Turnville was staring at Jack rather directly now. So he took a sip. ‘My concern, sir, is that this latest outrage in Bath will have been reported in all the newspapers. My name might have been unearthed – you know how these scribblers desire all the story. Even if I was to travel incognito, might I not be exposed?’
The Colonel was looking at him quizzically. ‘To what outrage do you refer?’
‘The assassination attempt?’
‘There wasn’t one.’
‘But—’
‘There was an explosion of a gaseous substance at a house on the Circus. Unfortunately it coincided with the King’s visit. Some old scientist was experimenting, apparently. The landlord was shocked – it was quite against the terms of the tenancy.’
Jack shook his head. ‘People will not believe that, surely?’
‘They will believe what we wish them to believe.’ Turnville nodded emphatically. ‘They are not at liberty, sir, to publish what they wish.’
‘Oh,’ said Jack, somewhat sadly. ‘I thought in England that they were.’
‘Ah, youth,’ said Turnville. Then he leaned forward and tapped the folder marked with aliases. ‘Well? Do you read this or no?’
Jack stared at the inked names, the desk they sat on, Turnville and then beyond him, to the rain outside. Could he do this? Yes. Did he wish to do this? That required more thought. He hated the way he’d been deceived, used. It was treason of a sort, as he’d said to Red Hugh over his sword point, a betrayal of friendship. Above all, a violation of honour. He had made it clear to the Irishman when they were about to fight against the privateer and he donned the uniform of his regiment, that honour had clear lines for him, ones that must not be crossed. Red Hugh had trampled over his as if they did not exist. Now that they were ‘quits’, as he had said, it demanded redress. And he was being offered that chance. A chance also to fight for England, in a different way than he had previously.
Still, there were two things he had to clear first. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I am ordered to report to my regiment.’
‘They will be informed, to your credit, trust me. And the second?’
Jack hesitated. But he had to say it. ‘I am not sure that, if I went, all my motives would be entirely pure. If I am honest, sir, Miss Fitzpatrick, uh, still … holds …’
He trailed off. Turnville had got up again, moved to stare out at the rain. ‘Hearken, Lieutenant Absolute, to the first law of espionage: No one engages in it for a single, pure reason. If they do, we waste no time on them for they are quickly dead. Some rejoice in the game of it, the codes, the disguises, the sudden betrayals, the unexpected triumphs. Some want power or gold, which are often linked.’ He picked a small thread off what, Jack now noticed, was a beautifully tailored jacket of rich brocade, and let it float away. ‘And if another is motivated by love, well – God help that man, I say. God help you.’ He turned. ‘And he will, just so long as, this time, you put loyalty first, eh?’
To whom? Jack thought, but he said, ‘I am still unclear, sir, why you want me to do this? Surely there are more experienced men who also have seen the Irishman.’
‘Such as?’ Jack pointed a forefinger over his shoulder. Turnville snorted. ‘Dawkins? Hardly. Not very bright, you see.’ He looked past Jack. ‘You’re none too bright, are you, Dawkins?’
‘No, sir,’ came the grunted reply.
‘And my other men? Too obvious or too old. Would find it hard to infiltrate, even if they were not personally known. Whereas you, with your youth and your background … I believe half of your generation find it to Rome on the so-called Grand Tour.’ He shuddered. ‘God knows why they should want to. Filthy inns, filthy food, filthy foreigners! I never desired to leave Britain, only did it with the regiment to kill Frogs. You shall fit easily into such a crowd. Many a youth visiting Rome is drawn to the supposed romance of the Stuart cause. Hmm?’ He reached back, tapped the sheaf of papers. ‘But it’s up to you, Lieutenant Absolute. Choose to serve your country by helping to capture one of its most abhorrent enemies. Serve yourself as well,’ a pitying smile came, ‘or choose not to, and live with the consequences.’
Jack looked again into the appraising eyes, recognizing the threat of those final words. Did he have a choice? The taint of treachery would follow him throughout his life. And was not this a way to help redeem the threatened name of Absolute?
