Hoare and the matter of treason cbh-3

by Wilder Perkins

  "But where shall we stow it until we return to Greenwich?" he asked, in part to see whether the gunner would come out with something equally bizarre.

  "Under your mattress, sir, of course."

  So Hoare, the least bit disappointed at his aide's failure to weigh in with a further fancy, put it where he was told.

  The next morning, the admiral heard Hoare's report impassively. As usual, his enormous form was so wreathed in tobacco smoke that he resembled a bull walrus on a foggy floe. The atmosphere was so thick that Hoare could barely restrain his coughs. The admiral did not trouble to do so. From time to time, the ferret Lestrade slid sinuously through the door, deposited a document, and waited for his master's instructions before winding away again. Since Portsmouth's criminal class knew Hoare himself as the Whispering Ferret, Hoare felt some kinship for the man, but little liking.

  "So you have determined that Ambler is dead, eh?" Sir Hugh growled, and wheezed.

  "My man Thoday did, sir," Hoare replied, and explained how.

  "Never mind the details," the other said. "At the inquest- which, at the rate unexplained deaths are occurring in this city, will take place some time after 1815-the jury will bring in the usual: 'Murder, by person or persons unknown.' The man's gone, and that's all there is to it. There are dozens ready to replace him."

  So much for the late Mr. Ambler, Hoare thought. He presented Mr. Goldthwait's opinion of Ambler's established habits, and remarked on the dead man's apparent prosperity.

  "And Mr. Goldthwait, Hoare?" came Sir Hugh's rumble. "What did ye make of Mr. Goldthwait, once ye found him?"

  Hoare's reply was ready. "He knows too much about me. If he knows so much about me… does it not follow that he knows as much about others, not necessarily to their good?"

  "Of course, he does," Sir Hugh said. "It's his job, or part of it. If you suspect Goldthwait on that account, you may as well suspect me."

  "About yourself, sir, for example?" Hoare ventured to add.

  "Me life is an open book, sir," Sir Hugh replied, not rising to the bait. "But, being of no interest to any save myself and my family, it is a book generally closed to outsiders." Rebuffed, Hoare returned to his appraisal of John Goldthwait.

  "He seems remarkably prosperous, too, sir. Has he independent means?"

  "No. He does not. He comes of ordinary folk-his father was a farrier, as I recall, and he has never married. No, Hoare, his prosperity is of his own making. In fact, that, I confess, begins to render me anxious about him."

  Sir Hugh knew when to pause for effect, and he used the pause to break the stem of his cheap clay churchwarden, toss it away, and fill its successor with coarse shag tobacco. Having lit it, he blew a thick blue puff into Hoare's face-not, it seemed to the victim, out of malice, but simply out of carelessness for his guest's comfort. Before continuing his discourse, he gave a loose, satisfied cough and spat copiously into a container on the floor at his side.

  "I have good reason to believe, Hoare, that he gambles. Gambles with cards, playing with men of all classes, whether high or low. And is quite a consistent winner. Has been for some years. Took poor Fox, for example, for more pounds than any Whig cares to think about.

  "Yet nary a whisper has come to my ears that he is a sharper or a flake. His opponents, even though they are generally losers, seldom accuse him of cheating, and those that have done so have never made their charges stick, or attempted to follow them up."

  "Is Mr. Goldthwait wont, by any chance," Hoare whispered, "to respond in the usual way to accusations of… ungentlemanly behavior? I mean, sir, that he may be so formidable a man to meet on the field of honor that… even the bravest prefer not to meet him."

  "Like yourself, Captain Hoare, eh?" Puff, puff. "No, sir. If that were the case, do you not think that the headstrong young bucks about town would be forever calling him out, not so much to prove the man a sharp as to prove their own panache before their friends, and their mirrors? I expect that you, sir, are not unfamiliar with that sort of thing."

  Hoare nodded. Sir Hugh was in the right. Sober men chose to avoid open conflict with him; younger men, drunken ones, and fools not uncommonly sought either to issue a challenge or to provoke one. The pretext generally had to do with his name, but lately Hoare had learned to let stupid remarks of that kind slide off in ways that did not impugn either party's honor.

  "There is more, sir," the admiral said. "I am a simple sailor and no man of accounts, more than is needed to have dealt well enough with navy recordkeeping when I commanded a ship of my own."

