Zeobab shook his head. ‘He don’t have a ship no more, ‘Peace. The Gideon’d went down, see.’
She saw. With the Gideon sunk, Captain Busgutt’s certificate was useless. The English press gang had found valuable booty, a crew of trained men without protection, and thought it was its lucky day.
The knife in Makepeace’s hand stabbed into the loaf and stabbed it again. She was so angry. How dare they, how dare they? King George and his shite Admiralty. Kidnap your own men but you leave ours alone. Here it was again – British tyranny. Stab. It was an old grievance, another of the reasons for Boston’s disaffection and a better one even than the Stamp Tax for tearing down Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson’s house. Stab. Pity he weren’t in it.
That the Royal Navy was even-handed and took any nationality it could lay its hands on did nothing to mollify an American seaboard which suffered badly from its predation. Men went missing with dreary regularity. Women and children were left waiting for husbands and fathers who’d been trawled like fish. Most never returned. Having been legally kidnapped, the few who escaped were hunted as deserters.
Makepeace’s knife cut the Board of Admiralty’s brains into breadcrumbs. Betty leaned over and took it away from her. ‘Did Oh-Be say if they was all saved?’ Most of Gideon’s crew consisted of local men.
‘He di’n’t know.’
Silence closed in on the kitchen with another question. Eventually Betty asked it. ‘Who’s goin’ to tell her?’
‘I ain’t,’ Makepeace said. Guilty of attraction to another man, she couldn’t look Captain Busgutt’s mother in the face.
But in the end she accompanied Zeobab into the taproom and held Goody Busgutt’s hand while he told her. The old woman diminished before her eyes; there was none of the anger that consumed Makepeace, not yet at any rate, though Saltonstall, on behalf of her friend, supplied enough for all of them. Goody Busgutt kept pleading for reassurance – ‘I’ll not see my boy again, will I?’ – a question to which, terribly, she knew the answer as well as they did.
They helped her back to her house.
The evening was giving a rare mellowness to the Cut; to the left, the tide lapped softly at the cobbles of its ramp and along its narrow, north-east facing terrace houses were soft-hued shadows, but there was still ferocity in the light that turned the walls and windows of the Roaring Meg’s side into amber.
Oh-Be-Joyful’s news had spread and further down the lane was a large cluster of women which hurried towards Zeobab and surrounded him with anxious questions. ‘Was my man pressed along of the others?’ ‘Did the press take Matthew?’ ‘Pressed.’ ‘Pressed.’
‘Ask her.’ Saltonstall established herself on Goody Busgutt’s steps and her voice rose above the clamour. She was pointing. ‘Ask Makepeace Burke. She’ll know. She’s took in a English lord as is a friend to them as steals our poor lads. Ask her what she’s a-doin’ with him in her bedroom.’
Unbelieving faces in unison turned towards Makepeace, the women’s go-to-meeting caps like the frill of spume on an advancing wave. She began gabbling as she had to Zeobab: Drowning. What else to do? Where else to take ’un? Every hurried word an apology and admission of guilt – and unheard. It seemed to her the wave was coming at her and she backed defensively into the Meg’s doorway.
But it was still absorbing shock. Almost the whole of the Cut was involved with the Gideon in one way or another; the men’s loss was not only personal grief but rents that now couldn’t be met, unpaid debts, little businesses that had been planned and wouldn’t transpire.
Mary Bell from Number 25 shifted her baby more firmly onto her hip. She came up so that she stood on one side of the little bridge that led to the tavern, Makepeace, with her back to the door, faced her on the other. They were friends. Mary’s young husband was second mate on Gideon and had sailed before his child was born. ‘What’s she sayin’, Makepeace?’ Her face crumpled. ‘Where’s my Matthew?’
Wordless, Makepeace stared at her. Useless, useless to say she’d saved a man from drowning not knowing who he was; her actions had no relevance to this woman.
Had Gideon gone down with all hands, Mary could have grieved and recovered. She came of a coastal people; the sea gave, the sea took away, she understood it, her church had prayers to rejoice or mourn the caprice of its profit and loss. But there was no formula for putting to rest the victim that disappeared into the jaws of His Majesty’s authorized monster. Though he didn’t come back, he remained the man who might or might not be dead, the husband of a wife who couldn’t remarry; he was a disembodied scream that went on and on.
These things had to be comprehended; Makepeace knew it because she too had to come to terms with an altered future.
But once they were – and Makepeace saw this too – somebody would have to pay for them, pain must be subsumed in revenge, a shriek of protest go up against the distant, arrogant, little island that inflicted such suffering.
And this time, there was a scapegoat to hand, trailing blood. Not a governor, not a stamp master – hirelings who took their orders from three thousand miles away – but a real, live Englishman who, on his own admission, had connections with the Admiralty, the same Admiralty that commanded the stealing of men. And he was here on their doorstep.
Helplessly, Makepeace went into the Roaring Meg, shut the door, bolted it and began preparations for a siege.
Nothing much to do,’ she said casually to Betty. ‘Why don’t you take Josh and go visit Hannah?’ Hannah was Betty’s close friend and lived along the waterfront.
‘You expectin’ trouble?’
‘No.’
‘Always could tell when you was lyin’.’
‘It’s just …’ It was difficult to clarify even to herself why she felt dread but she knew it wasn’t baseless. The nights of riot had created a palimpsest on which further havoc could be written, a ground for old and new scores to be settled in a way that Boston’s conformity had previously kept in check. Violence was in the air and she could smell it waiting outside her door. ‘… just if there’s trouble, if there’s trouble …’
‘Me and Josh family or not?’
‘You know you are, you old besom.’
‘’N’ so do every other soul ’round here. Want me ’n’ Josh caught strollin’ back from Hannah’s an’ chucked in the harbour? Thank you kindly, we’s stayin’ indoors an’ don’t nobody else ought to go visitin’ neither.’
‘It’s me they’re mad with.’
‘When people’s mad they ain’t picky.’
As an ex-slave Betty knew what she was talking about, but Makepeace was aware that she was just finding a good excuse to stay. How good an excuse was it, though? Would Aaron be safe going to Castle William?
Yes, she decided, he would, as long as he set out immediately. She was tempted to send the Englishman with him and then rejected the idea; there were people milling about the Cut who’d see them go; a crisis would be precipitated. Better for them all if the man made his escape under cover of darkness and with a force to protect him.
When Aaron came down from upstairs she apprised him of the situation. ‘You tell them soldiers to lie out from the jetty an’ keep quiet,’ she said. ‘We’ll row him to their boat.’
She accompanied her brother to the jetty. Aaron, too, had been enchanted by Dapifer who had offered to introduce him to the playhouses should he ever come to London. ‘Now there’s a true English gentleman.’