Jack Frake (7 page)

“Where’s your home, lad?”

“Clegg,” answered the boy.

“And your parents?”

“Dead.”

Trott hummed in doubt of the truth of this statement. Clegg was a mining and market town, and this boy wore farm clothes. But it was none of his concern. “And so you’ve hoofed your way to this great metropolis to make your fortune! Is that it?”

“No, sir. I mean to go to London.”

Trott hummed in doubt again, then scowled. “All right, you! I’ll pay you a shilling a week, and maybe a few pence more if custom is extra good. Room is the woodbin on dry nights and under the steps on wet. Board is your pick of the leftovers and sherry to warm your gizzards. Filching gets you a beating or the boot.” He paused. “What’s your name?”

“Jack Frake.”

“All right, Mr. Jack Frake, formerly of Clegg,” chuckled Trott, “it’s also understood you got no supervisory status here. You got observations or notions, you see me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If that’s square with you, you can start now. Get inside and put on an apron. Find a broom and sweep the floor, then come to me.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy turned and dashed inside.

Jack Frake launched into his job with an energy that astounded Trott, who had almost forgotten how spruce a tavern his place once was. The floor was swept, and stayed swept. The meat and fish were turned in the fireplace, and Trott began to experience again the pleasure of patrons’ compliments. The dishes were washed thoroughly, and plate and cutlery stopped disappearing, for they were collected almost the instant a patron had finished his meal. The boy had the knack of espying pilferers among the patrons, and kept a sharp eye on those most likely to clip his employer’s candles. This scrutiny deterred his suspects, and earned him threats of beatings from some of the soldiers. His efficient attention to patrons compelled Clarissa, Trott’s daughter, to become a fairer and busier waitress; he established an uneasy truce with her, even though she began accruing more farthings and pennies in gratuities than before. He helped Trott and his itinerant cook prepare the vegetables, scale and bone the fish, and slaughter the poultry. He had two fights in the backyard with Bob, the son, who was one year older; the first over the fact that Jack Frake was a stranger and Bob
wanted to assert his tenure; the second because he caught Bob stealing his possessions, which he had cached under the steps that led to the tavern’s let rooms. He won both fights.

He worked hard, harder than his parents had ever driven him to work, barely conscious of the world beyond the inn’s front door. Yet there was never a time that he thought, “Oh, Lord, give me back my yesterday.” He slept soundly at night under the steps; Trott had relented during the first week and allowed him to bed down under them on a mattress of straw and burlap. It was his task to wake at first light to start the fires in the fireplace and the stew-stove in the kitchen. At nights, on his mattress, he could feel the dying heat from the great fireplace playing on his face, and before his mind winked out, it glowed with the riot of new sights, sounds and words he encountered during the day and evening.

He had fled when he heard Leith’s insinuating voice at the door of the rectory; he did not think that the parson was a match for the man. Also, he feared, not the parson, but his loyalty to the law. So he had run more from the parson than from Leith, even though he felt a fondness for the man. He had never before felt an attachment to anyone, and it bothered him that he had not been able to say good-bye. As he went about his chores in the inn, questions buzzed in his restless mind. Were Leith and his mother searching for him? How would Parson Parmley have replied to his assertion that he did not believe in any spirits, including the one around whom the rector’s life revolved? How long was a voyage from Falmouth to London? Where were the colonies?

Two things marred Jack Frake’s perception of Gwynnford: the presence of the soldiers, and the workhouse.

At any time when its doors were open, at least one fourth of the Sea Siren’s patrons were redcoats at leisure from their duties. Their meager and often late pay did not allow them much relief from the regimental kitchen, so they drank endless tankards of gin, rum, and ale. When not accompanied by a sergeant, they became rowdy; if officers were present, only sergeants and corporals on good behavior ventured in. Jack Frake learned that the butcher’s knife Hiram Trott carried but never seemed to use was supplemented by a cudgel hidden in the other side of his apron. He saw it employed once on a half-drunk merchant seaman who refused to pay his bill, claiming that the fricassee he had consumed was mostly “Channel chicken” — sea gull. Trott grew livid at the charge; he was a better chef than an innkeeper, and his bill of fare attracted gentlemen and ladies
staying at other inns. He felled the sailor with a practiced tap of the cudgel, and deposited him outside. He was bigger and sturdier than any of the soldiers, and none of them risked his wrath.

