Jack Frake (2 page)

“And here,” continued the parson, pointing with his finger, “is Stanyard-on-Pendyn — Pendyn being the pretty little brook that feeds the Godolphin — ten miles west of Trelowe.” Parmley searched the boy’s face for signs of recognition. There was a tin mine in Stanyard, owned by a man who had a labor agreement with the union workhouses. Cephas Frake, he knew, was often sent there to load and push ore carts. “The ancient Romans, a people mightier than we, had a fort there, the ruins of which may still be seen. They, too, mined tin.”

Parmley paused in remembrance of something that pleased him, and took a large penny from his coat. He held it up. “Bronze, my boy. Part copper, part tin. Some of this coin may have come from those very mines.” He turned it over and showed the reverse to the boy. “Do you recognize her?”

Jack Frake nodded. On the reverse was the profile of a seated woman holding a spear in one hand, her other arm resting on an upright shield. She wore a great helmet with a curving crest.

“Do you think Britannia was a creation of His Majesty’s Mint?”

Jack Frake shrugged.

“Britannia is as old as the Romans,” continued the parson, unmindful of the fact that the content of his discourse had begun to range far beyond the boy’s knowledge and perhaps even his interest. But the boy was an
attentive listener, and the parson was lonely for a receptive audience, and so he went on. “She first appeared on their coins during the reign of Antoninus Pius, in the second century. Our version here was modeled by Frances Stewart, the Duchess of Richmond, almost a century past. She must have been a noble, lovely lady. The pose and the style, however, are undeniably Greek in inspiration. Yet I had my own name for Britannia, when I was a young man at Oxford. I dubbed her ‘The Auditing Athena.’ Athena! The Romans called her Minerva. The goddess of wisdom and power. Does she not look like she is listening, weighing, and judging what she hears? I thought it appropriate that we should choose her as our symbol.” Parmley stopped for a moment, looking more abstractly pensive. “Wisdom and power, my boy,” he sighed. “The two notions are not antithetical, as some aver. It depends on one’s dictionary. Today, of course, they are in mutual disrepute: wisdom, because it reveals our failings and makes us jealous of it; and power, because it dispenses with the need for wisdom, and offers instead the spice of avarice. This is true all over, but especially in our England, in this anxious year of 1744. We, above all other nations, should know better, for are we not envied for our vaunted liberties?” Parmley studied his penny for a moment, then put it away. “But — I digress. That is the purpose of a symbol, to remind a man of his first meaning. To remind a nation, too. Someday, I hope, England will remember hers.” The parson glanced at the map, and sadly tapped it with his hand. He studied the boy, and wondered if any portion of his reverie had found a home in the young mind. “Names, Mr. Frake, are not casual. If ever you must choose a name or symbol for something important, think on it most earnestly.”

Jack Frake stood and approached the map. He put a tentative, wondering finger on the edge of the island and traced the coast of Cornwall. Then he stepped back to his bench and sat down.

The parson, however, was through for the day. He refolded the map, and slammed the book shut. “You may go now, Mr. Frake. When you return next week, I may show you what lies beyond the Channel.” He paused with a shadow of a grin. “I may show you a
globe
.”

He then received his own and quite unexpected reward. Jack Frake, who rarely volunteered a word more than what was required, and who Parmley, in spite of his affection for him, had concluded was the most introverted, ungrateful boy he had ever had in the schoolhouse, smiled up at him and said, “Thank you, sir,” then jumped up and ran out the door into the chill afternoon.

W
HAT NORMALLY TOOK HIM TWO HOURS TO WALK, TODAY TOOK THREE
. Jack Frake was neither eager to go home, nor anxious to get there before dusk. He set off mechanically from St. Gwynn-by-Godolphin on the country road that meandered through the fields, pastures and meadows that lay between the two villages, his mind and energy happily preoccupied. He was hungry, but the prospect of the bowl of gruel his mother would fix for him neither enticed nor repelled him. He was deaf to the pleadings of his stomach.

His thoughts did not include his home, which was a one-room cottage on the edge of Trelowe’s commons, half a mile from the cliff and the Channel; or his bed, which was a pallet of straw on the dirt floor in a corner of the cottage, between the fireplace and the woodbin; or his parents, whom he regarded as looming nemeses to his life.

