Jack Frake (11 page)

“So I said,” remarked Smith.

“Interview!” said Skelly, turning to his associate. “Feed your scullion, and I’ll talk to him after I’ve settled accounts.” He turned and went through the curtain.

“He wants to talk to you,” said Smith. “Come on. You can wash some of that sleep off your face, and have some stew. You’ll need a full stomach to think hard, and Skelly will give you plenty to think about.”

Jack Frake rose, put on his jacket, and followed Smith through the curtain.

S
MUGGLING WAS A MAJOR ENTERPRISE IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
E
NGLAND
, a phenomenon created, aided and abetted by a complex array of import and consumption taxes, imposed by a government that wished to promote prosperity and to tax it, too. The import or customs duties were designed to nurture the growth of English industry by adding to the cost of private purchases of foreign-made goods which the government rather wished to be made at home for domestic purchase and export; “consumption” or excise taxes were levied on both English and foreign-made goods for the purpose of raising revenue. It was a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul who was obliged to pay the Piper; only the Piper seemed to prosper, though his pockets, too, were in fact empty. One major consequence of this policy was to stunt what little prosperity and material progress managed to occur under the combined weights of royal, aristocratic, and government entitlements and preferments, the endless wars, disastrous financial schemes, and rife corruption.

It also encouraged crime and the corruption of both the taxers and the taxed; as much or more energy was diverted to evading the taxes as was invested in producing things that could be taxed. The evasion attracted men of moral character and the criminally inclined alike, who, knowing nothing throughout their lives but an irrecusable injustice, accepted it as the norm. The first group broke the law from necessity; the second broke it
as opportunity. The system drew men who would surrender, meekly and guiltily, in the face of a revenue man’s rain-soaked pistol. It drew brutal, indiscriminate killers whose gangs controlled whole towns and whose suppression required the employment of the army. And it drew men, fewer, perhaps, who were neither meek nor brutal, but who were dedicated, in crime, to preserving something no one could yet name. It was to them that outlawry owed its romance. These few men seemed to be the most determined and the most menacing smugglers of all. They broke the law by fiery, clench-fisted choice.

The judicial system, though modern in method and the most advanced in Europe, was rooted in large part in the precepts of the medieval period. A man could be hanged for murder, and also for stealing a length of waste silk fabric from his employer or an armful of discarded wood chips from a shipyard. A woman could be hanged for picking a few shillings from another’s pocket, or for harboring a man who had stolen a sack of coal or vegetables. On one hand, life and property were revered and protected by an eclectic criteria that recognized no measurement of loss, theft or destruction. On the other, the government and the Crown treated them both as chattel.

* * *

The chamber in which Jack Frake awoke was a nook in one of several caves honeycombing a clot of low, barren hills near the market town of Marvel, some three miles north of the coast. The hills lay on the fringes of the estate of a country squire named Villers who had died in bankruptcy ten years before. The estate, which consisted of an unoccupied mansion and one hundred acres, had been the subject of contested ownership among three of the squire’s surviving brothers, two neighboring propertied gentlemen who, upon Villers’ death, produced deeds and receipts alleging ancient claims to portions of the estate, and the squire’s numerous creditors.

While the courts deliberated, the mansion fell into desuetude and decay, and the pastures, gardens and tillage reverted to wilderness. There was no one to notice the smoke that occasionally blew from one or two of the hills, no one to hear, when the wind was right, a faint neighing of a horse, a tantalizing strum of a lute, or a ghostly crescendo of laughter. Poachers and farmers suspected that the mansion was haunted by Villers’s ancestors, many of whom were slain or executed during the Civil War.
Townsmen were certain that the estate was inhabited by the Skelly gang and by spirits who granted the gang sanctuary in their netherworld in exchange for homage to pagan idols.

Neither the late squire, nor his brothers, nor the poachers, nor the townsfolk of Marvel knew of the existence of the caves, for the hills were surrounded by thick, thorny brush, impassable except by fire or ax. The squire’s former tenant farmers, who now paid their rents to the court, had not thought it worth the effort to clear the brush to get to the hills, as there seemed to be nothing on them but rock and grass, of which they had a surfeit in their own pastures.

