‘In and safe,’ he said, briskly. ‘That’s stumps, gentlemen. Victory to Westminster.’
Jack lay where he had fallen. It was only when he was lifted from the ground and hoisted onto the shoulders of his teammates and their supporters that he looked once more at his opponent. The Man was standing, still holding the ball against his muscled chest. And as he saw Jack looking he did something else that confirmed he was no Harrovian. He spat on the ball, threw it high into the air and, without watching where it fell, walked away.
The Inauguration of the Mohocks began late due to the necessities of triumph. Though Jack refused at least every second bumper during his processional through a gauntlet of back-slapping hands, he still discovered the stairs, when he finally reached them a good hour after stumps, harder to negotiate than normal. He climbed them now to a room that Matthews, the proprietor of the Five Chimneys on the edge of Tothill Fields, had set aside specially for them. He was fond of Jack, even fonder of the way money seemed to follow him, and this had been another epic day for the landlord’s coffers. In gratitude, he had even provided a stableman to hold the door against over-enthusiastic attention. Nodding to the burly ex-seaman, Jack pushed into the room.
His three friends were bent over dice. Abraham Marks was on ‘spot’, shaking the dice in his huge hands, muttering prayers, leaning over the table, dwarfing the others, especially the small, neat Nicholas Fenby who stared up through thick lenses, provoking the big man with insults and doubt. Between them, a tankard raised, was the Honourable Theophilus Ede, as slim as Marks was broad, as pale as Jack was dark.
Unnoticed, he took pleasure in watching them for a moment. The Jew, the Scholar and the Nobleman – with Jack something of a mix of them all. An outcast like Marks when he’d arrived at Westminster six years before with his broad Cornish vowels; studious like Fenby when he chose to be; a baronet’s son if not a duke’s. They’d all been singled out from the beginning, persecuted for their various differences, and had discovered, equally early, that strength lay in unity. If one was bullied, the bully would find himself isolated against the four some dark night in Dean’s Yard. If a monitor was over-enthused with his tanning rod, something queer would often befall him playing football on Tothill Fields. Even the ushers were known to withhold punishment ever since one of their number had taken a January tumble into the Thames. They had been known as ‘The Froth’ in the Under Petty, ‘Roaring Boys’ in the Upper. But now they were in the Upper First they’d decided they needed a new name. Hence their gathering there that night. They were to become, they had decided, Mohocks.
As Marks threw and lost, as Fenby yelped in triumph and Ede snatched up the dice for his turn, Jack stepped forward. ‘Ah-ha-ah-ha-HA-HA-HA!’ he cried.
‘Ah-ha-ah-ha-HA-HA-HA!’ the cry was returned.
He was especially pleased with this battle cry. He’d got it from an old soldier in Derry’s Cyder House one night, a veteran of the wars in Canada who had himself learnt it at the campfires of those savages who fought for the British against the French. It had a plunging, up-and-down cadence and an expectoral punctuation that was hard to master; but under the stimulus of many a tankard of arrack punch, the former sergeant of Foot was happy to coach Jack in his rendition. Mastered, he then taught it to his friends and though none attained his level of terror, they were bloodcurdling enough. They’d then decided it was far too fine a thing to share beyond their circle and the only possible recourse was to form an esoteric club around the whoop. With further research by Fenby, the scholar, and tales from Jack, who’d acquired a tattered manuscript entitled Slave to the Iroquois: a Tale of Rapine, Lust and Murther by One who Experienced all Three, the friends soon had the information necessary for a proper constitution. Jack was named chairman or, in this case, war chief. All that was to left was to settle on suitable initiation rites. Ideas had been mooted, set down on parchment. This meeting would finalize their choices.
With the cry still in the air, Jack closed the door on the stableman’s startled face. ‘So I ask you, lads,’ he said, smiling, ‘why are we gathered here?’
The response was immediate: ‘Who has not heard the Scourers’ midnight fame? Who has not trembled at the Mohocks’ name?’
