Jack Frake

by Edward Cline

  The other woman was Huldah Leith. She was not long on her visit. Leith was at first glad to see her, for neither his brother Peter nor his cousin, Jasper Dent, constable of Trelowe, had wished to see him or grant him an iota of succor. But once his wife learned that he had pleaded guilty to the murder charge, she was not so much shocked by the revelation that he had murdered a man as by the fact that his confession would now result in the forfeiture of all his property to the Crown. She would be left penniless and without even a home. Other men, she knew, had endured terrible tortures from efforts to wrest confessions from them, so that they could leave their families something after their passing. But her husband had lost everything without a finger having been laid on him. In the cell, she proceeded to abuse him with violent language, then physically assault him. He could not resist because he was shackled arm and leg to the cell wall. The commotion disturbed other prisoners and the jailer, who found it necessary to remove her from the cell and eject her from the prison. Huldah Leith stalked through the streets and found a tavern, in which she fortified her anger with gill after gill of gin. No thought of her son or of his fate even entered her mind. Two dragoons at liberty took a special interest in her story, and offered her the solace of their attentions, and eventually of their caresses.

  * * *

  Across the river, in the workhouse, Jack Frake fell into a fitful sleep on his straw cot, even though he had fought against it. He dreamed again. It was not a visual dream, this time, but an aural one. Redmagne’s version of “The Death of Parcy Reed” resounded in contest with the workhouse choir singing “The Coventry Carol,” which Jack Frake had heard the group practicing for three weeks. To this cacophony were added the words Skelly had spoken to him years ago: “This is not a lark… I killed a man!… You’ll beg to be hanged!… We will submit to chains… but we none of us will submit to their paper and ink parents!… I envy you your future, Jack… ”

  And then the dream became a nightmare, for a horrible face suddenly appeared. He could not tell whose face it was — Skelly’s or Redmagne’s — because it was contorted in a pain that seemed to want to explode its features. Sounds came from the face’s wreathing mouth, gagging sounds like those made by the highwayman he had shot. He saw a rope as thick as a man’s wrist digging into the neck. As the rope grew bigger, the face grew green, then black…

  Jack Frake awoke with a start and sat up. “No!” he shouted. He wiped a hand over his forehead and felt that it was wet. “No,” he said again, quietly.

  “No communication is permitted.” No words could be exchanged, no words of encouragement, or of comfort, or of farewell. There was a reason for the arrangement, thought Jack Frake, other than the one Pannell had given to the magistrate. There was a malignity beneath his ostensibly civic purpose. He supposed it must be a kind of punishment. But he did not care what the man’s purpose was.

  We are strong men, he thought. We can defeat anyone’s purpose. We have been hardened by life in the caves, by living out our own purposes. We could not have exiled ourselves for so long out of an act of mere disobedience. Skelly was right. But what moved us to live that way, and to accept an end such as that which the Crown has deemed proper for us?

  The answer was within himself, thought Jack Frake. He could feel it. He slammed his fists on the cot mattress once in frustration, because he could feel the answer, but not give it a name. “Perhaps you will find the words, someday,” Skelly had told him. Twice. If only he could find the words now, he thought, he could shout them to Skelly and Redmagne as they stood at the gallows, and he would consider it part payment for all they had given him.

  The immediate purpose of hanging was twofold: to end the life of the condemned, and to end it as painfully as possible. But a crueler agony, he thought, would be to end one’s life without knowing those words. There were tears in Jack Frake’s eyes, but he did not feel them.

  No communication between the prisoners was permitted. The boy answered this dictum with: None is necessary, but for those words. If I survive what has been awarded me, I will find the words that have eluded us. I am willing to die, but I am also willing to be punished and sentenced to be a slave. Should I live, he said to the images in his mind of Skelly and Redmagne, I will find the words, and dedicate the answer to you both. I will write it down and reclaim the liberties they have taken from us.

