The Blooding of Jack Absolute (44 page)

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 entirely 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

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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