Jack Frake

by Edward Cline

  “Keep it, Mr. Dawson,” said Redmagne with contempt, shoving the sack away. “Print yourself a book on the life of St. Bruno, or of Galileo. Sign it ‘Anonymous.’”

  “Sir, that is unkind of you!” exclaimed Mr. Dawson. Then he sniffed and added, “Not to say vain, and presumptuous!”

  “Is it? At least I can say to myself, ‘Thank God for pirates!’ Good day to you, sir.”

  Mr. Dawson, now livid, stood up and made to leave. At the last moment, he snatched up the bag of coins and walked out of the tavern.

  “When there’s no definition of sanity,” remarked Redmagne, “even sane men can be called mad.” He finished his coffee. Jack Frake noticed that his friend’s hands were shaking. “Come, Jack. Let us do some detecting work, and seek out the one responsible for my literary anagnorisis.”

  They spent the remainder of the day visiting small theaters and old haunts in search of Redmagne’s former colleagues. Finally, long after sunset, in the Orange Tree, a tavern that was an actors’ rendezvous on a side street off of Longacre, Redmagne recognized William Leggate, the property master of his old troupe. And the man recognized Redmagne as he approached his corner table, for he excused himself from his party and hurriedly guided Redmagne back outside before he was halfway inside the crowded, smoke-fogged tavern. They stood just outside the shadow cast by a sputtering street lamp.

  “John, what are you doing here?” he asked with urgency.

  “I’ve come for the express purpose of not attending Lord Lovat’s axing on Tower Hill,” chuckled Redmagne. He paused and studied the anxious look on his old colleague’s face. “Good evening to you, too, William,” he added. “It’s been ages, hasn’t it?” He took Leggate’s hand and shook it with emphasis.

  “We haven’t time to make merry or rollick through old times, John!” insisted the man. “They’ve been looking for you!”

  “Who has?”

  “Watchmen! And constables! A pair were in here not half an hour ago, and came straight to me with questions!” Leggate put a hand on Redmagne’s shoulder. “John, it’s known you’re in London, and there’s a price on your head! Fifty guineas for your mere arrest!”

  Jack Frake said, “It must have been the Neaveses, Redmagne! They went straight to the bailiff in Ealing!”

  Redmagne nodded in agreement. Leggate said, looking down at the boy, “Who’s this?”

  Redmagne made the introductions. “Jack, Mr. Leggate here could make a gown for Lady Yarmouth out of potato sacks, and she’d be proud to wear it to the Lord Mayor’s Water Procession.” He paused. “And it was Mr. Leggate who made the fatal weapon with which I poked Master Hockaday that evening, out of a barrel stave, of all things. What are you doing now, William?”

  “I’m costumer for another troupe — but never mind me, John! Get out of London quick as you can! You’re bound to be caught if you stay.”

  Redmagne was adamant. “That may be. However, I will have some gossip from an old friend. Is it true, what I hear? That Garrick is to marry La Violette?” he asked wistfully.

  Leggate nodded impatiently. “She’s made enough in the ballet to retire, and it’s said her patroness is negotiating a stiff contract.”

  “There are holes in your shoes, William,” said Redmagne, lightly tapping the objects of his scrutiny with the tip of his cane. “And your elbows are threadbare. Perhaps you should sew yourself a costume.”

  “I would if we could scare up more engagements, John,” said Leggate with bitterness. “But the war pinched many a pocket, especially those of the higher stratum. My new troupe did a masque at the Earl of Bracken’s last Tuesday, and his butler warned us to bring our own lunches!”

  “Well, so much for our gossip.” Redmagne frowned. “Have you read my book, William?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Leggate. “Wonderful work! I envy you for having written it. It’s not your usual stuff and nonsense, brilliant as that may have been.” The man relented and smiled. “If you want an epitaph for your gravestone, John, I’ll suggest one here and now: ‘I have gone neither to Heaven, nor to Hell, but to Hyperborea.”

  With a slight bow of his head, Redmagne said, “Thank you, William.”

  Leggate said, “It was Toby Trist who put me onto the identity of the real author. If it weren’t for him, I’d never have imagined.”

