Jack Absolute
4 total works
London 1759 and Jack's life is easy. A scholar at Westminster School, a master with cricket bat or billiard cue, the leader of a gang of bucks about the Town, he has both a girl he worships...and a courtesan teaching him the more basic arts of love. Yet he plans to give up all carousing, sit the examinations for Cambridge, find a career in any field he chooses. If he can just stay out of trouble for one night...From the billiard halls and brothels of London to a clash of Empires on the Plains of Abraham, Jack life is forever altered by the tragedies of that night. Through duels, battles, frantic escapes and a brutal winter spent in a cave in Canada, Jack learns the truth of his father's words...as well as a dozen things to do with a dead bear. A year on, the schoolboy will vanish, a man appear. But first he must learn to kill. To come of age, Jack Absolute must be blooded.
In 1777, Jack Absolute is famous...as the dashing lover in Sheridan's famous comedy "The Rivals". However, this notoriety comes as something of a shock to the 'real' Jack Absolute when he disembarks at Portsmouth after four months at sea, and seven years in India...Thus we meet the dashing Mister Absolute - rogue, duellist, charmer and Captain in the Light Dragoons. He is everything that Sharpe is not, he is both the epitome of the English gentleman and his nemesis. He leaves behind him a trail of cuckolded husbands, excited lovers and dead bodies...In the War of Independence, Jack has to leave London in a hurry after a duel goes hideously wrong. But he soon finds himself in a fight for his life in the colonies.
On his return voyage to England, Jack helps in the defeat of a privateer, gaining a friend in a charismatic Irishman, Red Hugh McClune, along with a large share of the prize money and a nasty dose of cholera. Saved by Red Hugh, Jack convalesces in Bath where he falls in love with the man's beautiful cousin, Laetitia. But this romance soon turns to tragedy. For there is more than love disguised in Bath. The Irishman is using the affair to lure Jack from his rooms that overlook the Circus and use them for political intrigue: on the day set for the elopement, the King is coming to Bath and Red Hugh plans to assassinate him - for the exiled King James III and all Jacobites. Jack foils the plot but, because he owes him his life, allows the Irishman to escape the noose. Red Hugh flees to Rome, taking Laetitia with him. Jack pursues to infiltrate the enemy. But recognised and betrayed by Red Hugh, he spends the winter in jail. He escapes to discover that Laetitia has married an aged Roman count to gain money and power for the cause, and that Red Hugh has gone to Portugal to join an Irish regiment raised to fight the Spanish.Jack's own regiment, the 16th Dragoons, is also there and Jack rejoins them to fight the war, charge with the cavalry at Valencia de Alcantara and defeat the schemes of the Irish traitor .
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