Jack Frake (19 page)

“That’s a foul business, John,” remarked Skelly darkly.

“Not so,” said Ramshaw. “England gets rid of her dross, and I make a pound on each felon I take off her hands.” It was an old argument between the two men, never resolved.

Ramshaw worked his pipe again, studying Skelly between puffs on the clay stem. Then he raised another matter they had also discussed many times before. “You’ve been beating to windward for a long time, my friend. How much longer do you think you can keep it up?” he asked.

“Until I die,” said Skelly without emphasis.

“There’s room for a man of your mettle in the colonies,” said the captain. “In any of them. Your fortune could buy you an excellent start. You have friends in almost all the colonies. You wouldn’t be alone. You could buy a plantation in Virginia or Maryland, and live easy for the rest of your days.” He chuckled. “Find yourself a young widow with property and marry her! There’s no lack of them over there. Might do it myself when I’ve tired of sailing.”

“I’m too old for that kind of enterprise, John.” Skelly had heard this argument before.

“Bosh! I’ve seen men your senior by twenty years resettle, and do well for themselves. You? I know your abilities, Augustus. If you can establish a comfortable living as a fugitive right under the Crown’s nose, imagine what you could accomplish with the freedom to show your face!” Ramshaw paused. “Of course, you’d need to take a leaf from your Mr. O’Such, and adopt a new name and history.”

Skelly smiled at his friend. It was neither a sad smile, nor an easy one. “If I can’t show my own face, with my own name, in my own country, then I’d rather stay a fugitive.”

“The colonies are your country, Augustus. They are England.”

“If they are England,” replied Skelly with some emotion, “then England can forgive me the death of a blackmailer, a rogue, and a thief of my happiness! She can also forgive me the effort of helping to make her the envy of Europe — so far as the material happiness of her people is concerned.” Skelly nodded out the window at the two ships, and pointed his own pipe. “She can forgive what now sits in my hold there.”

Ramshaw knew everything about the death of Warren Pumphrett, and also about the skirmish Skelly’s gang had had with Revenue officers near Fowey years ago. He shook his head. “They won’t forgive it, Augustus. Not any of it. Their nabs sit warm and rosy in Parliament and on the benches and pass their laws, and they don’t know and don’t care what those laws do to other men’s lives. They are protected from you, but you are not protected from them.” Ramshaw sighed. “That’s what the Revolution was about, you know. But then they forgot what it was for, and we got our Majesties back. Now we have the privilege of electing them.”

Skelly said nothing. He knew Ramshaw was right.

Ramshaw grimaced, then changed the subject. “How’s that new boy of yours doing?” He had met Jack Frake in January when
The Hasty Hart
rendezvoused with the
Sparrowhawk
ten miles off the coast of Cornwall.

“Jack? Jack is most promising. Went to London with O’Such. Now there’s a fellow you could argue into going to the colonies, John.
He
would do well there.” Skelly laughed. “Under the tutelage of common criminals, he’s becoming a man of the most upright character.” He smiled fondly. “I can’t claim all the credit, though. O’Such has done a lot with him. And, then again, Jack is himself.”

Ramshaw grinned, then squeezed and patted Skelly’s sleeve. “That’s because he’s a Skelly man!”

Skelly chuckled in modest acknowledgment. Ramshaw ordered another round of ale and some clams for the both of them, and they talked of other things. Then Skelly pointed with his pipe out the window. “Ah, look! The wind is up! A southeastern cloud, heading our way. Where would you place it? Over St. Malo? Or Granville?”

* * *

Isham Leith was living on luck and others’ negligence. He was about to benefit from chance again, in the form of Richard Claxon’s thirst and a woman’s roving eye.

Even though his father had been a distiller, Claxon did not drink ale or any other kind of liquor, as this conflicted with his amended religious conviction of the sanctity of total sobriety, which lay somewhere between Unitarianism and Quakerism. At some distance beyond Squillante, where he had taken down an order from the village grocer and scheduled a nocturnal delivery, he stopped beneath a tree to shade himself from the hot July sun and to slake his thirst with the spring water he had taken from the caves. He reached for his leather-bound bottle, which he had tied to his pony’s saddle. But he had not secured the knot firmly enough, and the rope slipped from his grip. The bottle fell on a rock in the road. He dismounted, shook the glass fragments from the soaked pouch, and moved on. By the time he reached Trelowe, he was desperately thirsty. He stopped at a new tavern on the road, and asked the woman there for a cup of water. The woman sullenly pointed to a well at the side of the cottage. From this he drew a bucket of water, and then gave the woman a shilling for two empty gin flasks he saw discarded on the rubbish heap nearby. These he filled with water and put into his pouch.

