Jack Frake (3 page)

“Granted,” said the sheriff. “But your offense is fivefold. You neglected to apply for commons leave to erect a fence or a hedge. You gleaned an excess of stone and wood beyond reasonable need, and so deprive your neighbors of their right to those materials. You raise turnips and clover without commons leave. You have assaulted or abused the persons of your neighbors for exercising their pasture rights. Finally, you enclose more than what has been deemed necessary by a committee of your peers for your own and the village’s sustenance. All these omissions and commissions constitute theft of land or theft of custom, in violation of the estovers of Trelowe. No formal litigation in court is necessary, as your guilt in these matters is beyond doubt and appeal. You are so charged, and so punished. It is as simple as that.” Without further word, he turned in his saddle and said to the mob, “Proceed.”

Cephas Frake opened his mouth to protest again, but the sheriff had turned his mount and was riding across the yard to supervise the fence’s demolition.

This time it was Frake and his wife who stood by dumbly as the villagers waded self-righteously into their task, and watched them knock down the stone piles and begin to build a bonfire of the wood in the middle of the garden. Jack Frake, however, was roused to a fury that transcended even that which he felt when his father belted him for neglecting his chores. He picked up a hoe and ran to attack the villagers who were building the bonfire. The villagers ducked the swings of his hoe, and laughed, not at him, but at Cephas Frake. But then the boy’s hoe struck one of the men in the head, leaving a gash under one ear. The constable rode up and whacked the boy on the side of the face with the flat of his short sword, knocking him down.

“Do that again, young Frake,” said the constable to the boy as he lay on the ground, “and you and your worthless father will be charged with obstructing His Majesty’s justice, and to Newgate or Bristol you’ll both go!” He paused to smile maliciously at the anger in the boy’s eyes. “Or maybe it’s the army you’d like to march with? They’s always in need of drummer boys.”

Neither Cephas Frake nor his wife moved to interfere. The boy got up and ran out of the field to the coast and his cubbyhole on the cliff.

When he returned hours later, the garden was a ruin, the stones were strewn all over the commons, and smoke rose from the smoldering remains of the bonfire. His parents were inside the cottage, at the table, drinking mugs of gin. His father pushed a dirty tin of the liquid into his hands. “They took our tillin’ tools in lieu of the guinea and a half, boy. We’ll have to work the soil with an ax and a poker.” When the boy said nothing, Frake looked away from his scrutiny. There was something lurking in the boy’s stare that was antipodal to what he had seen days before. “Drink up, boy,” he muttered. “Gin’s the only shoulder we got to cry on.”

His mother chuckled. “Have a swig of it, lad. It’ll put you to sleep and let you forget it all.”

“Why didn’t you fight those men?” asked Jack Frake. He put down the tin.

“What?” scoffed Cephas Frake. “And get killed or go to jail? What for?”

“Your rights as an Englishman,” said Jack Frake, repeating a phrase he had heard some of the village men utter with reverence.

“Hah! My rights! Stow it, boy! You’s talkin’ over your head!”

“You got twenty guineas to spare us, Jack?” asked his mother with mockery. “If you got them, you can buy us some time at Inns Court and a barrister to boot!”

“If they needed the stones and the wood, why did they burn the wood and just scatter the stones?”

“Because we forgot our place, and that’s the law’s way of remindin’ us of it!” snarled his father. “Don’t harp on it, boy. It’s rattlin’ me. We done wrong, so we’s just got to live with it and leave it.”

“They had no right to do that,” insisted the boy.

“Yes, they did!” countered his father. “And you had no right to take a hoe to ’em! You struck a particular good friend of mine. You shamed me, and I’m ashamed of you. They’ll be talkin’ about me ’til the moon turns green!”

“Why didn’t you try to stop them?” repeated the boy. “It was
our
fence!”

“It
weren’t
our fence!” said Frake. “They’s was stones from the commons, and no one said we could use ’em that way or any way!”

“You’re a coward,” blurted Jack Frake.

His father turned and walloped him with a backhand that sent the boy clear across the room to tumble to the floor. “Don’t you tell me my nose!” shouted Cephas Frake, rising and shaking a finger at the boy as if it held a whip. “Any more sass from you, and your mother’s goin’ to have to plant you in the garden! You hear?”

