John Wesley “Diamond Jack” Parker
Character history – John Wesley Parker was born April 1, 1846, in New Orleans; the son of Elvira Parker, wife of Jonathan Parker, a Methodist preacher. John was the elder of a pair of identical twins; Jonathan naturally named his boys after the founders of Methodism, the brothers John and Charles Wesley.
Although the Parker boys were identical in appearance, their demeanor was as different as night and day – John, who quickly adopted the nickname “Jack”, was polite and mannerly; Charlie was a rowdy boy, always running with the Creole gangs.
The twins’ fifteenth year was event-filled. In January of 1861, Louisiana voted to secede from the United States of America, joining the Confederacy. That same month, Elvira revealed that she was pregnant again. Despite the news, Jack was left to celebrate his 15th birthday without his brother, because Charlie ran away to “go fight the Yanks with General Lee.” The war actually erupted in mid-April of that year.
In June, in the middle of a difficult labor, Elvira suddenly called for Jack and sent the doctor and midwife packing from the room – she desired a private conference with her son. In obvious pain, his mother told Jack that she had been unfaithful to his father one time in her life – 15 years ago. Jack and Charlie’s hereditary father was not the pillar of the community Jonathan Parker, but a suave, aging riverboat gambler named Stephen Hoyle. She told Jack that she regretted her infidelity, but never regretted being a mother to her boys. An hour later she died giving birth to Jack and Charlie’s baby brother Samuel.
Jack was stunned by his mother’s revelation. A week later, he stowed away on the Natchitoches (pronounced NAK-ih-tesh – I know it’s weird, don’t ask me), a paddle-wheeled riverboat, having decided to seek his father, or at least information about him. Naturally the crew discovered him and brought him to the captain, a gruff man named Sam Reed. Reed was about to throw the young man overboard, but Jack threw himself on the captain’s mercy, spilling his pitiful tale in just such a way that touched the old river-rat’s heart.
Of course, Reed knew who Stephen Hoyle was; the gambler had steamed up and down the Mississippi hundreds of times on dozens of boats including the Natchitoches, over a long and illustrious career. Reed offered Jack a job as a deckhand, and Jack readily accepted.
The old captain and some of the older members of the crew regaled Jack with tales of the illustrious Stephen Hoyle, not least of which was that he claimed to be the son of the late, great games rules expert, Edmond Hoyle. Of course, the crew opined, this was hogwash; Stephen claimed to have been fathered during Hoyle’s final trip to New Orleans, despite the fact that Edmund was more than 90 years old at the time. It was on the Natchitoches that Jack received his first introduction to the gambling lifestyle and the game of poker.
Less than six months after Jack joined the crew, the Natchitoches was commandeered by the Confederacy to carry troops on the Mississippi. Jack took his pay and bought passage on a British steamer headed for London. Arriving in early 1862, Jack lived in London for the next 14 years, making periodic attempts to contact the Hoyle family. After an initial meeting at which Jack failed to produce any proof of his relation to the family (nor any interesting tidbits about Great Uncle Edmond), they refused to see him again. Jack traveled extensively throughout Europe, honing his skill at casinos throughout the continent, including Monte Carlo. During one of these games, Jack won a curious trinket, a brooch consisting of a sizeable diamond set into a cloisonné red diamond shape reminiscent of the playing card suit.
Of course, Jack explored the British and European cities and countryside during his self-imposed expatriation, and read voraciously. Of course he devoured his grandfather’s texts – A Short Treatise on Whist and Hoyle’s Book of Games. He also read popular European fiction; his tastes tended toward the new burgeoning genres of gothic horror, science fiction, and fantasy – Shelley’s Frankenstein, the early sci-fi of Jules Verne, and the work of Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. He also devoured penny dreadfuls, and whatever he could obtain from overseas. The works of the recently deceased New England author Edgar Allen Poe were among his favorites.
