A Catch of Consequence

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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