He groaned.
‘Hush up,’ she hissed. She’d heard the scrape of the front door. ‘No moaning. Not a squeak or my man’ll scalp you. Hear me?’
‘Oh God. Yes.’
‘And quit your blaspheming.’ She left him and went to find Tantaquidgeon.
The Roaring Meg was a good tavern, popular with its regulars, especially those whose wives liked them to keep safe company. The long taproom was wainscoted and sanded, with a low, pargeted ceiling that years of pipe smoke had rendered the colour of old ivory. In winter, warmth was provided by two hearths, one at each gable end, in which Makepeace always kept a branch of balsam burning among other logs to mix its nose-clearing property with the smell of hams curing in a corner of one chimney and the whale oil of the tavern’s lamps, beeswax from the settles, ale, rum and flip.
This evening the door to the jetty stood ajar to encourage a draught between it and the open front door. With the sun’s heat blocked as it lowered behind the tavern, the jetty was in blue shade and set with benches for those who wished to contemplate the view.
Few did. The Meg’s customers were mostly from maritime trades and wanted relief from the task-mistress they served by day.
The room reflected the aversion. A grandmother clock stood in a nook, but there were no decorations on the walls, no sharks’ teeth, no whale skeletons, no floats nor fishnets – such things were for sightseers and inns safely tucked away in town. For the Meg’s customers the sea’s mementoes were on gravestones in the local churchyards; they needed no others.
‘Going rioting again?’ she asked, serving the early-comers.
‘Ain’t riotin’, Makepeace,’ Zeobab Fairlee said severely. ‘It’s called protestin’ agin bein’ – what is it Sam Adams says we are?’
‘Miserably burdened an’ oppressed with taxes,’ Jack Greenleaf told him.
‘Ain’t nobody more miserably burdened and oppressed’n me,’ Makepeace said. ‘A pound a year, a pound a year I pay King George in Stamp Tax for the privilege of serving you gents good ale, but I ain’t out there killing people for it.’
‘Terrify King George if you was, though,’ Fairlee said.
‘Who’s killin’ people?’ Sugar Bart stood in the doorway, his crutch under his armpit.
‘I heard as how George Piggott got tarred and feathered down South End last night,’ Makepeace said quickly.
‘Tarrin’ and featherin’ ain’t killin’, Makepeace,’ Zeobab said. ‘Just a gentle tap on the shoulder, tarrin’ is.’
‘I’d not’ve tarred that Tory-lover,’ Sugar Bart said, ‘I’d’ve strung the bastard from his eyelids ’n’ flayed him.’
He tip-tapped his way awkwardly across the floor to his chair by the grate, turned, balanced, kicked the chair into position and fell into it, his stump in its neatly folded and sewn breech-leg sticking into space. Nobody helped him.
Immediately the injured man upstairs became a presence; Makepeace had to stop herself glancing at the ceiling through which, it seemed to her, he would drop any second, like the descending sword of Damocles. Bart’s virulence was convincing; she had no doubt that, should he discover him, he would contrive to have the Englishman killed before he could talk. Unlike most of those who’d indulged in smuggling – a decent occupation – Bart kept contact with the criminal dens of Cable Street and the surrounding alleys, never short of money for rum and tobacco. Whenever he hopped into the Roaring Meg its landlady was reminded that her tavern was a thin flame of civilization in a very dark jungle. And never more so than tonight.
Act normal, she told herself. She said evenly: ‘No cussing here, Mr Stubbs, I thank you.’ She heated some flip, took it to him, putting a barrel table where he could reach it, and lit him a pipe.
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