, window-frames, the lid of a desk, all of it a hazard to little boats like hers as it was carried out to sea on a combination of current and ebb-tide. A waste. Later on, she’d get Tantaquidgeon to see what he could salvage. Dry it out for tinder.

Lord, it was quiet. As she passed Copp’s Quay, a couple of painted figures that had been lying on it staggered to their feet and slunk off like dogs who knew they’d been naughty. Don’t let the magistrates get thee, boys. From the look of ’em, she’d guess their heads were punishment enough.

And there was Tantaquidgeon waiting for her as he always did, standing on the Roaring Meg’s gimcrack jetty and staring out to sea like the statue of a befeathered Roman emperor.

She was heading towards him when a prickle of movement a hundred yards further on caught her eye. A knot of men on Fish Quay, three, maybe four – it was difficult to see against the reflection of sun on water – a suggestion of furious energy and striped faces. Not all the rioters had gone home to sleep it off, then. No sound from them that she could hear above the call of the swans. One was standing still, keeping watch, while the others threw objects into the harbour as if they hadn’t slaked their revenge even yet. Something heavy had just splashed in, something else now – a hat. Waste again.

With her free hand she shaded her eyes to see who the men were. The one acting lookout was Sugar Bart, recognizable at once by the crutch that did duty for his missing leg. Would be. Always in trouble against authority, Bart.

Mackintosh? What was that shite doing this far north of town? No mistaking his swagbelly, painted or not; she’d seen it too often parading at the head of the South End mob on Guy Fawkes’ Nights. Mackintosh was leader of one of the gangs which took flaming papal effigies and trouble onto Boston’s streets every November 5, indulging in bloody and, sometimes, mortal battles with each other to show their enthusiasm for the Protestant cause.

Couldn’t make out the others.

Sugar Bart had seen her; she saw him stiffen and point. She’d be a blur against the sun. She waved to show she was a friend. A good taverner kept in with her customers, whatever hell they were raising.

Now what? She looked behind her. From her vantage point, Makepeace saw what Sugar Bart couldn’t.

A patrol of armed redcoats from North End fort was marching down the wharves towards Fish Quay, heading for Bart and the Mohawks who, because of the overhang of warehouses, couldn’t see it. The stamp of military boots came crisply to her, carried by the water, but Bart wouldn’t hear that either.

Makepeace put two fingers in her mouth and whistled a warning. Bart looked. She nodded towards the redcoats – and saw their muskets being levelled at her. She whistled on: With a tow, row, row, row, row, row for the British Grenadiers – signal to Bart there were soldiers coming, desperate advice to the soldiers she was a loyal subject of King George III, the shite.

One of the soldiers advanced to the edge of the wharf, shading his eyes. The sun was in its stride now, fierce enough to bleach colour and form out of the view of those looking into it. ‘You. Seen anybody?’

She cupped her ear, wasting time. The Mohawks had legged it; Bart was hobbling off.

‘Seen. Any. Body, you deaf bitch.’

She held up one of her pots. ‘Lobster. Lob. Ster.’ And may you boil in the saucepan with him, thee red-backed bastard.

The soldier gave up, the patrol resumed its advance down the waterfront and there was no time for reaction because, whilst dealing with the problem, she had seen a body. An upturned table with broken legs entangled with rags, part of last night’s wreckage, twirled on the current. From the corner of her eye she’d noticed it separate, a piece slipping off from the rest. And the new bit of flotsam was a man.

Idly, in case the soldiers turned round, she feathered the boat to where the current would bring the fellow near it. He was alive; a hand moved before he was carried under.

She kept whistling, for continuity’s sake in case the redcoats could still hear her, and to let the man know he didn’t have far to swim for rescue.

Jehosophat, wouldn’t you know it? The fool couldn’t swim. He was being sucked under again, only his clawing fingers visible above the surface.

Keep feathering? It was slower than rowing but to take the oar from the bow, find the other and put both in the rowlocks would lose minutes the drowning man couldn’t spare.

Makepeace kept standing, waggling her oar through the water like a giant mixing spoon with a friction that took the skin off even her toughened hands. Passing her jetty, where Tantaquidgeon still contemplated the horizon, she shouted: ‘Git, will you?’ angling her head towards Fish Quay, and saw him start off in the right direction in his infuriatingly unhurried stride.

The current, fierce at this corner of the harbour, was against her and taking the drownder further and further away from the quay. As he rolled, she saw a face white as cod, eyes closed in acceptance of death. Frantically, she feathered harder and closed the gap between them. She yelled: ‘Hold up,’ unshipped her oar and ran it forward under his left arm, which rose aimlessly to let it slip. She lunged again, this time towards the right arm and the blade was caught between waistcoat and sleeve, held by the pressure of water.