Nor did his thoughts dwell on the risk of encountering highwaymen or kidnappers. He had nothing a highwayman could want, unless it were the crudely repaired shells of leather that were his shoes, or the patched and re-patched rags that were his trousers, shirt and jacket. And the peril of being taken by a gang of kidnappers to be sold ultimately as a servant to gentlemen in the colonies — wherever they were — was faintly intriguing to him, even alluring.

His parents used that threat, too, in addition to the ogres and goblins.
“We could get a guinea for you, boy,” his father would say gruffly when he was in an especially foul mood. “So you mind your own nose and keep your mouth shut, or it’s off to the colonies with you!” His father disliked him, almost as though he were not his own son, but a special guest of his mother’s; his mother was indifferently tolerant of him, as though he were a penance she had accepted and worked into the daily drudgery of her life.

He understood these relationships as little as he did the one which existed between his parents. They argued often, and even fought with fists, pans and stoneware, drawing him, when they noticed him standing by as a spectator, into their bloody donnybrooks, whose points of contention were beneath his ken or care. What he witnessed between his parents was not what he imagined ought to be love and marriage. Reason, which his young mind was striving to enthrone in all matters that came under his purview, dictated that they should part and go their own ways. But their continued, embittered union defied reason and all his efforts to understand it. Jack Frake did not hate his parents. He simply was too young to grasp the role of enmity in the lives of adults such as Cephas and Huldah Frake. The word
inertia
was not yet in his vocabulary, but an unlabeled notion of it existed in his mind and it seemed to be the basis of his parents’ marriage. And he himself was a hostage to it by the unanswerable triumvirate of custom, law, and his youth.

At home, his life in and around the cottage was centered on the chores of feeding the chickens and pigs, milking the cow and a pair of ewes, and acting as a human scarecrow in their field to chase away birds, weasels and other pests — which included many species of rodents and also poaching squatters — and the wandering flocks of sheep and herds of cattle of the more prosperous denizens of Trelowe. The Frake family was not prosperous. They scratched together a living by bartering milk and produce from their field with other farmers and cottagers, as their ancestors had done for generations. Coin was a welcome but infrequent guest in their household. There were no books or newspapers in the cottage, not even a Bible; the boy’s introduction to letters began with the labels on liquor bottles and the trademarks on farm and kitchen implements and would have ended there, but for the intervention of Parson Parmley. Play was a forgotten pastime; Jack Frake was put to work a few years after he had learned to walk. He had never seen a toy and would neither recognize one nor immediately grasp its function. Privacy was a luxury he had to steal from the time allotted to his chores. He would roam the meadows and surrounding villages near him only at the price of a beating or the denial of
dinner, and usually both; it was a price he gladly suffered. His discovery of and frequent retreats to his cherished cubbyhole had cost him more bruises and hunger than he cared to remember.

Cephas Frake inherited from his father the copyhold to a neat cottage and a productive half-acre of the commons. Lacking, though, both his father’s instinct for neighborliness and his knack for discreetly exploiting loopholes in England’s semi-feudal agricultural practices, he soon found himself working blindly and futilely against the tribulations of his time. He was industrious, and occasionally innovative, but as he spent no time reflecting on the possible causes of his interminable race with poverty, his industry and infrequent flickers of thought got him little. He was incapable of imagining any other way of life — except, perhaps, on a bountiful royal pension which would spare him all purpose and effort. But while Cephas Frake had a bottomless capacity for effort, he had no purpose, and there was no one to instruct him in the importance of their dual role in a man’s life. Sober, he was a boisterous, convivial drone in whose soul no solemn flame had ever burned. Drunk, he was a clamorous juggernaut, and either offensively familiar or violently morose, depending on whether he was celebrating a trite advantage or soaking his sorrows. So he pitched himself against the tribulations, cursed the necessity of his struggle, and remained blithely and gracelessly ingenuous, never to learn that the things he struggled against were meaner, crasser and more insensitive than he.

