A Catch of Consequence

by Diana Norman

  For the first time Makepeace saw the full extent of what was to come. Oh my dear, she thought, oh my poor Pip. This nightmare beside her had not only looked up her skirt, he was lifting it, showing her and Dapifer naked for the public’s amusement. Their affection had become fairground entertainment.

  She felt very tired all of a sudden and closed her eyes.

  Beasley said: ‘You want to publish your version of it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Go away.’

  ‘Ought to, you know. Important, the printed word. I’ll call, shall I?’

  Her eyes flicked open. ‘Call?’

  He was addressing Betty and Tantaquidgeon. ‘If she don’t know the power of the press, the other one does. Anyone as can swear like this ’un needs preserving for a national treasure. Tell her she ought to talk to me.’

  ‘Young fella,’ Betty said, ‘you come near us again an’ this here Indian’s goin’ to take your scalp off an’ wear it.’

  Beasley nodded and took the sack from her, stuffing his papers back in it. As he went, he fished a dog-eared piece of cardboard from inside his jacket and thrust it into Makepeace’s hand. ‘My card,’ he said.

  They watched him slouch away, picking up his table as he went.

  Had Makepeace known it, another big gun had just been added to her future armoury.

  At that moment, however, she’d have shot him with it.

  Another outcome of that day was that she ordered Mme Angloss to design something which neither she nor, as far as she knew, any woman had worn before: a pair of short pantaloons to encase the thighs and the part between.

  Mme Angloss did so, under protest. She regarded the garment as unhealthy and indecent. ‘Ze privities should be free to ze air.’

  Makepeace didn’t like it much either, but there were greater indecencies.

  Just before they left for Hertfordshire, Dapifer took her down to Wapping to await the arrival of a ship bringing a gift he had ordered for her. ‘I trust you’ll approve.’

  ‘I’ll love it. What is it?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  They sat on the rickety balcony of the Anchor. An empty gibbet stood in the Thames silt a little further along to their right where the corpses of executed pirates were hung until the tide had covered them three times. An easterly wind brought the smell of sea from the estuary. Boats circumvented the tangle of hulls to land sailors and goods ashore, while others took apparently identical loads out to ships waiting to sail. Grubby Newcastle wherries, carrying their cargoes to the coal quays, slipped between the gilded figureheads of vast East Indiamen.

  ‘Miss it?’ Dapifer asked.

  ‘A bit.’ She didn’t want to tell him how much. At that moment she’d have sold her soul to be on the jetty of the Roaring Meg about to step into her rowing boat. ‘Pip, there’s the Lord Percy.’

  ‘She’s returning to the West Indies. Calling in at Boston first.’

  ‘Can we row out and say hello?’

  ‘In a while, if you want to. Makepeace, may I present Captain Dobbs? He’s brought you your present.’

  She thanked a middle-aged naval captain, though he appeared empty-handed. ‘Mighty kind of you, sir.’

  ‘A pleasure, ma’am.’ Captain Dobbs glanced wryly at Dapifer. ‘Also a relief.’ He moved to the rail of the balcony. ‘If you look down there, Lady Dapifer, my jolly is about to unload it.’

  A boatload of sailors, wearing the divided calico petticoat of ratings, was clambering up a ladder to the dockside. Some carried a ditty bag. One had a birdcage.

  ‘A parrot,’ she said.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  A marine sergeant gave a brusque order and the men shuffled into a sullen line. ‘They don’t look happy,’ Makepeace said.

  ‘They’ll be happier in a minute,’ Captain Dobbs said, ‘when I tell ’em they’re discharged and going home. Perhaps you’d like to tell them, ma’am.’

  And then she knew what the present was.

  Matthew Bell—he was the least changed—Laurie Crumpacker, the Sayward brothers, Jerry Batson, little Billy Kidder. . . all the Gideon’s crew. And there he was, the gaily fluttering ribbons on his hat unsuitable to the granite dignity his face had always kept and still did.

  The familiarity of the figures pierced her, as if she’d glimpsed her own children, aged, in a foreign land.

