Jack Frake (13 page)

“A tragic history, but a common one, I’m afraid. The moral of it is this: Were it not for the King’s laws, we might never have made our brief but sad acquaintance with Hal Tyler! We would, I believe, be enjoying his strawberries and apricots and cabbages — and his tobacco — in our own homes, or even in Ranelagh Gardens! Give me the chain.”

Jack Frake put the chain in Skelly’s hands, then stepped back and wiped the rust from his palms on his breeches.

The man rattled the chain once. “An ugly sound, is it not? There is more freedom in these caves, Mr. Frake, than in our towns. And chains — these things — are a more honest form of slavery than the specious liberty enjoyed by most of our countrymen, who are chained to laws much like those which killed Mr. Tyler. You will notice something about the men here, which is that the prospect of being swaddled in chains like these frightens them less than being swaddled in chains of laws, of which there are many more links. We will submit to chains” — Skelly again rattled the ones in his hand, then said contemptuously — “but we none of us will submit to their
paper and ink
parents!” Skelly threw the chain down, and sighed. “I am not a man of letters, like your flamboyant sponsor, Mr. Frake. If I were, I perhaps could put it more clearly. Your sponsor is befuddled, too. At least he has not communicated the thing to me. It’s a difficult thing to put into words, our rebellion. It’s not a high-sounding cause to most men, our business of wanting to mind our own without interference or penalty, and so few of them are willing to rally to our colors. Most of those who join me discover something about themselves, and in themselves — something roused by more than mere disobedience, but which learns to glory in its unfettered state, and cannot ever be put to sleep again except by cowardice or a hangman’s noose. I’ve not been able to say what it is. Perhaps you will, some day.” Skelly chuckled. “You’ll have the advantage of our example and association, and so will be able to devote more thought to it. Most of us, you may have noticed, got off to a late start. Perhaps someone has already found those words. However, in the meantime, I do know what I know, and that is the nub of it.” He glanced down at the chain and kicked it back under his desk. He paused to study the boy’s face. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Mr. Frake?”

Jack Frake nodded.

“
What
, then?”

“Even though we are chained by our outlawry, we are free men, more free than ordinary folk.”

“Crudely put, but right. By my own lights, I am a patriot. We all are, here. The government tries to kill my country. I try to keep it alive. What else could I be, then, but a patriot?” Skelly smiled tiredly and put the sword in its scabbard aside on the desk-top. “Well, end of lecture, Mr. Frake. You’ll get one-half of one percent of the profit realized on any consummated transaction.
The rate will improve with your skills. Does that agree with you?”

Jack Frake smiled. “It agrees with me, sir, and I agree to it.”

“Humph! So you say now! Wait until you see how much or how little that one-half of one percent can be! So!” exclaimed Skelly as he rose and stretched once. “Let us repair to the great hall, and see what Mr. Tuck is preparing for us for dinner! Capons, I believe, and plum pudding. I’ll try to talk him into whipping up a pot of syllabub. Interesting man, our Mr. Elmo Tuck,” said Skelly as he led Jack Frake from the chamber. “He was once chef for the old Earl of Danvers, who had a secret weakness for French cuisine, at which Mr. Tuck was secretly adept. However, one day Mr. Tuck, his kitchen fresh out of ingredients and condiments, innocently and without malice aforethought improvised and prepared the Earl a bowl of haggis. That’s a Scots dish, you see, but he may as well have presented the Earl with a bowl of cattle fodder. The old Earl thrashed him for that alleged insult, accused him of having Jacobite sympathies — the Earl, when a young man had helped put down the ’15 in Scotland — and banished him from Dorset. The Earl expired shortly after that episode, in a Weymouth inn, during a dalliance with a servant girl in his household he had brought with him. Mr. Tuck, who happened to be anonymously employed in that same inn, was found out by the Earl’s sons and further accused of poisoning their father. They wished to preserve the Earl’s good name by besmirching Mr. Tuck’s. Mr. Tuck fled the inn only a few steps ahead of the bailiff… ”

