Diana Norman - A Catch of Consequence

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.