He reached forward and picked up the file. ‘Red Hugh McClune,’ he read aloud, ‘William Leadbetter. Thomas Lawson. Josiah Tumbril …’ He looked up, out of the window, to the rain. A thought came but this one he didn’t speak.
I’ll see you all in Rome.
– PART TWO –
Hunting the Shadow
– ONE –
Rome
‘Huzzah! Huzzah!’
As he rose to the acclaim, the man took off his spectacles, his eyes receding to the size and shape of two currants on a frosted Chelsea bun. Where the frames had rested, bruises marked his cheeks in purple, stark against the sheen of the man’s dripping face. Rome was an inferno, all sweated. Yet though Jack made sure he kept well to the leeward of some of the Jacobites – MacBrave, the lugubrious Hebridean, was especially fruity – somehow he could forgive this man anything, even his ripeness.
For Watkin Pounce had an extraordinary voice. Completely at variance with his bulk, it was a counter tenor, exquisitely modulated, and Jack settled back to enjoy it. The man always sang the final verse of this, his favourite Jacobite song, the sentiments heightened by the large tear that inevitably squeezed onto his cheek:
With heart and hand we’ll join, boys,
To set him on his throne;
We’ll all combine as one, boys,
Till this great work be done.
We’ll pull down usurpation,
And, spite of abjuration,
And force of stubborn nation
Great James’s title own.
Hard on the heels of the most raucous huzzahs yet, Watkin’s voice dropped an octave and he bellowed, ‘The King across the water!’
The King just round the corner, thought Jack, rising with the rest, his voice as loud as any. While the cheers echoed he turned, called to the two boys standing in the doorway of their snug: ‘Raggazi, ancora vino, pronto.’ During his week in Rome it was most of the Italian he’d learned but he’d discovered he needed very little else. Those words and the wine they brought had won him the comradeship of the men in the room. It wasn’t hard to buy a Jacobite a drink – quite the reverse – and finding them had been just as easy. Once he’d been told about the area surrounding King James’s Palazzo Muti, he’d made for it directly – just another young Englishman come to gawk at the Old Pretender. His informant, a clergyman in the English enclave of the Piazza di Spagna, had warned that youths such as himself were considered fine prey to the exiles there. The least that could be gotten from them was news of home, while others, if they displayed the smallest sympathy for the Lost King’s cause, might be taken up and worked upon. Jack had made himself malleable.
Turnville had warned him against complacency. But truly, Jack thought, I am not complacent. I am just rather good at this.
He was especially pleased with his disguise. The story’s facts may have been concocted by Turnville but the gilding came from Jack. He felt he had suffered quite enough as Beverley. The tailors of Rome were excellent and, after all, it was essential that ‘Philip – Pip – Truman’ moved easily through all ranks of Jacobite society. His silk shirt with its lutestring piping and his maroon breeches were quite adequate for the present company – the foot soldiers of the Cause – but their ‘officers’, the exiled nobility, had different ways of using their time and better filled purses. Jack was thrilled with the dove-grey suit and green waistcoat he’d commissioned for the opera that night. Just as well that Turnville’s story had turned him into an earl’s son, he thought, for it required him to provide a purse to match.
Pounce, who’d been relieving himself in the chamber pot in the corn
er, now returned. ‘Are you well, Pip?’ he said.
‘Be better when this is filled,’ replied Jack, lifting his glass and joining in the cheer as the wine was brought in. He seized the bottles and poured everyone there a tot. ‘To your health, sirs,’ he cried.
‘To yours,’ came the shout. There were ten men in the small room and, once the liquor was thrown down and more replaced it, the conversation became general.
‘Allow me,’ Jack said, leaning over to fill Pounce’s already emptied bumper.
The faintest demur came. ‘Ah, Pip! You gladden an old man’s heart.’
Jack didn’t know quite how it had happened. But from almost the moment Watkin had encountered him gazing up at the Palazzo Muti, they had begun a relationship reminiscent of the one in the play he’d seen in Bath. Somehow he’d become Prince Hal to Pounce’s Falstaff, even if Mr Harper at Orchard Street could have fitted twice inside that threadbare black coat. Pounce was certainly as drunken as the stage knight, as prone to melancholy and bombast. Indeed he was a knight, but his estate in Norfolk was long forfeit, its recovery dependent on the Stuart restoration. Watkin, like Falstaff, was also quite content to spend Jack’s gold, and Jack was quite happy to let him. Pounce had showed him the town and, most importantly, had connections at the Palazzo Muti.