The soldiers were there because Gwynnford was one of several possible landing sites on the south coast for an invasion by a French army loaned by Louis XV to Charles Edward Phillip Casmir Stuart, the Young Pretender to the throne of England. An invasion fleet had actually been assembled in March near Brest, and the Channel fleet under Admiral Norris was about to give its warships battle, when a two-day gale dispersed the French and smashed Marshall Maurice de Saxe’s army transports in Dunkirk. Following this episode, in fact, the French king had had about enough of trying to unsettle British politics by using the Stuarts to unseat the Hanovers and establish a sovereign amenable to French policies, and his support of Charles Edward’s further schemes was lukewarm to the point of discouragement. But some powers in London were taking chances neither on the rumored exhaustion of Louis XV’s resources nor on the Young Pretender’s frustrated ambitions, and ordered the army to invest selected Channel ports as a precaution. Gwynnford was one of these ports.

Jack Frake concluded, on the strength of chat among officers overheard in the Sea Siren, that the soldiers were necessary, and so he grudgingly accepted their presence. The regiment was from the Midlands; its privates and corporals were homesick, lonely, and perhaps even apprehensive of the invasion. Their occasionally arrogant, besotted behavior was a small price to pay for the country’s protection. He did not yet grasp that the army was composed largely of the swarf and dross of his country’s society — of wanted criminals and sentenced ones, of the unemployed and the unemployables, of the dispossessed and the uprooted.

Hiram Trott, and other tradesmen in Gwynnford, he observed, perhaps felt the same way, but it was clear to him also that they regarded the money spent by the soldiers as one way of getting back some of their excise money. The redcoats, he noted, were charged a little more for their liquid and solid fare than were Gwynnford regulars.

The parish union workhouse intrigued him in an unsettling way. Late in the afternoon on his fourth day with Trott, he accompanied his employer on a cart to the wholesaler’s depot to collect firewood and coal. They passed the workhouse, a long, two-story brick building enclosed by a high brick wall. Through the iron bars of its gates, which were guarded by a man in a blue coat carrying a polished black cudgel, Jack Frake saw children
of various ages and a few adults loitering in a flagstoned yard. Many of them wore iron neck collars beneath their sallow faces; others were chained together in pairs, threes and fours.

“Who are
they
?” he exclaimed, his astonishment bursting through his usual reserve.

“Lost souls,” replied Trott. “Orphans. Paupers. Thieves. Some, I’ve heard, have even killed. They get rounded up and put in there — and many places like it in our fair land.”

“What do they do?”

Trott shrugged. “They work. They sort and cut firewood. They fashion the stocks of our army’s muskets. They carve buttons. They sew canvas. For a while, they even poured lead for musket balls in a little building, but the fire got away from them and the shop burned down with twelve mites in it about six years ago. And they’re sent out to work in mines and shopworks and fields. They do everything. Anybody that needs hands to do something cheap but got none to do it, gets them, and nearly free. Army contractors, mostly. And navy. The grown-ups’ quarters are just beyond. Can’t see it from here.”

“Do they ever leave?”

“When they’re big and shrewd enough, they climb the wall. Or if somebody takes a liking to some of them and hires them. Mostly they become criminals, and get transported to the colonies, or hanged.”

Jack Frake could reach no conclusion about the justice of the workhouse. On one hand, the children he saw in the yard might have starved to death, or died of disease or exposure, had they not been apprehended and made to live there. On the other hand, their chains and fetters and the guard with the cudgel were elements that did not fit his concept of benevolent salvation. After all, he himself was an orphan and a pauper, in a manner of speaking, yet here he was, free and determined to make his way on his own resources. He now understood his mother’s and Parmley’s abhorrence of the workhouse, and his late father’s shame. There was something cruel in such charity.