  Redmagne glanced at Jack Frake. “What did I tell you?” Then he asked Leggate, “And who else would you think had the same recollection — and would be in a position to point a finger?”

  “Adeline Cole,” snapped the actor.

  “There was enough acid in that reply to etch a Hogarth print, William. Why?”

  “It must have been Adeline Cole, John!” said Leggate. “You see, she married Nicholas Hockaday — Epping’s oldest son — or rather, he married her, set his sights on her one evening when she was doing pratfalls for another troupe, and away she went; she won’t even speak to any of us now, her old troupers. And Nicholas Hockaday is secretary to the Solicitor-General! He’ll be Marquis of Epping soon, for his uncle is prone with the fever and is not expected to outlive it.”

  “I see,” sighed Redmagne. Adeline Cole, on the night of the masque, played opposite him as Idonea Lumley, mistress of a deposed Privy Council adviser. “Well,” he mused, “she always envied me the last bow of an entertainment. But, then, I was the author of all our triumphs. And, then, I think she was furious with me because I never invited her to rehearse slap and tickle — except on the stage.”

  Leggate chuckled. “That’s right. I remember. But she certainly rehearsed it with everyone else.” He squinted into the darkness and saw a pair of men carrying staves coming in their direction. “John, go now!” he whispered. “They can’t see us yet. Please go! And Godspeed!”

  Redmagne turned, saw the men ambling up the street from Longacre, and then clasped Leggate’s hand. “Thank you, William, for your worry, and for not asking me where I’m staying! Those fifty guineas are tempting, I know. Wait! Here!” He reached into his purse and dropped a handful of guineas into Leggate’s coat pocket. “Ill-gotten gains for you, William. Don’t argue! We’ll meet again!”

  Redmagne and Jack Frake turned and walked quickly down the street, taking care to stay in the shadows of the street lamps. They went back to the Three Swans Inn.

  Chapter 19: The Tour

  AT THE INN, THEY ATE A LIGHT DINNER, AND THEN RETIRED TO THEIR room. There they removed their wigs, coats and shoes. There was a single window, which Redmagne opened and moved a chair to. He looked morose. Jack Frake asked, “Will you try to see your father?”

  Redmagne frowned and shook his head. “No, Jack. I tried mending things between him and me years ago. But he has a conscience to salve and a shame to erase. He would turn me in to the Crown with a speed that would make Adeline Cole blink.” He chuckled. “He was so set on my going into law, and then politics. Obviously he places no value on all the jokes about lawyers and politicians.”

  Jack Frake leafed through his book of Roman history for a while. Redmagne said nothing, but gazed out the window. Then the boy asked, “Why does it bother you?”

  “What bothers me, Jack?”

  “The book, and Dawson and this actress you knew.”

  “Because I have been betrayed, Jack. I’ve known a great many injustices, but I’ve never before been betrayed. And what was the vehicle of that betrayal? Hyperborea! I’ve done a few things in my life of which I am proud, but that book is my proudest act. And so, there sat Adeline Cole, passing an afternoon with, to her, an amusing novel, waiting for dear Nicholas to return from the Law Court at Westminster Hall. She came upon the name of Toby Trist. ‘Who’s that flapper?’ she asks herself. ‘Why, if it isn’t John Smith, up to his old tricks again! Lud! What a piece of information this is! My husband could use it and advance himself in the eyes of his gouty grace the Solicitor-General!’ And so she did the deed. Well, I was right to cast her as Idonea Lumley. She betrayed Toby Trist in the masque, too.” He shrugged. “Dawson? Well,
I thought he would have a little more spine.”

  Jack Frake did not like the pain he saw in Redmagne’s eyes.

  Redmagne went on. “That highwayman you wounded, Jack — remember him? There is a similarity here. You see, the ball entered a part of his body, and his body and all its parts asked the question: This is a foreign thing that has invaded us. How shall we deal with it? But the body cannot deal with it. That is why men die of their wounds.”

  “You should not let it disturb you so, Redmagne,” volunteered Jack Frake.

  For the first time ever, Redmagne glared at him with anger. The boy stared back at him. He saw that his friend wanted to reply, but would not permit himself to.