Tankards were slammed down in unison, beer froth foaming onto a table surface already awash, then raised and drained. The aspirant Mohocks – this tribe having been selected from the Six Nations of the Iroquois as the most vicious – had decreed a fast for the night, despite the victory celebrations: ‘No injurious spirits to be imbibed.’ It seemed appropriate to the holiness of what they were about to undertake. Brandy and punch were thus excluded. Beer, and especially the Five Chimneys Fine Porter, was, of course, another matter.
While Jack poured another round from the jugs and Ede carried on singing the rest of John Gay’s verse in his fine tenor, Fenby went to fetch a large sheet of parchment from a satchel. It had been carefully burnt around the edges, to give it an ancient touch, a feeling added to by the Scholar’s laborious copperplate. Pushing his thick glasses onto the crown of his nose, Fenby said, ‘Shall I re … re … read it, Absolute?’
Excitement or fear made his stutter worse but he was always game to struggle against the affliction. Jack thought he would spare him – and them.
‘But, fellow,’ he said, kicking a leg of Marks’s chair, who’d leaned back and now shot forward, ‘our friend here will be asleep if we do not give him something to do. Besides, those of the House of Mordecai chant as a natural part of their religion. Why not let him recite our new creed?’
‘And what do you know of my religion, Absolute, you who have none of your own?’
Marks’s face creased into what passed as a smile, indicated by his huge eyebrows meeting fiercely. ‘Give it here, then.’
‘A moment.’ The chair on which Ede had been leaning back so precariously now came crashing down onto its two remaining legs and the Honourable reached across the table for his tankard. ‘I should be the one to read it. I am he, remember, who played Quontinius in the Latin Play, a role you all coveted and failed to secure. Only I can give our principles their proper … gravitas.’
‘Gravit … arse,’ said Marks, rising belligerently, Fenby an irate shadow at his side.
Jack sighed. They were destined for debate, which, given their natures, could be interminable. Then he noticed something that would end all argument.
‘Manus Sinistra,’ he said, pointing, delighting in the horror on Ede’s face as he looked at the full tankard in his right hand. Rules of Honour declared that, on cricket days, one could only drink with one’s left. Harder and harder to remember as the pints slipped down.
‘Drink,’ came the universal cry, and Ede, with a careless shrug, duly did. Jack almost felt sorry for him. He was as slight as Abe was solid, as tall as Fenby was short, and so fair that Jack’s darkness made him seem as if he was made of air. They could almost see the black liquid slipping down that white throat as if it filled a translucent vessel. As he drank, the table was thumped. It took twelve knocks, six more than was usual with the Honourable. At last, he laid the vessel carefully down and settled back into his chair.
‘Apologies, apologies,’ he said, and belched. Then he joined in the thumping of pewter tankards upon the table again as Marks, unchallenged now, stood, raised the parchment before him and declaimed, ‘“Let it be known—”’
It was as far as he got. It had taken till then for them to realize that theirs was not the only percussion in the room. As they quietened for the words, they noticed that the door of their chamber was being kicked, irregularly and hard.
As Jack stepped towards it, it flew open. On the other side, the burly stableman who had kept guard was lying on the ground. One man was on his chest, another pinioned his arms while his legs, free, still kicked out. A blow from these had opened the door, though it looked like the force of each kick was weakening. This was probably due to the efforts of the third man who bent over the doorman with two hands round his neck.
>
Suddenly aware that he had an audience, this third man straightened, turned. Smiled. ‘D’ye know, this fellow had the cheek to tell us you were not to be disturbed. So we felt we had to reprimand him. Can’t let someone of his station sunder us, can we, dear cousin?’
‘Hallo, Craster,’ Jack said, and swallowed.
He hadn’t seen his cousin in six months and then only briefly and glimpsed across a packed and baying tavern from which Jack had slipped quietly away. He had contrived to see him as infrequently as possible and, since they boarded at different schools – Craster at Harrow – he had largely succeeded. There were a few family events when there could be no avoidance, the last a year ago at his mother’s birthday. Now, with this uninvited chance to study him, Jack could see that Craster had changed. He was just gone eighteen and if he was always big, he had grown huge, his chest thrusting out of a lime-green, brocaded waistcoat whose buttons had been much altered in a losing struggle to contain it. Thick, red-gold whiskers corkscrewed along his broad cheeks, matching the heavy curls that burst from under his tricorn hat. If he lacked the Absolute hair colour – Jack and his father were hell-black, as had been Duncan – he had the family nose, as prominent as Jack’s, yet streaked and mottled as Jack’s was clear. Indeed, the skin of the face was everywhere puckered; the inoculation had not helped Craster avoid the smallpox, unlike his cousin. His lips were fleshy and full, his eyes, set too close together, porcine and mean.