It was about that very place that he now spoke. ‘By the way, lad. The Anglican service at the Palazzo. I have obtained permission for you to attend.’ He dug in a pocket of his waistcoat, produced a silver token, a cross wreathed in Stuart oak leaves upon it. ‘So long as you do not disgrace yourself there …’ Watkin let out a large belch. ‘Oh, pardon me! You may use this to return again and again to your devotions.’
Jack, assuming what he hoped was a look both rapt and religious, took the token. To win over the Protestants – a large part of his following – the Catholic James had obtained permission from the Pope to have a Protestant chapel with a daily service – the only one in Rome. As soon as Jack heard of it, he knew he must have one of the precious tokens. It meant entry to the palace itself, surely the place that Red Hugh would come for his orders when he eventually reached Rome.
‘Oh, too wonderful!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will you be able to accompany one, Watty?’
‘As you know, my adorations are made elsewhere.’ Pounce’s sausage fingers made an elaborate crucifix in the air before they reached for his mug. Wine was again slurped noisily. ‘And speaking of adorations,’ he continued, a handkerchief dabbing at the flood on his face, ‘tell me once more of the love that you were forced to leave behind. For in your sorrow I see the very portrait of mine own.’
On their first night together, even matching half glass to full bumper, Jack’s tongue had run somewhat fast. He’d remembered to change Laetitia’s name in the telling, as well as her country, the full complications of their wooing and the manner of their parting. But, fuelled by wine, he’d been unable to hide the extent of his hurt, and his passion had stirred up an equal one in Watkin, who, it transpired, had forsaken his own first love to serve his King.
‘I’d rather hear again of yours,’ said Jack. ‘Her name, if I recall, was Rosamunde?’
‘Rose of the world, she was indeed.’ Pounce’s lips shook, a ripple that went through all his flesh. ‘I was but sixteen when we first met …’ a thick wrist was waved, ‘… thirty years younger, ten stone lighter …’
*
Jack staggered down the Via Columbina, trying to stop twenty stone of slick Jacobite sliding into the street. Pounce had reached his height even later than was customary, the 8 a.m. bell just sounding as they emerged from the Angelo tavern. Fortunately, it was a short stagger to his lodgings and his one room was at street level. Jack knew he’d never get him up stairs.
There was another advantage to what had become a daily ritual, the guiding of the man home. The route took Jack past the one building Turnville had ordered him to look at every day for his signal. It was an ancient palazzo, long since deserted by its noble occupiers, now a tenement with a family in every room. Twice each day he would pass, between eight and nine, four and five, looking up to the right-side window just below the peak of the roof. So far it had always been open and empty. Today, however, a striped red sheet hung from it.
‘At last,’ he murmured.
Pounce, who had been leaning ever more heavily upon him, jerked his head up to stare blearily about. ‘There already?’
‘Nearly, sweet Knight. Just a little further.’
Glancing just once more at the striped sheet, Jack guided the man across a busy junction, between two carts, their drivers conducting a shouting argument over right of way.
‘We are here, sir, and I must leave you.’
‘Come in.’ The little eyes barely opened in the large face. ‘Think I have a bottle … somewhere. Yours!’
‘Alas! I must sleep. I have to look my best for the Opera tonight.’ Jack was trying to disengage the man’s weighty arm, to lay it upon the stone railing.
‘Opera! Ah, the divine Tenducci!’ He bent to Jack to whisper. ‘Thought I’d sing myself, once. But duty called!’ He tried to tap the side of his nose, succeeding on the third attempt.
‘Music’s loss, the Cause’s gain.’ Jack managed to lower Pounce upon the step. He’d make his own way in eventually.