With all her weight, Makepeace pressed down on her end of the oar so that the man’s upper body came up, lopsided like a hunchback, hair trailing across the surface, nose and mouth blessedly free.

There was never anything so heavy but if she let go she’d lose him. The boat tilted wickedly. The body began to swing astern where, if it got behind the boat, it would wriggle itself off the oar. She let the blade dip and then, with a pull that shot pain up her back, jerked her end of the oar into the starboard rowlock. Even so, to bear down against the body’s weight demanded almost more than she had.

She cricked her neck, looking for help. Tantaquidgeon was on the quay. ‘Boathook. Fast.’ He strolled off to find one. They could drift to Portugal by the time he got back. Nothing to be done; she couldn’t control the boat and keep this bastard out of the water at the same time; he wasn’t helping, just hung there, dipping under, coming up, eyes half closed. ‘Wake up,’ she screamed, ‘wake up, you crap-hound! D’ye want to die?’

The shout jagged through nothingness to the last cognitive area of the drowning man’s brain and found a flicker of response.

Not actively die, he thought, and then: But life’s not worthy of effort either. His neck hurt. Plummets of glaucous water swam with the image of two naked bodies writhing on a floor, neither of them his own. Wounded long before the sea decided to kill him, he was slowing to languor. Not worth effort, not worth it.

But there were rises when he felt warmth on the back of his head and shoulders and caught glimpses of lacquer-blue and was disturbed by an appalling voice chiselling him awake.

As always when frightened, Makepeace became angry. Fury helped her haul in the oar until the body was against the boat starboard, a process that dipped it under again.

Holding the blade with one hand – buggered if she’d lose a good oar – she grabbed at the man and hooked his jacket over the rowlock so that he hung from it, head lolling. ‘An’ you stay there.’

Somehow, keeping her weight to port, she feathered back to where Tantaquidgeon was kneeling, boathook in hand. She caught the hook’s business end and, none too gently, shoved it under the man’s coat which wrinkled up to the shoulders. She directed it as the Red Indian pulled. A long, wet body slithered onto her lobster-pots and flopped among waving, reaching claws.

Then she sat down.

After a while she stirred herself and, wincing, dragged at the man’s coat so that he was turned onto his back. Using her foot – it was less painful to her back than bending down to it – she nudged his face to one side then pressed her boot on his bread-basket, released it, pressed again. She pedalled away, as if at an organ, until water began dribbling onto the lobsters from the man’s mouth and he coughed.

Makepeace Burke and her catch looked at each other.

Through a wavering veil of nausea, the man saw bone and freckles, a pair of concerned and ferocious blue eyes, all framed by hair the colour of flames that had escaped from its cap and which, with the sun shining through it, made an aureole. It was the head of a saint remembered from a Flemish altarpiece.

Makepeace saw a bloody nuisance.

Here was not, as she’d thought, a lickered Son of Liberty who’d whooped himself into the harbour; the Sons didn’t sport clothes that, even when soaked and seaweeded, shouted wealth. Here was gentry.

‘Who are you? What happened to you?’

He really couldn’t be bothered to remember, let alone answer. He managed: ‘Does it matter?’

‘Matters to me.’ She’d expended a lot of effort.

Long time, thought Sir Philip Dapifer. Long time since I mattered to a woman. He drifted off, oddly consoled, into unconsciousness.

Makepeace sat and considered, unaware she was still whistling ‘The British Grenadiers’ or that her foot tapped in time to it on the drownder’s chest.

If the bugger hadn’t fallen, he’d been pushed and she’d seen it done. Watched by Bart and others, Mackintosh had thrown the poor bastard in like he was rotten fish. And left him – admitted, they couldn’t dally – not caring if he drowned or floated. And worked on him first from the look of him – his face might be the moon fallen into her boat, so livid and bruised it was.

So he was enemy. Customs, excise, taxman, Tory, British-bootlicker: whatever he was she’d rescued him. ‘Should’ve let you drown,’ she grumbled at him, knowing she could not.

What to do? 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 looked down fondly at the richly clad bundle by her feet. ‘And maybe some cash with it,’ she said.

Having settled on a conclusion she’d actually reached at the moment the drownder opened his eyes, she felt better; she was a woman who liked a business motive.

Also she was intrigued – more than that, involved – by the man.

As someone who’d fought for survival all her life, Makepeace was affronted by apathy. Never having accepted defeat herself, this drownder’s ‘Does it matter?’ had excited her contempt but also her curiosity and pity. Look at him: fine boots – well, he’d lost one but the other was excellent leather; gold lacing on his cuffs. A man possessed of money and, therefore, every happiness. So why was he uncaring about his fate?