  Jack Frake said, “Your soul has been winded, Redmagne. But it can recover. There’s no profit in being the man who could not be the author of Hyperborea. Be him again.”

  Redmagne held his glance for a while, and then looked out the window. “Forgive me for being angry with you, Jack. You’re right.” He lit his pipe again, and picked up one of several newspapers he had bought in a tavern on their way back to the Inn. But after a moment, he dropped it. “Listen, Jack!” he said. “It’s ten o’clock. Listen to the bells marking the hour, all around the city. The parishes, whose churches don’t have bells, have watchmen call out the hour. You can hear them, too. Listen; you can hear the quiet roar from under London Bridge, and the carriages rolling over its length, many on their way to Ranelagh Gardens. Listen hard enough, and you can hear people singing outside their tenements and taverns, or catch the sound of hautboys and oboes and violins of a private chamber concert.” He paused. “Listen, and you can hear the whisper of Millicent Morley’s nightgown as she enters little Etain McRae’s bedroom to sing her a lullaby. She must know, Jack. She must have known that the Neaveses did their dirty deed, too. Would she still want a wanted man? Verily, I believe she would.” He paused. “I must see her again before we leave. I’ll find her.”

  Redmagne picked the newspaper up again. “Jack, I am resolved that we shall have one proper evening here. They will not rob us of that, at least.” He looked at his companion. “Are you willing to risk it?”

  “Yes,” answered Jack Frake.

  Redmagne snapped the paper. “Then tomorrow we shall tour the town. The season ended in April, and many concert patrons have fled the city for the summer, but tomorrow evening Viscountess Oldham’s opera company is performing a pasticcio of Handel’s arias and choruses at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket. It’s a benefit for widows and wounded soldiers of the Scottish campaign, at five guineas a ticket, so we needn’t worry about seats. Following that, we shall dine at Ranelagh.” He threw the paper aside. “But tonight, we sleep.”

  The next day, Redmagne took Jack Frake all over the city — to London Bridge, to the Steelyard, to the Timber Yards, to the various waterworks, to the nine-story Dye Houses on the Thames. They even browsed through the bookshops in St. Paul’s Churchyard. But while Redmagne was as generous with his descriptions and anecdotes as usual, their tour was soured by an undercurrent of jeopardy. They knew that they could be seized at any moment.

  Redmagne visited the offices of several tobacco merchants and asked for information about Ian McRae, partner in a firm that traded with Virginia — and Millicent Morley’s employer. No one had heard of him. “You might try Glasgow,” quipped a junior partner in one establishment. “Those damned Scots are horning in on our business.”

  They next went to Cornhill, a section of the city that contained the Royal Exchange and numerous merchants’ coffeehouses. In the Virginia and Maryland Coffeehouse they had to press through an especially noisy group of merchants, brokers, agents and ship captains. The place was more like a commodities exchange than a place of relaxation. A Scots trader had heard of McRae, but could not remember the names of his associates, and did not know where he lived.

  Redmagne kept his promise and took Jack Frake to the site of Skelly’s emporium. It was covered now with shanty hovels made of scraps and discards from the city’s refuse, and lay just half a block from a prosperous street. Beggars, prostitutes, and children in rags eyed them hungrily as they stood there, and to keep them away Redmagne drew the sword from his cane as a warning. “I can’t look at this without cursing the Crown, Jack. Skelly’s business could have been a jewel of the city. Instead, the Crown’s greed has spawned an ugly blight that has become a charge to us all. There’s not a single creature in that dunghill who isn’t in the almshouse racket — and who thinks he needn’t try to leave it or this dunghill, and has made poverty his career.” He turned away in disgust. “Come, Jack. Enough of this. Let us go into the enemy’s camp, and watch him preen himself. The Duke of Cumberland is reviewing the Horse Guards on the Parade Grounds. ’Tis a sight to see.” Back on the Strand, Redmagne hailed a hackney and told him to drive to Whitehall.