The boy did not reply, dared not reply. The look on his father’s face told him that he had touched something that lay immersed beneath the gin-warped anger: the will to murder. So he bit his lip and pushed himself back to rest against the woodbin, and glanced away, so that his father could not see the look on his own.

Huldah Frake shrieked in laughter at the stunned look on her son’s face. “Serves you right for tryin’ to be the man your father ain’t either!”

Cephas Frake whirled to his wife, then took a swipe at her, and another fight was on.

The indignation the boy felt over the sheriff’s and villagers’ actions soured into implacable contempt for his parents. Not many days later he saw his father carousing drunkenly in the village with some of the men who had helped to destroy the fence. And as time went by, his father would be absent for long periods, returning with a bag of food or a few shillings in his pocket. The boy could not be sure, by listening from his pallet to his parents’ nocturnal conversations, whether his father was poaching on neighboring commons, or begging in other villages. Sometimes Cephas Frake would return with a face bruised or bloodied. And during these
absences, the boy’s mother would send him away from his chores when local men stopped by. One of them, a man named Leith, a cousin of the constable of Trelowe, came more often than most. These stealthy visits resulted in more beatings for Jack Frake, now by his mother, to ensure the boy’s silence about her callers.

Cephas Frake, despairing of feeding himself and his family, at last submitted to the ignominious alternative of going to the parish workhouse. With the connivance of the rector of St. Gwynn, he passed himself off to the parish union governor as a landless pauper. Robert Parmley, who preferred to have boys as pupils in his classroom than as wards of the workhouse laboring, in chains and fetters, over cloth, metal and wood, agreed to take the boy under tutelage three times a week, at no charge. And so Cephas Frake went to use his muscles in the tin mines, china-fields and slate quarries in the area, and Jack Frake suddenly found himself in school.

That had been a year ago.

None of his past was present in his mind now. His thoughts on the journey from St. Gwynn to his cubbyhole were simply the unconscious enjoyment of himself and his surroundings, each step and thought adding a fraction to the intricate calculation whose final answer was the moment. The moment had seized him and, for a while, wiped out all recollection of his past. He sensed, too, but only vaguely, that it was important for him to mark this moment, for when he next remembered it, it would be with happy, selfish reverence or with the bitter regret of loss, depending on the justice he earned for himself as a man. But to a boy of ten, the reality of manhood is eons into the future, and so the fleeting insight was shorter than a footnote. It did not govern the elated, excited peace he felt in himself, and with which, from the throne of his cubbyhole, without gesture or ceremony, he blessed himself and the world.

H
IS CUBBYHOLE WAS A PUNCTURE IN THE SHEER DOWNWARD SWEEP OF
granite to the beach two hundred feet below, vacated by material ejected millennia ago and since ground to sand by the surf. It was not visible from atop the cliff, and hardly noticeable from the Channel. Jack Frake discovered it one day when he plopped to his stomach at the edge to watch the fall of a stone he dropped from his hand. Its roof was the ground he lay on. There was no way into it but to shimmy over and drop to the edge of the demi-cave’s floor; no way out but to grip the edge of the roof and heave oneself up, taking care not to look down or to think of the space in back of or below one. Jack Frake wanted it, and claimed it, his single-minded greed overruling the paralyzing screams of fear in his mind and muscles as he mastered its ingress and egress that first time. After a while, he forgot the fear and felt that the hole was no more formidable than a fence.

He had expected to find a bigger hole, perhaps even a giant cavern, but there was just room enough for one sitting man, or one stooping boy. Sea gulls and other birds had built nests in it; he chucked them out and no more nests were built. When the wind was still, he could hear the tread of horses and the voices of passersby on the road that ran along the cliff side above. And sitting alone, his mind found the time to acquire perspective and horizon. The cubbyhole was a greater reprieve from his parents and the cottage than was his pallet of straw. There, in the darkness, the trials of the
day and his mundane surroundings triggered an almost instant lapse into sleep; here, he could remain awake, and think, and dream, even though the hole was often dark or enclosed in damp, thick fog, and the pounding surf below was relentless in its effort to lull him into a mental haze as gray as the fog.

Tonight, the wind was strong and blew against the cliff from the south. On it came a thick fog that erased the sea, the sky, and the sails. The coming of the fog was a sign that he should start home. He had never spent a night here; it was too cold even in the summer. This was April, and there was still a chance of snow. Jack Frake leaned forward and hugged his knees to stop them from shaking.

