an echoing, hurrying footfall suggesting emergency – its perpetrator having to make explanation to the magistrates if there was none.
Today, to Aaron who had missed both riots, it was shocking, haunted by the daubed, shrieking poltergeists who had rampaged through it the night before, the wounds they’d inflicted pointed up by the stillness, as if a fine face had turned slack and dribbling in open-mouthed sleep. Because no work should be done on the Lord’s Day, avenues were still littered with the black scatterings of bonfires. Fences and flowerbeds lay trampled; broken glass winked in the gutters.
In Hanover Square the huge, hundred-year-old oak tree that stood in its middle had sprouted new fruit. A figure was hanging from one of its branches.
Close to, it turned out to be an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the Stamp Master of Massachusetts Bay. Last night the old man had been made to stand before it and apologize for his offence of administering the Stamp Act.
Where Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson’s white, pillared mansion had stood among trees there was no mansion. An empty shell gaped in its place surrounded by wreckage as if it had vomited semi-digested furniture onto the lawns. Birdsong from the motionless trees seemed out of place in the devastation. A statue was headless, urns broken. Over everything, like demented snow, lay paper and, here and there, the leather binding it had been ripped from – Hutchinson had owned the best library in New England.
‘Will you look here?’ Aaron held out the torn frontispiece of a hand-written manuscript to Makepeace. ‘He was writing this, that good man, and they tore it up. Look.’ The title was in beautiful copperplate: A History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
Makepeace’s only interest was the present; Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinsons’s virtues and omissions were ground she and her brother had fought over too often. ‘Well, where is he now?’
Aaron shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s taken refuge with Governor Bernard out at Castle William.’
‘Run, run, fast as you can,’ said Makepeace nastily. If there was no authority left in town, what safety was there for Dapifer? Or herself, for that matter?
‘Stay and be killed, is that it?’ Aaron was equally upset. ‘They got at his cellars, I tell you. Drunken madmen they must have been.’
‘They was patriots,’ she yelled at him, hitting out because she was frightened. ‘Hutchinson and his yes King George, no King George, let me lick your boots, King George … don’t matter if good Americans is starving and all his relatives is living in palaces paid for out of poor people’s taxes.’
‘Hutchinson advised against the Stamp Tax, you know he did, you stupid female.’
And they were back on their ancient battlefield, made more bitter by the knowledge that both had truth on their side. Sir Thomas Hutchinson’s love of English upper-class mores and his nepotism were notorious – Stamp Master Oliver was his brother-in-law and between them the two families monopolized most of the Bay’s government offices – but he was also erudite and for over twenty years had devoted himself to the betterment of the colony into which he’d been born.
Aaron was right – Hutchinson was a good man. Makepeace was right – Hutchinson wasn’t a good American.
Betty stepped between them. ‘This ain’t buyin’ baby a new bonnet. What we goin’ to do with him upstairs?’
‘Get him away by boat,’ said Aaron. ‘I’ll row to Castle William and get them to send an escort for him tonight.’
‘Take him with you,’ Betty said. ‘Save time.’
Aaron shook his head. ‘Too risky. The Sons ain’t observing the Sabbath that religiously. Looks like they’re in charge. One of them stopped me and Tantaquidgeon coming home and asked what we were doing. I said we had sickness in the house and had gone for a doctor. If they’re patrolling the water like they’re patrolling the streets, your fella’ll get tipped back in the harbour – and me with him.’
Makepeace groaned. Her brother, usually incautious, was showing common-sense, an indication of how seriously he’d been scared by the situation. Nobody would question him alone in a boat – watchers who knew him would assume he was making another of his visits to Harvard friends across the river – but if Sugar Bart saw him with Dapifer …
What Aaron didn’t realize, because even now his fingers couldn’t take the pulse of the neighbourhood like hers, was how disastrous it was going to be for the Roaring Meg’s local reputation when a bunch of redcoats, invited redcoats from the loathed garrison at Castle William, turned up to rescue an Englishman from its midst. As well run up the Union Jack and be done with it. The Sons would never drink here again. Probably nobody else either, she thought. But what else to do? Nothing.
She smoothed down her apron. That bridge would have to be burned when she got to it. ‘Go up and tell the Goodies we got lobscouse and brandy for their supper in the taproom,’ she said to Aaron. ‘You can tell the English your plan while they’re down.’
Free lobscouse and brandy. She shook her head at her own open-handedness. ‘This rate,’ she said to Betty, ‘we’ll be ruined before we’re ruined.’
While the Goodies gorged in the taproom, Zeobab Fairlee came to the kitchen door asking for them. Makepeace pounced on him, he was her oldest customer and friend, sat him down and began gabbling her tale of wounded, rescued Englishmen – ‘What else could a Christian body do, Zeobab? Eh? Eh? Couldn’t let ’un drown, could I?’ – and, having done it, how could she appease the Sons?
He was preoccupied and barely listened to her. ‘There’s news, ‘Peace,’ he said, ‘I come to tell Goody Busgutt.’
His brown nut of a face showed no expression – a bad sign; imparting and receiving disastrous news was done in this community with a stoicism that bordered on the comatose. ‘It’s the Gideon.’
Betty paused over the fire, Makepeace sat down, gripping the knife with which she’d been cutting bread until her knuckles showed white. Her own face was impassive. Don’t let him be drowned, Lord, she prayed, don’t let Captain Busgutt be drowned. Batting your eyelashes at Englishmen and your fiancé drowns – it’s the Lord’s punishment. ‘Dead?’
Zeobab shook his head. ‘Pressed.’ The word tolled through the kitchen like a passing bell. It was almost as dreadful, it was almost the same.
Among the incoming ships piling up in the Bay, unwilling to risk their cargo and passengers while there was rioting in town and, in any case, last night barred from docking by Boston’s laws against Sunday working, was a pursuit boat from the Moses, a whaler recently returned to Nantucket full of blubber. Commanding the boat was the Moses’ first mate, Oh-Be-Joyful Brown, anxious to renew his acquaintance with the young Boston woman he’d been courting now that he had money enough to marry her. Impatient of the delay, Oh-Be-Joyful had irreligiously rowed ashore early this morning though, being nevertheless a dutiful man, he had not gone straight to his lady but had first sought out Goody Busgutt. ‘Couldn’t find her, see,’ Zeobab said, ‘so he comes to me.’
‘Will you get to it?’ snapped Betty.
What Oh-Be-Joyful wanted to tell Goody Busgutt was that while hunting on the Grand Banks, the Moses had met another whaler, a homeward-bound Greenlander. Since neither was in competition at that stage of their voyages, they had stopped to chat in the middle of the Atlantic like two housewives over a fence.
‘An’ the Greenlander,’ said Zeobab, ‘she says three months previous she come across the Gideon sinkin’, rammed by a whale, see, and takes off the crew. But she was bound for Liverpool to discharge her oil, so that’s where she takes ’em. And at Liverpool, so her master told Oh-Be, the press comes on board an’ takes Cap’n Busgutt and his men for the navy.’
‘They can’t.’ Makepeace was standing. ‘They can’t press him. He’s protected.’
In order for Britain’s trade to flourish, certain classes of seafarers