The boat bumped gently against the Meg’s tottering jetty. Makepeace looked around with a surreptitiousness that would have attracted attention had there been onlookers to see it.

Bending low, she climbed the steps and looked into the tap-room. Nobody there. She went through and opened the front door to peer into the Cut for signs of activity. Nothing again.

She returned to the boat and told Tantaquidgeon all was clear. She threaded her lobster-pots together and dragged them up and through the sea entrance to her tavern with Tantaquidgeon behind her, the tarpaulined Englishman draped over his forearms like laundry.

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 lick-spittles, respectable yes-King-Georgers, no-King-Georgers, let me wipe your boots with my necktie, your majesty. I wished I’d been with ’em.’

‘It’s a reasonable tax, ’Peace.’

‘You don’t pay it.’ Immediately, she was sorry. She didn’t want him indebted; she’d gone without shoes and, sometimes, food to raise and educate him and done it gladly. What she hadn’t reckoned on was that he’d become an English-loving Tory.

She broke the silence. ‘Aaron, there’s a man up in my room—’

He grinned. ‘About time.’

‘You wash your mouth out.’ She told him the story of her dawn catch. He thought it amusing and went upstairs to see for himself.

Makepeace turned her attention to the lobsters which, neglected, had begun to tear each other’s claws off.

‘Reckon he’s English,’ was Aaron’s verdict on his return. ‘A lord to judge from his coat. Did you see how they cut the cuffs now? When he marries you out of gratitude, remember your little brother.’

‘Sooner marry the Pope,’ Makepeace said. Aaron could be trusted on fashion; he made a study of it. An Englishman, by Hokey, worse and worse. ‘That important, somebody’ll be missing him, so keep your ears open today and maybe we’ll find out who he is. But don’t ask questions, it’d seem suspicious. And, Aaron …’

‘Yes, sister?’

‘I want you home tonight. But, Aaron …’

‘Yes, sister?’

‘No argifying and no politics. The Sons is getting serious.’

‘Ain’t they, though?’ He kissed her goodbye. ‘Just wait ’til I tell ’em you’re marrying the Pope.’

She waved him off at the door.

The Cut was awake now, shutters opening, bedclothes over windowsills to be fumigated by the sun, brushes busy on doorsteps, its men coming up it towards the waterfront – even those without jobs spent the day on the docks hoping, like rejected lovers, that they would be taken on again. Only Aaron went against the flow, heading towards the business quarter with an easy swagger.

Few wished him good morning and she suspected he didn’t notice those who did. Already he’d be lost in the role of Romeo or Henry V or whatever hero he’d chosen for himself today; he was mad for Shakespeare. The Cut, however, didn’t see youthful play-acting, it saw arrogance.

From a doorway further down came a sniff. ‘You want to tell that brother of yours to walk more seemly.’ Goody Busgutt was watching her watch Aaron.

‘Morning, Mistress Busgutt. And why would I do that?’

‘Morning, Makepeace. For his own good. He may think he’s Duke Muck-a-muck but the Lord don’t ’steem him any higher’n the rest of us mortals. A sight lower than many.’

Makepeace returned to her empty kitchen. ‘I’ll ’steem you, you bald-headed, bearded, poison-peddling, pious …’ In place of Mistress Busgutt, two lobsters died in the boiler, screaming. ‘… you shite-mongering, vicious old hell-hag.’

Cursing was Makepeace’s vice, virtually her only one. John L. Burke, master of profanity, lived again in the Irish accent she unconsciously adopted when she indulged it. She allowed no swearing in others but, as with the best sins, committed it secretly to relieve herself of tension, with an invective learned at her father’s knee. Today, she reckoned, having sent her both a dangerous, unwanted guest and Goody Busgutt all in one morning, the Lord would forgive her.

It was a busy day, as all days were. With Tantaquidgeon stalking in her wake, she took her basket to Faneuil Market instead of to Ship Street’s where she more usually did her buying, partly because the meat in its hall would be kept cooler and freer of flies than that on open stalls and partly to listen in that general meeting place for mention of a missing Englishman. She doubted if she could have heard it if there had been; Faneuil’s was always noisy but today’s clamour threatened to rock its elegant pillars.

Boston patriotism, simmering for years, had boiled out of its clubs and secret societies into the open. For once a town that prized property and propriety was prepared to sacrifice both for something it valued higher. There was no catharsis from last night’s mayhem, no shame at the damage, everybody there had become a patriot overnight. ‘We showed ’em.’ ‘We got ’em running.’ She heard it again and again, from street-sellers to wealthy merchants. She found satisfaction in hearing it from a knot of lawyers fresh from the courthouse, as exhilarated as any Son of Liberty at last night’s breakdown of order. Deeds, wills, all litigious documents were subject to Stamp Duty; the tax had hit the legal profession hard. But you sharks can afford to pay it, she thought, I can’t.

