Hoare and the matter of treason cbh-3

by Wilder Perkins

  He could see the other craft now, the one that had carried the boarders. Swinging in the tide, it was drawing alongside them. It was a pair-oar, propelled by sweeps and not by sculls, somewhat longer and beamier than their own craft, and it held a single passenger in its stern sheets. He was near enough to grip, and Hoare gripped him. He pulled him into the double scull, where he threw him into the bilges and sat upon him, panting heavily.

  So sitting, he could give his full attention to untangling stroke oar and his opponent who were still battling in the bilges. Appearing from aft, Thoday gripped one figure's hair. Hoare dropped his sword and followed suit with the other.

  "This one's ours," Thoday grunted, and struck Hoare's man behind the ear with a heavy object. There was silence, broken only by panting breath all around, the gentle wash of water in the bilge, and the smothered whimpers of the visitor upon which Hoare was perching. The perch, he now realized, was a woman. He could tell by its feel.

  "Bert," stroke oar said in a muffled voice. "Where's Bert?"

  Hoare was about to break the news to him that Bert had been lost overside, when the missing man hauled himself wearily up and in, over the wherry's square counter.

  " 'Ere I be, Matthew, no thanks to you," Bert gasped.

  Thoday was breathing heavily. "Well, sir, that's the second time this thing has come in handy." In his hand, he held the falcon figurine from Mr. Ambler's rooms. Even in the dark, Hoare could tell it had drawn blood.

  In the heat of battle, one of the wherry's sculls had been lost overside. Besides, the man Bert was in no condition to row, and Hoare frankly doubted that Thoday had ever learned how.

  "We haven't reached Greenwich yet," he whispered to the man Matthew. "Move us along, if you please."

  "Wot, all by myself, after jest fightin' off a pirate crew? Take an oar yourself, mate."

  "Pipe down and row."

  The man began to complain bitterly.

  "You hardly have a right to complain," Hoare told Matthew between heaving breaths. "Look here… you've gotten yourselves a prize out of this night's work." He had quietly cleated to the scull's counter the pair-oar's painter, which its last occupant had brought aboard with him as any good waterman should.

  "Come on, Bert, bear an 'and," Matthew told his mate.

  "Wot, wif only one oar?" Bert's voice was slurred. " 'Ere then, you, budge over and gimme room." Elbowing Thoday out of his way, Bert stuck the odd scull between the thole pins and took up Matthew's rhythm. They began to make a sidling headway through the fog, the captured pair-oar towing dismally in their wake.

  With Thoday's help, Hoare busied himself with securing their captives, including the woman he had been using in lieu of a thwart. She seemed to be a young person. When she began to protest at being mishandled, in a whispered snarl he ordered her to pipe down if she knew what was good for her. The rasp he produced apparently cowed her, for she piped down and let herself be trussed.

  Allowing for the state of the tide, Hoare judged, the wherry and their captive pirates might have drifted to within hailing distance of Royal Duke. He put his fingers in his mouth and uttered his deafening general-purpose whistle. As he did so, he saw, no more than a few fathoms to starboard, the loom of some vessel. It reached well above their heads, and the wherry was sweeping past her.

  "Ahoy the boat!" came a voice from her deck. Hoare nudged Thoday.

  "Identify me," he whispered.

  "Royal Duke," Thoday called, thus announcing that they were carrying the yacht's commander.

  "Ask 'em if they know her whereabouts."

  "D'ye know where she lies?"

  Hoare could hear a mutter of consultation. Then, "Two or three cables downstream. Atropos lies next below us, then Leopard, then your brig."

  Atropos. Twenty-two guns. Hornblower's sloop. A nothing perhaps, but vastly more powerful in comparison with his own command, just as her captain was vastly more powerful than a mere Commander Bartholomew Hoare. It would have been a pleasure to stop and pay a call on Hornblower, but it would have been neither right nor proper. Besides being a new father, Hornblower, he knew, was preparing his ship for sea and would have no time to waste on a casual midnight call from a subordinate officer, no matter how friendly he might be.

  "What ship is that?" Thoday called to their guide, echoing his commander's whisper.

  "Guerriere!" came the reply.

  "Thank you, Guerriere!"

  They rowed on past two more ghostly forms, before Hoare repeated his shrill whistle. He did so again, and then again, until, muffled perhaps by the fog, he heard a faint call in reply.

  "Pull for the sound, men, pull for the sound," he whispered.

  Alongside the brig at last, Hoare saw all the others, including the dead attacker and the one Thoday had stunned with the falcon, hauled aboard in safety before he hauled himself through the low entry port. Once on deck, he could sort them all out. He ordered Mr. Clay-who, sensible man, had been long abed and appeared with his uniform coat hastily donned over his nightshirt-to see that Matthew and Bert the boatmen were suitably refreshed, then turned to his captives.