The Sea Siren had four lodging rooms, tended to exclusively by Clarissa. Two rooms were let to a major and two captains; they were gentlemen and their purses seemed always filled with silver. But one lodger earned the special deference of Trott and his progeny, a brusque, dark, ugly little man who invariably appeared in a black tricorn and a gray coat. His frock, waistcoat, trousers and boots were always immaculate. He had come
three weeks ago, shortly before the soldiers. He said little, and chatted with no one. After he finished his meals, he would sit for hours at his corner table with his pipe, and listen. When darkness fell, he vanished. From Bob, who was now on speaking terms with him, Jack Frake learned that this was Henoch Pannell, Commissioner Extraordinary of His Majesty’s Revenue. “He’s here to trap Skelly,” whispered Bob. “He’s got men lodged in all the other inns and they’re all ears for news of smugglers. They got mounts and they ride the coast at night, lookin’ for Skelly.” Three times during his first week, Jack Frake had been awakened in the middle of the night by Pannell pounding on the front door to be let back in.

There was another silent man, who lodged in the fourth room alone. He wore a brown tricorn and a brown cape. Hiram Trott knew only that his name was Mr. Blair, a merchant’s agent who seemed to have much time on his hands, and that he was mute, though not deaf. He communicated with Trott and his staff with slips of paper, on which he wrote with a sliver of black chalk. He was a tall, lean man who often spent his hours, also with a pipe, at a corner table across the room from Pannell, reading books, the only ones Jack Frake saw in Gwynnford. They were small books, most of them written by someone named Shakespeare. Bob and Clarissa could barely read, did not like serving the man, and so it fell to Jack Frake to bring him his meals and drink. He seemed pleased to learn that the boy could read his notes, and gave him generous gratuities. His mien differed from Parson Parmley’s; as the rector’s smile had been kindly and wistful, Mr. Blair’s was hearty and contagious. Once in a while, Jack Frake noticed Blair studying him with a curious intensity.

By the end of his first week, Jack Frake was enamored of the smoky hubbub of the Sea Siren, and even proud of his contribution to it. To him it represented a microcosm of the world beyond. But in the beginning of his second week an overheard conversation checked his almost monomaniacal devotion to his job. “Imagine that! Snuffin’ a parson!” “What some men won’t do! Took all the silver, even the church chest!” “Books and vestments and papers were throwed all over, and a window broken for malice! It’s sacrilege, I say!” “It was the vestry-clerk who found ’im, lyin’ in a pool of ’is own blood, on Sunday mornin’, with people waitin’ at the church door for services!” “The last one to see ’im alive was the widow who cooked for ’im that morning, just before ’e ’ad the boys over for lessons.” “Fool! It were the boys who seen ’im last!” “Fool again! It were the killers!” “Justice wasn’t long in coming. The scoundrels who did it had a falling-out
over their gains, and killed each other.” “The one stabbed the other, and the other shot the one.” “Oyston and Lapworth? Seems I heard they was in a spirits ring in Devon that the sheriff there smashed some Easters ago.” “They was found near Trelowe, close by the constable’s place, by the constable himself!” “He was out shootin’ bird with his cousin, and there they was, in a clump of trees. They was lodgin’ in the public up there.” “That’s the Leith brothers’ place. It was the older one who was with the constable, weren’t it?” “That’s right. Isham. He’s a nervy bloke.” “All the loot was there, in the parson’s own valise, even the candlestick the constable says they did him with.” “No, no, not all of the loot was found, I hear. Some of the plate hasn’t been accounted for, and they never found the chest. This Jasper Dent says they lost it from the cart fleeing the rectory, or a pauper found the bodies first and made off with what he could carry.” “Vicar Heskett here sent Sexton Cullis up to St. Gwynn when they got the news. Neighbors say he was in tears when he saw the carnage.” “Old Parmley? Didn’t he lodge here once? I recollect some salts havin’ merry with him one night.” “Well, I says the Lord works mighty fast when he’s avengin’ one of his own.”

Leith, thought Jack Frake. Isham Leith killed Parmley — or all three of them had a hand in it — and then Leith killed
them
. He was at first tempted to upbraid himself for not having stayed with Parmley that afternoon. Only now did the words, “He’s come and gone, sir,” surface in his memory, spoken a moment before he took the globe and hurled it at the window. But if he had stayed — if the parson had not so impressed him with his reluctant devotion to the letter of the law — what then? He would have had to go with Leith and submit to an unknown fate.

But as he went about his chores, another thought — and it was not so much a thought as it was the stamina of a past one — reminded him that in that moment, hurling the globe was an act of resolve to govern his own life and never to leave it to the mercies or vagaries of others’ purposes, benign or otherwise.