Jack Absolute (6 page)

Jack rose, Até beside him. Sheridan struggled up but, red-faced, fell back.

‘No, me boys, this hare has run his last. I think I’ll converse with the owner of this fine establishment. Always useful to
hear how the simple folk are talking these days. And when the Runners find me here, I can entertain them for a while.’

Jack began to protest but Sheridan interrupted him. ‘Go and Godspeed. They will not incarcerate me long. We play my new comedy,
The School for Scandal
, for the King next week, and he will not like to be disappointed. Go!’

Two swift handshakes, and Jack and Até turned, began to run. Behind them Sheridan called out, ‘Write me, dearest
Jack, of your exploits, if you please. You always provide such thundering good plots!’

Jack snorted. He knew how this plot had to end. They needed to buy – or steal – horses in Windsor and ride south. The Portsmouth
road was not far. He had to beat the news of this action to the coast. With the right tide, he could be a-ship and on his
way to Nevis ahead of any pursuit.

They were a few hundred paces along the road when they heard the dogs again. Glancing back, they saw lanterns and shapes moving
before the shepherd’s hut. Some lingered, but a significant body set off in immediate pursuit.

They ran faster, looking to the left for a gap in the hedgerows, a path through the fields and down to the river. Behind them,
the horns blew again, dogs bayed. And then another sound came under it all, a rolling, crunching noise, joined by the clear
snap of a whip. Half-turning, Jack saw the huge shape of a coach and six, moving at speed through the pursuing pack. He was
close enough to hear the curses heaped upon the coachman.

The vehicle drew alongside, slowing slightly to match their stride. A blind went up.

‘Care for a ride, Jack?’

John Burgoyne leaned in the window, a pipe in one hand, silver flask in the other. Jack didn’t hesitate.

‘Much obliged, General,’ he said, swinging a foot up on to the running board. The door of the carriage opened and he threw
himself inside while Até, a pace behind, scrambled up the rear of the coach to its roof. As he was joined, the coachman cracked
his whip again and the six horses surged forward.

‘Strange … that you should just … happen by, sir,’ Jack gasped.

‘Strange indeed. And fortuitous, it seems.’ Burgoyne smiled at him. ‘Cognac?’

‘A moment … to catch my breath, sir … if you please.’

He leaned out of the window, looked back. Darkness had enveloped the sight of pursuit. The sounds of horns, frustrated men,
and yelping dogs retreated into the night.

Jack sat back, then became aware of a presence beside him. He turned. ‘Ah, Miss Reardon. Please excuse the intrusion.’

She smiled. ‘Mr Absolute, how glad I am to see you again.’ Then her smile vanished. ‘But you are wounded, sir! Quickly, may
I help you? I have some knowledge of these matters.’

‘Wounded?’ He glanced down. ‘Oh, the blood is not mine.’

And he laughed. It suddenly felt rather good to do so, so he carried on for a little while, until Burgoyne, a broad grin on
his own face, said, ‘So, did you kill your man, Jack?’

‘I did not, sir. I had hoped to avoid it. I merely pricked him.’

Burgoyne shook his head. ‘You might come to regret that. This Tarleton has built up a brutish reputation. Scarce eighteen,
and he has already dispatched three fellows. He’s not the sort to consider honour satisfied if he loses. And he keeps some
strange company.’

Jack now took the flask and drank. The cognac tasted even better than it had the previous night.

‘Are you referring to his Second, this German Count? I did wonder about him.’

‘And so you should.’

Louisa added, ‘The General believes he is aiding the Rebels in my poor country.’

‘In what way?’

‘Have you heard of the Illuminati, Jack?’

‘I have not.’

Burgoyne took the flask back, drank, then continued. ‘Of course, you’ve been away. And even if you’d been here, you might
not have … you do not move within the Mystery, do you?’

The General was referring to the Freemasons. Jack had always avoided the Brotherhood, even though it might have aided him
in his business ventures. He felt there was more than enough secrecy in his life, enough obligation. But he knew Burgoyne
to be high up in the order.

‘I do not, sir. Are these Illuminati a lodge then?’

