Jack Frake Page 4

  The woman’s face had grown stonier as Leith spoke. When he was finished, she said, “He’s gettin’ too smart, Leith. I’m losin’ him.” She paused, then added, “He can read and write now, and he’d fetch a good price even if you pushed them, wouldn’t he?’

  Again Leith shook his head. “We got to play the prince, woman, or it ain’t no good!”

  Huldah Frake helped herself to the black flask. Then her whispered words softened. “Better somethin’ than nothin’, luv. We might lose him anyways. Know what he said today?”

  “What?”

  “He said he’d leave the next time I smacked him!”

  “Did he now?” chuckled Leith. “Uppity little bugger!”

  “He’s been actin’ airy for a time now. That damn Parmley’s hexed him somehow. I believe he’d really bolt, and then we’d lose those guineas we need, Leith. We won’t have the coin to set up shop, and your cousin won’t bother gettin’ us that public house license. You’ll be stuck with your lazy brother, and I’ll be in the workhouse.”

  Leith was silent for a long time. Then he sighed. “All right,” he growled. “I’ll fix it. For tomorrow.” He looked at the woman. “But they won’t come here and bundle him off. These fellows is professionals. They can sly the law blindfolded if they’s careful. He’s got to be snatched far away from Trelowe. They even got a billet on a merchantman that’s unshippin’ cargo in Gwynnford, and that’s sailin’ for Virginia in a week after takin’ on goods in Plymouth.”

  “How would the… spirits… do it?”

  “Gentle, like. They’ll just talk him out of his wits, that’s all. Feed him a fantasy. They got indenture papers they can fix any way they please.” Leith paused and looked thoughtful. “But they got to have a story ready, so he don’t start screamin’ or makin’ a row.”

  Huldah Frake glanced once at her sleeping son. “I’ll let him go to the church tomorrow. And then they could meet him on the road and say they’re from Parmley and they’re takin’ him to this school in Falmouth.”

  Leith hummed in tentative agreement. “What’s its name?”

  Huldah Frake searched her memory. “Christ of Leeds.”

  Leith scoffed. “Funny name for a school. Never knew Christ worked magic in Leeds. Don’t recall the Bible ever mentionin’ his settin’ foot in England at all.”

  “That’s what Parmley said its name was. Christ of Leeds Academy.” Huldah Frake clenched a fist behind her back. She was not certain that it was right or wrong. It was the nearest she could recall the name. But she was desperate and dared not show any doubt.

  “All right,” said Leith. “I’ll tell ’em they’re to be gentlemen come from Parson Parmley to escort him personally to Christ of Leeds Academy in Falmouth.” But he frowned again. “But do he want to go to this school?”

  “He wants to, Leith. He begged me to let him.”

  Leith emitted a low chortle. “Maybe you’re right, Huldy. The parson’s rattled his noodle. Imagine wantin’ to go to school! It ain’t a normal aspiration! Next thing you know he’ll be expectin’ you to knit him shirts of Flanders lace and pen ‘Observations from a Correspondent’ to the Cornish Gazette, and lookin’ down his nose at you if you can’t! Be nervy to have ’round. Or even embarrassin’!” He paused, then slapped some coins — six pennies and two farthings — onto the tabletop. “There’s what I got for your eggs, Huldy. Some officers snapped ’em right up. Business is always good when the redcoats is in town. Wish they’d put up a barracks here. They might, you know, since My-Darlin’-Charley’s still aimin’ to give George-His-Nabs the heave-ho. Wonder how much the Frenchies are into him for? They say Marshall Saxe’s the best general on the Continent, and he was all set to march on London. Say, I ain’t goin’ back out in that rain ’til it lets up! Here, luv, help me out of my boots… ”

  Huldah Frake knelt and tugged off one of his muddy boots. “That’s what I like about you, Leith. You got gumption, and you know things, and you can read, too.”

  “Sure I can read,” said Leith. He assumed an air of smug superiority, and added, “But I don’t never let it go to my head.”

  Jack Frake rolled over on his pallet of straw, away from the fire and the candlelight across the room.

