As voices erupted from the deck above him – a mix of Kentish curses and the bizarre approximation of French that the river pilot spoke – Jack pushed away from the tiny cabin’s wall, steadied himself and returned to the task of creating that impression. Replacing the cracked mirror on its hook, he regarded the least distorted of his reflections. It was the first time he’d donned the uniform since embarkation and it did not hang as well as it had in Portsmouth; he’d inevitably lost weight in the green weeks despite the hearty eating since. His father’s generosity, now Jack had submitted to his will, was limitless and included the extra £30 for this private … box – it could not be dignified with the word ‘cabin’ – and a seat at the captain’s table. Beevor ate well and so, once he’d mastered himself, did Jack; they’d only had to resort to salt provisions three days before Gaspé.
The red coat, with its lines of gold buttons and embroidered lace loops, hung limply from his diminished shoulders. It would have to wait for a regimental tailor to alter it, but he’d managed the waistcoat and breeches himself with a few stitches of sail yarn in the back. Turning each way, Jack had to admit that the overall effect was none too shabby. His hair was powdered and Mrs Beevor had done a tolerable job in setting it. The ribbon that gathered it was of the same dark blue as the uniform’s facings while the collar and cuffs had been further darkened with boot black. His stock was white and fresh from the tailor’s crêpe.
Burgoyne had said to him, ‘You will be the first of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons to serve in North America. You must be a credit to the regiment.’
Looking at himself, Jack felt he probably would be – at least sartorially.
Burgoyne. He knew how his colonel had protested that they should not be sending someone with a mere three months in the trade. Yet he also knew he was a victim of Burgoyne’s own excellence. The 16th Light Dragoons had rapidly become the most fashionable of regiments, that ex-cavalryman King George himself attending the parades and exercises of ‘The Queen’s’, often accompanied by the wife for whom they were named. And when His Majesty’s detailed thoughts on the pursuance of the war had to be taken to his commander in Canada, it was obvious his messenger must be drawn from the ranks of these new favourites. Then it could only be decided by the ‘last in, first out’ law of volunteering; Jack was the most junior cornet, the last to receive his commission and thus the most expendable.
At their final meeting, Burgoyne had again expressed how he would not have it so. Then he’d given Jack a copy of his newly published Code of Instructions for officers. ‘Read, lad, read all the way across. And if, perchance, there is an old soldier on board, attach yourself to him, let him teach you the other part of a Dragoon’s life, the infantry drills we ain’t got to yet. For, as sure as shit is shovelled, there’s no English cavalry on that continent.’ He’d smiled. ‘Till you get there, of course.’
Jack had taken the advice, read assiduously and found himself a mentor, a foul-mouthed corporal from Yorkshire, William Hancock. He’d agreed – for a far from modest five guineas – to teach Jack the essentials of drill and the use of the musket, throwing in for free a quite extraordinary collection of new curses concerned with southerners’ lust for livestock.
From above, a renewed burst of swearing came, accompanying another vicious lurch of the ship. Steadying himself, Jack looked down again. Next to the now tattered copy of Burgoyne’s Instructions were two letters. The first was from his father and, though he had conned it several times, he picked it up once more. It was worth the study.
It was written from Herrenhausen and dated 1 July, two weeks before Jack sailed. It was the only direct contact Jack had had from his father, though notes had been sent to his mother, and it detailed briefly Sir James’s rapid progress to the Royal Palace in Hanover where he had many former comrades, having fought in that country’s wars in the 1740s. He had re-enlisted, seeing no swifter way to regain his position in England than by distinguishing himself, once again, against the French. And there was a shortage of experienced cavalry officers.
He had also been informed of Jack’s mission.
So both Absolutes are bound for war. I had hoped to be with you in your first encounters, to guide you with my experience and steady you with my own equanimity. But your doting mother and kiss-me-arse schoolmasters had filled your thoughts with too much useless blasted learning and your subsequent follies conspired to deprive me of the opportunity and you of my counsel. But these precepts I would have you mark. Your duty, sir, is to yourself, your comrades, your country and your King and of these, the first two are the most important. In the chaos of battle, listen to your officers and for your drums, watch for your standards; but ride knee to knee with Johnny to your left and Billy to your right. Fight for them; for they will preserve you and you them. Never retreat before they do. Never betray them.