‘Of a kind. A new one, formed in Munich only last year by a man called Adam Weishaupt. A professor of religious law, apparently,
and many of his followers are of the same ilk. Lawyers!’ Burgoyne gave the title a soldier’s contemptuous emphasis, drew on
his pipe. ‘Yet these fellows have formed a secret society
within
a secret society. No one is quite sure what they want, though they have tried to infiltrate every lodge in the realm, succeeded
with many. This Von Schlaben even approached me.’ Burgoyne exhaled a gout of smoke towards the carriage window. ‘I now regret
not leading the Count on a little to discover more. But a contact who did said this Weishaupt’s motives are shrouded in Jesuitical
casuistry. He was educated by Jesuits, apparently, and rejected them later as not
extreme
enough, too tied to a Catholic orthodoxy. Thus my friend did not learn much; but he got the impression that these Illuminati
seek, in all societies, disorder, disruption—’

‘Revolution?’

‘Indeed. To build an “illuminated” new order out of the chaos of the old. With them in control, presumably.’

Now that Jack’s heart had calmed, his mind was engaged. And there were questions here that puzzled him.

‘So why his interest in me? He seemed very set on my extinction.’

As he asked the question, he recalled again part of their conversation at Drury Lane, Burgoyne’s parting words, and, remembering
it, he had the beginnings of an answer.

‘Did you not let it be known, sir, that I had already accepted your offer to rouse the Iroquois for the King?’

Burgoyne smiled. ‘I’m rather afraid I may have given out that impression.’

‘So if Von Schlaben understands the importance of the Iroquois to the British cause, he might perceive me as a serious threat
to the Revolution? To the disorder he seeks?’

‘You know, Jack, I’m rather afraid he might.’

Jack looked out of the window at the roadway speeding by. The fields were giving way to more houses. They were entering the
outskirts of Windsor.

Of course. There always had been more to it than a dispute over a pretty player.

‘Well, General, I think you have enmeshed me here.’

It was said with a little heat but Burgoyne merely smiled still. ‘Alas, Jack, I fear you are right. How ever can I make amends?’

‘You are bound for Portsmouth?’ He received a nod. ‘Then a ride there would quit your obligation. My boat, as yours, awaits.
If you will but take me to the docks—’

‘And you will be arrested the moment you set foot upon them. My boy, you were called out in the most public setting possible.
In accepting Tarleton’s challenge, you in turn challenged the Authorities … and they seem very serious about restricting a
gentleman’s prerogative of honour. Examples must be made and you will make a fine one. Not too wealthy to cause a fuss but
still well known. Your estates will be forfeit, your neck may well be stretched, you will at the least be thrown into the
Clink and nothing can save you.’ Burgoyne smiled again. ‘Well, almost nothing.’

‘“Almost nothing”, General?’ Louisa leaned in. ‘Oh, do say there is something that can be done for the gallant Captain!’

They seemed to be sharing a private joke. Jack, looking from one to the other, suddenly realized what it was. And that it
was on him.

‘As usual, my dear, you have hit upon the very heart of it.
If you were indeed “Captain” Jack Absolute again, entrusted by a commander of one of His Majesty’s armies – odds life, I suppose
someone very much like myself! – entrusted, as I say, with a mission vital to your country’s cause … why then, my boy, no
civil power on earth could touch you.’

Enmeshed indeed. There was no escaping from the snare. Instead of further anger, though, Jack could only tip back his head
and laugh.

‘It really is a very good plot,’ he said, looking at each in turn, ‘I must write Sheridan with it.’

‘You will have plenty of time on our voyage to America.’ Louisa smiled, laying her hand on Jack’s arm, squeezing it gently.

He looked from her fingers up into her steady green eyes and seemed suddenly to see in their pattern something of the land
from which she came. It appeared he had no choice now but to return to that land, to North America, eleven years after he’d
left it. Até, facing into the wind atop the carriage, would be delighted. And Jack, now he had no other option, was strangely
pleased too. His business in Nevis could, with very careful handling, wait a short while. And as for the Colonies, he had
had another life there, other causes; it would be a homecoming, of sorts. Once more, to be Daganoweda, the ‘Inexhaustible’
of the Mohawk. Once more to be a captain of the 16
^th
Light Dragoons. Once more to be a secret agent of the Crown.

Leaning back into the cushions of the carriage, Jack Absolute faced the inevitable with a smile. Até’s words on the duelling
ground came back to him.