  * * *

  “But you said I wasn’t to go.”

  “Well, I changed my mind,” said Huldah Frake late the next morning. “I can change my mind, can’t I? The parson came by last night, when you was asleep. We talked about you goin’ to this school and we fixed it up.”

  “He came here in the storm?” asked Jack Frake, trying to keep the doubt out of his words.

  “Yes, he did,” said his mother. “That’s how much he thinks of you, he’d risk his health in that storm just to do right by you.” She looked at her son once, and saw a peculiarly empty expression on his face. Then she continued to scrub the table fiercely with a wet rag. “You start at this school in a week, and some gentlemen from the school might even come by to take you there, and on a ship, too. That’ll be fun, won’t it? You won’t be so… far away. Might even come down to see you.”

  The boy stood watching his mother. He did not know whether to hate her or despise her; he knew the distinction between the two judgments. But he could feel nothing, not even an echo of the choking trauma of betrayal he felt last night. Had there not been a gale, he would have left the cottage while she and Leith slept. This morning, as he went about his chores, he removed what few things he wanted or would need, and hid them in some bushes beyond the garden. He made these preparations as coldly, ruthlessly and unfeelingly as he knew his mother had discussed his fate with Leith.

  He asked, “How will you mind the garden? Some new squatters’ll help themselves to everything, if it isn’t watched.”

  “I’ll manage, Jack. Don’t you worry. Now get along. You don’t want to hold up Parson Parmley.” Huldah Frake steeled herself, then broke away from her task long enough to dart over to him and bend to kiss him on the forehead. The boy remained still, his senses alert for some lingering pause in the act, some confession of reluctance. But he did not feel it. She returned to the wooden bucket of water he had drawn from the well for her, and stooped over it to wring out the rag, her back to him.

  “Off with you, Jack,” she said, standing to fiddle with the rag and stare at the opposite wall. “And don’t dawdle along the way. And don’t let him keep you so late, like he did last time. Be back before dark, or I’ll beat the sauce out of you and you’ll — ” When she turned to him again, the cottage door was open to the sun and a cloud-flecked sky.

  Chapter 5: The Globe

  FOR A WHILE, HE WAS FRIGHTENED. THE FEAR IN HIS BEING — A FEAR triggered by the dreadful, featureless void that now lay before him — used every argument in its repertoire in a frantic effort to placate his conviction and send him back, humbled, to the familiarity of his home. He could choose to believe that the words he heard last night had not been spoken; or that he had not heard them; or that he had heard them, but only through the garbling filter of a fitful dream; or that neither the words nor their utterers had meant anything at all, and he was being vain to presume that he had been their subject.

  But the words were spoken — for otherwise they would not have so violently seared his thoughts — and in his mind their reality wore a merciless supremacy that stood fast against the assault. At last, failing to find a breach in his conviction, and unable to shake the courage of his commitment to that supremacy, the arguments broke off their attack and melted into the mists of irrelevancy.

  The emptiness no longer daunted him, once this crisis was over. He was free to fill that space with his own actions, his own purposes, and his own pennants. His glance swept over the horizon from east to west, registering the wonderful enormousness of the world before him and the magnitude of the step he had taken into it. His flight from home was not so much a rash, desperate act as it was the final, inevitable seal on his separation. He felt the radiant wholeness of himself. From that moment on, he
was beyond reclamation by any conventional persuasion. Before him now lay the adventure of his own life.

  The afternoon sun warmed the cubbyhole and began to dry it out. Jack Frake was not in it, but sitting on its roof, legs dangled over the edge. A cloth sack containing his things lay beside him. In it were his “Sunday” shirt, distinguished from the one he wore on weekdays by two extra brass buttons and artfully concealed patches; a pair of socks; a tin cup; two ears of corn and a pouch of peas and beans; a marble he had acquired in a trade with a village boy for a wooden button from his coat; and a handful of pennies and farthings, the ones he earned long ago and had managed to hide from his parents after the others were appropriated for the household.

  He picked up his sack and swung it over his shoulder. Parson Parmley’s map remained to be explored, and his globe to be seen. He started walking down the road to St. Gwynn.

