The Blooding of Jack Absolute

by C. C. Humphreys

  Até looked away, up into the canopy. When at last he looked back, his gaze was firm. ‘I have thought of this, Daganoweda. Thought of going with you.’

  ‘Then do.’

  ‘One day. One day I would like to see “what is dreamt of in your philosophy”.’

  ‘Will you stop quoting that bloody play?’

  Até leaned forward, reflected fire not the only light in his eyes. ‘And that is why I cannot go. Because I cannot quote from anything else.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have taught me some things. But there is so much still to learn.’ The sadness went, replaced by excitement. ‘But the French are beaten now; this war ends. And my uncle-by-law, William Johnson, each year he sends some boys to a school in Connecticut. Maybe he send me. Then I learn everything. Then I come to England.’ Off Jack’s look he added, ‘I will come, Daganoweda.’

  Jack nodded. ‘So tomorrow we part.’

  ‘Unless …’

  ‘Unless?’

  ‘Unless you come with me.’ Até’s excitement was building. ‘You know your English ways. And now you know some of our ways, too. But your ignorance is as great as mine is of yours. I can lead you. You can truly become a Mohawk. You can join the clan of the wolf.’

  For a long moment, Jack stared into the flames. Why not? The thought of London excited and appalled in equal measure. He had grown comfortable in the forest, there was game he hadn’t hunted in this land he’d started to love, a friend to hunt them with, a man whose life he’d saved, who’d saved his. And there was still that damned war cry to learn!

  Yet he shook his head. ‘I cannot. I have orders and to disobey them, to go with you, I would become a deserter. And there is an oath I swore to my country, to my King, and a promise made to my father to honour the uniform he has honoured, the name we share. There is a land I love and people who love me there, blood of my blood.’

  The silence came between them again, the flames’ snap suddenly loud. After a time, Até rose and came to Jack’s side of the fire and there he did something strange. He took Jack’s hand. ‘Nothing is for ever. We will meet again. You will return to this land because you will be drawn by this,’ he pointed to Jack’s heart, ‘and this.’

  He had drawn out his knife and now he pressed it to Jack’s palm, looking up at him. At his nod, Até slashed it in one swift motion down the flesh under the thumb. In a moment, he had matched the cut with one of his own.

  ‘So this will bring you back, to the land where you will always be Daganoweda,’ he said, pressing flow to flow, ‘because blood of your blood is now here as well.’ He gripped so hard he made Jack wince, that smile coming again. ‘Also you owe me more chances to save you. Because without you last winter I would have died … pretty damn quick!’

  It was not the last of Jack’s blood that Até shed. At dawn, a dry shave and many nicks later, he no longer sported the scalp-lock that, more than anything, denoted him as a Mohawk. With the tricorn upon his head, and his body once more encased within silk and serge, he was again Cornet Jack Absolute of the 16th Dragoons. And if his skin was still stained with the dye Até had concocted for him to maintain his disguise, Jack could remember summers in Cornwall when he’d been nearly as dark.

  They parted on the ridge where the valleys met. Snow lay before each of them, frozen hard yet not so deep it could not take the horses; yet both knew that, when the promised big storm came and the paths became impassable to hoof, they could skim across the surfaces on the snowshoes each had strapped to their backs.

  They parted without words. All the necessary ones had been spoken the previous night, then sealed in blood. With a swift salute befitting the uniform he wore, Jack turned his horse, prodded it downhill through a drift till he came to an avenue between the trees where the snow was shallower. He picked up speed there, putting distance between the parting and himself. Soon he was out of sight of the ridge.

  Yet not of sound. Suddenly, faintly, Jack heard the familiar, long, drawn-out ululation. ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH-HUM,’ it came, echoing down the valley.

  ‘Of course,’ he said aloud, ‘Of course! That’s it.’ Tipping his head, he gave it back, listened to the echo bouncing off the crags. It was … perfect! So good in fact that, if he wished to, he knew he would finally be able to teach the Mohocks of Covent Garden exactly how it was done. But in that moment, with the cry not yet faded from the valley’s slopes, he knew he never would.

  HISTORICAL NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The campaign that climaxed in the Battle of Quebec is less taught now, the concept of Empire-building less kindly regarded. Yet that battle above those cliffs in 1759 is certainly one of the turning points of history. It won Britain Canada. It also conceivably lost Britain America for, by defeating and eventually disposing of our mutual French enemy, the Colonists no longer needed our protection. Sixteen years later they began to slip the yoke.

  It was also one of the most dramatic of victories: a secret landing at 2 a.m.; the light infantry scrambling up sheer cliffs in the dark to silence the sentries and seize the cliff tops so the army could march up the hidden road; the French waking to find the red ranks drawn up outside their walls; the perfect volley that finished them; the deaths of both Wolfe and Montcalm in their respective moments of triumph and despair. There was almost too much drama for the pen and I had to select what to focus on or the battle would have occupied the whole novel.