  Hoare found it impossible to conceive of this man mountain pacing the weather side of his own quarterdeck, but indeed it must at one time have been so.

  "But," the mountain continued, "I cannot believe that the prosperity which you so shrewdly noted derives wholly from cards. There must be another source, and I dread what it may be.

  "Look at this," he said. "The coded text came to our pigeon loft several days ago, directed to Mr. Goldthwait. Somehow, thank God, one of the idiots in my service misdirected it; otherwise, it would not have reached my eyes, or now yours. Only now has one of those idiots managed to decipher it. No thanks to them, by the way, but to your own wizard. Or 'witch,' perhaps I should say-that remarkable Taylor woman in Royal Duke. For, as you know, it was she that broke the code."

  Hoare took the paper that Sir Hugh placed on the desk within his reach.

  "Acts: nine, one and two," he read, silently.

  "You know the reference, I'm sure," Sir Hugh rumbled.

  "I fear it escapes me, sir."

  " 'And Saul,' " Sir Hugh recited, " 'yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.' "

  "Thank you, sir." Hoare made his whisper sound as humble as he could.

  "The cipher, and the content of the message it bears, have a most uncomfortable familiarity, don't ye think?" Sir Hugh asked.

  "Indeed it does, sir," Hoare said. "It's an inflammatory text. It has much the same character as the messages Taylor unraveled from the documents of the late Captain Spurrier."

  "Precisely so. And, as you will remember, too, the ultimate source of those messages to Spurrier has never been determined. There is, Captain Hoare, every reason to believe that it is French-or at least French-connected. One of Bonaparte's men, Hoare. Who else could it be?"

  The question of the ciphers had troubled Hoare ever since he had encountered his first one, early in last year's inquiry into the blowing-up of Vantage and several sister ships. The texts were generally Biblical in tenor, if they were not actual quotations, and they used Biblical names for writer, recipient, and any third parties. The names were suggestive, like a nudge in the ribs, but-like nudges in the ribs-skirted specificity. The whole topic had been tantalizing; the ciphers could be read, but no one had succeeded in tracing them to their sources or identifying the owners of those nagging Biblical names. Each new accession-there had been three or four-plucked more sharply at Hoare's intellect.

  Hoare had thought before of one possible source, one who, at least as far as he knew, had no connection with the French but had an odd, mad agenda of his own. He debated with himself, then decided to speak up.

  "It could be Sir Thomas Frobisher, sir."

  "Who?"

  "Sir Thomas Frobisher, baronet and knight, of Dorset. He is by way of being virtual master of the entire county, or at least so he believes, and many Dorset folk believe with him. Including Spurrier, the Satanist, who chopped off the heads of those captains not so long ago… and then had the effrontery to drown in his own vomit while my prisoner."

  "Never heard of 'em." Sir Hugh's rumbled admission was rueful.

  Hoare was taken aback. Until now, it had seemed to him that Sir Hugh Abercrombie, like Mr. John Goldthwait, was omniscient.

  "Sir Thomas was Spurrie
r's master, you may recall, sir, at least in county affairs. What if anything he had to do with the atrocities in the South, I cannot say."

  "I had forgotten." The admiral broke his churchwarden's stem with a sharp snap, as if to exorcise his rage at having been found wanting in knowledge. "Go on about him, sir."

  Hoare obeyed. As he felt he must in order to be fair, he stressed the ill feeling that stood between him and Sir Thomas. He described what he perceived as its initial cause-how he, Bartholomew Hoare, had mocked the baronet on the evening of their first encounter with his description of how, instead of riding to hounds as any gentleman would, the Hoares, father and son, engaged in battery. This, as he had explained to Sir Thomas then and explained to Sir Hugh now, involved training bats to catch large insects and return them to their handlers.

  "Like falconry, sir," he explained. "It was a foolish jape, sadly mistimed and fatally misdirected. The misstep did me no good, I am ashamed to say." He paused and awaited his admiral's displeasure.

  Instead, Sir Hugh, rearing back in his enormous chair, began to roar with laughter. That laughter was a daunting thing to hear. Deep and cataclysmic, it could have signaled the drowning of ancient Atlantis.

