Jack Frake

by Edward Cline

  He had been saved once by Redmagne. But he did not think of this dilemma and decision in terms of returning the favor. Redmagne’s life meant far more to him than that. He knew that he would probably die in the effort, but he raised his tiny pistol at the same time he pulled back the hammer.

  As for the highwayman, he began to laugh. The pistol in the boy’s grip had pathetically small power and range, and the boy stood more than five feet away, his eyes round with fear. “So be it, you little blighter!” he snorted as he pressed the trigger.

  Jack Frake, pointing the pistol at the man’s face, fired first.

  The highwayman gasped, let go of his pistols, and clutched at his throat. He began to scream, but the scream disintegrated into a pathetic howl. The man tried to climb out of his saddle, but his legs got tangled and he tumbled to the ground.

  Jack Frake saw a third horseman, who was waiting in the woods, wheel his mount around and gallop away through the brush. Jack Frake dropped from the coach step and walked cautiously over to the wounded highwayman. The man rolled back and forth on the ground, clutching his throat through the mask, blood seeping through his fingers. He made gagging sounds, like the cry of a goat that had had one of its legs broken. The sound more than the sight traumatized Jack Frake. The man tore off his soaked mask, and Jack saw that the bandit was only a boy a few years older than him. The bandit glanced up with maddened eyes and saw Jack Frake approach with the pocket pistol still clutched in his hand. He managed to get his legs under himself and stumble quickly into the woods, still gagging.

  Jack Frake felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw Redmagne. The man was studying him with a curious look. “That’s what a ball can do to you, Jack.”

  “He was going to shoot you.”

  “Or you, Jack,” remarked Redmagne. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and squeezed it once in silent thanks.

  Redmagne stepped away to pick up the dropped pistols. He walked back and held them out, grips first. Jack Frake put his pocket pistol away and tentatively took hold of the new ones. “These are yours, Jack. Fine pieces of Spanish work. Matching, too. Wonder who he took them from.” He turned and examined the mount. “This mare has seen better years, though. We’ll take her and sell her for what money she’ll bring. But the saddle’s new, as are the pistol cases. We’ll keep the cases and sell the saddle. It’ll fetch more than will the mare.”

  Jack Frake stared at the mount blankly.

  “Come on, Jack,” said Redmagne. “Climb into the saddle. We’ll escort the coach as far as Ealing. Lock and case your new pistols, and reload your little one. You will guard the rear. Keep a sharp eye out for that third man.”

  Jack Frake obeyed. Redmagne adjusted the stirrups for him, then walked away.

  The coachman and farmer were standing near the body of the first highwayman, which lay near the waiting horse. “He’s dead, all right, gov’nor,” the coachman barked in satisfaction. “You gave ’im a third eye!”

  Redmagne stooped down and removed the mask. “Know him, coachman?”

  “I think I seen ’im at the inn on the trip out.” The coachman laughed. “His road days is over!”

  “Help me move him off of the road.”

  The three men picked up the body and deposited it in the gutter at the side of the road. Redmagne searched the body and stood up with another pistol and a bag of coins. “He won’t be needing these,” he said, tucking the pistol in his belt and dropping the bag into one of his frock pockets. He nodded to the horse. “Take those long guns, coachman, and keep them handy.” He took out his brass box and penciled a note — A highwayman who encountered a Skelly man — and tucked it into one of the dead man’s sleeves. Then he went and led the horse to the coach, where he reclaimed his own pistols. “When I’ve reloaded, coachman, we can leave. My… nephew and I will escort you as far as Ealing.”

  Spencer Neaves stepped down from the coach and glared at Redmagne. “Who are you, sir?” he demanded. “What is your real name?”

  “My real name?”

  “Yes,” said his wife, who quickly descended and turned to the coachman. “I distinctly heard the boy there address this… gentleman by a name other than the one with which he introduced himself! It was Redman, or Redmaize, or some such, instead of John.”

  The coachman stared at Redmagne and stepped back. “Did you say ‘Redmagne,’ Mum?”

  “Yes, Redmagne!” confirmed Miss Morley involuntarily.

  The coachman studied Redmagne for a moment, then laughed and spoke to Mrs. Neaves. “Milady, you’re safer in this man’s company than if you was guarded by the King’s Palace Cavalry!” He grinned at Redmagne, then winked, and climbed back up on the coach to his seat.