Even newspapers – another taxed item – had increased in price; she could no longer take the Boston Gazette for her customers to read as she once had. From the triumphant headlines: ‘The Sons of Liberty have shown the Spirit of America’, glimpsed as copies were passed hand-to-hand through the market, she gathered that the press was trumpeting revenge.

Indeed, no catharsis. If anything, those who’d taken part were excited into wanting to do it again and gaining recruits who saw their royal Governor taken aback and helpless.

In one corner, a penny whistle was accompanying a group singing ‘Rule, Bostonians/ Bostonians rule the waves/ Bostonians never, never, never shall be slaves’ with more gusto than scansion. Tory ladies, usually to be seen shopping with a collared negro in tow, were not in evidence, nor were their husbands.

‘Mistress Burke.’

‘Mistress Godwit.’ Wife to the landlord of the Green Dragon in Union Street. They curtsied to each other.

‘Reckon we’ll see that old Stamp Tax repealed yet,’ shrieked Mrs Godwit.

‘We will?’ shouted Makepeace. ‘Hooray to that.’

‘Don’t approve of riotin’ but something’s got to be done.’

‘Long as it don’t affect trade.’

They were joined by Mrs Ellis, Bunch of Grapes, King Street. ‘Oh, they won’t attack patriotic hostelries. Tories’ll suffer though. I heard as how Piggott of the Anchor got tarred and feathered.’

The Anchor was South End and gave itself airs.

‘Never liked him,’ Makepeace said.

‘Sam Adams’ll be speechifyin’ at the Green Dragon tonight, I expect,’ announced Mistress Godwit, loftily.

‘And comin’ on to the Bunch of Grapes.’

‘Always ends up at the Roaring Meg.’

Honours even, the ladies separated.

Despite the ache in her back, but with Tantaquidgeon to carry her basket, Makepeace detoured home via Cornhill so that she might be taunted by fashions she couldn’t afford.

Here there was evidence of a new, less violent campaign against the government. At Wentworth’s, who specialized in the obligatory black cloth with which American grief swathed itself after the decease of a loved one, a sign had been pasted across the window: ‘Show frugality in mourning.’ The draper himself was regarding it.

She stopped. ‘What’s that, then?’

‘Funereals come from England, don’t they?’ he said. ‘The Sons say as English goods got to be embargoed.’

Makepeace had never heard the word but she got the gist. ‘Very patriotic of you.’

‘Wasn’t my idea,’ said Mr Wentworth, resentfully.

The Sons of Liberty had been harsher on Elizabeth Murray, importer of London petticoats, hats and tippets for fifteen successful years. One of her windows was broken, the other carried a crudely penned banner: ‘A Enimy to Her Country’.

Men on upturned boxes harangued crowds gathered under the shade of trees to listen. Barefoot urchins ran along the streets, sticking fliers on anything that stood still, or even didn’t. Makepeace watched one of them jump on the rear of a moving carriage to dab his paper nimbly on the back of a footman. As the boy leaped back into the dust, she caught him by the shirt and cuffed him.

‘And what d’you think you’re doing?’

‘I’m helpin’ Sam Adams.’

‘He’s doing well enough without you, varmint. You come on home.’ She took a flier from his hand. ‘What’s that say?’

Joshua sulked. ‘Says we’re goin’ to cut Master Oliver’s head off.’

‘It says “No importation” and if you kept to your books like I told you, you’d maybe know what it means.’

She was teaching Betty’s son to read; she worried for his literacy, though he’d gone beyond her in the art of drawing and she’d asked Sam Adams if there was someone he could be apprenticed to. So far he’d found no artist willing to take on a black pupil.

He trotted along beside her. ‘Don’t tell Mammy.’

‘I surely will.’ But as they approached the Roaring Meg she let him slip away from her to get to the taproom stairs and his room without passing through the kitchen.

‘Going to be a long, hot night, Bet. I don’t know what about the lobsters. Can the Sons eat and riot?’

‘Chowder,’ said Betty. ‘Quicker.’

‘How’s upstairs?’

‘Sleepin’.’

‘Ain’t you found out who he belongs to?’

‘Nope. Ain’t you?’

Maybe she could smuggle him to Government House – she had an image of Tantaquidgeon trundling a covered handcart through the streets by night – but information had Governor Bernard holed up, shaking, at Castle William along the coast.

‘Sons of Liberty meeting and an English drownder right across the hall. Ain’t I lucky?’

When she went up to her room, the drownder was still asleep. She washed and changed while crouching behind her clothes press in case he woke up during the process. Tying on her clean cap, she crossed to the bed to study his face. Wouldn’t set the world on fire, that was certain sure. Nose too long, skin too sallow, mouth turned down in almost a parody of melancholia. ‘Why?’ she complained. ‘Why did thee never learn to swim?’

