1
The Rode and Shackle
Late Summer, 1813 Glasses and bottles trembled. Hobnails clattered against the broad rib of granite-porphyry shaping the moor, resonating through the inn’s foundation, up dry-rotted posts, and along scuffed oak planks. Miniature cat’s paws, a mariner’s telltales, ruffled the surface of swanky-filled mugs. Jeremy Castor launched the heavy boom of his right leg out from his stool and swiveled, looking for his cousin. Momentum caused him to lose his balance and he compensated by clapping his left hand down. His vessel capsized and the brew gathered in sweet, viscous pools around his fingers. Merit Davey had just staked a guinea on the crude anchor etched into the table and he had his right arm raised above his head. His left hand stroked the lucky feather hidden in his pocket. A sunken, toothless man sitting across from him stared up at the fist, as though anticipating a blow. Merit held no weapon; he wielded a pair of pig’s knuckles of his own fashioning, slightly weighted. They favoured the anchor; not the crown. Never the crown. They were moments from their maiden voyage, christened with a measure of swanky-infused spit. When Merit heard Jeremy slap the bar he turned abruptly, jouncing his blond curls. The cousins held each other’s gaze for an instant. From Jeremy’s expression, Merit immediately understood that the pressers would soon be upon them. And Jeremy saw in Merit’s face what amounted to an apology. “Best be out the back, lads” said the innkeeper, as he calmly opened a narrow door behind the bar. Merit turned back to the table and the gummy grin of the banker. Again, he raised his fist. “Merit!” Jeremy stood, overturning his stool. Merit squeezed his eyes, thrust the dice back into his trousers and ran toward the door. He was at the threshold when he remembered his stake. “My guinea!” Jeremy’s hand, wide as a fluke, spread across Merit’s back and propelled him through the opening. The banker wheezed as he salvaged the abandoned coin. If he’d wanted to be spiteful, Jeremy would have reminded Merit that he’d been warned. How foolish it was to be out on a Saturday night, frolicking. Prime time for the trawling press gangs, with the saloons full of young merchant marines and fishermen in a pliable frame of mind. We’ll go to the Rode, Merit had said, no-one will look for us there. The Rode and Shackle, a public house of weathered stone anchored in the middle of the Cornish countryside, two miles inland from Porthleven, had withstood six centuries of royal successions. It used to be called the Rode and Anchor. One night thieves made off with its namesake, a modest-sized anchor adorning the front stoop, securing the inn against the gales and horizontal rain slicing in from the Atlantic. They knocked the iron crown from the rotted wooden shank and left the rode and shackle, still chained to a ring jutting from the brick. The rusting crown likely went to outfit a Porthleven fishing ketch, to replace one that had been cut away. Rather than find and haul another anchor up from the harbour, the proprietor chose simply to change the name. Only old men - arthritic fishermen, broken miners, lame soldiers – frequented the Rode. Even then, as a group, they were few and declining. Younger men preferred the atmosphere provided in Porthleven or Helston; livelier entertainments, higher stakes, regular fights, the occasional woman. Eighteen year-old Jeremy and twenty-two year old Merit wouldn’t be expected at the Rode. Still, Jeremy’s mother implored them to stay out of the taverns. Brainless pilchards, Alice would say, rushing straight into their weirs. Keep to yourself, they won’t bother with you. Do your job. Then straight home. Don’t you leave me, Jem. Jeremy’s father and two brothers were on the continent, fighting Napoleon. There were only three things to do in their part of Cornwall: mine, fish, or fight. That’s the way it had always been. But Alice had always hoped her youngest might attain a different station. Sporadically, since he was ten, Jeremy had attended school at St. Michael’s in Helston. The curate accepted fifteen students a year, boys of exceptional promise, for a small tuition. Alice’s unmarried aunt Gladys, the curate’s housekeeper, used the extent of her meager influence, baking extra batches of Eccle’s cakes, to convince the curate to take Jeremy as one of his students. Alice hoped he would continue to study and to even become a curate himself one day, or at least a deacon. To never leave the parish. You’re all I’ve got, Jeremy, she would say. Like the other young men of Porthleven, Jeremy’s future was confined; in a different, more maternal way. Alice’s other directive: keep an eye on Merit. “He’s kin,” she’d say. “Distant, but relative. We’re the only family he has left.” Merit’s mother, a Parisienne, died when he was five, bearing his still-born sister. His father, Alice’s second cousin, lay beneath the crust of Spanish soil, shot through by a republican musket ball. Merit’s brother, impressed by the Royal Navy, was likely dead or drunk, or both, in Singapore, Port Royal, Halifax or some other Godforsaken foreign port. Hide him from trouble, Alice would say, he’s rebellious like his mother, his heart pumps Jacobin blood. And he’s single-minded, like that rooster his father. On this occasion, as on so many others, her competing pleas were impossible to honour. Merit had spent most of his free time in the last month crafting dice from a set of gleaming pig knuckles he’d obtained from the butcher. He was certain he’d devised a pair so subtle in their design and execution that they could not fail. He insisted that he would try them out that Saturday night. We’ll be safe at the Rode, he’d said. Jeremy, despite his misgivings, went along, only able to satisfy one of his mother’s requests. The cousins tumbled out from the back of the tavern onto the moor just as the press gang mobbed through the front. A newly backing wind high above the Rode had corralled the clouds, wrung them of their moonlight, and condensed them into a low ceiling of damp wool. Shafts of yellow from the tavern’s windows reached into the gloaming. Jeremy clutched at Merit’s neck. “Nowhere to hide,” he said, breathless. “What have you done to us?” Merit raised his hand; he was thinking. “Chough Tor,” he said, and he was off north, toward the outcropping where the