  Jack Frake smiled. The coachman’s familiarity with Redmagne’s name proved the wisdom of his advice to his friend in the matter of an alias.

  “I refuse to travel in this beast’s company!” declared Winifred Neaves to the coachman. Mr. Neaves, shaken by Redmagne’s panache, by now had little to say, and did not second his wife’s motion.

  “I’m afraid that’s an improper wish, Madam,” said Redmagne, “and, considering that my nephew and I have just now preserved your belongings and perhaps even your virtue and your life, your trepidation is keenly painful to me. Your only alternative is to walk to Ealing.” He grinned. “Have no fear, Madam. We mean to get you and your husband there safely.”

  At a comfortable trot, Redmagne preceded the coach on the highwayman’s horse, while Jack Frake followed. Redmagne said nothing else to the boy about the incident. It was an experience he would have to accept and reconcile on his own. The boy had always been prepared to fight, but until now had never had to see one immediate consequence of winning. Miles later, Jack Frake urged his mount ahead and rode up alongside Redmagne. “It might’ve been you that was killed,” he said, “or only injured, and making those noises. I’m glad it wasn’t you. I’d do it again.” Redmagne nodded once. Then Jack Frake fell back to his place behind the coach.

  A mile before Ealing, Redmagne asked the coachman to stop for a moment. “This is where we’ll leave you, sir, and we thank you for your hospitality and discretion.”

  “It were my pleasure, sir!” replied the coachman with a tip of his hat.

  Redmagne rode up to the window where the governess sat. He smiled down at her, then reached inside for his cane and valise, which he slung from the saddle pommel. He took out his brass writing box, and penciled something on a scrap of paper, folded it, then handed it to Miss Morley. “My recommended reading for your next trip, milady,” he said. “We shall meet again.” The woman took the slip, but before she could open it, Redmagne bent in his saddle, took her hand, and kissed it, then on impulse took her face and kissed her softly on the lips. “Yes,” he said, “we shall be meeting again… ”

  Miss Morley, for once, was left speechless. She clutched the slip of paper in her hand, and watched Redmagne as he rode away, oblivious to the scandalized stares of the Neaveses and the open curiosity of Etain McRae.

  They waited until the stagecoach had rounded a bend a half mile down the road. Beyond the bend, over the fields and trees, they could see the spires of Ealing. Redmagne exclaimed, “Jack, I’m in love! With Miss Millicent Morley! What a primly modest name for a woman with so much… fire! I keep seeing her, with those locks of hair, not imprisoned by cap or bonnet, falling gracefully to her bare shoulders, and telling me what she thinks of Reverend Benjamin Slocock and his sermon on Pamela… She has a most attractive way about her… ” Then he caught himself, and laughed, because the rest of what he thought about Miss Morley was not for another’s ears. “Come on, Jack!” he said, pulling on his reins and spurring his mount into a field. “I know a shortcut that will take us round Ealing. London awaits!”

  Chapter 17: The City

  THE INTELLECTUAL POLITICAL, LITERARY AND ARTISTIC CAPITALS OF EUROPE then were London and Paris, with Vienna, Rome and Berlin acting as special satellites. It is difficult to assess which cap
ital was the leader, and which was the follower, for in the many realms of any cultural rivalry there must be innovators and pathbreakers on the one hand, and emulators and refiners on the other. London and Paris scored mightily on both sides, to their mutual benefit, even though throughout the eighteenth century they were at war with each other more often than not. In the short intervals when the capitals were not struggling for overseas supremacy, the citizens who had been taxed to pay for the contests thronged across the Channel to trade, to tour, to learn, to observe and write, to become endeared to the other nation’s charms and amenities. When gathering war clouds threatened to cut them off from home, Frenchmen and Englishmen would wistfully exchange adieu and Godspeeds with friends, mistresses, tailors, tutors, coffeehouse companions and favorite innkeepers.

  Redmagne had a hypothesis to explain the differences between France and England. It was all his own, though he claimed no scholarly accolade for it. Jack Frake had heard it before in his tutorials in the caves. He heard it again, rephrased, in the middle of an ever-widening river on a balmy July afternoon.