Above all, fight for yourself; for the name of Absolute and the glory that your ancestors have always attached to it. Just as you did on that field of honour against another of the same name, your cousin. I was proud of you then, boy, when you toed the line. I saw the man in you for the first time. I doubt not but that you shall continue to make me proud.
The next passage was written with a different nib, in different ink. His father had moved on.
Now, as to that affair. Because we both go to war with all the peril that entails, I will have all clear and honest between us. Though your honour was at stake that night in Vauxhall, your life was not. Colonel Burgoyne and I agreed that young lives should not be blighted by disfigurement, death or disgrace so your pistols were loaded with powder but not ball. I took the decision for you and do not apologize for it. Yet since you have now proved yourself a man, I will never again interfere in such an affair. Should one arise, which, given your hot blood and general stupidity is almost certain, you are on your own. Again, remember your name.
As you know, your cousin has been dealt with. You must now leave that matter where it lies. And as to …
He broke off. Dealt with? Though Jack had read the letter a dozen times, his anger at his cozening a little less each time, this was one part he could not, would not accept. Though he’d been cut off from Absolute funds, the last of it used to purchase him a commission in a regiment of Foot, Craster had essentially been pardoned, not punished.
Jack returned to the letter, though the words were scratched upon his heart.
And as to the other matter, your mother informs me that this too has been dealt with. It may not be to your satisfaction but it is best for all – especially the lady concerned. Again, I urge, nay, command you: Leave it lie!
Re-reading this, Jack sighed again, closing his eyes. He had repeatedly tried to see Clothilde but had never been readmitted to the house on Thrift Street. His mother, however, had. And, a week after the affair at Vauxhall, three announcements had been made: that Craster had emerged from hiding and left for his regiment; that the warrants issued for the arrests of the younger Absolutes had been withdrawn; and that Clothilde Guen was to marry her cousin, the apprentice, Claude Berri, who’d bought a partnership in the House of Guen.
Absolute gold had provided a dowry, allowing her future husband his elevation. On hearing the news Jack had gone immediately to Soho, to howl outside the shuttered house till the Watch were called on him. He’d had no further contact with her until the eve of his departure when a package had arrived at Curzon Street containing all his letters and poems, any trinket he’d ever given her – including the merman, now a crushed and mangled thing – and a short, curt note demanding the return of anything of hers. The feeling he’d had when he’d read that, the rejection he’d felt! And then the very different feeling as something had slipped from the envelope and fallen upon the bed.
Jack reached up now into his shirt, felt to the end of the leather string, touched the object held there, rubbing his fingers along the half-coin’s edge, neatly cut by a goldsmith’s daughter. He had no need to look at it, a part of a silver half-shilling from Edward t
he Sixth’s reign, nor read again the words that were scrawled on the scrap of paper the coin had been wrapped in. ‘La moitié de mon coeur.’
Shutting his eyes, closing his hand over it now, he held her half-heart and prayed that across the ocean, sometimes, the newly-wedded Madame Berri still held his.
Carefully, Jack began to stow his possessions in his fustian haversack. The very last of them, the only one he hadn’t reconsidered was, like Burgoyne’s Instructions, a book, beautifully bound in a green leather cover, the title incised in gold. He picked it up now: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
It was Alexander Pope’s version, a restoration of the complete text. And it was his mother’s parting gift, given at the dockside at Portsmouth at the very moment before boarding. She had insisted on accompanying him, despite his protestations. ‘I did not have the chance to wave one Absolute off to war,’ she’d said, laughing. ‘I will not miss playing that scene twice. And I’ve just the gown for it!’