  Captain Dobbs was saying to Dapifer: ‘ . . . a fine seaman, Busgutt, but I’m not sorry to be rid of him. Always admonishing me as if I were a heathen. Let’s hope the volunteers you’ve given me to replace this lot will be a little less mindful of the Lord’s commands and a little more of the Admiralty’s.’

  ‘Do you want go down, Makepeace?’

  She managed to shake her head. What could she say to him?

  Captain Dobbs gave an order and for a moment the ribboned hats tilted as the Bostonians looked up to see where it came from. Their eyes slipped over the elegant woman on the balcony without recognition. Next minute they were being transferred to the tender from the Lord Percy.

  The tears plopping onto her face dried cold in the wind as she watched them scramble up the nets over the Percy’s side. Did they know yet they were going home? Somebody would tell them. She’d like to have seen that.

  She felt for her husband’s hand and clutched it against her cheek. It was warm on her skin. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Wish you were going with them?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m already home.’

  Chapter Nine

  IT was a landscape out of Brueghel, brown figures following a plough, white earth livid against a bleak, grey sky. The excitement of winter was in the busy, cawing rooks circling above the bare branches of elms.

  Two men clearing a ditch along a common doffed their caps and waved.

  The horses’ hooves made muffled squeaks on the snow as the coach turned to go through an ancient archway and ploughed along a village street, a track serving a row of thick-walled, deep-thatched cottages.

  They turned in through open ironwork gates to begin the drag uphill between two lines of sweet chestnut trees, past a small church and cemetery, to the top and the manor called Dapifers.

  Had Makepeace not known it already, the first glimpse of the house as she craned her neck out of the coach window would have told her the Dapifers were not a family to alter things. Add on, yes; change, no.

  The modest keep Eudo Dapifer, steward to Henry I, had built for himself on this Hertfordshire hilltop had been patched and recrenellated for the War of the Roses and again when Roundheads and Royalists battled across the surrounding countryside. It was still there, ivy-covered but serviceable. A fifteenth-century Dapifer had attached a hall to which an Elizabethan descendant had added a turret with a cupola. His Jacobean heir had waded in with an Italian garden and a stable block.

  Queen Anne’s era had passed it by, so had Palladianism. The house spread along the crest of its hill as artless and untidy as the River Drift meandering through the valley below it.

  Catty Dapifer had disliked the place; too bucolic.

  That day, with its firelit windows and the snow rounding its roofs, it blinked down at Makepeace like a line of huddled, wide-eyed owls on a branch, and she loved it.

  To her relief, most of the Grosvenor Square servants had been left behind in London; only two footmen, both of them Hertfordshire men, were travelling with Fanny Cobb, Tantaquidgeon and the luggage in the covered cart. Robert had been given the holiday to go and visit his mother.

  Betty was to be integrated into the manor’s staff as assistant to its resident cook and housekeeper—a woman of advanced years and, according to Dapifer, benign disposition. Aaron and Susan were to join them in a day or two. Makepeace was to be surrounded by her friends.

  She had a presentiment of joy; this was deep, deep countryside, biting air tinged with earth and manure, the Middle Ages of her ancestors. But she looked doubtfully across at the child on the seat opposite her. ‘I hope it won’t be too quiet here for
you, my lord.’

  During the journey from London she’d tended to fawn on the boy, partly investing him in her mind with the sophistication and ease with wealth his father must have had, partly out of pity for his orphaned state. His mother, a commoner from Ireland and reputedly beautiful, had died giving birth to him.

  Lord Ffoulkes said with some energy: ‘I hope not, ma’am.’ It was the first time he had roused himself to be other than polite in her company. He was a round-faced, sturdy little boy with lamentably ginger hair.

  His courteous but non-commital manner on being introduced to her and his apparently unsurprised acceptance of the fact that he was sharing the coach not only with Makepeace and Dapifer but two black people—Betty and Josh—argued either total self-possession or misery.

  She’d hoped that, since Josh and he were of an age, they would be company for each other; so far neither had exchanged a glance.

  ‘Don’t worry, Andrew,’ Dapifer said. ‘My wife’s from New England where they mark the Lord’s birth in a round of riotous Bible-reading. At Dapifers we celebrate Yuletide until it surrenders. We shall not be quiet.’