Craster’s cronies rose from their task and their victim pulled himself up to wheeze against the doorframe. Jack pushed his chair back, gave himself what space he could. Behind him his friends did the same. They had heard tales of Jack’s cousin.
‘Shall we send this dog for some more of their watered-down ale, cousin, and toast the Absolute name?’ Craster had taken one step into the room, immediately making it seem too small. ‘After all, you added to its lustre today with your fine Hand. Well done, old fellow.’
The congratulations came from such a constricted throat it told Jack something. ‘You didn’t make the mistake of backing your school against your family, did you, Craster?’
The other grunted. ‘I may have risked a little gold, aye.’
‘How little?’
‘Enough.’ The voice lost any pretence to civility. ‘I thought the odds were against you, to be sure. We seemed too strong.’
There was something shifting in the eyes, something behind the words. ‘You didn’t take any measures to affect those odds, did you?’
‘What do you mean, sir?’
‘I mean, sir,’ said Jack, ‘the inclusion in a school team of someone who is not a pupil?’
‘Don’t know what you are talking of,’ Craster muttered, turning away. But any further blushes were spared him by the recovery of the doorman who lurched up, gave his assailants a baleful look and staggered down the stairs. He seemed to be trying to summon help, noises emerging from his chafed throat.
‘I think you may wish to consider leaving and swiftly. Matthews doesn’t care for his men to be assaulted. He don’t tolerate it from a Westminster, we are forever banned from the Tavern. From a Harrovian he may take stronger measures.’
Craster stepped closer to the table, lowering his voice. ‘Then I will be brief, sir,’ he said. ‘You would not deny Harrow a chance to get even, would you?’
Jack frowned. ‘I think another cricket match might take a little arranging.’
‘I do not speak of cricket,’ his cousin interrupted briskly, ‘but of another game in which you are also reputed to excel. Billiards.’
‘I am indeed … fond of the game.’ Behind him, Fenby sniggered. Jack had been Westminster’s champion for two years now.
‘As am I.’ Craster’s eyes gleamed. ‘Care to take me on?’
Jack hesitated. He’d heard, because his mother had complained about it, that his cousin was spending much time in the company of rogues of the baize, men who could fleece an unsuspecting fellow of the shoes he stood up in. And Craster’s clothes, now Jack examined them closer, were finely tailored indeed, quite beyond the purse of one on the sixty guineas per annum Jack knew his father allowed Craster. Perhaps he was supplementing his living another way.
Craster butted into the silence. ‘Frightened?’
It was Jack’s turn to colour. ‘Of you, boy, never.’
His cousin’s cronies hooted at that. Craster said, ‘Well then, the day after tomorrow, the Angel. Noon.’
There was no hesitation now. ‘Agreed.’
‘And a little wager perhaps?’
‘Of course. How little?’
Craster grinned. ‘Oh, say … one hundred guineas.’
Ede whistled, the sound cut off by Marks’s elbow. It was a lot of money, far more than either schoolboy would have. But no doubt, as in the cricket, each school would back their side.
‘Done,’ said Jack.
The triumph was clear in Craster’s eyes as he reached out a hand and they shook with no squeezing for dominance, just a quick agreeing shake. They would have competition enough and shortly.
From below came the sounds of boots on the stairs, the muttering of angered men. Craster glanced back casually, then down onto the table. ‘What’s this?’ he said, spinning the Mohock Charter around. Ede stepped forward to seize it but Jack waved him back. He let Craster read.
‘Revival of the Mohocks, eh? I have heard of that crew. Do you think you have the spunk, you four?’ He said it with a contempt that indicated his beliefs.