Indeed she had, a flowing dress of glorious chartreuse. She’d continued laughing in the coach all the way to Portsmouth, right up to the very ladder of the ship. Only at the very end did the tears come, as she made him give all the promises she, the soldier’s wife, knew he could not keep. And at the last, as a seaman urged him aboard, she’d pressed a package into his hand. Later, when he’d looked at it in his cabin, he’d thought it was merely a reminder of a wonderful night they’d shared, seeing Garrick in the role at Drury Lane. But then he’d read the inscription on the inside cover, written in her bold, slanting copperplate: ‘All truths are within. Seek them out, sweet prince.’
He’d read it several times on the voyage, enjoyed it, as a story. But truths? He’d found more to admire in Laertes than Hamlet: ‘Your enemy before you, a weapon in your hand?’ If he could only have Craster thus. He’d pasted Clothilde’s last, brief note on the final page.
He’d just placed the book within the bag when someone hammered on the door.
‘Are you ready, there? The boat’s alongside and you’ll transfer here.’
He’d been told that a flat-bottomed barge would take him the last stage through especially treacherous shoals to the Army’s headquarters. They had made that rendezvous. Here, on 11 September 1759, he was about to set foot for the first time upon the continent of North America.
Hastily tying his sack shut, donning his cloak and Dragoon cap, he took one last look in the mirror. A soldier grinned back and stuck out his tongue.
‘Yes,’ called out Cornet Jack Absolute, opening the cabin door, ‘I am indeed ready.’
He may have been ready for them. But the brigadiers of the Army at Quebec were unprepared for him.
‘What have we here? Are these Billy Pitt reinforcements at last? Damn me if he hasn’t sent us a piece of Chelsea porcelain!’ guffawed a man near the head of a table, his gaitered legs upon it, his well-cut civilian clothes open to reveal his frilled shirt. He was eyeing Jack’s uniform in an exaggeratedly amazed way and was ostentatiously drunk.
‘General Wolfe?’ Jack stood near the flap of the large command tent, nervously looking between the three men there.
‘Don’t know what our Caesar looks like, boy?’ bellowed the man who’d first spoken, enormous black eyebrows shooting up into the expanse of his glistening forehead. ‘Well, I am sure I have his portrait hereabouts.’ He brought his feet off the table and began to root beside him in a capacious leather bag.
‘Tush, George,’ said a bald, pinch-faced gentleman to his left, raising a restraining hand, ‘leave the lad alone. He’s only just arrived.’
‘Best he knows straight away, what? We should have no disillusions.’
The third man there, who, unlike the other two at least sported the scarlet of the soldier if without the distinguishing lace of the officer, spoke sharply. ‘Murray’s right, Townshend. Let’s have a bit of dignity before the King’s messenger.’
The dishevelled officer shot the man a cold look, muttered something, then carried on with his search. The soldier sighed and turned back to Jack. ‘Come in, lad. Come! You may remove your hat. Cavalry, eh? What regiment are you with?’
Jack stepped a pace forward, fumbling the cap off as he came. ‘Sixteenth Light Dragoons, sir.’
The still-rooting officer, who’d been addressed as Townshend, said, ‘Never heard of ’em!’ while the other officer continued. ‘And their commander?’
‘Colonel Burgoyne, sir.’
Townshend looked up from his searching. ‘Heard of him. Dilettante! Playwright!’ Each word was given an equally contemptuous edge. ‘Didn’t he fuck up that raid on Normandy last year?’
Jack was not shocked by the profanity but by the assault on his commander. ‘I’ll believe you’ll find, sir, that he was the only officer, Army or Navy, to emerge from that venture with any credit.’
It was said with a heat that caused the man to stop his fumbling and look up sharply. ‘Don’t like that tone, boy. Here one minute, already contradicting your superior?’
Before Jack could reply, the redcoated soldier interjected. ‘Leave him alone, Townshend. Bully someone of your own rank, why don’t you?’ This caused a return to the searching and the soldier turned back to Jack. ‘Don’t mind him, lad. I think he’s merely startled by an expression of loyalty. It’s become rare as plover’s eggs in these parts.’ He smiled. ‘I know your colonel well. A fine man. We were at school together.’