  They had detoured south from Ealing to Chiswick on the Thames, where they sold the highwaymen’s horses and saddles to the proprietor of a leather works who regarded the asking price of ten guineas for them as something close to theft, and who therefore asked no questions. Redmagne then hired a local waterman to row him and Jack Frake to London. The waterman balked at first; his career was to ferry passengers back and forth between Chiswick and the farm country directly across the Thames, and he complained loudly about having to work against the tides the whole distance. But his arguments succumbed to two golden guineas and a promise of two more if the gentleman and his nephew were safely deposited on the Whitehall Stairs by the nearly finished Westminster Bridge. The sum represented over a quarter of his yearly income; it fueled his arms, legs and shoulders and turned him into a relentless rowing machine.

  Not long into the trip down river, Redmagne posited his idea: “There’s one main reason why England leads the way in politics, Jack: Agincourt. Can you remember why?”

  “No,” laughed Jack Frake, seated opposite his mentor. He was surprised that Redmagne would raise the subject now, and he was too excited about their destination to remember what had been said.

  Redmagne sensed this and feigned disappointment. He raised his cane and playfully knocked the boy’s hat askew. “Agincourt, Jack. But first, Runnymede in 1215, and King John’s concessions to testy, abused barons who did not want to go to war again and pay for the privilege, too. Those concessions made up the Great Charter. Now, France might have produced the same phenomenon, in due time, for the same reasons. French barons could be as testy, and French monarchs as presumptuous and abusive, as any of our own. But two hundred years after Runnymede, our Henry decimated Charles’s French nobility at Agincourt. There were few testy, abused barons left to challenge the monarch, and those that followed were not of the same mettle as those who perished by Henry’s archers, swords and axes. France has since then been as resolutely monarchical as England has been tumultuous. That, in short, is why England, for all her egregious faults, is a better place to live, while France is a worse, even for all her magnificent virtues.”

  This brief lecture lodged itself somewhere in Jack Frake’s half-attentive mind, and served as a prelude to his first visit to the city. Skelly had described it to him many times, as had other members of the gang. But nothing Skelly or Redmagne or the others had said about London could have prepared him for the experience.

  London was the source and the primary transmission belt of the nation’s virtues and faults. It was not only the capital; it ruled England in ways other nations’ capitals did not. London fashions, London literature, London music, London theater, London art, and London money flowed out to other cities and towns across the island and to the colonies. This was due in part to the Crown’s mercantilist policies, and in part to natural economic causes. Many of England’s leading artistic and literary lights — Gainsborough and Reynolds, the painters; Garrick, the actor; Goldsmith and Johnson, the authors — journeyed to London, for that was where the power, money, patrons and audiences were. Handel could not have settled in Hull or Birmingham and composed the same oratorios and operas. The Italian craze of the period — complete with a lucrative business in smoke- and manure-cured ‘Old Master’ forgeries — could not have taken root in Leeds or Winchelsea. French artists and engravers could not have thrived and established a Soho in Manchester or Sheffield; these were growing manufacturing towns that did not even have representation in Parliament. London was the proving ground for nearly all endeavors that had reason, tenacity or guile to succeed.

  London at this time sat almost exclusively on the ‘north side’ of the Thames. It began at Shadwell and the windmill-dotted Isle of Dogs, and ended abruptly some five miles up river at Millbank and the Chelsea Water Works, under the shadow of Westminster Abbey. In between lay a busy metropolis of at least half a million people. The Thames was crossed by citizens and visitors chiefly by ferry; competitive watermen vied ferociously for the business of rowing passengers between the dozens of “stairs” on the opposing banks. Until Westminster Bridge was finished three years later, only one bridge spanned the Thames, London Bridge, whose closely spaced piers turned it into a roaring, killer dam at high tide. The bridge was home to thousands in its packed, multi-storied houses; it was also an arcade of shops where penny-pinching housewives and maids could buy anything from poultry to pins. Ladies and gentlemen with golden guineas to spend shopped in the more elegant venues of the Strand or St. Paul’s Churchyard, where tradesmen’s goods were neatly displayed in windows.