The readiness is all.

He took the flask again, raised it first to the lady and then to the General. Taking a long pull of the exquisite cognac,
Jack realized that he was, indeed, ready.

Jack Absolute leaned on the taffrail of HMS
Ariadne
at dusk, staring at the skyline of Quebec. It looked very different from the first time he’d seen it, eighteen years before.
Then it was undergoing a siege, had been reduced by artillery for a month. In the lower town, roofs had tumbled in, walls
had crumbled, and the docks had been turned into a profusion of splinters and spars; in the upper town the French held on,
protected by their unassailable cliffs, certain that winter’s approach would force the besiegers to withdraw before the ice
of the St Lawrence trapped and crushed their ships. The old enemy looked down upon a starving English army, wasted by the
bloody flux, mutinous. Falling apart. Until …

Jack searched for and found a slice of shadow in the granite rockface.

In 1759, control of that slice, that narrowest of roads, had allowed General Wolfe to move his forces up onto the Plains of
Abraham before the City. But seizing the track had required an advanced party to scramble up the cliffs in the pre-dawn dark
and dispose of the French piquets before they could sound the alarm. And since half the officers already there were sick,
and the majority afraid and since he was newly arrived from England and as foolhardy and expendable as only a sixteen-year-old
Lieutenant of Dragoons could be,
he had been one of the first to volunteer for the assault. With muffled swords and powderless pistols, the advanced guard,
Jack near the front, had killed the sentries on the cliff-top then guided the rest of General Wolfe’s army into position.
The Marquis de Montcalm, awaiting his enemy further up the river, had discovered them suddenly before Quebec’s weaker landward
walls; he’d marched his men down to confront them. For glory. For France. And had been one of the first to die in the perfect
volley the British had delivered that day.

Distant thunder underscored his thoughts, and Jack shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the chill May wind. That
track had not been the first place he’d hazarded mortality even then; but it was where he’d received his first battle scar,
now just one of many. And here he was, a lifetime on, back where his Colonial adventures had begun. He wondered briefly if
the fate he’d only just escaped then awaited him now.

Not here though. Not in Quebec. The battle at the end of that track, atop the Plains of Abraham, had won a continent for the
Crown. Even if the townsfolk still spoke French, that enemy had been vanquished. The English returned now to fight someone
different. Someone that had, until very recently, been on the same side in the overthrow of that ancient foe.

Jack sighed, wondering how many old allies he would now squint at along the barrel of his musket, men he’d called friends,
whom he must now call Rebels and traitors. His secret hope was that Burgoyne meant to keep him at his side. In the five-week
voyage from Portsmouth, the General had been large with questions, niggardly with answers, not very specific as to Jack’s
duties.
‘Help rouse the Iroquois.’
Yes, but they were a disparate people scattered over a vast wilderness.
‘Gain a true knowledge of the enemy.
’ Yes, but was he to seek it out, or decipher it when it arrived?

They had dropped anchor only that morning. Messengers had come and gone all day, bearing information that Burgoyne would be
using to refine the plans he’d hitherto kept to himself. His key officers had been summoned to a special supper that night.
No doubt Jack and all the others would get their answers and their orders then. And find out exactly how the man the American
Rebels contemptuously called ‘Gentleman Johnny’ planned to defeat their Revolution.

As always, Jack hadn’t heard him come, until the words were spoken.

‘Shall we dive in, Daganoweda, and see who is first to the shore?’

Jack squinted ahead. ‘It’s far.’

‘We’ve swum further.’

‘Not when we weren’t being chased.’

He turned to Até. The Mohawk’s gaze remained fixed ahead. As usual he was wearing the little that passed for his clothes,
so Jack continued, ‘And even you might find it cold, Até. The ice is not long gone.’

Até grunted. ‘Colder than the high Ganges the day the Thugees chased us to the cliffs?’

Jack smiled and winced at the same time. Another land, another scar. ‘No, not as cold. And probably not as far.’

‘Well then. I am ready if you are.’

Neither man moved, just stared at the shore, at the sweep of woods above the town just gaining its spring shrouding. The forests
here were so different from England, from India and the Caribbean; silver maple and spruce, white cedar, hemlock. Both men
breathed deeply, held the scent in their nostrils.