  From a distance, on the edge of the field, standing with a crowd of other onlookers, they watched the Duke review the mass of mounted scarlet after the Guards performed intricate maneuvers on the green expanse. As the Duke rode up and down with his aides between the ranks of the assembled cavalry, the band of the Foot Guards played The Hohenfriedberger March. Jack Frake had never heard a band before, and he watched the musicians carefully. He noticed that the drummers were black men, leopard skins crossed over their tunics and green and yellow ostrich plumes adorning their caps.

  Little of this would Jack Frake be able to remember as a continuous whole. The magnitude, elegance, variety, beauty, crudity and shabbiness of all the things he saw and heard registered in specific places in his mind, and would come back to him later, unsummoned, for reasons he would grasp only after long incubation, in a flash of insight or realization.

  But there was one thing he carried away from London as a distinct memory. It was a single chorus from the pasticcio at the King’s Theatre that evening. Again, this was his first time in a theater; the magical scenery, the vibrant actors and singers, the stupendous orchestra laboring in the pit, was a beckoning confluence of elements funneled in the darkness of the vast chamber to a single elevated frame of light, all combining to hold him in awe at both his capacity to enjoy it and men’s capacity to imagine it and produce it. The musical numbers followed one after another, but the one that seemed to turn his nerves to atoms and reduce his soul to a quivering aspic of gratitude was the last, “See, the conquering hero comes.” A soprano led the chorus in the performance, and many in the audience joined in. The power, the lyrics, and the delivery of it invited him to adopt it as his personal anthem. He thought that this must be what was sung in St. Paul’s Cathedral; at least, he associated the chorus with that edifice. When it was over, and attendants appeared to relight the candles for the departing audience, Jack Frake sniffed and was surprised to feel a tear roll down his cheek.

  Redmagne noticed it, but did not comment. “It says here,” he remarked, holding a candle to his program, “that the last chorus was included in Judas Maccabaeus in the season last year. But I attended a performance of that oratorio, and I don’t remember it.” He closed his program. “Oh, well. The whims of composers are a mystery, even to me.”

  To this, Jack Frake’s reply was merely to wipe his cheek with his sleeve.

  When they were outside, they lingered for a while at the entrance to watch a succession of carriages come to pick up aristocrats, merchants and other wealthy patrons, and also to wait for a hackney looking for a fare.

  “Look!” said Jack Frake, pointing to the night sky. “What is it?”

  Up the river, somewhere over Whitehall, the streak of a rocket burst into a star of blue, gold and red, and before its arching, falling arms faded, another star exploded, and another.

  “Fireworks, Jack,” said Redmagne. “Some duke or other is celebrating an event, or entertaining guests. Well, does it matter which? It’s a pretty sight.”

  After a moment of watching the display, Jack Frake exclaimed, “Oh, Redmagne! I belong here!”

  Redmagne clasped his shoulder. “
So do I, Jack,” he sighed. “So do I.”

  Ranelagh Gardens, outside the city in Chelsea, on the north side of the Thames, was an imposing round rococo building enclosed by landscaped grounds. Beneath a vast rotunda and in the center of a wide promenade was a fireplace that reached to the chandelier-hung ceiling eighty feet above. The night was warm, and so no fire had been lit. Two tiers of private boxes looked over the space, broken only by an enclosed multi-level orchestra stand. The tables around the fireplace were laid with red baize cloth and fine silver tableware; thousands of candles produced as much light as the noonday sun. Paying guests would stroll in groups or pairs on the promenade around the fireplace and the red baize tables, while musicians in the orchestra serenaded them with violins, oboes and harpsichords. It was a place to see princes and princesses, lords and ladies, and even dukes and duchesses, to be seen by them and to walk in their footsteps; perhaps to exchange nods, bows, curtsies and even frigid smiles. It was a place to gossip and to gather gossip for the next day, a place to flirt with all propriety, and to make discreet arrangements for a passionate tryst that same evening. The sparce fare of cold cuts, coffee and tea was expensive, served with grace and efficiency by an army of waiters. Redmagne ordered triple portions of everything for himself and Jack Frake. “On each of our plates, thank you,” he instructed the attentive, liveried waiter, “as when we take a stroll we wish to converse with each other, and not with each other’s stomachs.”