* * *

Skelly was right; life in the claustrophobic caves was no lark. Jack Frake, however, did not seem to mind the artificial regime. He was in the constant company of men who seemed to be of his own stamp. This circumstance did not cause him to relax, but to be more conscientious about his work. He could not decide whether he was motivated by a desire to earn their respect, or by a desire to grant them his. He dove into his work with the same energy and enthusiasm that he had displayed at the Sea Siren. During his first year in the caves, he rarely ventured far beyond the thickets that encircled them. He was kept busy as a scullion, as the cook’s helper, as a shepherd for the livestock, as a lookout for intruders and as a scout for the gang when it moved
en masse
in and out of the caves. He grew to become possessive of the caves and their inhabitants. And he grew to covet
the shillings and guineas that began to accumulate beneath his bed of straw.

Other boys might have resisted the regime and rebelled against it. Jack Frake, cherishing the privilege of living and working with a band of unusual men, submitted to it without question. He knew that he had something to learn from all of the gang-members, aside from the reasons why they were outlaws. He saw in each man a tiny reflection of himself. There was a word or phrase that identified the common denominator that united the gang. It eluded him, and seemed to elude the men, too. He saw, further, that the gang-members were truly men of good will and good cheer, but that also each one had a secret agony, which was his status as a fugitive. Paradoxically, the agony did not belie their benevolence.

The gang ate well, lived well — its living quarters were finely if eclectically appointed with contraband furniture from the Continent — and wanted for little. It went where it pleased as long as Skelly’s rules were heeded. It worked as a brotherhood. Its members lived in caves, while the rest of English society lived within four walls. But each gang member grew to regard the conditions of his “free” countrymen as abnormal and could not be shaken from this conviction, even though many members spent long periods of time away from the caves with their families. The gang was knit together by the pledge; and by more: by a covenant of defiance, by a commitment to justice, by a reciprocity of respect. The gang was a kind of Freemasonry lodge, except that the pledge was its only ritual and the fugitive status of its members its only initiation.

Skelly was the moral hinge on which the rest of the gang swung. All the men deferred to his judgment, even though he was open to new ideas and suggestions. He was a touchstone for rectitude. He did not rule the gang with terror or an iron fist or blackmail. He did not seem to rule it at all; his “laws of residence” — as Redmagne humorously called them — were too obviously necessary and logical for any member to question or violate. To break any one of them was to assure mortal peril. As Redmagne came to represent a fount of wisdom and knowledge to Jack Frake, Skelly came to embody those things in action.

The dining hall served other purposes. One day it would serve as a dry bowling green, on another it was the venue for a game of skittles. But it often took on the ambiance of a coffee-house in which grave matters and light were debated. The men argued religion, politics, women, and other subjects dear to their hearts. Often they would agree on one side of a controversy and send a petition to Marvel’s Parliamentary representative, or a
letter to the King or a London newspaper, signed “Skelly and Company, Importers.”

Each member regarded the appellation “Skelly man” as a name of honor and a mark of distinction. Years before, one of Skelly’s first recruits, a Scottish merchant named Giles Kincaid, was caught, tried, and sentenced to the Falmouth gallows. From the execution cart, the rope around his neck, he proclaimed to the priest, the sheriff, the hangman and to the crowd below, “I am a Skelly man! We are all Skelly men — those of us man enough to cherish their liberty!” Piqued by this remonstrance, the sheriff ordered Kincaid’s body taken down, dismembered, and its parts tossed into the Channel from the cliff of nearby Pendennis Castle. Kincaid’s name and his last words were carved into the limestone wall outside of Skelly’s quarters. It was his only gravestone.

Jack Frake was billeted in another niche of the caves with an older boy, Richard Claxon. Claxon was the son of a Bristol brewer and Nonconformist hanged when the Devil’s Brood, a coffee-house debating society of which he was recording secretary, was raided by the authorities, and its members charged with sedition and conspiracy to kidnap the royal family. The charges were specious, based on a set of notes in the elder Claxon’s hand, which was but a hypothetical question discussed by the society: Could Englishmen keep their liberty without a king or a dictator? The presiding judge and the jury ignored the context of the notes. Claxon was sentenced to death and his colleagues to imprisonment or transportation. After the sentence had been carried out, Richard Claxon assaulted the judge with a club outside his home, crippling him for life, and had begun to terrorize the jurymen when the sheriff and a bevy of constables nearly trapped him. In the Skelly gang the boy’s chief task was to roam the towns and villages of that part of Cornwall to collect information on the authorities and orders from shopkeepers for goods. He was a quiet, brooding boy who kept to himself, and read his Bible. Jack Frake did not attempt to breach his reticence, and sometimes thought that his colleague had lost the power of speech.