  Makepeace suppressed an ‘Oh dear’. Popish practices.

  As it turned out, Christmas at Dapifers was not Popish, it was pagan, as much to do with ancient invocations for the return of the sun as it was with Christ made flesh. And Makepeace was too busy with the preparations to worry about it.

  Even with the addition of the footmen, the staff kept at the manor was insufficient for the entertainment to be extended from Christmas Eve to Plough Monday. A list of her duties compiled by the aged, benign but authoritarian Mrs Bygrave, Dapifers’s housekeeper, was mountainous.

  Makepeace went to challenge her husband with it. ‘Thirty-eight silver spoons? Where’m I going to find thirty-eight silver spoons, and why?’

  ‘Pattons of Hertford makes them for us.’ Dapifer was reading some papers, his feet up on a battered escritoire in his turret room. ‘Each adult on the demesne gets one every Christmas. Tradition. Gratitude for saving their Dapifer lord in the Stephen and Matilda war.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘During the eleven forties. And don’t forget the bean in the plum cake for the Lord of Misrule. Oh, and the wassail bowl is kept in the church vestry, tell Simmonds to get it out. The orchard needs to be thoroughly wassailed or the apples won’t grow next year.’

  She groaned. ‘Goody Busgutt would report us to the magistrates.’

  ‘She should see us burying the Corn Dolly. Have the dinner invitations gone out?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at her list. ‘Two cows? Who’re we feeding? The whole damn county?’

  ‘Just this part of it.’

  ‘Pip,’ she said, ‘suppose they won’t come because of me? All that food wasted.’ The guests invited to the Christmas feast were, as far as she could tell, mostly shire folk but, being so, they probably disapproved of divorce even more strongly than did the peerage.

  ‘They’ll come. Around here you don’t offend a Dapifer, however many wives he’s got. Sir Toby, for instance, is the local Member of Parliament, a Whig—his seat’s in my pocket and he does what I tell him. He likes Forc’d Cabbage Surprise with his meat.’

  Sir Toby and Lady Tyler. Top table. ‘I know. Mrs Bygrave said. The surprise is how long it takes to bloody make.’ She leaned across the escritoire. ‘You’re doing this deliberately, ain’t you?’ She pushed his legs off the escritoire so that his chair skidded on the floor.

  ‘You said you lacked employment,’ he said, sadly. ‘I’m giving you employment. Lock the door.’

  ‘I ain’t got time.’

  ‘Lock the damn door.’

  They made love on the threadbare Persian carpet in front of the fire. Later, when she discovered she was pregnant, she ascribed it to that morning in the high, circular room with winter sun coming through the lancets onto piles of dilapidated books, the scent of burning apple logs and ancient stone, somebody whistling down in the courtyard.

  ‘Confess you’re having the time of your life,’ he said, nuzzling her hair. ‘I understand they refer to you as “missus”. A compliment.’

  ‘What did they call her?’

  ‘ “My lady”.’

  She despaired of keeping rooms warm and floors clean. It was as if the old, oaken manor was an extension of the countryside, tramped and sledged with offerings of holly and ivy, a tree trunk of Yule log, pots of honey—the bees had to be thanked for it—vegetables, herbs. The hall echoed with calls from ladders as the greenery was hung, the back yard with the bellows of animals unappreciative of having their throats cut in a good cause. The blur of work parted now and then to imprint other images.

  One morning, in the huge, noisy and medieval kitchen, she found Sam the pigman having the blood from his nose stanched by Fanny Cobb and the blacksmith, Edgar Croft.

  ‘What’s happened here?’

  ‘Only lifted Betty’s petticoats, didn’t he,’ Fanny told her.

  ‘Wanted to see if she were liquorice all a way down, tha’s all,’ Sam said.

  Betty, up to her elbows in pastry, was grinning. ‘Felt my liquorice fist instead.’

  ‘Goin’ to put her up agin Battlin’ Bob in the prizefights next,’ Edgar said.

  There was a general air of relaxation. The village faces had a stoniness which, Makepeace was learning, in Hertfordshire passed for laughing.

  She took in a breath of relief. They’d melded. ‘Am I the only bugger working around here? I don’t get that pig quartered in five more minutes, Sam, I’ll roast you in its place.’