In 1867, one of his frequent jaunts took him to the western England town Hurst Green. While enjoying the small-town pubs and hostels, and the bucolic atmosphere, Jack read the Poe tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which features the nigh-superhumanly insightful detective C. Auguste Dupin. As he finished the story in the local pub, he thought he heard a child’s voice outside calling “Hoyle! Hoyle!” Intrigued, he investigated and tracked down the child, but discovered that instead of “Hoyle”, he was calling “Doyle”, the surname of a young friend. The eight-year-old boys, James and Arthur, were students at the local Jesuit academy. Amused by the misunderstanding, he gave the boys the story he had just finished reading.
Back in England, another Poe story led Jack to a life-changing discovery. While reading the writer’s treasure-hunting tale “The Gold-bug”, Jack was struck by the impression of familiarity during the story’s code-cracking sequence. A week later, he realized that the typographical gibberish of the treasure map’s cipher reminded him of some of the scoring diagrams and hand layouts in his grandfather’s work.
Although he initially dismissed this similarity as simple coincidence, the thought stuck in his mind. One evening, he idly began to examine one particularly cipher-like scoring diagram in Book of Games as if it actually *were* a cipher. As he was far from an expert cryptographer, Jack toiled for weeks on the “puzzle”, as he thought of it. At times, as he was about to give up, a frustratingly almost-meaningful phrase would appear as if by magic to fire his obsession.
Finally in October 1870, Jack hit upon a phrase that made perfect sense – and led to other phrases that made sense, until he had a whole short passage decoded – but that passage was almost as cryptic as the cipher itself.
In his coded passage, Hoyle referenced spiritual, otherworldly beings he called “demons”. The passage mentioned that these beings wielded great magical power, and could be forced to serve humans of strong will. Most importantly, the passage detailed a relatively simple process for catching a brief, shadowy glimpse of the demons in their home realm.
Although the process involved the use of a mildly hallucinogenic mushroom (ground fine and smoked), it convinced Jack to continue his cryptographic study of his grandfather’s writings. He read everything he could locate about ciphers and codes, even retracing the steps Edmond himself had taken as he had attempted to research the magical arts. He visited libraries in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris. By 1876 he had decoded and practiced enough to activate some few simple – though useful – hexes.
Jack continued to gamble successfully during his magical studies, and, in 1876 was flush with success at the tables. In August of that year, while conducting the ritual to gaze once more upon the shadowy Hollow Man, Jack was instead plagued by a vision of his father, ill in bed, attended by doctors. Jonathan Parker appeared pale and weak as a dying man.
Jack immediately booked passage on the HMS Norris, a steamer bound for New Orleans. After a financially disastrous voyage during which Jack lost the lion’s share of his winnings due factors including sea sickness and worry, he arrived two months later, to find the city of his birth and childhood greatly changed.
Appearance – Jack Parker is 5’10” tall and slim, with straight dark brown hair and piercing blue eyes. He sports a thin mustache and smokes fragrant hand-rolled cigarettes by way of a short ebony cigarette holder. The smoke combines the scents of fine tobacco and clove with a hint of something undefinable, but reminiscent of brimstone. He typically wears a fancy gray or black suit and worn but well-polished black boots, a black Stetson, and the red diamond brooch worked into a Western-style bolo tie. He carries no obvious weapons; most often his hands are busy flipping or one-handed-shuffling a deck of cards which he seems to pull from and return to nowhere as the situation dictates.
Demeanor – Jack is still as polite and affable as he was in his childhood, but his conversational skills have matured and taken on the quality of a well-traveled man of the world. Although not classically handsome (but not an ugly man either), Jack can exude an almost palpable charismatic aura when he chooses; and friends, enemies and strangers alike often find themselves agreeing with his oh-so-reasonable propositions. Jack’s hands are restless, always fiddling with cards, or spinning a coin, or toying with whatever small objects happen to be nearby.
Note – Possible conflict: Jack’s father may not take too kindly to his cards; I don’t think Methodists approved of them in those days.
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Next post - A character introduction for a game in which I planned to play an older version of Jack, settled down and running a saloon.