  A troop of dragoons caught up with him and trotted past him. Their horses were the healthiest, most powerful he had ever seen. The soldiers were armed with sabers, and pistols and had muskets slung over their red-coated backs. The captain eyed him severely but did not stop to question him.

  Jack Frake hiked through Trelowe, and through a smaller cluster of cottages that had no name. On the top of a hill, he stopped and crouched behind a bush. Below, the dragoons had halted at the fork in the roads to St. Gwynn and Gwynnford. He saw the captain talking with one of three men who waited with a dogcart by the nearly leveled ruin of an ancient church. The man gesturing to the road leading to Gwynnford was Isham Leith.

  When the dragoons moved on, Jack Frake left the road and cut through the moor to St. Gwynn. He supposed that Leith had a story ready to explain his presence, and was there to identify Jack and collect the price previously settled on with the two strangers. Other than this mental notation, Leith no longer concerned him.

  When he reached the church in St. Gwynn, he stashed his bundle behind the rectory stable and went inside. He was late. Parson Parmley was already leading the other boys through a writing exercise. He gave a reproving look as his tardy pupil took a slate and a piece of chalk from the desk and sat on one of the benches.

  Two hours later the parson dismissed his class. Jack Frake waited until the other boys had gone, then approached him. “Sir,” he asked, “if I wanted to go to this school, could I go by myself?”

  Parmley studied the earnest face for a moment. There was something new and indefinable in it. He had not expected to see the boy today. “Good heavens, no,” he sighed. “There are expenses, you know, and you would need your mother’s permission in any event. Otherwise, there would be… well… difficulties. Your mother must first be declared a pauper, and you, yourself, as well, and I don’t believe you would wish that to happen. I don’t expect that ever to happen, though, if the things I hear are true.” He paused and sat down in his chair. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mr. Frake, more than you can know.”

  “What things?”

  “Have I heard? Well, this is merely rumor, idle talk volunteered — to me, of all souls! — in malice and disaffection, that your mother is considering marrying a man of dubious means by the name of Leith. If this be true, that, and her demonstrated antipathy to your attendance at the Academy — which shook me to the core, mind you — would combine to erase all likelihood of your going there. I doubt even that you would be allowed to continue coming here for instruction.” Parmley paused. “Indeed, I am surprised to see you here now.” His expression invited an explanation.

  But none came. Jack Frake was silent. Parmley came a little closer to identifying the change in the boy. Here, he thought, was someone who was in command of his own mind. The parson’s sense of helplessness about the boy’s fate oddly diminished, as did his sadness. “Is there anything else, Mr. Frake?”

  “You promised to show me a globe.”

  “Ah, yes! So I did! And so I shall!” The parson smiled and rose. “It’s in the rectory, in my study.” He paused. “Is there something else you think I should know?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well. Follow me.”

  It had clouded over since Jack Frake detoured over the moor. An eastern wind whipped the trails of smoke from St. Gwynn’s squat chimneys, and the air had turned moist with the promise of more rain. The rectory sat on the side of a hill, away from the main road and apart from the village of St. Gwynn. It was no larger than one of the town’s cottages, but its lines were sharper and its washed walls more fastidious. It boasted five lead-paned windows and a small wood fence that sheltered the strip of grass in front.

  “Sir,” ventured the boy after they had traversed the yard separating the rectory from the stable, “what is a spirit?”

  Parmley stopped just short of the front door of his rectory and turned to him. “A spirit? Why do you ask?”

  “I heard men in the village talk about them.” This was true. He had heard men in the village talk about spirits.

  Parmley’s sense of unease returned. “To be spirited,” he answered, “is to vanish, like magic, with neither trace nor clue to the deed, as though evil spirits had snatched one from the realm of the living, from the earth itself. Those who kidnap children, and even grown men and women, and sell them into slavery, are called spirits.” He paused. “The notion of spirits is strictly of rural origin, born in superstition. The men who pose as spirits are quite corporeal, I assure you, and deserve more scurrilous appellations than I am at liberty to utter. But their guile, secrecy and occasional successes stir the shoals of ignorant, untutored minds. They are a disappearing ilk, though. One shouldn’t worry about them.” He was beginning to know the boy’s mind, and was certain that he would not have asked the question if the subject had not been forcibly imposed upon his thoughts for some unknown reason. He frowned down at the boy. “You don’t believe in vaporous spirits, do you, Mr. Frake?”