As she reached the door, a voice said: ‘Not a public school requirement, ma’am.’

She whirled round. He hadn’t moved, eyes still closed. She went back and prised one of his eyelids up. ‘You awake?’

‘I’m trying not to be. Where am I?’

‘The Roaring Meg. Tavern. Boston.’

‘And you are?’

‘Tavern-keeper. You foundered in the harbour and I pulled you out.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome. How’d ye get there?’

There was a pause. ‘Odd, I can’t remember.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Oh God. Philip Dapifer. I don’t wish to seem ungrateful, madam, but might you postpone your questions to another time? It’s like being trepanned.’ He added querulously: ‘I am in considerable pain.’

‘You’re in considerable trouble,’ she told him. ‘And you get found here, so am I. See, what I’m going to do, I’m a-going to put my …’ She paused, she never knew how to describe Tantaquidgeon’s position in the household; better choose some status a wealthy Englishman would understand, ‘… my footman here so as nobody comes in and you don’t get out. You hear me?’

He groaned.

‘Hush up,’ she hissed. She’d heard the scrape of the front door. ‘No moaning. Not a squeak or my man’ll scalp you. Hear me?’

‘Oh God. Yes.’

‘And quit your blaspheming.’ She left him and went to find Tantaquidgeon.

The Roaring Meg was a good tavern, popular with its regulars, especially those whose wives liked them to keep safe company. The long taproom was wainscoted and sanded, with a low, pargeted ceiling that years of pipe smoke had rendered the colour of old ivory. In winter, warmth was provided by two hearths, one at each gable end, in which Makepeace always kept a branch of balsam burning among other logs to mix its nose-clearing property with the smell of hams curing in a corner of one chimney and the whale oil of the tavern’s lamps, beeswax from the settles, ale, rum and flip.

This evening the door to the jetty stood ajar to encourage a draught between it and the open front door. With the sun’s heat blocked as it lowered behind the tavern, the jetty was in blue shade and set with benches for those who wished to contemplate the view.

Few did. The Meg’s customers were mostly from maritime trades and wanted relief from the task-mistress they served by day.

The room reflected the aversion. A grandmother clock stood in a nook, but there were no decorations on the walls, no sharks’ teeth, no whale skeletons, no floats nor fishnets – such things were for sightseers and inns safely tucked away in town. For the Meg’s customers the sea’s mementoes were on gravestones in the local churchyards; they needed no others.

‘Going rioting again?’ she asked, serving the early-comers.

‘Ain’t riotin’, Makepeace,’ Zeobab Fairlee said severely. ‘It’s called protestin’ agin bein’ – what is it Sam Adams says we are?’

‘Miserably burdened an’ oppressed with taxes,’ Jack Greenleaf told him.

‘Ain’t nobody more miserably burdened and oppressed’n me,’ Makepeace said. ‘A pound a year, a pound a year I pay King George in Stamp Tax for the privilege of serving you gents good ale, but I ain’t out there killing people for it.’

‘Terrify King George if you was, though,’ Fairlee said.

‘Who’s killin’ people?’ Sugar Bart stood in the doorway, his crutch under his armpit.

‘I heard as how George Piggott got tarred and feathered down South End last night,’ Makepeace said quickly.

‘Tarrin’ and featherin’ ain’t killin’, Makepeace,’ Zeobab said. ‘Just a gentle tap on the shoulder, tarrin’ is.’

‘I’d not’ve tarred that Tory-lover,’ Sugar Bart said, ‘I’d’ve strung the bastard from his eyelids ’n’ flayed him.’

He tip-tapped his way awkwardly across the floor to his chair by the grate, turned, balanced, kicked the chair into position and fell into it, his stump in its neatly folded and sewn breech-leg sticking into space. Nobody helped him.

Immediately the injured man upstairs became a presence; Makepeace had to stop herself glancing at the ceiling through which, it seemed to her, he would drop any second, like the descending sword of Damocles. Bart’s virulence was convincing; she had no doubt that, should he discover him, he would contrive to have the Englishman killed before he could talk. Unlike most of those who’d indulged in smuggling – a decent occupation – Bart kept contact with the criminal dens of Cable Street and the surrounding alleys, never short of money for rum and tobacco. Whenever he hopped into the Roaring Meg its landlady was reminded that her tavern was a thin flame of civilization in a very dark jungle. And never more so than tonight.

Act normal, she told herself. She said evenly: ‘No cussing here, Mr Stubbs, I thank you.’ She heated some flip, took it to him, putting a barrel table where he could reach it, and lit him a pipe.