  Now that Hoare could see them plain, out on an open deck, he realized that between them he and Thoday, with only minimal assistance from Matthew and none at all from Bert, had defeated four opponents. Five, if one counted the woman, though one should not, for she had been of no consequence in the affray. She alone was on her feet. He himself had pushed two opponents into the Thames, on or under which he presumed they remained. One, dead of the cut into his back, lay staring blankly up into the graying sky. The man Thoday had stunned had come to his senses, more or less, but still sprawled on the deck, muttering. The young woman stood facing Hoare, shivering with fear, cold, or a combination of the two. All hands were soaking wet.

  "All right," Hoare whispered to her. "Which one of you is the leader of this crew?"

  " 'Im," said the woman from between her chattering teeth. She pointed at the stunned man, since he could not yet speak for himself.

  "Well? Who is he? And, for that matter, who are you?"

  "P-P-Poll, sir, if ye please. Floppin' Poll, they calls me."

  "And he?"

  "Dickson, sir. Dick Dickson. " 'E's scurf of a school o' water-flimps… I dabs it up wif'im."

  Thoday saw Hoare's blank expression. "'Beds with him,' she means, sir. He commands a fleet of river-going scroungers… petty pirates. He is new to me."

  "And how did Dick Dickson and you, and his other friends, come to take us on?" Hoare whispered.

  "Dunno, sir. All I know is, Sol come to the lurk an' took Dick aside. I hollered, o' course. I 'eard 'im tell me Dick to get a crew togewer an' lay off Grinnage an' nobble any wherries wot come dahnstream. You was the first come by, sir, worse luck. The perisher, 'e din't tell us you wasn't no flats. Nah look wot ye done to me cove. I'll 'ave the lor on fez, I will."

  Hoare could not help admiring Floppin' Poll's reviving spirit, so he forbore to point out to her the illogic of calling the law on him, the gang's intended victim. Besides, she was turning blue. One of the female Royal Dukes, McVitty, the librarian with permanent spectacles, was loitering about, looking anxiously at her. He should think of her as a Royal Duchess, he supposed.

  "Get her below, McVitty, will you, and turn her over to Tracy?" Tracy, surgeon's mate, had been a medical student at St. Bart's, but had married unfortunately and run off, as he thought, to sea.

  "Aye, aye, sir. Come on, woman." McVitty hoisted one of the other woman's arms over her shoulder and half-supported her to the yacht's fore hatch, where Hoare lost sight of them.

  "Best to get this one down to Tracy, too, sir," Mr. Clay advised. "He's breathing peculiarly."

  "Make it so, Mr. Clay," Hoare said. He went below to his pigeon-smelling cabin, and turned in. It had been a long, adventurous day.

  Back aboard Royal Duke at last, weary and confused, Hoare lay long abed before he could compose himself for sleep. Sleeplessness was an unusual thing for Bartholomew Hoare;
ever since his first lonely nights as a mid, he had dropped off as quickly as any other sailor. It was a skill necessary for survival, he thought as he stared up through the dark at the deck beams a foot above his nose. A sailor must learn early to take his sleep as he could find it, generally in all-too-short snatches, generally hungry, often wet. Compared with those days and with other ships, his state tonight was one of luxury.

  He managed to put the late encounter behind him, and think back to the preceding day and those three damnable inquisitions, one after another.

  Something, he thought, had been disturbing Sir Hugh deeply-something besides the grave matter that the massive man had described, something behind that which he had not wished to disclose. Something personal, perhaps. Certainly, Sir Hugh's state of health must be distressing him. But Hoare was too tired to think further, and fell asleep.

  Upon awakening, he lay for a space, wandering idly across the meadows of his memory, stopping once in a while to browse off some pleasant morsel, and overlooking the weeds for now. He had begun to share his meadow with Eleanor, only to find that she had a similar meadow of her own, to which she was making him, too, welcome.

  He paused in mid-browse, upon realizing that there was someone else in his cabin. When he opened his bleary eyes, they hit upon the face of Eleanor herself, regarding him with her usual serenity from within the depths of Sir Hugh's enormous swinging chair. He sat up too suddenly and struck his head a stunning blow on the deckhead. She was supposed to be safely tucked away with her father, well north of London. Yet here she was.

  "I had… thought you in Great Dunmow, visiting your papa," he said as soon as he could speak coherently.

  "As you can see, I am not," she answered. "I am sorry to have startled you. Does your head hurt?"

  "Not much," he said, sitting up and rubbing it. "I am truly delighted to see you." Indeed, he was. Every day since they first met on the shingle of Portland Bill, he had become fonder of her.

  "What moved you to change your mind and join me here?" he asked.

  "Well, it was you yourself, for one thing," she said. "As time goes by, I grow fonder of you. I don't understand why.