  “No, sir,” said the boy. “Not in any.”

  “Why not?”

  “If they existed, nothing would make sense.”

  Parmley chuckled uneasily. He was tempted to overwhelm the boy with the rudiments of the theological proofs of the only Spirit that mattered, but a strange reluctance checked him, a reluctance composed in part of his devotion to the necessity of God, and in part of his devotion to the boy’s mental chasteness. It was the first time in his long, studiously casuistic life that the notion of spiritual purity had presented itself as a paradox. The antilogy troubled him; he could not yet resolve it or even think clearly about it, but he knew that he alone was its author. He stood speechless for a moment, then limited himself to remarking, “You’re a philosopher, Mr. Frake. Truly.”

  He took the boy inside the rectory. It was divided into rooms — a novelty to Jack Frake. There was a kitchen, a bedroom, and a study. They were small rooms, but each seemed to be a separate world to him. There was furniture, and pictures on the wall, and in the study, shelves of books rendered inaccessible by the bric-a-brac of a bachelor scholar.

  And a globe. It sat on Parmley’s desk, a small blue, gold and ochre orb of metal resting in a cradle of polished teakwood. Next to it stood a tall silver candlestick. Behind the desk and a tall leather chair, was a window that looked out on St. Gwynn and the Channel beyond.

  Jack Frake tore forward past the parson, recognizing the globe without ever having seen its like before. He rested his hands on its surface, each palm over a continent, and looked for England. He found the mutton leg; it was one of the smallest islands. He thought that if it were dropped into one of the oceans, it would be lost forever. Through the window, in a break in the cottages, he could see the Channel; in his mind he was imagining the distance from St. Gwynn to the Cape of Good Hope. He turned his head and flashed a grin of discovery and gratitude at the parson, then glanced back down at the globe and rolled it in the cradle.

  Parmley, watching the boy from the door, was suddenly overcome with an emotion. How many men in past ages, he asked himself, had been punished, and tortured, and e
ven put to death for having been so happily, frankly impetuous in their thinking of the world in the same manner as the boy was thinking now? The boy’s joy was natural, and unsullied by any knowledge of what transpired in the world. He did not think that such knowledge would ever spoil it. It seemed to be so normal a manner for anyone to look at anything.

  This thought was followed by another, equally stunning one: he was glad that the boy had not heard very many of his sermons on piety, humility, charity and deference to the wisdom of the Almighty. God and Jack Frake seemed antithetical; the one rendered the other utterly superfluous. Parmley leaned against the doorframe, drained by the power of the contrast and by the implications of this crisis of faith. He felt shame, and also a desire to apologize to the boy for having subjected his person to absurdities.

  There was a knock on the rectory door. Angry at the interruption, Parmley whirled around and strode to answer it. He opened it, ready to vent his distracted passion on the caller. He saw a tall, bony, slovenly looking man standing there, who removed his tricorn and worried its brim nervously with the fingers of both hands. A saddled horse stood tethered to a post of the fence. Just up the dirt road were two more men sitting in a dogcart, watching and waiting with too casual an interest.

  “What is it?” demanded Parmley, one hand on the edge of the door, the other on the frame.

  “Reverend Parmley?” asked the man with hesitancy. He had expected a more affable greeting from a man of the cloth.

  “Yes?”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, and beggin’ your pardon, sir,” said the man with a slight nod and a toothy grin. “My name is Leith. Isham Leith. I own, well, some property in Trelowe.”

  Parmley frowned. “And?”

  “Huldah Frake — of course, you know her — she sent her son Jack here for schoolin’ a while ago, and I’m just inquirin’ if he came.”

  Parmley had never before lied in his life, and he lied now, brazenly, without calculation or conscious decision. “He’s come and gone, sir.”