  "Well, Hoare, that explains why you pricked up your ears so oddly the other day, when I mentioned falconry in connection with our man Ambler. At least, there's that little question answered for me. I had been wondering.

  "But continue about this man Frobisher." Once again, Sir Hugh's bass voice grew grave.

  "The important thing about him, sir," Hoare whispered, "in this connection at least, is his absolute conviction… that he, and not our present Majesty, is the proper wearer of the English crown."

  "A peculiarity, to be sure," the admiral said, "but hardly a matter of gravity. After all, Bedlam is crawling with men who imagine themselves Jesus Christ. They can't all be; the Savior did not, as far as I know, claim to extend to His own person His miraculous ability to multiply the loaves and fishes. If He had, I should imagine, the matter would have preoccupied all Christian divines for centuries past, with an undoubtedly beneficial effect upon the souls of us all."

  "Indeed, sir. In the case of Sir Thomas's delusion, though, the trouble is that he has a certain odd attraction… which has made him, as I said a moment ago, the effective dictator of Dorset. Not only that, he has extended that strange magic… to the House of Parliament in which he sits. I have been told, by Sir George Hardcastle and Mrs. Selene Prettyman, among others-"

  "What Prettyman says, I find, is generally to be taken as absolute fact," Sir Hugh observed. Puff, puff.

  "— that he has a number of adherents in Parliament who might better be described as devotees, if not worshipers. You would know more about that than I, sir."

  "I blush to say that I had overlooked that," Sir Hugh said unblushingly, "probably because his claim is so typical of that sort of madness. Besides all those miraculous Jesuses, I know of a round dozen King Charleses, divided equally between father and son. As I remember now, he is an uncommon good political man, well able, as you observe, to get his own way.

  "If I may leap to the conclusion to which I believe you are about to come, you suspect of Sir Thomas Frobisher what I have commenced to suspect of John Goldthwait-that he has entered into a conspiracy with the French."

  "Exactly, sir. If Bonaparte should overlook an opportunity to put a spoke in Britain's wheel by fomenting an insurrection against the Crown, it would hardly be the first time. And… if the possibility did not occur to him, there is always Fouche."

  "Ah, yes. That son of a bitch, that ugly little bum-worm…"

  For some minutes, Admiral Abercrombie continued to string out maledictions about his opposite number on the far side of the Channel, as if he were signal midshipman in a flagship, running up orders to the Fleet. Interrupting himself only with agitated puffs at his pipe, he came to anchor only when he swallowed smoke the wrong way, gagged, and in a whisper no stronger than Hoare's, ordered the latter to pound his back. Hoare obeyed.

  "I do not like Goldthwait, Hoare," the admiral gasped at last. "I never have. But you are quite right. Nothing gets past that… never mind. So we have two suspects, of which Frobisher is one and Goldthwait himself the other."

  "Against neither of whom, sir, do we have proof sufficient to take action," Hoare whispered.

  "We, sir-no, you, sir-must find that proof. Or satisfy us both that each of us has let his imagination run riot. I was becoming anxious enough with only Goldthwait on my hands; now you have doubled my anxiety. Go forth, young man, before I suffer an apoplexy. Do your duty; there is not a moment to be lost. You may count on my support-within reason. As you go out, pray send Lestrade in. Good day."

  Chapter VII

  I want you to put together a crew of reliable men to row a watch boat across the Thames at night, say half a mile above the brig."

  " 'Watch boat,' sir? I don't twig. 'Picket boat,' d'you mean?"

  "Damn you, don't pick at me, or I'll pick your nose off and make that mort of yours eat it while you watch, together with its filthy contents."

  The listener blew his nose nervously.

  "Place yourself where you can keep an eye on any boat that approaches Royal Duke from upstream, day or night. You can be fishing, or lobstering, or whatever you think of. Diving for treasure, if you want. When you clap eyes on an officer passenger, you're to intercept him, apprehend him, drown him, d'ye understand?"

  "Aye, yer honor."

  "When you have him, strip him, weight his body, drop it over the side, and bring every speck of his possessions to me. Every speck, understand?"

  "Aye, yer honor. But what if'e's in a navy boat manned wi' fightin' men? My boys may be wild boys, but they ain't so wild they'll go up against trained soldiers or matlows, no way, unless the odds is two to one or better."