birds congregated, the choughs; black as stout, with beaks like bloodied marlin spikes. Jeremy loped behind Merit. A memory ghosted through his brain; he was five, struggling to keep up with his two older brothers as they marched to the pond, never looking back, his home-made rod slipping from his shoulder, his line catching and fouling in the gorse, restraining his progress. Five men stamped across the granite lobby of the Rode, making their contribution to the scuff that had worn and polished it dismal black. These men were unemployed miners from the nearby villages of Gweek and Goonhusband. For one reason and another, they were no longer fit for the mines, no longer fit for much of anything beyond snaring other young men for the Royal Navy. They were squat, meaty, rooted to the ground; thick in every sense of the word, made confused and irritable by the lead that dusted their lungs and clotted their blood. They scanned the lounge, passing dull eyes over the few customers: the fat one, snoring loudly, lantern light flickering against the globe of his bald head as it lay parallel to the table; the ancient one, barely visible behind the pewter mug that towered over him, a stinking puddle at his pigeon-toed feet; the two nestled in a blue cloud huffing on their slender, clay pipes, a shuffle of cards between them; the one sitting behind the crown and anchor table, grinning; the bartender mopping a rag at the sticky pool atop the bar. Even these five miners, rejected by the lead wheals at thirty and likely dead by forty five, found the scene pathetic. “Even’ to you Da,” one of them said through a curled lip, “a fine sty you run here.” The bartender continued mopping. “I’s told two fishermen been by.” The miner called Biscuit scraped toward the bar. His colleagues spread out through the lounge. One of them picked up a mug from a table, took a long draught, and spewed it over the snoozer’s bald head. The man woke, crying “You know I can’t swim!” He toppled sideways from his chair. No-one laughed, not even the perpetrator. “You seen em Da? You seen em?” The bartender shook his head. “Who’s swanky you sponge Da?” Biscuit had the innkeeper by his suspenders and was pulling them in left and right across his throat. “May have been,” the old man whispered, raising clouded eyes, “maybe it was they.” Disgusted, Biscuit excavated a wad from the lining of his tortured bronchials and launched it across the bar. If he could finish this task soon, receive his payment, he could be back in town by midnight, drinking himself painless before the headache returned. He jerked the old man’s suspenders. For a moment, a smile threatened, as he imagined drawing the straps across each other as far as they could go and popping the tender’s head from his neck like a daisy from a stem. He tightened. The fabric cut further into the man’s windpipe and goggled his eyes. “No, it t’aint, ‘tis it?” Biscuit said out loud, to no-one but himself, releasing his grip. “T’aint worth the bother. Not t’all.” The old man fell to the floor. Killing the man would only complicate the task. Biscuit spat again, this time in the direction of the fallen man, another futile attempt to rinse the taste of metal from his mouth. He nodded to his colleagues and they proceeded to enter the remaining rooms of the inn, kicking open closets, tipping chests, overturning tables. When they were satisfied all that remained in the inn were old men and their residues, they spilled out the back and headed north. It took about fifteen minutes for Jeremy and Merit to reach the tor. A whiff of ammonia told them it was near. Far off they could hear the rustle of feathers and the ticking of talons on rock, but could see nothing. Merit led, feeling his way around the outcropping until he stumbled behind a granite stack in the shape of a crow’s nest. Jeremy followed and joined his cousin. They crouched down, shoulder to shoulder, panting, looking back in the direction they came. With the woolen sky absorbing the soft spill of moonlight, nothing could be discerned across the moor. Narrow slits, emanating from the windows of the distant Rode, stared back at them like a pair of beastly eyes. For several minutes, there was only the sound of their breathing as they began, slowly, to uncoil. Still, they kept watch on the unblinking Rode. Merit was the first to break the silence. “’Tis a pity about my guinea, though,” he said softly. “Mer?” Jeremy whispered, after a time. “Aye.” “Where’s your special die? Can I see it?” “Why?” “I’d like to grind it beneath my heel.” “You’ll not have it. It’ll lay a golden egg yet.” They were quiet again for several more minutes. “I’m sorry Jem,” Merit said, finally. “Truly I am. It was a hair short of prudent, I see that now.” Jeremy said nothing, so Merit pulled his luck charm from his pocket and ran an index finger down its filament ends. Marianne, his mother, had given him the feather just months before her death. “C’est une plume exceptionnelle mon petit lapin,” she had said in her high, bright voice, gathering him in her arms. It had fallen from the sky, she had explained, as she and her friends had crossed the seventh arrondissement on their way to a parade and demonstration. It was all that Merit had left to connect himself to his mother. “But you understand,” Merit continued, encouraged by Jeremy’s silence. “Them old hens at the Rode were overdue for a plucking. An enterprising man needs a project, needs keeping busy. He might go spare.” Jeremy watched as Merit held the quill by its nib and twirled it. Jeremy thought of his own mother, Alice, probably keeping vigil by the hearth, pouring another tepid cup of tea, imagining the worst. He thought of the cap, sitting half-finished on the side table. I’m the fool, going along with Merit again, aren’t I? More pleasant at home, knitting my cap, purling and casting by the blaze. Part of him longed for the satisfying order and symmetry of a well-executed stitch. Still, he couldn’t deny that the adrenaline-laden blood pumping at his temples and the briny air in his nose had left him invigorated. He couldn’t help imagining himself one of those acrobatic birds whose rookery they’d squatted, out to sea within a couple of beats. Free. “I think we’re out of the soup now Jem,” Merit said. “It’s looking all clear. I don’t see a thing. Can’t hear nothing but the choughs.”