  ‘All right, missus.’

  On her way out, she nudged Betty. ‘Told you to wear drawers.’

  Two days later, Makepeace, furious because she’d been frightened, faced two small, shivering, blanketed boys. ‘You varmints. I told you the ice wasn’t thick enough, didn’t I tell you? I’ve a mind to tan your arses. Suppose Tantaquidgeon hadn’t been watching? We’d’ve lost you both. You stay off that damn lake till I say it’s safe—I know about water.’

  ‘Yes, Miss ’Peace.’ That was Josh.

  Lord Ffoulkes stared her out. ‘Josh says you can sail a boat.’

  ‘And you’re sailing to bed this minute.’

  But there was something there and when she’d stopped shaking she went up to his room. He was curled like a foetus among the bedclothes. She put her hand on his forehead; warm but no fever.

  She lay down next to him, carefully staring up at the ceiling. ‘What’s this about sailing?’ At least his father’s death hadn’t given him a horror of the sea.

  ‘I want to learn. I want to sail to America.’

  ‘Surely. I’ll teach you. But why?’

  ‘My father’s there.’

  She wished Dapifer wasn’t out; he’d know how to cope with this. She said quietly: ‘You know he drowned, Andrew. You went to his memorial service.’ Dapifer said the child had stood it like a guardsman and answered the King’s condolences with dignity.

  She watched his grubby little hand tighten on the sheet. ‘ . . . goodbye.’

  ‘What?’ She leaned over him.

  ‘I didn’t say goodbye.’

  Perhaps a goodbye couldn’t be said in Westminster Abbey among pomp and dignitaries and bloody incense.

  She clenched her teeth against an old, childhood agony; they hadn’t let her say goodbye to her mother, either; they’d taken her away when Temperance Burke went into labour with Aaron. By the time the neighbours returned Makepeace home, Temperance was already buried.

  Lord, let me help him. All she could do was tell him what she’d once told Dapifer, how quick it must have been . . .

  She ended: ‘But that’s one good thing, it was the same sea. Same sea the Thames goes into, same sea that little Drift out there gets to in the end. Souls don’t have any difficulty navigating the Atlantic. How about when we get back to London you and me sail down the Thames to the estuary and give it some flowers for your pa?’

  She’d d
one the same thing when her father died, to help float his soul back to Ireland. Goody Busgutt had called her a heathen.

  ‘Will he see them?’

  ‘He surely will.’ She added with difficulty: ‘No need to say goodbye, neither. You and him ain’t finished just because he drowned.’

  The boy turned to her and she put her arms round him and they sobbed together.

  Aaron and Susan arrived from London on the day before the dinner at Dapifers for the local dignitaries. They brought with them a copy of the latest scandal sheet, Picknicks.

  ‘Susan didn’t want you to see it,’ Aaron said, ‘but I reckoned you’d better. The item’s short but it’s dirty.’

  The woman Sir Philip Dapifer now parades as his wife is reported lately to have been found serving ale to sailors in New England. A tavern wench, Sir Pip? The original Lady Dapifer has entered a suit in the Court of Arches against him, alleging his criminal conversation with this person. These columns promise to report all the interesting scenes fully, minutely and circumstantially displayed by the forthcoming trial.

  It was a peculiar sensation. She wasn’t in Dapifers’ parlour at all but back in Boston, in the bay, and standing not on the Roaring Meg’s jetty but on a hulk, drawn through the water on a long chain attached to a cutter. A target. Often she’d watched the puffs of smoke and the spout of water as the cannons fired their practice shots. Now she was the target itself and bracketed, to right, to left, waiting for the shot that would hurl her into the air in disintegrating spars.

  Catty Dapifer was finding her range.

  Dapifer pulled the paper from her hand. ‘Is this your friend John Beasley?’ He squinted at the small print bearing the proprietor’s name. ‘Apparently not.’ He threw the sheet in the fire. ‘Trash. Not worth bothering with.’

  ‘Excuse me, but I think it is.’ Aaron, usually in agreement with his brother-in-law’s every word, was standing up to him. ‘This needs action, Pip. People are ingesting this poison. You’ve got to counter it.’