A voyager disembarking at Boston’s North End had a choice. If he were heedless of his purse, his health and his hope of salvation, he would disappear into those sinning, acrid alleys. If he were wise, he would make for the coastal beacon that was the Roaring Meg, with its smell of good cooking and hum of decent conversation.
In winter, when light from whale-oil lamps shone through its bottle-bottomed windows to be diffused in snow, the Roaring Meg resembled a Renaissance nativity scene, a sacred stable. Named after the noisy stream that ran alongside it before entering the sea, the tavern deserved its halo. Makepeace kept it free of the Devil’s flotsam by perpetual moral sweeping, brushing harlots and their touts from her doorstep, plumping up idlers like pillows, ejecting bullies, vomiters, debtors and those who took the Lord’s name in vain.
A little stone bridge led over the stream to its street door above which was displayed the information that John L. Burke was licensed to dispense ales and spirituous liquors. John L. Burke was in the grave these three years, having energetically drunk himself into it, but a man’s name above the door inspired more confidence in strangers than would a woman’s, so Makepeace kept it there.
North End magistrates conspired in the fiction and, if asked, would say that the licensee was actually Makepeace’s young brother Aaron, but they knew, as did everybody else, who was the Roaring Meg’s true landlord and privately acknowledged the fact. ‘Makepeace Burke,’ one justice had been heard to say, ‘is a crisp woman.’
An accolade, ‘crisp’: American recognition of efficiency and good Puritan hard-headedness. Makepeace took pride in it but knew how hard it had been to win and how easily it could be taken away. One word of scandal or complaint to the magistrates, one impatient creditor, one more storm to hole the Meg’s creaking roof – there was no money with which to replace it – and she would lose her vaunted crispness and her tavern.
And now that she had a calm moment in which to consider the consequences of what she was doing – in Puritan society wise women always considered consequences – suspicion grew that she might be jeopardizing both merely by harbouring the drownder under her roof.
The Cut, the lane at the sea end of which the Meg stood, was as respectable as the tavern itself, a narrow row of houses that passed through the surrounding wickedness like a file of soldiers in hostile Indian forest. Eyes at its windows watched for any falter in its rigid morality and one pair in particular was trained on herself.
‘Makepeace Burke’s picked up a man.’ She could hear the voices now. And, because the Cut was as patriotic as it was respectable, she could also hear the addendum: ‘A Tory man.’
It hadn’t been easy, a woman running a tavern. One of the proudest moments of her life – and the most profitable – had been when, with the imposition of the Stamp Tax, the local lodge of the Sons of Liberty had chosen the Roaring Meg for their secret meetings. Good men most of ’em, like nearly all her customers, but, again like her other regulars, driven to desperation by an unemployment that was the direct result of British government policy.
And among those very Sons was at least one of the group that had thrown the drownder into the harbour. Mighty pleased they’d be to find Makepeace Burke succouring the enemy. An enemy, what’s more, who’d report them to the magistrates quicker’n ninepence.
‘Who done it on us?’ Sugar Bart would ask, as he climbed the gallows’ steps.
‘Makepeace Burke,’ the Watch would reply.
After that, no decent patriot – and all her clientele were patriots – would set foot in the Roaring Meg again.
Oh no, she couldn’t trust the Watch not to give her away; apart from being as big a collection of incompetents as ever let a rogue slip through its fingers, it was hand in glove with the Sons of Liberty. Last night, when Governor Bernard had called on the Watch to drum the alarm, he’d discovered that its men had joined the mob and were happily destroying property with the rest.
The nearer she got to her tavern, the more perturbed Makepeace became. ‘Lord, Lord,’ she prayed out loud, ‘I did my Christian duty and saved this soul; ain’t there to be no reward?’
Like most Boston Puritans, Makepeace had a pragmatic relationship with the Lord, regarding Him as a celestial managing director and herself as a valued worker in His company. Until now she’d found no conflict between Christianity and good business. She obeyed the Commandments, most of ’em, and expected benefits and an eternal pension in return.
And the Lord answered her plea this bright and hot August morning by skimming the last word of it across the surface of His waters until it hit a wharf wall and bounced it back at her in an echo: Reward, reward.
Receiving it, Makepeace became momentarily beautiful because she smiled, a rare thing with her, showing exquisitely white teeth with one crooked canine that emphasized the perfection of the others.
‘You surely can hand it to the Lord,’ she told Tantaquidgeon. ‘He got brains.’
The drownder was in her debt. There was no greater gift than that of life – and she’d just given his back to him. In return, he could reward her with a promise of silence. Least he could do.
She looked down fondly at the richly clad bundle by her feet. ‘And maybe some cash with it,’ she said.
Having settled on a conclusion she’d actually reached at the moment the drownder opened his eyes, she felt better; she was a woman who liked a business motive.
Also she was intrigued – more than that, involved – by the man.
As someone who’d fought for survival all her life, Makepeace was affronted by apathy. Never having accepted defeat herself, this drownder’s ‘Does it matter?’ had excited her contempt but also her curiosity and pity. Look at him: fine boots – well, he’d lost one but the other was excellent leather; gold lacing on his cuffs. A man possessed of money and, therefore, every happiness. So why was he uncaring about his fate?
The boat bumped gently against the Meg’s tottering jetty. Makepeace looked around with a surreptitiousness that would have attracted attention had there been onlookers to see it.
Bending low, she climbed the steps and looked into the tap-room. Nobody there. She went through and opened the front door to peer into the Cut for signs of activity. Nothing again.
She returned to the boat and told Tantaquidgeon all was clear. She threaded her lobster-pots together and dragged them up and through the sea entrance to her tavern with Tantaquidgeon behind her, the tarpaulined Englishman draped over his forearms like laundry.
The Roaring Meg’s kitchen doubled as its surgery, and the cook as its doctor, both skills acquired in the house of a Virginian tobacco planter who, when Betty escaped from it, had posted such a reward for her capture that it was met only by her determination not to be caught.
She might have been – most runaway slaves were – if she hadn’t encountered John L. Burke leaving Virginia with wife, children, Indian and wagon for the north after another of his unsuccessful attempts at farming. John and Temperance Burke had little in common but neither, particularly Temperance, approved of slavery, and they weren’t prepared to hand Betty back to her owner, however big the reward. She’d stayed with the family ever after, even during her late, brief marriage, despite the fact that John Burke’s failures at various enterprises often necessitated her working harder than she would have done in the plantation house.
She examined the body on the kitchen table, deftly turning and prodding. ‘Collarbone broke.’ She enclosed