Jack Frake was six when his father and mother began to offer food and drink outside their cottage to travelers who used the road that was a short-cut on the journey between Plymouth in Devon and Falmouth to the west, and to the west coast of Cornwall. His father even went to the trouble of painting a crude sign, picturing a crossed knife and fork over a glass, which he hung over the cottage door. Jack Frake was given the task of fetching fodder and water for the travelers’ mounts, and earned what was to him a fortune in pennies for sweating them down with a thick brush. Once, a carriage-and-four stopped at the cottage, and he saw for the first time a liveried coachman, a gentleman and a lady, and a boy his own age in silks, velvet and a white wig. The other boy did not speak to him, and stared at him with condescending curiosity. Jack Frake did not notice the condescension, but returned the stare with a critical glance of his own. He did not know where the people came from, nor where they went, but the family, the carriage, and the other boy were his first clues to another kind of existence, elsewhere.

After two months, a county sheriff rode into the yard and threatened his father with the exorbitant fine of two guineas for operating an establishment without a victualler’s license. Cephas Frake was too much of a cynic to question the necessity of a license, and too dull-witted even to think of offering the sheriff a bribe. In peevish obedience, he found his ladder, took down the sign, and chopped it to pieces in front of the still-mounted, astonished sheriff. Then he lay down his ax, and stood facing the man, waiting. The sheriff frowned, uttered another warning, and rode away, his head shaking in time with the swish of his mount’s tail.

Jack Frake was also astonished at his father’s behavior. Cephas Frake noticed the boy studying him. “There’s crows in our corn, boy!” he growled. “Wipe that look off your face and shoo ’em!”

Two miserable years later, in the summer after the corn, beans and other crops had been sown and the wheat was beginning to come up, Cephas Frake grew more possessive of his common plot, and got into fights with villagers whose livestock trampled his garden. Then he had an idea. He would build a fence around his plot. Some of the village men had fences around their gardens. His would simply be bigger. When he told his wife his plan, she merely looked doubtful and shrugged. When he told his son, he was answered with a silent expression of awed respect, something new and unsettling to him. He was not certain that he cared for what the boy’s expression implied, but he playfully mussed the boy’s flaxen hair and said, “Let’s do it, boy.”

Together they labored for days, hauling stones from the surrounding fields in a barrow, and erecting piles of them at intervals around the plot. They took longer trips together to collect driftwood from the beach and timbers from abandoned hovels, and used the wood to connect each pile to the next. And then they laughed together when, after the waist-high fence was finished, they stood at its gate to watch the sheep and cattle on the other side of the fence stand dumbly immobile at the obstacle in their path, and then shuffle away. “’Tis a thing of beauty, that fence,” remarked Cephas Frake with a chuckle.

On his own, Cephas Frake had invented the practice of enclosure without ever having heard of the phenomenon, which was then imperceptibly changing the country’s rural landscape to the detriment of countless squatters, cottagers and marginal farmers, but to the advantage of the bustling manufacturing cities, which got more and better food. The commons was a major impediment to the spread of enclosure, a carcass of feudalism
doomed ultimately to be removed.

Too, he had never heard of socialism — no one then had — which was what the ‘commons’ was a form of, as it allowed villagers and cottagers like the Frakes equal rights to timber, grazing pasture, turf and fish in the land ringing a village. Villagers and farmers could erect fences around their gardens or small plots, but only by consensus. Cephas Frake had not asked anyone’s opinion, permission or advice concerning the enclosure of land which was not even nominally his, but the village’s.

One afternoon, about a week after the fence was finished, the sheriff and the constable of Trelowe arrived at the cottage with a noisy mob of villagers, cottagers and squatters in tow. The sheriff, by His Majesty’s authority, directed the mob to dismantle the fence, and fined Frake a guinea and a half for “theft of commons land.”

Cephas Frake was shocked, first by his lapse of memory, and then by the swiftness of the retribution. He removed his hat and stepped forward. “But it’s our food, sir,” he said, a note of meek apology in his words. He spoke in a loud, deferential voice, addressing not so much the sheriff as the mob, hoping it had some power over the sheriff. Some of the men in the mob fed their families with the produce that came from his plot. He assumed that this counted for something. “And it’s some of them men’s livestock that eat it, and what they don’t eat, they mash underfoot so we can’t.”