Now, Jack and Ate have found a new publisher-- our friends at SourceBooks and hopefully will gain a wide, wider, widest readership so that we will get more Jack! and more Ate! ( especially more Ate).
I am offering a bit of a giveaway for American and Canadian readers on the blog here as well as a sneak peek of the first chapter (which has one of the best openings ever )Two ! TWO ! lucky readers will get the chance to escape into Canadian history with Jack and Ate and their lovely, stupendous adventures.
All YOU have to do is comment and tell me what your favourite line in Hamlet is and why
(why Hamlet? Read the book)
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Chapter One
An Affair of Honor
The snow lay deep over Hounslow Heath and the light was failing
fast. They were already late, a double annoyance to Jack Absolute; not only was
it considered ungentlemanly to keep people waiting for such an affair, but it also
meant that by the time the ground had been reached, the Seconds introduced, the
area marked out, and the formalities dealt with as to wills and burials, it
would be too dark for pistols. It would have to be swords; and by the look of
him, his opponent was in fighting trim. If he wasn’t twenty years younger than
Jack he wasn’t far off and, as a serving cavalry officer, would be fencing
daily; while it was five years at the least since Jack had fought in such a
manner. With a variety of other weapons, to be sure. But a tomahawk or a Mysore
punch dagger had a very different feel to them than the delicate touch required
for the small sword. Of course, one could only be killed with the point; it had
no cutting edge. But the point, as Jack knew all too well, was all that was
required.
As his feet slipped yet again on the icy boot prints of those who
had preceded him, Jack cursed. How large
will the damned crowd be? The affair could hardly have been
announced more publicly, and many would choose to attend such a fashionable
fight. Money would already have been staked. He wondered at the odds. Like an
older racehorse, Jack had form. He had “killed his man”—in fact, in the plural,
several more than these gentlemen of London could know about. But his opponent
was certainly younger, probably stronger, and above all, inflamed with the
passion of wronged ardor. He fought for a cause. For love.
And Jack? Jack fought only because he’d been too stupid to avoid the
challenge.
He sniffed. To top it all, he suspected he was getting a cold. He
wanted to be warm in the snug at King’s Coffee House, a pot of mulled ale in
his hand. Not slip-sliding his way across a frozen common to maiming or a
possible death.
“Is it five or six duels you have fought, Daganoweda?”
Jack, whose eyes had been fixed on the placing of his own feet, now
glanced at the speaker’s. Their nakedness seemed like vanity, especially as
Jack knew his companion had a fine pair of fleece-lined boots back in their
rooms in St. Giles. However, Até would never pass up such an opportunity to
display the superior toughness of the Iroquois Indian. The rest of him would
probably have been naked too had Jack not warned him that ladies might attend.
The concession had been fawn-skin leggings, beaded and tasseled, and a Chinese
silk vest that scarcely concealed his huge chest or obscured the tattoos
wreathed around his muscles. Midnight-black hair fell in waves to his almost
bare shoulders. Just looking at him made Jack shiver all the more, and he
pulled his cloak even tighter around him.
“Six duels, Atédawenete. As I am sure you well remember. Including
the one against you.”
“Oh,” Até turned to him, his brown eyes afire, “you count a fight
against a ‘savage,’ do you? I am honored.”
The Indian made the slightest of bows. Iroquois was a language made
for irony. Jack had had too much cognac the night before—the first error in an
evening of them—and a duel of wits was one conflict he could live without
today. So he reverted to English.
“What is it, Até? Homesick again?”
“I was thinking, brother, that if this young brave kills you—as is
very likely since he is half your age and looks twice as vigorous—how then will
I buy passage to return to my home across the water, which you have kept me
from these eleven years?”
“Don’t concern yourself with that, brother. Our friend here will
give you the money. It’s the least he can do. He owes me after all, don’t you,
Sherry?”
This last was addressed over his
shoulder to the gentleman acting as his First-Second, as the hierarchy of duels
had it. The dark-haired young man was struggling to keep pace with his taller
companions, his face alternately green and the palest of yellows. The previous
evening, Richard Brinsley Sheridan had drunk even more cognac than Jack.