  There, in the dark cell, deaf to the plaintive sounds that floated through the air of the children’s prison, Jack Frake was hurled back in his mind to the afternoon he had learned about the globe. This was merged, not inexplicably, with the memory of the day he had run away, and faced a blank future, and had felt the thrill of expectation that the emptiness was his own to fill. The two memories became one. He sat on his cot for a long while, much as he had in his cubbyhole on the cliff long ago, in a state of immaculate self-possession.

  Then the first light of dawn touched the iron bars of the window high above him. He looked up at the bars, and his first thought was: They are strong men, and will not die easily. I never had a chance to save Skelly’s life, he thought. But I can deny the Crown the pleasure of taking it.

  The lock on the oak door rattled, and a warden came in with bread and soup. Jack Frake ate every bit of it. He was hungry, and he would need his strength to do what he was resolved to do.

  Two hours later, Henoch Pannell entered with two of his men and a warden. “You will put on your finery, Master Frake,” said the Commissioner, pointing to the clothes which Jack Frake had not touched. “This is a special day, and you should be dressed for it.” He grinned. “It’s going to be a nippy but cloudless day. We even have a special place to view the moment, with the mayor and Lord Twycross.”

  “Then what?” asked the boy.

  “Then what? Good news, of a sort, though you may have ambivalent feelings about it. Simon Haslam, the prosecutor, has prevailed upon the court to indenture you into his service. Later today he will exchange five guineas for your papers. Of course, you will be chained to the desk to which he assigns you — until you have accepted the fact of your servitude. The chain will be removed when you learn to treat the remainder of your sentence as a kind of apprenticeship.” Pannell paused. “I made no serious objection to the proposal. It is past the season, but I was feeling, well, generous.”

  “I don’t want your generosity.”

  “It was not entirely kindness that moved me to endorse the notion, Master Frake. You flouted the law for a very long time. Now it is time that you be made to serve it — for a very long time.” Pannell picked up the cocked hat — the one Jack Frake had worn to London — and inspected it, then threw it back down on the pile of clothes he had guessed were the boy’s and had ordered brought from the caves. “Accept Mr. Haslam’s employment. Your fate could have been worse. But — one hint of misbehavior or disobedience from you this morning at the gallows, and I have the power to have you thrown into the felons’ den to await your original sentence. You have no money or influence to make your stay there tolerable, and your incarceration could last for as long as a year. You could very easily die of some disease, or be murdered, or simply starve. Whichever way you look at it, Master Frake, your future is not sweet with ‘dignity’ — except, perhaps, at one of Mr. Haslam’s desks.”

  * * *

  People had begun assembling on Falmouth Square early in the morning. By ten o’clock, an hour before the seven condemned were to be marched out of the prison, the square was surrounded by a circle of dragoons and a deputized contingent of tipstaffs separating the crowd from the gallows. The dragoons were mounted and faced the gallows; they sat with sabers drawn and carbines primed. The cart was already in place beneath the gallows. The hangman and his assistant waited with a pile of noosed rope.

  The condemned would be allowed to make a parting speech. At Tyburn in London, the prison ordinaries, acting as secretaries, would have printed the condemned’s last thoughts on life and sold copies of them to touts, who would in turn sell them to the crowd as souvenir
s; it was a way of augmenting the priests’ meager income. In Falmouth, this practice was considered bad taste, and was not followed. When the condemned was finished with his speech, the hangman would step down, tap the horse’s neck once with his whip, and the trained horse would move the cart away from beneath the gallows three or four feet. And the condemned would hang. The hangman would wait for a moment, then proceed to repeat the sequence with the next felon, and the next, until all the felons were dangling from rope or until there was no more room on the gallows. No College of Surgeons existed here to vie for the bodies, which would be stacked at the side until the public event was concluded. Then friends or relatives could claim the bodies for burial; if no one claimed them, they would be buried in a mass grave on the outskirts of town.