Sugar Bart asked no pity for his condition and received none; instead, metaphorically, he waved his missing leg like an oriflamme in order to rally opposition against those whom he considered had deprived him of it. An excise brig he’d been trying to outrun in his smuggler while bringing in illegal sugar had fired a shot which should have gone across his bows but hit his foremast instead, and a flying splinter from it had severed his knee.

That Bart had survived at all was admirable but Makepeace had long decided he’d only done so out of bile. In all the years he’d patronized the Roaring Meg, she’d never learned to like him.

He didn’t like her either, or didn’t seem to, was never polite, yet his sneer as he watched her from his chair bespoke some instinct for her character, as if he knew things about her that she didn’t. She’d have banned him but, discourtesy apart, there’d never been anything to ban him for.

‘Was you whistlin’ this morning, weren’t it?’ he asked.

There was no point denying it. ‘Saw the redcoats coming.’

‘See anything else?’ Makepeace hadn’t expected thanks or gratitude and didn’t get any.

‘Lobster-pots. What else was there?’ She was an uncomfortable liar so she carried the fight to him: ‘And what was you doing there so early, Master Stubbs?’

His eyes hooded. ‘Sweepin’ up, Makepeace, just sweepin’ up.’

Jack Greenleaf said: ‘I heard as you was at the Custom House with the South End gang, an’ doin’ the damn place – sorry, Makepeace – a power of no good, neither.’

‘Ain’t denyin’ it.’ Sugar Bart was smug. ‘There’s some of them bastards won’t be shootin’ men’s legs off in a hurry.’

There was a general ‘Amen to that’ in which Makepeace joined. Since the government cracked down on smuggling sugar, the price of rum, which, with ale, was her customers’ staple drink, had almost doubled. This time she excused the use of ‘bastards’. As a description of Boston’s excisemen it was exact.

‘They got Mouse Mackintosh today,’ Zeobab said, ‘so you be careful, Bart Stubbs.’

Bart sat up. ‘They got Mackintosh?’

‘Noon it was,’ Zeobab said, ‘I was near the courthouse an’ redcoats was takin’ him into the magistrates. He’ll be in the bilboes by now.’

‘What they get him for?’ asked Makepeace. ‘Custom House?’

‘Don’t know, but earlier he was the one broke into Oliver’s house,’ Zeobab said in awe. ‘Led the lads, he did, swearing to lynch the … ahem … Stamper when he got him.’

‘Busy little bee, weren’t he?’ Makepeace’s voice was caustic; in her book Mouse Mackintosh was a South End lout and although Stamp Master Oliver deserved what he got, he was an old man.

‘A hero in my book,’ Bart said.

‘Cut the mustard an’ all, ’Peace,’ Jack Greenleaf pointed out on Mackintosh’s behalf, ‘they say as Oliver’s resigned from Stamp Masterin’ already.’

‘Still got to pay the tax, though, ain’t I?’

‘You have.’ Sugar Bart’s voice grated the air. ‘That’s a-why we’ll be on the streets again tonight, so fetch another flip, woman, and be grateful.’

Conversation ended for her after that; the taproom was filling up with men whose thirst for the coming rampage was only equalled by that for liquor. Hungry, too, wanting to eat in company rather than with their wives who, in any case, were reluctant to light a cooking fire in this heat.

She wished she’d caught more lobsters, but there was the lamb from Faneuil’s for lobscouse and there was always plenty of cod and shellfish to chowder.

Aaron came back from work, taking off his coat and donning an apron, catching her eye.

They managed a brief moment together in the kitchen, a savoury-smelling hell where the great hearth’s bottle-jacks, cauldrons, kettles and spits, outlined against fire, looked not so much domestic as the engineering of some demonic factory, a resemblance emphasized on the walls where Betty’s shadow loomed and diminished like that of a beladled, shape-changing harpy whose sweat, sizzling onto the tiles when she bent over them, formed a contrapuntal percussion with the hit-hit of mutton fat falling into the dripping well and the shriek of another lobster meeting its end.

‘Do you know who he is?’ Aaron was excited.

‘Philip Dapifer,’ she said.

‘Sir Philip Dapifer. They reckon he’s a cousin of the Prime Minister. He’s staying at the Lieutenant-Governor’s house. There’s a search on – he ain’t been seen since before dawn.’

‘Hokey! Is there a reward for him?’

‘Don’t know, but they reckon if he ain’t found soon the British’ll send in troops.’

‘Holy, holy Hokey.’

There was no time to pursue the matter; voices were calling from the taproom for service. With Aaron, she entered a wheeling dance between kitchen, casks and customers, carrying pots of ale, six at a time, balancing trays of trenchers like a plate-twirling acrobat, twisting past the barrel tables. The air grew thick with tobacco smoke, sweat and the aroma of lobscouse and became almost intolerably warm.

