Jack Frake (22 page)

At a comfortable trot, Redmagne preceded the coach on the highwayman’s horse, while Jack Frake followed. Redmagne said nothing else to the boy about the incident. It was an experience he would have to accept and reconcile on his own. The boy had always been prepared to fight, but until now had never had to see one immediate consequence of winning. Miles later, Jack Frake urged his mount ahead and rode up alongside Redmagne. “It might’ve been you that was killed,” he said, “or only injured, and making those noises. I’m glad it wasn’t you. I’d do it again.” Redmagne nodded once. Then Jack Frake fell back to his place behind the coach.

A mile before Ealing, Redmagne asked the coachman to stop for a moment. “This is where we’ll leave you, sir, and we thank you for your hospitality and discretion.”

“It were my pleasure, sir!” replied the coachman with a tip of his hat.

Redmagne rode up to the window where the governess sat. He smiled down at her, then reached inside for his cane and valise, which he slung from the saddle pommel. He took out his brass writing box, and penciled something on a scrap of paper, folded it, then handed it to Miss Morley.
“My recommended reading for your next trip, milady,” he said. “We
shall
meet again.” The woman took the slip, but before she could open it, Redmagne bent in his saddle, took her hand, and kissed it, then on impulse took her face and kissed her softly on the lips. “Yes,” he said, “we shall be meeting again… ”

Miss Morley, for once, was left speechless. She clutched the slip of paper in her hand, and watched Redmagne as he rode away, oblivious to the scandalized stares of the Neaveses and the open curiosity of Etain McRae.

They waited until the stagecoach had rounded a bend a half mile down the road. Beyond the bend, over the fields and trees, they could see the spires of Ealing. Redmagne exclaimed, “Jack, I’m in love! With Miss Millicent Morley! What a primly modest name for a woman with so much… fire! I keep seeing her, with those locks of hair, not imprisoned by cap or bonnet, falling gracefully to her bare shoulders, and telling me what she thinks of Reverend Benjamin Slocock and his sermon on
Pamela
… She has a most attractive way about her… ” Then he caught himself, and laughed, because the rest of what he thought about Miss Morley was not for another’s ears. “Come on, Jack!” he said, pulling on his reins and spurring his mount into a field. “I know a shortcut that will take us round Ealing. London awaits!”

T
HE INTELLECTUAL POLITICAL, LITERARY AND ARTISTIC CAPITALS OF
E
UROPE
then were London and Paris, with Vienna, Rome and Berlin acting as special satellites. It is difficult to assess which capital was the leader, and which was the follower, for in the many realms of any cultural rivalry there must be innovators and pathbreakers on the one hand, and emulators and refiners on the other. London and Paris scored mightily on both sides, to their mutual benefit, even though throughout the eighteenth century they were at war with each other more often than not. In the short intervals when the capitals were not struggling for overseas supremacy, the citizens who had been taxed to pay for the contests thronged across the Channel to trade, to tour, to learn, to observe and write, to become endeared to the other nation’s charms and amenities. When gathering war clouds threatened to cut them off from home, Frenchmen and Englishmen would wistfully exchange
adieu
and Godspeeds with friends, mistresses, tailors, tutors, coffeehouse companions and favorite innkeepers.

Redmagne had a hypothesis to explain the differences between France and England. It was all his own, though he claimed no scholarly accolade for it. Jack Frake had heard it before in his tutorials in the caves. He heard it again, rephrased, in the middle of an ever-widening river on a balmy July afternoon.

They had detoured south from Ealing to Chiswick on the Thames,
where they sold the highwaymen’s horses and saddles to the proprietor of a leather works who regarded the asking price of ten guineas for them as something close to theft, and who therefore asked no questions. Redmagne then hired a local waterman to row him and Jack Frake to London. The waterman balked at first; his career was to ferry passengers back and forth between Chiswick and the farm country directly across the Thames, and he complained loudly about having to work against the tides the whole distance. But his arguments succumbed to two golden guineas and a promise of two more if the gentleman and his nephew were safely deposited on the Whitehall Stairs by the nearly finished Westminster Bridge. The sum represented over a quarter of his yearly income; it fueled his arms, legs and shoulders and turned him into a relentless rowing machine.

Not long into the trip down river, Redmagne posited his idea: “There’s one main reason why England leads the way in politics, Jack:
Agincourt
. Can you remember why?”