  London’s most numerous edifices were churches, some three hundred of them, and their steeples punctuated the skyline. The dome of St. Paul’s and the towers of the Abbey dwarfed everything else, including the diminutive Houses of Parliament, whose two bodies, the Commons and Lords, met in cramped upstairs halls. The white walls of the Tower of London were visible from miles down the river, and served as palatial confinement for a variety of Crown offenders. In addition to apartments, the Tower also contained a museum and a menagerie of exotic animals. For a small fee, one could visit the museum, gape at leopards, panthers, monkeys and even an elephant in the menagerie, or have tea with a prisoner and envy his splendid living appointments.

  London was frustrating; merchantmen bringing cargo up river into the city were stopped by the barrier of London Bridge, and also by the necessity of having their cargoes cleared or dutied by the functionaries of nearby Customs House, and often had to wait for weeks in the traffic-clogged river before being able to land their cargoes at a Lawful Key or wharf. There were no docks in London and the physical task of unloading ships was done by lighters.

  For all its churches, London was crime-ridden; the thieving began on the Thames, where accomplices on the merchantmen would toss dutiable goods wrapped in water-tight parcels overboard to be retrieved by ‘mudlarks’ on shore at low tide, and at riverside sea-coal depots whose heavers and foremen would walk off with bushels of Newcastle black. London was larcenous; enterprising thieves were not a merchant’s only nuisance. Customs inspectors had unlimited power over the wealth brought into the port. For a bribe, they would clear a cargo and declare a duty paid; if they were not satisfied with the amount of a bribe, or if a merchant or captain complained or refused to resort to bribery, an inspector could threaten to “rummage” his vessel — ostensibly to search for contraband rum or other hidden goods — and order the vessel literally torn apart. Many customs inspectors also conspired with the wharfingers — owners of the legally monopolized Lawful Keys — to have cargoes condemned, landed, and auctioned in a warehouse, and split the profits. More than one merchant found himself bidding for his own goods at a government-supervised auction.

  London was noisy; the incessant clop of the shod hooves of horses and the rumble of the iron-rimmed wheels of carriages, hackneys, wagons and drays rolling over its muddy cobblestone streets,
competed with the cries, drums, horns, grinding stones and bells of street hawkers peddling their wares or services.

  London was dirty; thousands of chimneys spewed soft coal smoke into the air, whence it fell onto trees and horses and ladies’ satin gowns. When it rained or drizzled, the drops would gather soot and coat everything they touched. ‘Night soil’ was regularly hurled out of windows or into kennels or open sewage ditches. The city usually lay under a twilight of dreary gray. A day when Londoners could see and feel the sun and glance up at a blue sky was called “glorious.”

  London was lightless and suffocating, for most Londoners, even on glorious days; an exorbitant window tax on private buildings, not to be repealed for another century, drove landlords and owners of many commercial structures to shutter or block the windows of their tenants and employees.

  London smelled; parish street sweepers could not keep up with the city’s thousands of horses, and if a horse, other draft animal, cat, dog, or rat died, it was left in the street to decay. In parish churchyards, the poor were buried in flimsy coffins in mass graves, which were not covered over until twenty or so coffins filled the hole.

  London was dangerous; although foreign visitors commented enviously on the candle- and oil-lit lamps of its streets, one could just as easily be killed for a shilling in their shadows as in the darkest alleys, and be stripped of one’s clothes as well. Guides with torches or lanterns known as link boys could be hired to lead anyone traveling at night through the darker streets; often they would lead their customers directly into the hands of cut-throats. Mohocks, gangs of aristocratic toughs, terrorized neighborhoods day or night with senseless beatings and whimsical destruction of property; watchmen and constables were among their favorite sports. Gangs of footpads and teams of cut-purses and pickpockets roamed the streets and infiltrated distracted crowds with little fear of being caught; there was no police force, only frightening punishments and a feeble corps of parish-paid watchmen who trusted to luck and informants to apprehend known criminals, when they dared bother to concern themselves at all. Wigs, swords, hats, watches, fine laces and silks, and silverware could be had with a snatch and a dash, and sold minutes later in special thieves’ markets. Conviction for their theft could earn one a whipping, a burned hand, the pillory, or hanging, depending on the monetary value a jury placed on the stolen property. Butlers, valets, laborers, laundresses and maids were regularly hanged on Tyburn Tree or at Newgate Prison for robbing or murdering their employers.