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Updated: June 27, 2025
It was very clear to me that no meeting on level terms was in front of me, and when I got into a large, brilliant room where some dozen splendid ladies and as many elegant, easy-mannered gentlemen were assembled, I felt inclined to turn tail. "Empress." It was the exact word. Master Freake put his arm in mine and led me towards her.
I got him in unseen without and unnoticed within, for the Colonel and Master Freake were again at their arguments of state, hammer and tongs, and they minded the click of the door behind them no more than the crack of a spark at their feet. Indeed the Colonel said "Pish!" with great vehemence, and Master Freake's "My dear sir!" had a shake of pepper in it.
He was just concluding his story on my return, and without interrupting him, I clumsily thrust the hat on her head and flung the coat over her shoulders. "Master Freake," she said, in her sweetest bantering tones, "my servant, as he absurdly calls himself, is really an artist in helping people.
"Master Wheatman means," explained Mistress Waynflete, "that he saved me from my Lord Brocton's clutches at the imminent risk of his own life." She stretched out her hands and touched the holes in my coat with her white, slender fingers. "My lord's rapier made these," she said. "An inch to the left, my friend," quoth Master Freake, "and you'd have been as dead as mutton.
Master Freake was talking with the Prince as composedly as if they had been friends of old standing. We had missed the beginning of their talk, but it was plain that Charles had expected a recruit and was disappointed. "And why do you stand aside from us both?" he asked. "Sir," said the sedate merchant, "I am not interested in making kings." "What then?" "Kingdoms, sir."
He refilled his glass and then, leisurely and with his eyes dreamily fixed on the fire, loaded his pipe with a new charge of tobacco, and went on smoking. "Are you a Jacobite?" suddenly asked Margaret, looking inquiringly at Master Freake. "Dear me, no, Mistress Margaret," was the frank reply. "But you need not curl those sweet lips of yours, for neither am I a Hanoverian."
"Stap me!" cried his lordship. "His name's Weir!" "He will know me better if I call him Turnditch," said Master Freake icily. He spoke unmistakable truth. I could see the shadow of the gallows fall across the man's face. What stiffening there was in him oozed out, and he stood there wriggling in an agony of apprehension, like a worm in a chicken's beak.
Master Freake, who had not spoken a word, dismounted, and I led the mare into the wood and hitched her reins over a bough. Then I returned to the man I had saved, and found him looking calmly down on the man I had killed. The black vizard was now soaking in a horrid pool of blood and brains. I stooped, and with trembling fingers moved it aside and revealed the features of the dead man.
On a Wednesday morning in the middle of February the "Merchant of London" swung into Boston Harbour on a full tide and was moored fast by the Long Wharf. Master Kilroot hurried me ashore to the house of the great Boston merchant, Mr. Peter Faneuil, to whom I carried a letter from Master Freake. It was enough.
Brocton turned white as a sheet, and the old rogue shook as a dead leaf shakes on its twig before the wind strips it off. There was in them none of the family pride which keeps the great families agoing. "I opened the letter. I mastered its contents. I still have it," continued Master Freake, every sentence, like the crash of a sledge-hammer, making these craven bystanders shake at the knees.
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