Before Skelly, the first men to use the caves were Roman officials and legionnaires, who hid their families in them from marauding Celts allied with the rebellious Iceni. After them, Britons hid in them from marauding Danes. Now they were the refuge of desperate Englishmen hiding from marauding Englishmen.

The caves were ideal for habitation. There were fissures and chimneys in the rock through which prevailing winds circulated air. An underground spring carried water from lower depths to pools in two of the caverns. The floors were flat and the walls almost plumb. There were three entrances to the labyrinth, protected by the brush and invisible to the undiscerning eye. Each entrance was reached by a serpentine path which forked into several others, which were dead-ends, and the entrances were camouflaged to look like dead-ends. The paths wound through a forest and eventually connected with the King’s highway south of Marvel.

The caves were divided into three sections. One housed the gang. Another contained its inventory of contraband. The third served as a stable for the gang’s mounts and as a shelter for its livestock, which consisted of chickens, pigs and goats. Gang members took turns tending to these accomplices in crime.

Commissioner Hennoch Pannell and his predecessors knew that the Skelly gang operated out of the vicinity of Marvel. Squads of dragoons drafted into Revenue service had scoured the pathways, copses and coverts around the hills but found little beyond poachers’ traps, stray sheep and cattle, and encamped paupers. Pannell had even searched the Villers house once, and for a time had a watch set on it. But there were no signs of life to be found. Pannell, a London man with some cosmopolitan pretensions, cursed the superstitions of the region and the reticence of the local inhabitants. He turned his search elsewhere.

* * *

There were twenty men in Skelly’s gang, every one of them wanted for various crimes against the Crown. None was a common criminal. Each had committed some action that defied authority: one, a former shopkeeper, had refused to pay a hearth and window tax; one, a former cattle driver, had struck a parish tithesman and stole back the cattle the churchman took from him in lieu of money; one had delivered an impromptu, slanderous tirade against Parliament and a corrupt minister and his clique; one had written and distributed scandalous verse about King George and his two sons, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, and Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall; one had knowingly sold contraband tea, silk and bread; one, a former London Customs House inspector, had shown mercy to a merchant who pleaded he’d be ruined if he paid the duties on his impounded shipment of French lace, and was charged with theft of Crown revenue; one was a former butcher’s apprentice whose employer was driven to highway robbery when the City trebled his stall fee; one was a former highwayman, famous for his wit and gallantry, who had offered to rob Skelly himself as he strode into Fowey, and was persuaded instead to join the gang.

Throughout Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset, the four counties that lay between the Bristol and English Channels, it was known that the Skelly gang was not simply another band of criminals, and its reputation and esteem varied from group to group. The common people revered Skelly and his gang for their derring-do and mockery of the authorities. The middle class was divided between those who openly blessed the gang for the goods it sold to their merchants and shops
sans
all taxes, and those who, with surreptitious prudence, also purchased the same goods, but were nonetheless envious of the gang’s moral mettle. The landed gentry and aristocracy chuckled, over their breakfasts, at the newspaper accounts of the gang’s exploits, but in their church pews exuded concern for the gang’s example for defying order and established society. And customs and excise enforcement officials simply cursed the gang and their duty to ensnare it; there was neither glory nor profit in assured humiliation.

Osbert Augustus Magnus Skelly interviewed prospective members of his gang in the dining hall of his hideout and headquarters. It was the biggest cavity of the caverns. Its severe gray walls were decorated with some of the souvenirs of the gang’s exploits. On it were fixed a red Customs
Service Revenue jack and a rowing boat’s black backboard, emblazoned with the King’s Arms, both trophies of a race between the pursuing boat and Skelly’s contraband-laden galley in a wild, high tide surf near a Dorset beach; the patrol boat smashed against some rocks, broke up, and all aboard it either drowned or were dashed against the rocks and killed. There were a dozen hats hanging from pegs, their former owners excise men who had arrested one or another of Skelly’s men, only to be arrested by Skelly, disarmed and relieved of their prisoners, and taken blindfolded to another county, stripped naked, and set free on a country road, their bare wrists handcuffed behind their bare backs. There was a collection of weapons: muskets, pistols, swords, and halberds, all taken from men who had guarded Customs warehouses raided by Skelly to recover seized contraband for which he had already paid.