“Ah, money, Jack, yes. Always a wee bit of a problem there.” Though
he had left Ireland as a boy, a slight native brogue still crept in, especially
in moments of exertion. “But, of course, you’ll be triumphant today, so the
need will not arise. And in the meantime, can you and your fine-looking friend
speak more of that marvelous language? I may understand not a word, but the
cadences are exquisite.”
Jack pulled a large, soiled square of linen from his pocket and blew
his nose hard. “Careful, Até, you’ll be in one of his plays next. And we all
know where that can lead.”
The playwright wiped an edge of his cloak across a slick brow,
sweating despite the chill. “How many more times can I apologize? As I said,
you were thought dead and thus your mellifluous name was free to appropriate.”
“Well, I may be dead soon enough. So your conscience may not be a
bother too much longer,” Jack muttered. He had caught sight of movement through
a screen of trees ahead.
If the crowd’s
big enough, he thought, perhaps even
the incompetent Watch
might have heard
of it and turn up to prevent this illegality.
Once he would have objected vigorously to any attempt by the authorities to
restrict his right to fight. Once…when he was as young as his adversary,
perhaps. Now he could only hope that the Magistrates’ intelligence had
improved.
But no reassuring Watchmen greeted Jack, just two dozen gentlemen in
cloaks of brown or green, a few red-coated army officers, and, in the center of
the party, wearing just a shirt, the man who had challenged him—Banastre
Tarleton. Jack was again startled by his face. The youth—he could be no more
than eighteen—was possessed of an almost feminine beauty, with thickly lashed
eyes and chestnut curls failing to be constrained by a pink ribbon. But there
was no hint of a lady’s fragility in his movements, laughing as he lunged
forward with an imaginary sword.
He looks as
if he is on a green about to play a game of cricket, Jack thought, and he wondered if it was the cold that
made him shrug ever deeper into his cloak. He glanced around the circle of
excited faces that turned to him. No women, at least. Not even the cause of
this whole affair, that little minx, Elizabeth Farren. The hour was too close
to the lighting of the footlights at Drury Lane and her show must go on. Yet
how she would have loved playing this scene. The sighs, the sobs wrenched from
her troubled—and artfully revealed, carefully highlighted—bosom, as she watched
two lovers do battle for her. She would be terribly brave one moment, close to
fainting the next.
An actress. He was going to be killed over an actress. It was like
one of Sheridan’s bloody comedies, not dissimilar to the one in which the
playwright had made him the unwitting star. It was an irony perhaps only an
Iroquois could fully appreciate. For if Sheridan hadn’t used his name in The Rivals, if Jack hadn’t then felt it
necessary to watch some posturing actor play “him,” if he hadn’t succumbed, yet
again, to the effects of brandy and the actress playing the maid, and if she
wasn’t already beloved by this brash, stupid, handsome, young officer…
Até and Sheridan had moved across to commence the business, and Jack
noted the two men with whom his companions were discussing terms. One, an
ensign in the resplendent, gold-laced uniform of the Coldstream Guards, was
talking loudly and waving his arms about. Yet it was the other, Tarleton’s
Second-Second, who held Jack’s attention. He was standing behind and slightly
to the side, his will seemingly focused, not on the details of the duel, but
entirely forward onto Jack, just as it had been the previous night, when his
soft whispers had urged Tarleton on. This man had the sober but expensive dress
of a rich cleric, the long, pale face of a scholar. And looking now at the man
he’d heard named the Count von Schlaben, even in the poor light of a winter
sunset, Jack could see that this man desired his death as much as the youth who
had challenged him; perhaps even more. And in that moment of recognition, Jack
knew that there was more than actresses involved and that honor was only a
small part of this affair.
If I am
about to die, he
thought, looking away and up into the cloud-racked March sky, the
least I can do is to understand why.
Something had occurred the previous night at the theater, aside from
the play and the challenge. Something that had brought them all here to this
snowy common. So it was back to Drury Lane that Jack’s mind went, in the few
moments before the formalities were settled, and the dying began.
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