Richard Claxon was by now a tall, fair-haired youth of seventeen with the face of an angel. To his handsome features was added the animation
and serenity of religious fervor. He was the only member of the Skelly gang who did not gamble, play games, swear or take the Almighty’s name in vain. Also, taking after Redmagne, he had assumed the refined manners of a gentleman.

The woman watched Claxon, still mounted on his pony, fidget with his pouch, oblivious to her appraisal. She was fascinated by the youth’s looks, and flattered by the courtesy he had paid her, which she rarely received from the men of the area. She stepped up next to his pony and engaged him in idle chatter. He pleasantly obliged, as he had time to spend until his next rendezvous.

After some desultory talk about the state of the roads, the new cheapness of tea, and the weather, the woman adjusted her
décolletage
and sighed, “It
is
hot, don’t you think? And you ridin’ for hours in this hot sun! You poor thing!” Her hand passed over the exposed part of her bosom, then idly came to rest on the youth’s leg.

Richard Claxon’s gaze was arrested by her dark eyes, which looked up at him with an intent that paralyzed him and made him self-conscious. He was unschooled in the ways of women, and utterly ignorant of sex. The woman’s eyes and the touch of her light hand on his leg triggered a maelstrom of inchoate desires, images and denials, jumbled together with fragments of the most strenuous dicta from his Bible. The two storms raging in his mind and body collided and left him inert. He could only stare at the woman, who smiled at him with a wisdom that frightened him.

She said, as her fingers began a gentle tattoo on his leg, “We’re lookin’ for help here, my husband and me. You could board here a while and do odds and ends. Our custom’s pickin’ up, and you could earn an extra shillin’ or two.”

“I… don’t know,” stammered Claxon.

“Where’d you say you was goin’?”

“I… didn’t say — ” began Claxon. His mind raced to remember the story he had ready for strangers when it was necessary to answer their questions. “I mean… I am going to Portsmouth to seek an apprenticeship in the shipbuilding trades.”

“Oh, my!” exclaimed the woman. “That’s such a
long
way off! And you look so tired! Why don’t you wait until my husband comes back? We can talk then. I’m sure he’d see it
my
way.” Her hand became a little bolder, and began to stroke his leg. “What’d you say your name was?”

“I didn’t — ” began Claxon again. The tension inside him was growing
unbearable. It blocked his memory now, and he snatched at the first name that came to mind, the name of a colleague in whose place he was riding today, and who had gone to wicked London. “My name… is Jack!” he blurted. “Jack Frake!”

The woman gasped, her hand darted away, and she stepped back as though he had cursed her. Her eyes were pits of anger and shock. “What name did you say?” she demanded in a low, menacing voice.

Released from the trance, and confused by the woman’s reaction, Richard Claxon doffed his hat once, managed to say, “Thank you, ma’am!” then dug his heels into the sides of the pony. In seconds he was out of the yard and safely back on the road. He continued at a canter for a while, not daring to look back, then slowed to a walk. He took a watch from his coat and glanced at the dial. He breathed easier. He would be on time.

Now, Isham Leith was content, because Henoch Pannell was content. He rode out of Gwynnford on his mount, leading a pony that carried two panes of unglazed glass for the new inn. He had decided to add a window to the former cottage, and one to the addition in the back. Pannell’s threat to revoke his license to open the tavern had receded with time. The new tavern was opened, and it was breaking even. His brother Peter was minding the inn in Trelowe. He felt safe, redeemed, and hopeful. He was almost tempted to whistle.