‘We shall see,’ Jack said evenly.
‘And the rout planned for tomorrow night, eh?’ He smiled. ‘Well, do get to bed at a reasonable hour, dear cousin. For you will need all your faculties the day after next.’
Five workers of the Inn had appeared on the stairs now. They were carrying cudgels and headed by the irate doorman and the landlord, Matthews. The latter called out, ‘Mr Absolute, these curs have abused my man. If you have no objection, sir, we’d like to teach ’em some manners.’
It was tempting to step back and let justice have its way. And for a moment Jack enjoyed the unease that came to his cousin’s face and those of his fellows. But blood was blood in the end. And his father would not forgive him if he heard that he’d not stood up for an Absolute.
‘I would take it as a special favour to myself, Mr Matthews, if you would accept their apologies this one time. And perhaps a guinea to let liquid soothe your man’s injured throat?’
The seaman’s anger relented somewhat at the suggestion. Craster’s seemed to increase but he recognized he had no choice. Not with five before him and Jack at his back.
‘I’ll get it back on Wednesday, never fear,’ he muttered, before turning to the men blocking the door and handing over the coin. ‘And now, if you wouldn’t mind …’
The three were jostled a little as they made their way down but were allowed through. His men scurried on but at the bottom of the stair Craster paused and called back, ‘A good turn deserves a reply, cousin. I was at my dear uncle’s house this noontime, paying birthday respects to my aunt. They said they were seeing you at suppertime but, sure, they must have mistaken the day … for do they not dine at six? And is it now not half past that hour?’
With a final smirk, he was gone. Jack flushed. He didn’t know how it happened but he was always incorrigibly late. As the landlord and his men passed down the stairs, Jack seized coat, hat and stick. ‘Zounds. Bloody damnation and hell,’ he cursed, ‘I must be away.’
‘But, Absolute,’ Fenby had snatched up the parchment, ‘do we not have to settle on the Initiation Rites?’
‘You three do it. I’ll agree to all you devise and see you tomorrow. Five o’clock at the Old Hummum Hotel.’ He was at the door when he turned back. ‘Marks, you’ll raise the stake, yes?’
‘I will.’ Marks’s skill at dicing and an eye for winners in the cockpits meant he had a syndicate of Westminsters who would back him. A hundred guineas was a large sum. But once it was known that school honour was at
stake …
Jack took the stairs three at a time. Behind him, the Mohocks’ war cry rang out again but this time he did not join in. For now he had to reckon with something far more savage than a savage. He had to deal with Sir James Absolute.
– FOUR –
A Quiet Supper
Jack ran. His legs, sore from his exertions at the crease, were wobbly at the start and combined with a stomach – and brain – still awash with the Five Chimneys’ Fine Porter, to make the placing of his feet on the slick cobbles of Horse Ferry Street rather tricky. There were crowds outside the Cockpits in James Street, his constant dodging and weaving accompanied by the shrieks of birds in battle, so he did not really get into his stride till he was past Buckingham House and onto the grass of Green Park. He had, of course, been strictly forbidden to go there at night for darkness transformed it from a fashionable strollers’ promenade into an arena for other forms of exercise. Indeed, it seemed to Jack that every second bush was being shaken vigorously, giving forth groans, giggles and the occasional curse or scream. The worst part of the Park was on the edge of Piccadilly, where the two-penny bunters could dispatch clients in one moment and be back on their pitch a moment later. But it was the most direct route home and although he was still several streets away, he imagined he could hear his father’s roar.
Down Street took him up. There was a cut through Collins Court, a fence to jump that brought him out onto Brick Street and the gardens. Though these were diminishing in size, swallowed by the houses and white stone mansions of an ever-expanding Mayfair, there were still a few hold-out tenants who grew vegetables to sell and kept their animals. Jack had often used this back way into the house and it was his only hope now. Hoisting himself over the fence, he failed to shush the sheep that scattered from his path. Someone shouted from an open doorway but he did not pause. A wall was vaulted and he was in the back garden of Absolute House. Light came from the scullery and he made for it. More light came from the room above, the glister of a hundred candles. The birthday celebration was underway.