Sugar Bart caught at her skirt as she went by. ‘Where’s Tantaquidgeon tonight?’

‘Poorly,’ she said. There it was again, that instinct he had. For all the heat, she felt chill.

‘Thought I couldn’t smell him.’

Conversation was reaching thunder level, pierced by the hiss of flip irons plunging into tankards.

And stopped.

Sam Adams was in the doorway. He stood aside, smiling, threw out a conjuring hand and there, shambling, was the self-conscious figure of Andrew ‘Mouse’ Mackintosh.

Little as North Enders had reason to love the South End and its gang, Mackintosh had become an instant and universal hero with them. The taproom erupted, boots stamped planking, fists hammered table-tops, cheering brought flakes of plaster from the ceiling. Even Makepeace was pleased; it was a bad precedent for Sons of Liberty to be in jail, and anyway, she loved Sam Adams.

Everyone loved Sam Adams, Whig Boston’s favourite son, who’d run through his own and his father’s money – mainly through mismanagement and generosity – who could spout Greek and Latin but preferred the speech of common Bostonians and the conversation of cordwainers, wharfingers and sailors, and who frequented their taverns talking of Liberty as if she were sitting on his knee.

Ludicrously, in the election before last he’d been voted in as a tax collector, a job for which he was unfitted and at which he’d failed so badly – mainly because he was sorry for the taxed poor – that there’d been a serious shortfall in his accounts. The authorities had wanted him summoned for peculation but, since everybody else knew he hadn’t collected the taxes in the first place, he’d been voted in again.

He marched to the carver Makepeace always kept for him by the grate, his arm round Mackintosh’s shoulders, shouting for ‘a platter of my Betty’s lobscouse’.

‘How’d ye do it, Sam? How’d ye get Mouse out?’

Aaron took his hat, Betty came tilting from the kitchen with his food, Makepeace tied a napkin tenderly round his neck – though Lord knew his shirt-front was hardly worth saving – and, less willingly, offered the same service to Mackintosh. As she did it, she saw one of his hands had a grubby bandage that disappeared up his sleeve and seeped blood. ‘You hurt, Mr Mackintosh?’

‘Rat bit me.’ It was a squeak. Large as he was, Andrew Mackintosh’s voice was so high that when he spoke cats looked up with interest.

An English rat, she thought. Her drownder hadn’t gone down without a fight.

The room was silent, waiting for Adams’s answer.

‘Told ’em,’ he said, spraying lobscouse, ‘I told the sheriff if Andrew wasn’t released, there’d be general pillage and I wouldn’t be able to stop it.’

‘That’d do it, Sam,’ somebody called out.

‘It did.’ He stood and clambered up on his chair to see and be seen. ‘That did it, all right, didn’t it, General Mackintosh?’ He looked around. ‘Yes, there must be no more North End versus South End. We’re an army now, my Liberty boys, a disciplined army. By displaying ourselves on the streets like regular troops, we’ll show those black-hearted conspirators at Government House—’

‘’Scuse me, Sam.’ It was Sugar Bart, struggling up on his crutch. ‘Seems to me you’re talkin’ strategics.’

‘Yes, Bart, I am.’

‘Then I reckon as how you should do it upstairs so’s we shan’t be overheard.’ The man was looking straight at Aaron.

Sam Adams regarded the packed taproom. ‘Looks like there’s too many of us for the meeting-room, Bart.’

‘And it’ll be hot,’ Makepeace put in desperately. Visions of the Englishman moaning, a passing hand lifting the latch of her door to find that it was bolted from the inside …

‘Maybe,’ Sugar Bart said, not taking his eyes off Aaron, ‘but there’s some as don’t seem so bent on liberty as the rest of us.’

Now Sam got the implication. He crossed to Aaron and put his arm round the young man’s shoulders. ‘I’ve known this lad since he was in small clothes and a good lad he is. We’re all good patriots here, ain’t we, boys?’

The room was silent.

It was Aaron, with a grace even his sister hadn’t suspected, who resolved the situation. ‘We’re all patriots right enough, Sam, but this one’s going to bed early.’ He bowed to Sam, to Sugar Bart, to the company, and went upstairs.

‘That’s as may be,’ Bart said, ‘but how d’we know he ain’t listenin’ through the floorboards?’

Makepeace was in front of him. ‘You take that back, Bart Stubbs, or you heave your carcase out of this tavern and stay out.’

‘I ain’t sayin’ anything against you, Makepeace Burke, but your brother ain’t one of us and you know it. Is he, Mouse?’