“No,” laughed Jack Frake, seated opposite his mentor. He was surprised that Redmagne would raise the subject now, and he was too excited about their destination to remember what had been said.

Redmagne sensed this and feigned disappointment. He raised his cane and playfully knocked the boy’s hat askew. “Agincourt, Jack. But first, Runnymede in 1215, and King John’s concessions to testy, abused barons who did not want to go to war again and pay for the privilege, too. Those concessions made up the Great Charter. Now, France might have produced the same phenomenon, in due time, for the same reasons. French barons could be as testy, and French monarchs as presumptuous and abusive, as any of our own. But two hundred years after Runnymede, our Henry decimated Charles’s French nobility at Agincourt. There were few testy, abused barons left to challenge the monarch, and those that followed were not of the same mettle as those who perished by Henry’s archers, swords and axes. France has since then been as resolutely monarchical as England has been tumultuous. That, in short, is why England, for all her egregious faults, is a better place to live, while France is a worse, even for all her magnificent virtues.”

This brief lecture lodged itself somewhere in Jack Frake’s half-attentive mind, and served as a prelude to his first visit to the city. Skelly had described it to him many times, as had other members of the gang. But nothing Skelly or Redmagne or the others had said about London could have prepared him for the experience.

London was the source and the primary transmission belt of the nation’s virtues and faults. It was not only the capital; it ruled England in ways other nations’ capitals did not. London fashions, London literature, London music, London theater, London art, and London money flowed out to other cities and towns across the island and to the colonies. This was due in part to the Crown’s mercantilist policies, and in part to natural economic causes. Many of England’s leading artistic and literary lights — Gainsborough and Reynolds, the painters; Garrick, the actor; Goldsmith and Johnson, the authors — journeyed to London, for that was where the power, money, patrons and audiences were. Handel could not have settled in Hull or Birmingham and composed the same oratorios and operas. The Italian craze of the period — complete with a lucrative business in smoke- and manure-cured ‘Old Master’ forgeries — could not have taken root in Leeds or Winchelsea. French artists and engravers could not have thrived and established a Soho in Manchester or Sheffield; these were growing manufacturing towns that did not even have representation in Parliament. London was the proving ground for nearly all endeavors that had reason, tenacity or guile to succeed.

London at this time sat almost exclusively on the ‘north side’ of the Thames. It began at Shadwell and the windmill-dotted Isle of Dogs, and ended abruptly some five miles up river at Millbank and the Chelsea Water Works, under the shadow of Westminster Abbey. In between lay a busy metropolis of at least half a million people. The Thames was crossed by citizens and visitors chiefly by ferry; competitive watermen vied ferociously for the business of rowing passengers between the dozens of “stairs” on the opposing banks. Until Westminster Bridge was finished three years later, only one bridge spanned the Thames, London Bridge, whose closely spaced piers turned it into a roaring, killer dam at high tide. The bridge was home to thousands in its packed, multi-storied houses; it was also an arcade of shops where penny-pinching housewives and maids could buy anything from poultry to pins. Ladies and gentlemen with golden guineas to spend shopped in the more elegant venues of the Strand or St. Paul’s Churchyard, where tradesmen’s goods were neatly displayed in windows.

London’s most numerous edifices were churches, some three hundred of them, and their steeples punctuated the skyline. The dome of St. Paul’s and the towers of the Abbey dwarfed everything else, including the diminutive Houses of Parliament, whose two bodies, the Commons and Lords, met in cramped upstairs halls. The white walls of the Tower of London were
visible from miles down the river, and served as palatial confinement for a variety of Crown offenders. In addition to apartments, the Tower also contained a museum and a menagerie of exotic animals. For a small fee, one could visit the museum, gape at leopards, panthers, monkeys and even an elephant in the menagerie, or have tea with a prisoner and envy his splendid living appointments.

London was frustrating; merchantmen bringing cargo up river into the city were stopped by the barrier of London Bridge, and also by the necessity of having their cargoes cleared or dutied by the functionaries of nearby Customs House, and often had to wait for weeks in the traffic-clogged river before being able to land their cargoes at a Lawful Key or wharf. There were no docks in London and the physical task of unloading ships was done by lighters.