  Three of the prisoners were notorious, or at least extraordinary, and few of the spectators had ever before seen a book burned. The crowd formed along the lines of rank, status and occupation. Ladies and gentlemen of leisure stood together. Tradesmen and men from other “genteel” professions such as physicians and schoolmasters and their families formed another clot. Maids, servants, seamen and laborers formed the biggest group. Some in the crowd came from sympathy for the condemned smugglers. They were not numerous. Of the latter, some came because Skelly and Redmagne had defied the tax, and their punishment was seen as disproportionate to the crime. And some came because everything they had ever heard about Skelly and Redmagne seemed to point to an answer to a great mystery about their country, about their neighbors, and about themselves.

  At ten-thirty two constables, preceded by Sheriff Grynsmith, parted the crowd and lugged to the gallows an open iron box on legs. This was placed in front of the gallows. Next to it was put a jar of paraffin and a tinderbox. In the iron box Grynsmith laid a great mass of papers, and on this a printed copy of Redmagne’s Hyperborea, taken from Skelly.

  At ten-forty-five the crowd parted again to admit a special group of spectators: the mayor and his wife; several aldermen and their wives; Lord Twycross and the King’s Proctor, who had postponed their return to London to see justice done; Henoch Pannell and two of his Revenue men; a warden from the parish workhouse; and a boy, almost a man, in green velvet breeches, a green silk coat, and a black velvet, gold-edged tricorn. Spectators wondered who the last personage was; he was surely a personage, to be dressed so richly and to carry himself with the assurance of a duke’s son. But this personage’s wrists were held together by handcuffs, and the two Revenue men each had a firm hand on the boy’s shoulders.

  At eleven o’clock, as Falmouth’s church and town hall bells rang the hour, the crowd parted again to make way for the condemned. Their progress was slow. Each prisoner wore leg irons, and the cuffs linking their wrists behind their backs were linked by a chain to the cuffs of the next prisoner. The first prisoner was an old man, one of the pair who had broken into the customs warehouse, and he walked with difficulty. Each prisoner was flanked by a jail tipstaff. Sheriff Grynsmith led the procession mounted on a great bay. He carried a mahogany baton capped with a bronze and silver orb.

  The top bar of the gallows was of iron with grooves at the top to better secure rope. The supporting poles were of white oak, and created eight spaces of irregular width along the length of the gallows; some spaces could accommodate one prisoner, others as many as three. The condemned were lined up along the gallows, one to a space, with a tipstaff standing behind each prisoner.

  Skelly and Redmagne were dressed as they had been when captured. They both spotted Jack Frake in the special group of observers. The boy bit his tongue and held his hands up to reveal his handcuffs. Then he solemnly reached up and doffed his hat. The men smiled at him, and nodded. Redmagne’s head turned and searched the crowd for Millicent Morley. He did not see her.

  The last prisoner was Isham Leith. Someone in the crowd shouted, “Look! The parson killer!” Rocks suddenly sailed through the air at Leith. One hit him on an ear and caused it to bleed. But most of the missiles missed him to strike a dragoon’s mount or spectators across the square. Leith hung his head, afraid to look up at the gallows or at the crowd. Nothing the crowd could do or say could surpass the treatment he had received at the hands of his wife the night before. His face bore the bruises and scratches of her fury.

  At Tyburn Tree, prisoners debated among themselves and with the authorities about who had the right to hang first. In Falmouth, this practice was considered an abuse of the prisoners, and was prohibited. The sheriff assigned the order of hangings.

  Grynsmith rode down the line of condemned and tapped the woman with his baton. She was unchained from the prisoners on her left and right, helped up to the cart once the hangman had positioned it, and a rope was slung over the iron bar and the noose fixed tightly around her neck. She was a handsome woman with reddish-brown hair. She wore a gown of white linen that resembled a long smock, and a mob cap.

  “Speak, if you wish,” said Grynsmith, “as is your right.”

  The woman looked around at the crowd, then said, “I am Nora McGillicutty. I am Irish, from Donegal. My husband, a chandler, died, and left me to make my own way. So I made lace, and so it was Irish lace. No purchaser of my lace had any complaint about it, for it was as fine and dainty as any that comes across the Irish Sea. And what was my crime? No one will tell me, except to fill my ears with laws. This is the way of England.” She looked down then at the hangman, and nodded. “Send me to heaven, hangman.”

