The Blooding of Jack Absolute (6 page)

It was a challenge and it was taken up, the underarm chuck making the hard leather come fast and straight. Jack’s bat defence
was mistimed and the ball thumped into his shin.

Probably the only two people who did not groan at the crack it made were the bowler and Jack. He walked away, restraining
both limp and yelp. And when he took up position again, he called down the wicket. ‘The midges are out early this year.’

The next ball came, if anything, even harder, just as straight. Again it missed Jack’s bat, to crack again into the shin,
almost in the same place. Jack made sure his voice had shed his agony before he looked up and smiled. ‘No, seems I was mistaken.
They’ve passed away.’

‘Less talk, young man, if you please,’ the umpire growled.

They had disdained the fashion for playing six in an over, had stayed with the legal four. So he had two balls to face, two
to finish it. Yet the next one went wide, too tempting to flay at it and yield up a catch. He left it. Jack looked at the
bowler
again and wondered if his provocations had worked. The Man had, after all, been chucking them down all afternoon and, with
these three fast deliveries, he was tiring. The ball would come fast again but perhaps not as fast, straight … but maybe not
quite so straight.

To encourage him, Jack stepped deliberately one pace to the side. Once more the twin stumps, their bail perched atop them,
were temptingly exposed. The challenge was given.

Taken. Unfurling those heavy shoulders, The Man let the ball fly, and Jack was wrong both about the speed and its accuracy.
It pitched once, short, which Jack wanted, but it came on perfectly hard, perfectly straight, which he didn’t. It demanded
safety, a patting away, a wait for something less deadly. And Jack couldn’t wait, wouldn’t let Fenby face the bowler again.
He needed five runs, five times his battered legs must carry him up and down that wicket. And the short outfield where the
spectators encroached was usually only worth the four. Yet Jack had played this field for years, knew all its little secrets
–unlike the bowler. There was one place where the ground dipped and ran into a clump of scrub bush, a place where fives could
sometimes be found. It was off Jack’s right shoulder, forty-five degrees behind him. So now, as the ball came straight, hard
but short, he angled his bat toward that place. A miss and he was out, and he and Westminster had lost.

The ball hit the tilted bat with all the ferocity The Man had put into it and took off, Harrovians in pursuit. Jack didn’t
even look. ‘Run,’ he roared, and Fenby, backing up well, passed him before mid-wicket. His legs felt stiff but as he turned
at the opposite crease, the sight at the field’s perimeter gave him impetus. The ball was disappearing into the shrubbery,
two white-clad boys in close pursuit.

‘Again,’ he cried, striding to meet and pass his partner. The crowd was hallooing both chaser and chased. ‘Two!’ came the
universal cry. All knew what was required.

‘And again,’ Jack yelled above the tumult, making his third run. Turning, he saw the boys still rooting frantically, others
rushing to their aid. So they took the penultimate run required, leaving just the one more to win. But at the very moment
that his bat touched down in the crease, even as his breath came in gasps and his legs became as stiff as the stumps before
them, even as he was turning to go for that last wild sprint, a boy emerged from the bush, ball in hand.

He could stop, let his team-mate face another over. That was the safe and sensible thing to do. The scores were level now
so even if Fenby got out, as was most likely, the match was a draw.

‘Again,’ Jack bellowed instead and, as the Harrovian bent to throw, Jack began to run.

With ten paces to go, Jack sensed, rather than saw, the ball above his head, sensed it in the tensing of the receiving fielder,
none other than The Man who’d sprinted down, anticipating this final play, shoving aside the boy whose job it should have
been. His eyes were up, he took a step back as Jack closed the distance to five yards. A leap, a hand shot high, one moment
a bare palm, the next it filled with dark leather. Three yards and Jack began to dive, but stretched ahead of him as his arm
had stretched ahead to take a wave in Cornwall. No watery softness to cushion him here, just hard ground from a dry spring.
His eyes were on that ball as The Man brought it from on high, flashed down. As the tip of the willow bat reached the crease,
the bail was struck from the stumps.

‘Out! Out, by God!’ cried all of Harrow.

‘In! In, by God, and safe!’ rejoined Westminster.

And all there looked at the umpire, crouched low and intent a few yards away. He was a neutral, an usher brought in from St
Paul’s School due to some rather unfortunate rioting at a close and disputedly biased decision a few years previously. In
a sudden silence that seemed eternal, under the prone Jack’s desperate appeal, beneath the threatening, outstretched hand
of The Man, the umpire slowly straightened.

‘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.