He went the opposite way to the dangling sheet. It could have gone now anyway, as his contact might have noted him observing it. Turnville had told him he would be reached by this method. Now he had. Jack knew that he would not meet the fellow, his ‘scoutmaster’, but the signal meant that he had information for Jack. And he’d been told where he had to go to collect it.
Watkin Pounce’s lodgings were quite close to the Piazza di Spagna and from that square there was an entrance to the gardens on Monte Pinchio, his destination. But after that first night in the Hotel de Londres, Jack had moved lodgings and strictly avoided that piazza. Though he was fairly certain he was not followed – the craft he’d learned in the forests of Quebec when fighting the French made him hard to stalk even on cobbles – where the English gathered in Rome was dangerous ground for ‘Pip Truman’. Turnville had been right: the city was awash with young Englishmen on the Grand Tour. Jack had no doubt that many an Old Westminster was among them, schoolfellows all too delighted to bellow out, ‘Jack Absolute!’ He risked the sights because he always went between ten and noon, when no self-respecting Westminster would be up. Strangely, despite his alcoholic appetite, Pounce always was, and often accompanied him, an entertaining guide.
Jack made a wide circuit, cutting across the Piazza Barberini, ducking up a small pathway that ran alongside the palazzo of the same name. This cart track came to a fence, easily climbed, into the gardens on Monte Pinchio. These were open to the public, a kindness of the Borghese family who owned them. It was a favourite walk of Romans and their guests; for water flowed here, and trees gave a little shelter from the oppressive sun, though Jack, who had been there once before on Pounce’s advice, again thought that the gardens themselves were poor compared to those of England. There were no rolling, lush lawns, only square rectangles of brownish, parched earth. Some of the walks were pleasant enough for their trees but people walked beneath them on sand, not gravel, while the occasional hedge was tall and poorly trimmed. Flowers grew not in the sweeping beds of the London parks, but in rows of earthen pots. It was all so regimented, with none of the artificial naturalness, the rustic simplicity, that so pleased the eye in England.
Still, Jack was not there for the views. He moved down the avenues a little quicker than most of the early strollers but not so fast as to draw attention. In his previous visit, he had traced at least half the route. So when he came to the plantation of pine trees – some four hundred, it was said – he began to move more slowly, to look for the signs.
A statue of a dryad, arms inevitably lopped, marked a side avenue to the right. He took it, looking for a dip after about a hundred yards, and noticed it by sound not sight. Voices came, laughter, hidden from
his sight, as if they were beyond a ha-ha. He slowed, till he could peer over the slight crest. A couple were down there, a young fellow of dark complexion and in want of a shave, trying to put his arm about the waist of a buxom girl, dressed in the apron of a maid, she laughing and half-fighting him off. Then, as he watched, the youth grabbed at her wrist, pulled her up the slope and on down the avenue. A bend took them from sight, their laughter lingering.
Jack descended into the dip. Just at the point where it began to rise again, he looked left. The pines, perhaps six in each row and spaced about a dozen feet apart, descended to another parallel path below. He looked closer, to the nearer trees. There! A carving, two sets of initials within a laurel wreath. He passed the tree, scrunching over pine cones, counted four trees in, halted. He was quite well hidden in there, but he looked around to be sure. In the distance, he heard more laughter.
At head height, a bole had been hollowed out by some creature, then abandoned. He reached up, grabbed the paper lying there, then marched swiftly on, down to the next avenue, turning along it in the opposite direction to the way he’d come. He left by a different gate, mingling swiftly with the mob.
Jack had taken a small room in the eaves of the crumbling Palazzo Cesari, its principal advantages being the breeze that occasionally blew through his ever open shutters, and its proximity to the Palazzo Muti, the heart of Jacobitism. It also had an ancient caretaker whose gender Jack had never settled upon due to the swathes of cloth he/she sported day and night. He suspected that this personage was a member of the Cesari family itself, now impecunious. Families lived in the larger rooms below; only himself and one aged servant above. But the door had a stout lock, the window sills so decayed they would require an ape’s skill to shimmy along, and the sexless caretaker, who lived directly below, possessed a dog of tiny size and loud yap. No one could approach Jack without his being forewarned.
Absolute Honour Page 19