  The hangman shrugged, turned, and tapped the horse’s neck with his whip. The horse rolled the cart away, then stopped. The woman gave a cry, choked, and her legs kicked. The body will fight for life independently of its owner’s will to live or die. After twenty seconds, the body stopped jerking. The hangman did not bother to determine whether she died of strangulation or of a broken neck, for either was possible, and it made no difference to him.

  Sheriff Grynsmith next tapped the shoulder of the old man. The hangman and his assistant hoisted him up onto the cart and affixed the noose. “Speak, if you wish,” ordered the sheriff, “as is your right.”

  The old man looked around with a dazed, sorrowful expression. “I made my peace with God and my wife.” Then he looked at the hangman and shook his head in question, as though there were nothing else that could possibly be said. The hangman nodded and tapped the shoulder of his horse.

  The old man died instantly; everyone present heard the snap of his neck.

  Sheriff Grynsmith rode down the line and tapped Redmagne on the shoulder. As the hangman removed the chain that connected him to Skelly on his right and to Isham Leith on his left, Redmagne addressed the sheriff. “Mr. Skelly and I wish to be hanged together.”

  Grynsmith frowned and glanced, not at Henoch Pannell, but at Lord Twycross. The magistrate nodded. Grynsmith took out a rolled sheet of paper from his coat and read it while the hangman made his preparations. “By order of His Majesty and the courts, the literary work authored by one John Smith — ” he paused to point his baton at Redmagne “— called Hyperborea, has been deemed unfit for English eyes. It is to be so stigmatized.” The sheriff rolled the paper up and put it back inside his coat. Then he nodded to the hangman.

  The hangman took the jar of paraffin and poured the substance over the book and manuscript in the iron box. Then he lit a match from the tinderbox and held it against the manuscript paper.

  Dirty smoke emanated from the box, then flames.

  Redmagne watched the flames grow hotter and higher until the whole mass of paper was a glowing cube crowned with a flickering arabesque of fire. Anyone watching him who expected to see a look of anger, sorrow or anguish on his face was surprised to see a slight smile on his mouth. When ashes began to ascend and float in the breeze above the square, Redmagne glanced up at Grynsmith. “That is my soul burning there, sir. I will speak now, as is my right.”

  Grynsmith nodded. “Say nothing treasonous, or seditious, or blasphemous, or you will be gagged.”

  Redmagne closed his eyes, then raise
d his head and looked up at the sky and the smoke rising in the calm, chill air. He sang, and his tenor voice silenced the rustle of the crowd and carried his words clearly to the Fal.

  “Sound the trumpet till around you make the listening shores resound!

  Come, come ye sons of art, come, come away!

  Tune all your voices and instruments to play,

  To celebrate this triumphant day!”

  Redmagne lowered his head to gaze again into the fire, then shut his eyes.

  A woman’s voice filled the shocked silence. “Redmagne! My cavalier! I will be with you always!” Redmagne opened his eyes in recognition of the voice. He saw Millicent Morley, her hair disheveled and her traveling suit in disarray, standing directly across the square from him. She had pushed and fought her way through the crowd and obstructing dragoons to see him.

  No one recognized the melody, or the words. Most thought it a curious thing to do under the circumstances. But one very old gentleman remembered. He turned to a bystander, a stranger, and said, “The last time I heard that was when I was a tyke of ten, on Queen Mary’s birthday. I was a page boy at court, then.” Only three souls in that unholy congregation understood the intent of Redmagne’s ode: Jack Frake, Skelly, and Millicent Morley. The sheriff was too startled to protest, and in any event would not have known on what grounds to protest. Lord Twycross blinked once. Edgecombe, the King’s Proctor, searched his memory for the relevance of the lyrics. Henoch Pannell furrowed his brow in cynical confusion.