In March, by sheer chance, because a local smuggler by the name of Thomas Hackluyt and two of his friends had come to his other inn to discuss the rendezvous with a Dutch lugger the following night, and had done so with an indiscretion exacerbated by drink, Leith was able to give Pannell the time and place of the run. Hackluyt and his friends were captured by Pannell on the beach not a half mile east of Gwynnford, together with fifty ankers of brandy and eight ponies. One of Pannell’s men had even managed to wound a Dutch sailor, whose lugger drifted too close to shore, with a lucky shot from his musket. The smuggler and his friends were now being tried in Falmouth, and Pannell and his men were attending the trial. The Extraordinary Commissioner was happy because Hackluyt, by his information, was responsible for perhaps a quarter of the undutied brandy consumed in the area around Gwynnford. The catch earned Pannell a glowing letter of thanks from the Surveyor-General of Customs for Cornwall. “It is most imperative,” wrote the Surveyor-General in a spurt of pompous confidence, “that the Crown and its servants enjoy the duties expected on these commodities, rather than these scoundrels, who merely put these revenues
to private use. And it is supremely imperative that you press your search for Augustus Skelly. If he is captured and punished, the spirit of lawlessness in this county will soon be extinguished.”

Isham Leith knew nothing of the letter, of course. The only aspect of it that concerned him was Pannell’s promise not to call him as a witness to Hackluyt’s conversation. He knew that Pannell made this promise, not out of concern for his informant’s life, but because the Revenue man was still relying on him to collect information about the Skelly gang. “Thank you, Mr. Leith,” the Commissioner had said late one evening after the Hackluyt gang had been taken in chains to the Gwynnford jail to await transfer to Falmouth. “Excellent catch. I knew that you had potential. Now, if only you could help me with the Skelly gang. I would retire from this post, and leave the county to return to its former lawless state.” He smiled. “I’ll be out of
your
hair.”

Leith convinced himself that Pannell meant it. No one stared at him when he rode into Gwynnford earlier in the morning to buy the window panes, as might have happened if anyone had suspected him of informing on Hackluyt. Even Hiram Trott, whom he passed riding out of the town in his cart, nodded in greeting to him.

An hour later, on the road back to Trelowe, he noticed a horse, a cart, and a man beneath a tree, a tree some two hundred feet from the road on the moor — the very tree where he had lured and slain Oyston and Lapworth. A fearsome, unwelcome memory froze his mind for a moment; the site rattled him and he had avoided going near it ever since that day years ago. He passed the site and cast surreptitious glances at the person sitting on a rock beneath the tree.

He frowned. It was Hiram Trott. He blinked in wonderment and rode on.

As he approached his new inn, he saw something in the distance that disturbed him. After a few moments, a youth on a pony came toward him, someone he seemed to remember and had noticed in the past, but never wondered about. He and the rider exchanged perfunctory nods.

Minutes later, as he came nearer the cottage, Huldah Leith rushed out of the yard to meet him. “Leith! That boy you passed on the road — ”

Leith reined in his mount. “You mean the one I saw you handlin’?”

“What are you talkin’ about? He stopped here for water, and he bought some gin bottles — ”

“I
saw
you from the rise on the road yonder!” said Leith, pointing with his riding crop to the spot. The youth had crested it and was now out of
sight. “I saw it all, Huldy! Is that what’s to go on while I’m away?”

“Leith, I didn’t — ”

Leith raised his riding crop and struck his wife across the face. “I told you to mend your bitchin’ ways, woman, or I’d scar that face of yours!”

Huldah Leith held a hand to the already reddening welt on her face. “You ignorant bastard!” she screamed. “That boy said his name was Jack Frake!” She had lived for years with a suspicion which she dared never name, and she wanted to know nothing about how her husband had come into the money to renovate the cottage. She did not know that he was in thrall to Henoch Pannell.

“Huh! Did he, now?”

“He did!”

“Didn’t look nothin’ like your bastard!”

“That’s right!” said Huldah Leith, balling her hands into fists. “That ain’t him, all right, but why would he use Jack’s name instead of his own — unless he
knew
him?”

Leith scoffed. “He was at sixes and sevens, I’m damned sure, Huldy! The way you was coddlin’ his breeches, I’m surprised he didn’t say he was the Duke of Cornwall!” Leith struck his wife again with the crop.

Huldah Leith made no effort to touch her face now. “Jack’s still in these parts, Leith,” she warned. “He could get us in trouble. Go and stop that boy and use your crop on
him
for the truth!”

With his anger partly spent, the import of his wife’s words began to sink into Leith’s mind. He glared in disgust at his wife for a moment. He tethered the pony to a post. “Don’t touch that glass till I’m back.” Then he reined his mount around. “And we ain’t finished with this, Huldy.” He trotted back up the road.