Quarrelling would have attracted more attention so she let him go. She called Tantaquidgeon and put him on guard at the jetty, then went upstairs to take out her anger and discomfort on a true English gentleman.
He was sitting by the window, looking tireder and gloomier than ever; a day with the Goodies could do that.
‘Well,’ she said, storming in, ‘you cost me my marriage. You gone and got Captain Busgutt pressed. Ain’t I lucky?’
He turned his head, blinking. ‘He’s been ironed?’
‘Pressed, pressed. Taken for the navy.’
‘I did that?’
‘Thy government, then.’ She was waving her fist. She’d give him press gang.
He had the sense to listen, giving a nod from time to time. When she finally ran out of breath, he said, ‘I can get him out, you know.’
The sheer omnipotence of the statement made her angrier. ‘And what about Matthew Bell and the rest of the crew?’
‘I’ll get them out as well.’
‘Oh.’ She paused. ‘Do it then.’ She still didn’t want to be placated. ‘But how long’ll that take? They could be aboard an East Indiaman by now. Or sailed to China. I’ll be in my grave before I’m a bride.’
‘Believe me, my dear Procrustes, marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’ Then he said: ‘Does Mrs Busgutt know?’
Makepeace sighed. ‘She knows.’
‘Ah. Yes. Poor soul. I thought I heard the voice of Mrs Saltonstall. She was using the words “English lord” in tones that suggested a blight on our former intimacy. She’s blaming me.’ He looked at her. ‘And you.’
He’s quick, Makepeace thought. She hadn’t meant him to know how much trouble she was in; that was her business. She said, more gently: ‘They got to blame somebody. It’ll pass.’
‘Will it?’ He shook his head at her. ‘You really should have let me drown, shouldn’t you, Makepeace Burke?’
‘You wanted to, di’n’t you? I saw.’ She advanced on him with another grievance. ‘You was letting slip. I saw you. You was letting it beat you.’
He shrugged and turned back to the window. ‘As I remember, my situation appeared unpropitious.’
‘There’s always propitions – whatever they are. You struggle ’til the Lord sounds the last trump. See him?’ She pointed out of the window to where Tantaquidgeon stood on the jetty below them. ‘He’d be dead now if he’d thought like you.’
She told him the story, partly so that he could profit from Tantaquidgeon’s example and partly because, when things were bad, as now, she encouraged herself with this triumph of Christian survival.
At the time John L. Burke had been playing at frontiersman, attempting to earn a living for himself, his wife and his small daughter – it was before Aaron was born – by trapping along the fur-rich edges of the Great Lakes. Another failure; the family’s only gain from that particular enterprise had been Tantaquidgeon. Makepeace, then four and a half years old, had found him lapping from the stream to which she’d gone for water. The wound in his skull was horrific.
The Burkes discovered later, from other sources, that an Iroquois war party had raided his settlement – he was a Huron – massacring everybody in it, including his wife and son, and as near as spit killing Tantaquidgeon himself. To reach the stream where Makepeace found him he’d crawled several miles. She’d run to fetch her mother.
‘His brains was coming out, Pa said he was a-dying, so did the other trappers’ families. But Ma said he di’n’t need to less’n he had a mind to it.’ Temperance Burke had prayed over him as she nursed him and become heartened by his repetition of ‘Jesus’, his only word.
She’d named him Tantaquidgeon after an Indian familiar to the early Puritan settlers. ‘He was a praying Indian, see,’ Makepeace told Dapifer, triumphantly. ‘The Lord hadn’t sounded the trump for him yet and he knew it and he fought to stay living, spite of everything. He wouldn’t be beat.’
‘And you’ve kept him ever since?’
Makepeace was as surprised at the question as she had been when Dapifer had asked her why she’d saved him from drowning. ‘Couldn’t manage on his own, could he?’ The Indian’s devotion to her mother had been absolute; after Temperance’s death it had been transferred to herself. ‘He’s family.’
‘Can he say anything at all?’
‘He says “Jesus”. Ma said that was enough.’ Makepeace felt heartened, as she always did by recounting the story. ‘Ma was a remarkable woman and Tantaquidgeon’s a remarkable man. You want to be more like him.’
She means it, thought Dapifer. That overgrown doorstop down there is being held up as an example to me. He said, meekly: ‘I’ll try.’
There was that ravishing grin again; she was extraordinary. He said: ‘They’re going to punish you, aren’t they, Procrustes?’
The smile went. ‘It’ll pass.’
‘I’d better stay.’
‘That’d rile ’em more.’
‘What then?’
With hideous honesty, she said: ‘I was minded there’d be a reward.’
‘Good God.’ He’d been fooled by the relationship that had grown between them; he’d intended to send her some extravagant memento, a piece of furniture, a jewel; he’d forgotten she was a member of a class that grubbed everywhere for money. ‘And what are you minded my life’s worth?’ He added, with assumed calculation: ‘And don’t forget I saved you from the Goodies.’
‘Not for long, you didn’t.’ She pushed an errant red ringlet back into her cap as she reckoned the cost of him. There was the expenditure on the Goodies’ food and drink, there was undoubtedly the loss of her custom, she might be forced to close the Meg and open a tavern somewhere else, and the loss of Captain Busgutt. And – here she doubled the figure she’d first thought of – there was the cost of falling in love with an Englishman who was about to leave her, who must leave her, who would have left her whatever the circumstances – she had no illusions about that – the memory of whom would keep her incapable of loving another man for the rest of the days. That was worth something.
She took a deep breath. ‘Forty pounds?’
Sir Philip Dapifer, born to an income of fifteen thousand pounds per annum, appeared to consider. ‘Cheaper to marry you,’ he said. ‘Will a draft on my Boston bank be acceptable?’
‘Cash,’ she said.
‘Cash.’
She spat and they shook on it. He would have held onto her hand but she dragged it out of his and went abruptly out of the room.
He returned to the view. A cormorant slouched on the prow of a boat, holding out its wings to dry in an attitude of crucifixion, as still and as blue-black as the top of the Indian’s head below.
The pain inflicted by his drubbing was beginning to recede, though his shoulder still ached and he could hear the wheezing in his ears which tormented him when his heart skipped and then redoubled its beat as it often did nowadays.
The moon was rising like a transparent disk in a sky still retaining some light. It was losing its perfect roundness as if a coiner had clipped it on one side, bringing with it a lessening of the heat and giving a sheen to the little islands in the Bay so that they looked like a school of curved dolphins arrested and pewtered in the act of diving.