Two men dominated Jack Frake’s life in the caves. That is to say, they served as his models for different things. John Smith — now Redmagne — and Augustus Skelly.

Redmagne was the son of Caleb Smith, an influential London tobacco merchant. He was the only member of the gang who had a university education. He had spent some time at the Temple Bar, clerking for a prominent Whig barrister, with the goal of becoming a barrister himself. But an infatuation
with a Covent Garden actress led to an infatuation with the theater, and he left the barrister to appear in masques and plays put on by a troupe of actors that catered to the aristocracy. His father disowned him and discontinued his allowance. But the troupe was popular and rarely idle. Smith worked as actor, playwright, and agent. He wrote many of the troupe’s successful one-act satires, often on commission from noblemen who wished to embarrass their friends with oblique exposés of their affairs and scandals. The names with which he introduced himself to Jack Frake were some of the names of his characters.

In the early spring of 1733, he was commissioned to write a masque that was a thinly disguised inflammatory attack on Robert Walpole, the Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, First Lord of the Treasury and “prime” minister, and his hotly debated excise taxes on wine and tobacco. The new levies were purportedly a first step to ending the smuggling and corruption engendered by the customs practice and intended to tighten the government’s ability to collect taxes on all that it chose to tax. The proposed plan sparked riots in many cities, the burning of effigies, and the flight of many incumbents standing for re-election on a pro-excise platform from their own boroughs to avoid tar-and-feathering. Redmagne himself participated in the public opposition, delivering satirical ballads of his own composition in front of the London homes of representatives known to favor the excise, a bright red cockade that bore the words “Liberty, Property and No Excise!” pinned to his hat.

The troupe was cheerfully assured by the gentleman, who was also an earlier victim of Redmagne’s pen, that the masque would be well received by the guests of another nobleman. In the party’s suburban London garden, the troupe presented the piece, with Redmagne in the lead role. It was a grave miscalculation. They had been duped. The audience was composed of aristocrats and Whigs loyal to the besieged chancellor. Not long after the beginning of the masque, just as Redmagne and others were having doubts about the wisdom of their performance, the nobleman’s son mounted the stage, interrupted Redmagne in the middle of a soliloquy, and challenged Redmagne to a duel in his father’s name. Redmagne laughed, and with the tip of his wooden sword pushed the young gentleman off of the stage, which was only a foot above the ground. “Daff the excise, sir!” he shouted down at the prostrate figure, “and never stop a player’s business again! ’Tis quite
rude
, and
not
the behavior of a gentleman!” But the young man suffered a broken neck, and died later that night. Redmagne fled.

Walpole’s tax scheme was defeated that April when the chancellor withdrew it from Parliamentary consideration after months of fierce public and political opposition. Redmagne had to content himself with celebrating its demise in hiding. He still kept the red cockade that bore the words “Liberty, Property and No Excise!”

After a few years of leading a fugitive life, working in various London trades and penning verse humorously critical of Parliament and the aristocracy, he chanced to amuse an otherwise dour patron in a London ale house with a saucy ballad he had composed. The patron was Augustus Skelly.

All the gang members read and owned books; Redmagne owned a library which was crammed into his otherwise roomy niche. So it was natural that, among his other duties, and owing to his university background, it fell to him to tutor anyone who wished to pay him a penny a lesson. Jack Frake wished it, and over time received the rudiments of a gentleman’s education. He was introduced to literature, to geography, to science, to astronomy, to Latin and Greek. It was from Redmagne that he learned the Latin name for Cornwall — Cornubia — and that the ‘tre’ in Trelowe was actually Cornish for ‘homestead’ and not ‘tree,’ as Parson Parmley once suggested.