  Research narrowed it down. I wore out the pages of Osprey’s superb Quebec 1759 by Stuart Reid. Then there was C. P. Stacey’s study with the same title, Quebec 1759, which had marvellous incidental detail, especially the conflicting tales of the reciting of Gray’s Elegy prior to the attack and clarifying the calls the French sentries made as the English army drifted downstream with the tide. For native affairs, D. Peter Macleod’s The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years’ War was excellent and I also met him at the Canadian Museum of War in Ottawa where he kindly gave me his time and a ‘eureka’ moment – by pointing out that Rogers’ Raid on St Francis took place just three weeks after the Battle.

  I’d decided early that London – the city I live in, the city I love – was also going to be a major backdrop to the story. The more I read about that great metropolis and its inhabitants in the eighteenth century, the more I realized how little has changed. So much of the London we know was built in Georgian times and Londoners behaved then much as they do now, especially the youths. They caroused around the town, played games, gambled on anything, drank far too much, chased women, and always sought the sleaziest after-hour dens to end up in. The English don’t change even if, by most standards, 2004 is tame compared to 1759. They also reacted just as you’d expect when, in 1752, the government finally decided to bring England into line with the rest of Europe – 200 years late – by adopting the Gregorian calendar. They rioted! I’ve always found the idea of those missing eleven days fascinating, hence the start of this novel.

  Research once again gave me stories and their settings. For Cornwall, West Country Words and Ways by K. C. Philips was proper! It appeared that the British Museum put on a show especially for me, London 1753, but also for the 250th anniversary of the Museum’s founding, full of texts, prints and artefacts. The catalogue was superbly detailed and I owe a great debt to its editor, Sheila O’Connell, and the curators. For debauchery, no one was a better guide to the taverns, bagnios, billiards halls and whorehouses than William Hickey in his Memoirs of a Georgian Rake while Wits, Wenchers and Wantons by E. J. Burford also provided lively detail. I again had great experiences in the British Library’s Rare Books section, holding an original copy of that seminal Whores’ Directory, Harris’s List of Ladies; as well as the Alexander Pope 1731 edition of Hamlet, printed at Dirty Lane, Dublin.

  Two period novels gave me the flavour of language and mores: Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett; and the book that is one of the bawdy benchmarks in English literary history, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. Any resemblance to that great work is enti
rely intentional.

  Yet my favourite research is always on the ground and I owe a debt to many guides. My first were at a snooker hall in North Finchley where an old friend, Geoffrey Boxer, and his pool-hall-hustler son, James Boxer, helped me work out Jack’s nigh-impossible winning shot. Then, in the forests of Killarney Provincial Park, Ontario, Steve Sanna of Pow Wow Wilderness Adventures took me by canoe into the wilds for three days and pointed out the flora, fauna, shelters and edibles that would enable Jack and Até to survive a winter.

  My favourite moment came when I emulated my considerably younger creation and the British Light Infantry by scaling the cliffs that rise from the St Lawrence River to the Plains of Abraham at Quebec City. Though the battlefield itself is much developed and encroached upon, the cliffs are hardly altered. I cheated by doing it in running shoes and with a back pack in the afternoon, rather than in boots and carrying a musket in the middle of the night. But it gave me priceless detail – the shale cliff face slipping away, the deadfall of maples crumbling to the touch, the sturdier branches and trunks to be used as ladders. I climbed from the base where I calculated they might have begun, and came out on what was once the secret path and is now a road, exactly at the stone marker which testifies to Wolfe’s midnight landing (and implies, in French, that he cheated!)

  I went to the Georgian cricket match at Marble Hill House where I met two people: Christine Riding of Tate Britain, who kindly sent me the beautiful Gainsborough catalogue from the exhibition, great for faces and dress; and Andy Robertshaw of the National Army Museum who showed me how to use a musket and bayonet.

  Of many other contributions, one stands out. I can give you ‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’ in German, Italian and Danish. For this book, I really, really wanted it in Iroquois. Fortunately I met a Mohawk at the Battle of Saratoga reenactment in 2002 (as one does), who produced a card with e-mail address from within his furs and feathers. Wolf Thomas is the man to whom I am so grateful; the phrase worth repeating, in any language, ‘akwekon katon othe:non tsi ne’ ken’.

  Some others to thank. David Chaundler, Bursar at Westminster School, who showed me around and checked facts. Nat Heyden for her French. Alma Lee, Artistic Director of the Vancouver Writers’ and Readers’ Festival who gave me shelter when I first conceived Jack. As ever, my publishers at Orion, Jane Wood, Publishing Director, and Jon Wood, my point man there, editor, champion and friend; Susan Lamb who does such a great job on the paperback front; Henry Steadman, my excellent cover designer; Kim McArthur, my powerhouse Canadian publisher; Rachel Leyshon who does the line-by-line editing and, often annoyingly, keeps me honest; I also must mention my brilliant new agent, Kate Jones at ICM, who is busy revolutionizing my career. My wife, Aletha, who accepts the occasional weirdness to which writers are prone. And my son, Reith Frederic, born this year, who allows his father to work … some of the time!

  C. C. Humphreys

  London, July 2004

  Copyright

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Orion Books.

  First published in ebook in 2011 by Orion Books.

  Copyright © 2005 C. C. Humphreys

  The moral right of C. C. Humphreys to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 3857 0

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