For all its churches, London was crime-ridden; the thieving began on the Thames, where accomplices on the merchantmen would toss dutiable goods wrapped in water-tight parcels overboard to be retrieved by ‘mudlarks’ on shore at low tide, and at riverside sea-coal depots whose heavers and foremen would walk off with bushels of Newcastle black. London was larcenous; enterprising thieves were not a merchant’s only nuisance. Customs inspectors had unlimited power over the wealth brought into the port. For a bribe, they would clear a cargo and declare a duty paid; if they were not satisfied with the amount of a bribe, or if a merchant or captain complained or refused to resort to bribery, an inspector could threaten to “rummage” his vessel — ostensibly to search for contraband rum or other hidden goods — and order the vessel literally torn apart. Many customs inspectors also conspired with the wharfingers — owners of the legally monopolized Lawful Keys — to have cargoes condemned, landed, and auctioned in a warehouse, and split the profits. More than one merchant found himself bidding for his own goods at a government-supervised auction.

London was noisy; the incessant clop of the shod hooves of horses and the rumble of the iron-rimmed wheels of carriages, hackneys, wagons and drays rolling over its muddy cobblestone streets, competed with the cries, drums, horns, grinding stones and bells of street hawkers peddling their wares or services.

London was dirty; thousands of chimneys spewed soft coal smoke into the air, whence it fell onto trees and horses and ladies’ satin gowns. When it rained or drizzled, the drops would gather soot and coat everything they touched. ‘Night soil’ was regularly hurled out of windows or into kennels
or open sewage ditches. The city usually lay under a twilight of dreary gray. A day when Londoners could see and feel the sun and glance up at a blue sky was called “glorious.”

London was lightless and suffocating, for most Londoners, even on glorious days; an exorbitant window tax on private buildings, not to be repealed for another century, drove landlords and owners of many commercial structures to shutter or block the windows of their tenants and employees.

London smelled; parish street sweepers could not keep up with the city’s thousands of horses, and if a horse, other draft animal, cat, dog, or rat died, it was left in the street to decay. In parish churchyards, the poor were buried in flimsy coffins in mass graves, which were not covered over until twenty or so coffins filled the hole.

London was dangerous; although foreign visitors commented enviously on the candle- and oil-lit lamps of its streets, one could just as easily be killed for a shilling in their shadows as in the darkest alleys, and be stripped of one’s clothes as well. Guides with torches or lanterns known as link boys could be hired to lead anyone traveling at night through the darker streets; often they would lead their customers directly into the hands of cut-throats. Mohocks, gangs of aristocratic toughs, terrorized neighborhoods day or night with senseless beatings and whimsical destruction of property; watchmen and constables were among their favorite sports. Gangs of footpads and teams of cut-purses and pickpockets roamed the streets and infiltrated distracted crowds with little fear of being caught; there was no police force, only frightening punishments and a feeble corps of parish-paid watchmen who trusted to luck and informants to apprehend known criminals, when they dared bother to concern themselves at all. Wigs, swords, hats, watches, fine laces and silks, and silverware could be had with a snatch and a dash, and sold minutes later in special thieves’ markets. Conviction for their theft could earn one a whipping, a burned hand, the pillory, or hanging, depending on the monetary value a jury placed on the stolen property. Butlers, valets, laborers, laundresses and maids were regularly hanged on Tyburn Tree or at Newgate Prison for robbing or murdering their employers.

London was cruel; unwanted infants were either abandoned in dark alleys or on the doorsteps of the middle class or the Foundling Hospital, or murdered, usually with brandy, gin, or rum. Abandoned children who were not sentenced to a workhouse or to a trades training regimen at Bridewell
Prison very likely would grow up to be pickpockets or prostitutes by the advanced age of ten years. Beggars were everywhere; begging was a profession, employing the artifices of fake ailments and disabilities, and the real artifices of deliberately blinded or maimed children to solicit pity. Convicted highwaymen, who proudly dubbed themselves “Inspectors of His Majesty’s Roads,” vociferously claimed the privilege of being hanged first among a dozen or more condemned criminals taken by cart from prison to the gallows, which occurred every six weeks, usually on a Monday. Touts worked the huge crowds of spectators at these “Tyburn Fairs” and took bets on who would hang first or on how long a criminal would hang by the neck until dead; it often took as long as half an hour, as hangmen did not use trapdoors or weights. When a man or woman was pronounced dead, a tugging match over the body would frequently ensue between relatives and representatives from the College of Surgeons, who by law had first claim to the body for purposes of dissection. Men and women sentenced to the pillory, such as the one at Charing Cross, were often stoned to death in the stocks by the crowds, even though they had not received a death sentence and might have been released the next day on payment of a fine of one mark.