‘Westminster, sir? So was I.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Christ preserve me, another one,’ muttered Townshend.
Ignoring him, the soldier stepped forward. ‘You have dispatches for us?’
‘I do, sir. But I was ordered by the King himself to give them only into the hands of General Wolfe. Are you he?’
‘I am not. I am General Monckton. This is General Murray,’ the small, balding man raised a glass-filled hand, ‘and this is General Townshend. We are Wolfe’s brigadiers.’
Before Jack could introduce himself, Townshend gave a yelp of triumph. ‘Got it!’ he cried, slapping a piece of paper down upon the table, spinning it so Jack could see. It was a caricature in pencil, a very thin soldier in the most impoverished of uniforms, supporting himself on a fusil. Words, too small to be read from where he was stood, were written within a ball that emerged from his mouth.
‘There, boy! Now you’ll recognize our Alexander when you see him,’ yelled George Townshend. The spite in the voice was as cruel as the depiction on the page. Jack, out of depth the moment he walked into the tent, was doubly drowned now. He had no idea what was expected of him, what reaction he could give. He’d been taught that respect for your commander-in-chief was essential. What had James Wolfe done to forfeit these men’s?
A voice came quietly from behind him, preventing any utterance. ‘May I see it?’
All turned. Stood just inside the flap, his hand still upon it as if it partly held him up, was the model for the cartoon: James Wolfe, Commander of His Majesty’s Army at Quebec.
He hung there for a moment, regarding each of them in turn, then detached himself and moved to the table. Leaning heavily, he regarded the cartoon in a silence that Jack was sure he was not the only one to find awkward. The length of it did, however, give him the chance to study his new commander, to try to tally all that he had heard of the man with the reality before him. For Wolfe had been much talked about by excited schoolboys at Westminster, at home and in the short time he’d had with the Dragoons. Jack recalled now what Burgoyne had said when he’d first told Jack of his mission: ‘Watch General Wolfe, lad. He is ardent for glory. A necessary attribute of a successful commander perhaps that yet can be quite a danger to his men.’ And that had confirmed what his father had said when Jack had met him once at a coffee house, the newspapers full of Wolfe’s appointment, at the age of thirty-two to this command. ‘I know him, a little. Fought with him, at Dettingen and at Culloden Moor.’ Sir James had placed a finger to his temple, revolved it. ‘But you know what the King said when someone
was cautioning him against making the appointment. “Mad, is he? Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals.”’
Jack now studied the man studying his caricature. The portrait exaggerated but not much for the eyes were very small above a long thin nose, the cleft in his chin was deep, a long, corn-pale pigtail ran from beneath a soldier’s plain hat. What the picture could not get, being in pencil, was the extreme whiteness of the skin, emphasized by the two very red and heated patches on the high cheekbones.
The man does not look mad, Jack thought, he looks ill. And closer to fifty than thirty.
At last, Wolfe straightened. ‘Not one of your best, Townshend.’
His subordinate would not meet his eye. ‘Just a little joke, sir, you understand, to relieve the tedium.’
‘The tedium? Ah, yes. I am sorry I have so contrived to bore you, George.’ Wolfe spoke in a flat monotone, as if the choice of words affected their delivery. ‘But I think I may have found a way to occupy your sword rather than your pencil. Can you be as cutting with that, I wonder?’
At this, the three men, even Townshend, became alert. Monckton, who, Jack deduced from his position at the head of the table, had to be the senior brigadier there, spoke. ‘You refer, sir, I presume, to the plans we submitted to you these three days past? That you graciously conceded were both sound and prudent?’
A faint smile came to the bloodless lips. ‘Sound and prudent. Now those are words to grace any hero’s tombstone, are they not?’
‘General, we—’
‘Your plans would cost us the campaign, and the King his colonies. I have been out tonight, gentlemen, upon the river. I have come up with a different plan. Less sound. Far less prudent.’
The Blooding of Jack Absolute Page 18