And there was a pair of buckled shoes, set apart from the other mementos, on an otherwise bare wall.

The dining table, of shellacked oak, was thirty feet long, and was built from the planking of the deck of a revenue sloop that ran aground when its captain ordered it too close to the beach to better observe some suspicious men. Over it, suspended from a gilt-iron chain, was a silver chandelier of twenty candles, and down its length were silver and copper candlesticks. Mugs, glasses, tankards, plates, dice and packs of cards littered the top. There was even a book, and some newspapers.

In a corner of this hall was the kitchen, whose fireplace took advantage of a chimney-like fissure in the rock. Close by was a pool. Blair-Smith took a bucket, dipped it into the water, and gave it to Jack Frake. “Wash up, Jack. I’ll see if I can scrape some stew for you from the bottom of the pot.”

Later, still alone in the hall with Blair-Smith, Jack Frake sat at one end of the table, eating his stew and sipping a mug of ale in between glances at his surroundings. Blair-Smith sat placidly on the bench close by, reading a copy of the London
Gazetteer
, a Whig newspaper, and smoking a pipe.

But Jack Frake was full of questions. “Why were you pretending to be someone else at the inn?” he asked. “I mean, why were you there, when Mr. Pannell was searching for you?”

“We were keeping an eye on
him
, lad. We’ve been looking over his shoulder, so to speak, ever since he arrived in these parts months ago. He and his men have snared a few smugglers, but no one from our gang. He hasn’t made a move without our knowing about it. When he left on his nocturnal patrols, I slipped out through my window in your inn and was right
behind him.”

“How did Mr. Skelly know you were arrested?”

“
Mr
. Skelly?” chuckled Smith. “That’ll tickle him. I wasn’t the only Skelly man there, young Jack. When Farbrace cuffed me, word got out to Skelly, and he planned my bail. In fact, we knew the
Rover
was heading for Gwynnford before the town did.”

“Why did you let them arrest you?”

“It wasn’t a matter of choice,” answered Smith, snapping the paper. “It was a matter of by whom. I was going to be arrested, there was no arguing about that. But I knew why Admiral Harle was there — we’d got word he was on the road, looking for French agents and spies, and apprising invasion points. Now I can’t speak French, but I can imitate a Scot, and you might have noticed there aren’t many Scotsmen in Gwynnford. So it was a Scot he got. The Admiral was the least grim of my possible fates. If Pannell or that lieutenant had got his hands on me, well, that would’ve been the end of my illustrious career. I’d planned to speak, but you beat me to it with your shovel.”

“Why did you pretend to have a dead tongue?”

“To avoid having to answer so many questions,” replied Smith, snapping his paper again. “Eat your stew, or I
will
turn mute.”

Jack Frake spooned a few mouthfuls. “Where are all the men I heard talking?”

“Being paid.”

“You look different.”

“In my former life, I was an actor.”

“What’s an actor?”

“An actor is a person who entertains others by being someone else. Sometimes he is paid with money; other times, with rotten fruit. He usually plies his trade in a theater.” Smith relented and explained the theater to the boy, and offered to show him the make-up kit he had retrieved from his room at the Sea Siren.

After a few more mouthfuls of stew, Jack Frake asked, “What may I call you?”

“Me? Why, Smith, of course.” Smith noted the look of disappointment on his auditor’s face. “It is my real name. You may consult the parish register of St. John’s in Wapping, if you doubt it.”

“May I call you Redmagne?”

“Even though I haven’t a single lock of red hair?”

“Yes. I think that ought to be your real name. Mesula Redmagne.”

“
Methuselah
,” corrected Smith. “All right. Redmagne I am.” The newly named smuggler turned his attention back to the
Gazetteer
, now not entirely displeased with the boy’s incessant curiosity.