  "If that's what you see, then forget it; we'll try something else. But don't think you can fight shy with me, not if you want to keep your head on its shoulders. I'll know, oh yes, I'll know.

  "Now, you and your moll, drink up and get out."

  Titus Thoday appeared able to navigate the warren of London streets through the suffocating blanket of cold smoky fog, with ease. Hoare suspected that one could bring him anywhere into the city, blindfold, and, within minutes, he would have oriented himself and gone about his business. Now, carrying the Pickering portrait gallery under one arm, rolled up like a rather large umbrella or a small set of regimental colors, he conducted Hoare to the steps below Westminster Bridge. There he negotiated on their behalf with a double-scull wherry to take them down to Greenwich. The wherrymen grumbled, but when the price rose high enough, helped them aboard their little craft and set off downstream on the ebb.

  The party approached the riptide under London Bridge without difficulty, despite the fog. Not unskilled in small craft himself, Hoare admired the oarsmen's mastery of this rushing flume. Yet even so, he tensed as they swept under the bridge to the muffled roar of invisible yellow-white waters; less than six hours from now, he knew, those waters would be reversed, and anyone wishing to travel downstream would have to begin below London Bridge, or wait.

  Once through the bridge, Hoare leaned back beside Thoday and relaxed with a sigh. The sounds and the smells were the familiar ones of water, though of freshwater instead of salt. The difference was enormous, of course. He was on the water again, and not cramped into filthy alleys by the towering press of buildings. It was his turn to be at home, and Thoday's to be at sea. Fog or no fog, he could sense that Greenwich lay not far ahead, to starboard. Yes, he mused, there was nothing-absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing, he thought dreamily, messing about in boats. He liked the phrase, and tucked it sleepily into his mental commonplace book. Messing… messing…

  A shout from bow oar brought him back to reality with a heavy crunch. They had rammed, or been rammed by, another craft. Whoever the strangers were and whoever was at fault, they meant the wherry
no good, for they neither shouted in outraged reply nor screamed in panic, but swarmed aboard the double scull out of the fog in a confusing rush. The bow oar was quickly overwhelmed, and Hoare, as he drew his sword, heard him splash into the Thames and go gurgling off. Thames boatmen, like blue water sailors, seldom swam. Beside him, Hoare sensed that Thoday had drawn the blade of his sword cane.

  Stroke oar was more alert than his mate, more courageous, or simply did not want to lose his livelihood and his craft, for he grappled with the first of the boarders. The wherry tilted alarmingly. Thoday lost his balance and began to topple over the side. Hoare heard the slim cane-sword clatter into the wherry's bilges. He grabbed his shipmate under one arm and pulled him back aboard, out of danger, as a second boarder scrambled aft with a rush past stroke oar and his struggling attacker, followed by a third. It was two against two in the dark, then.

  Hoare's own particular foe clawed for his eyes, but a knee in the bollocks stopped him with an agonized gasp, and the clawing stopped. Hoare thrust the heel of his free hand under the man's jaw and pushed, hard. Over he went, backwards. Hoare could now turn to Thoday's aid. As far as he could tell, the man on top was a boarder, for he smelt vile. Thoday, he realized fleetingly, was a cleanly man, as well as lacking his adversary's weight.

  Hoare had his target. Without finesse, he hacked his sword into the boarder's back. With a shriek, the man collapsed upon Thoday. Hoare freed his sword and turned to the struggling pair amidships to see if he could tell friend from enemy. If so, he could bear a hand. What with their thrashing, he could not, and stood helpless.

  But still another boarder was coming aft, balancing himself carefully as he came, as though he, too, knew something about messing about in boats. But, perhaps, not quite enough. Hoare thrust down with one foot, then with the other, setting the double scull a-rocking steeply-so steeply, in fact, that a wash of Thames water came over the larboard coaming. Then he reversed the motion. Back in Canada, up the Saguenay, he had seen French lumberjacks match skills that way on a log. The one who stayed out of the river was the winner. The young Hoare had at least tried this "burling" against a Canadian friend, and had gotten well soaked every time, but he had at least tried it. This opponent had not. Hoare saw him flail his arms wildly, saw him fail to regain his balance, saw him teeter and fall. He fell flat, with a clumsy splash that soaked Hoare's face and shoulders.