As he did so, he saw a faint light far out beyond the surf. It was a lantern on an invisible ship. It swayed in the wind and with the barely audible creaking of the vessel as it rode the waves. The water was deep enough to accommodate a merchantman or even a first-rate warship, but only to within two hundred yards of the beach. Up until a few moments ago, the cliff walls were visible in the moonlight; even the most negligent watch could not have helped but see them. Gwynnford was three miles up the coast, but no Gwynnford pilot or tidesman would ever steer a ship into port over such a wide arc, so close to the cliffs, regardless of the roughness of the seas.

Jack Frake knew that the ship was coming on for only one of two reasons: it was lost, and would soon run aground on the shelf that rose abruptly in the water; or it was not lost, and was skirting the cliffs for a mysterious purpose. He rested his chin on his knees, and strained his eyes to discern the shape and size of the ship.

Then there was a footfall above him, and some pebbles dropped onto the edge of the cave floor. He jerked back and looked up at the roof.

“It’s the
Sparrowhawk
, all right,” said a voice. “I can smell the tobo from here.”

“Signal her to Gwynnford,” commanded another voice. “If it is she, she’ll put in there, and then we’ll see.”

“Why wouldn’t it be she? Who else would come to this point?”

“A revenue sloop looking for us. Pannell’s the new customs whip now. He’d hang Ramshaw by his heels from the crow’s nest to get our lay, and I can’t say as I’d blame Ramshaw for squealing then. So signal Gwynnford, and we’ll look her over there.”

The aura of another light appeared above the hole, then flashed on and
off in a series. After a moment, the lantern in the fog answered in kind. Voices came from that direction now, clear but indistinct, and the sound of sails being tacked. The ship slowed, stopped, and began to retreat deeper into the fog.

Jack Frake got carefully onto his hands and knees and poked his head out of the hole to look up.

A man stood directly over him, a tall man in a greatcoat and tricorn. The toe of one boot protruded over the edge of the roof; the boy had merely to raise a hand to touch it. Near the man stood another who held the lantern, which blotted out his own face but lit that of the first. The face of the man wearing the tricorn was a stern, clean-shaven, hard face, more forbidding than the sides of the cliff. The mouth was tight and grim, the nose almost triangular, the eyes black marbles of purpose.

The lantern light shifted a little, and Jack Frake saw the glint of inlaid silver on the grips of a pair of pistols that were jammed into the man’s wide belt. He ducked back, and the heel of one of his hands rolled on a small stone and catapulted it over the edge.

“What’s that?” asked the other voice sharply. The lantern light was extinguished.

Jack Frake heard the reply — the cocking of a pistol.

Moments passed. The boy remained stock-still, knowing that the two men above were doing the same. He watched the ship’s lantern recede into the fog and finally disappear.

“Just a rabbit,” said the other voice. “Can’t be anything else. There’s no place for anyone to hide up here.”

After another moment, the boy heard the pistol being uncocked. “Let’s get back to the cart,” said the commanding voice. “She’ll be in Gwynnford in an hour.”

The protruding boot jerked away and Jack Frake listened to the diminishing footsteps. But in the wind he could not hear the rattle of a cart. He waited a long moment, then hoisted himself up out of the hole. In the pitch-black distance he could see another lantern moving away on the road, and hear the clop of a pair of horses and the sound of wheels rolling over dirt.

Only three kinds of men carried pistols along the coast, or anywhere else: King’s men, smugglers, and highwaymen. The King’s men were also called customs men, excise men, and tax collectors. He had seen them only half a dozen times, passing by the cottage or through Trelowe on horseback. No one greeted them, and they greeted no one. They were despised,
but deferred to. The deference was paid grudgingly; or, what was worse, obsequiously, which, to a King’s man, was much more suspicious courtesy. They were feared, not because of the pistols they carried, but because they represented the King or Parliament, whose reach was longer than a mere ball of lead. They could ruin a man in a minute, at the height of his career, in the abyss of his desperation, or over the course of a lifetime. At this time, more than half the price of any finished good purchased in England represented a tax, indeed several taxes. Jack Frake, whose family lived chiefly on barter, did not yet understand how this contributed to his family’s and neighbors’ straits. He knew only that the King’s men had power, and that few men trifled with them.