The appeal to his ally was a mistake; Mackintosh was a newcomer not au fait with the personal interrelationships of the Roaring Meg and its neighbours; indeed would have been resented by those very neighbours if he’d pretended that he was. Wisely, he kept silent.

Bart, finding himself isolated, surrendered and began the process of sitting down again. ‘I ain’t sayin’ anythin’ about anybody betrayin’ anybody, I’m just saying we got to be careful.’

‘Not about my brother, you don’t.’

Sam Adams stepped between them. ‘We are going to be careful, gentlemen, careful we don’t quarrel among ourselves and spoil this happy day when Liberty arose from her long slumber …’

While he calmed the room down, Makepeace went angrily back to her barrels and resumed serving. Wish as I could betray you, you one-legged crap-hound.

She wondered if she could solicit Sam’s help in the matter of the Englishman. Obviously, he was in ignorance of the assault on the man by his new ‘general’. Wouldn’t countenance violence, would Sam.

With that in mind, in between dashes to the kitchen, she listened carefully to what Bart had called the ‘strategics’. Sam and Andrew Mackintosh were playing the company between them.

Sam’s rhetoric was careful, reiterating the need for caution in case the British government reacted by sending an army to quell its American colony.

‘No,’ agreed Mackintosh, ‘we ain’t ready for war agin’ the redcoats.’ And then: ‘Not yet,’ an addendum which brought a howl of approval.

Sam: ‘On the other hand, we can achieve the act’s repeal peacefully through the embargo on British goods.’

Mackintosh: ‘Peacefully break the windows of them as disobeys.’

Sam: ‘See that Crown officials, stamp-holders, customs officers are made aware of our discontent.’

‘Break their windows an’ all,’ Mackintosh said. ‘Keep ’em awake at nights with our drummin’.’

In other words, thought Makepeace, Sam was going to play pretty to the British and let Mackintosh and his mobs stir the pot.

Even had there been an opportunity for her to have a secret word with Adams, she decided, in view of these ‘strategics’, that it would be unwise. He was advocating reason yet allowing Mackintosh to inflame his audience for another night of rioting. Maybe he was out for revolution but, whether he was or wasn’t, he’d got a tiger by the tail; even if he’d be prepared to understand why she sheltered a representative of British tyranny, his tiger sure wouldn’t. Word would inevitably get out. Broken windows, lost custom: that’d be the least of it. Did they tar and feather women? She didn’t know.

She didn’t, she realized, know what men were capable of when they got into this state. She was watching the customers of years, ordinary decent grumblers, become unrecognizable with focused hatred.

For the first time, she wished Sam Adams would leave. She nearly said to him: Ain’t you got other taverns to go speechifyin’ in? But it appeared that he had anyway. She saw him and Mackintosh to the door, curtsied, received a kiss of thanks from Adams, a grunt from his companion and watched them go with relief.

But it was as if they’d lit a fuse that gave them just time to get out before it reached the gunpowder. Makepeace turned back to a taproom that, without the restraint of Sam Adams’s presence, was exploding.

Was that old Zeobab climbing up on a table? ‘Let’s drub ’em, boys,’ he was shouting. ‘Let’s scrag them sugar-suckers.’ An exhortation causing stool-legs to be broken off for weapons, perfectly good pipes to be smashed against the grate like Russian toast glasses, and rousing Jake Mallum into trying to grab her for a kiss.

And Tantaquidgeon, her chucker-out, was upstairs.

Makepeace cooled Mallum’s passion by bringing her knee up into his unmentionables, yelled for Betty and, with her cook, managed to snatch back two stool-legs with which to belabour heads and generally restore order. Betty lifted Zeobab off the table and planted him firmly on the jetty.

Makepeace went to the door, holding it wide: ‘Git to your rampage, gents,’ she called, ‘but not here.’

She saw them out, some shamefaced and apologizing, most not even saying goodnight as they rushed past her to begin another night of liberty-wreaking. Already flames flared on Beacon Hill and Boston was beginning to reverberate with the beat of drums.

Sugar Bart was in front of her. ‘That redskin were healthy enough earlier,’ he said. ‘Saw him with you in town. Where’s he gone?’

Sure as eggs, he knew she’d seen what he and the others had done to the man on Fish Quay this morning and found Tantaquidgeon’s unusual absence from her side suspicious. He couldn’t think she’d betray him but he knew something was up.

She loathed the man; he frightened her. ‘You ain’t welcome at the Meg any more, Mr Stubbs,’ she told him stiffly, ‘not after what you said about Aaron.’

He rubbed his chin, staring straight into her eyes. ‘The Sons is at war now,’ he said. ‘Know what they do to informers in war, Makepeace Burke?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you still ain’t welcome.’

She watched him hop away, ravenlike, into the darkness, then quickly bolted every shutter and door.

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