  "There was another reason," she said, somewhat later. "More than one, in fact. It seems that I have become accustomed to my independence-at least, from my father and my brothers. Jack, my childhood protector, is long gone to Pondicherry, where he is making his fortune a-shaking the pagoda tree like that Lord Manymead you tell me about. In his absence, Gerald rules the roost, our father included. He is more the bully than ever. And poor Jude-well, he always was a scrub, I fear.

  "No, I prefer my own household, my own little ward, my own people. And my own husband, thank you very much, sir. " She nuzzled his shoulder where it joined his neck. "Now, tell me your tale. What dragons have you slain lately, for king and country?"

  Hoare gave her a drastically curtailed precis.

  "You seem to have learned a great deal, Bartholomew, while on the North America station," she said. Her voice was slightly acid. "In addition, of course, to getting married. This 'burling' you described, for instance. Why, I should not be surprised to learn that you learned gambling as well as the other naughty habits-those I enjoy so much."

  Hoare startled and gulped. His past, in fact, held a secret that, while it would not be held disgraceful in the eyes of the world, he preferred to keep to himself. Stationed in Halifax as second in a sloop during the closing days of the fratricidal American war, he had taken up cards. He had been almost as lucky at the table as he had been earlier in the rebellion, when he had snatched up a small fortune in prize money while still a mere midshipman.

  However, his shame derived from neither the gambling itself nor his good fortune in it. The shame was that, wrongly accused of cheating by a spirited young French-Canadian seigneur who had lost heavily to him at a card game, honor had compelled him to call the man out. Georges-Louis Honore Laplace was an inexperienced stripling, though a creditable shot like most of his fellow countrymen, but Hoare had already been out almost as many times as he had years. In the ensuing encounter, he had missed his aim, which was to inflict a mere gentle chastisement, and had severely wounded his opponent.

  During his long convalescence, young Laplace was attended by his slender younger sister Antoinette. Once, when duty allowed him ashore, young Bartholomew had visited his victim's sickbed below the Citadel, met the sister, and lost his heart to her.

  Hoare's eloquence-for ten years of normal speech still remained to him-had persuaded her. He had even been willing to be married in the small Roman church that served the French colony. But the fact that he could not convert and still keep his precious commission had caused an estrangement to arise between his bride's people and himself. This must have weighed, he always thought, in their decision to return to the wilds of Quebec. They took with them the daughter Antoinette had died in bearing him. All of this-the birth, Antoinette's death, the family's return to Canada, had taken place while Hoare was at sea in Beetle, helping to wind up the fratricidal American war. He had never seen their child-Leticie, the name the sour-faced cure had shown him in the baptismal register upon his return to Halifax. He had never even learned whether or not she bore her father's family name, and he was of two minds on the subject. He did not wish her to be nameless; yet on the other hand, if the girl should grow up to move in Anglophone circles, his own name would carry invidious connotations.

  He was irrational on the topic, he knew, but Hoare blamed Antoinette's death on the good fortune he had experienced in play with her brother, which had resulted in his challenge. He had therefore sworn solemnly that never again would he touch a card. He had kept his pledged word.

  But Eleanor was still speaking, more or less into his ear.

  "Besides, Bartholomew," she said, "there is another reason for my descent upon you. There were strangers in Great Dunmow, watchful strangers, watching me. I did not trust them.

  Now, if you compare it with Little Dunmow, Great Dunmow may be a metropolis, but it holds no more than a hundred folk, young and old, and, were something untoward to take place, I would find myself without protection. So I up and came down to Greenwich."

  "Leaving our household behind, madam?" Hoare whispered. "That makes little sense."

  "No, my dear. I brought the entire household along-Tom, Agnes, Jenny, Order the cat, Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all. It required the hiring of a wain."

  "I should imagine so," he said. "If we are to continue junketing about England like so many gypsies, we must betake ourselves to a wainwright and have a vehicle built to our order, from the keel up."

  "And you shall give it a new name for every voyage, the way you did Devastation, or whatever your pinnace was last named, before you decided to settle on a consistent name for her."

  "Nemesis." Hoare's voice was absent. "But tell me more about these strangers."

  "I have little more to tell you," she answered. "In a metropolis like Great Dunmow, strangers stand out, especially when they loiter about without any visible reason for doing so. They were townsmen, it seemed, shifty, and not overly strict about leaving the possessions of others alone. As I said, I did not like them or the oh-so-subtle watch they kept on me, so I came here."

  "And where did you leave your wainful of family?"

  "Oh, as to that, dear Jane's cousin Augustine-imagine, Bartholomew, the foolishness of his father, John Austen, naming one of his sons Augustine-has gone off with his people to Jamaica on some business of his wife's family, and his house was to let. It is the other side of Blackheath, not more than half an hour's drive from the quay opposite Royal Duke. Very suitable it is, too. You shall see it and take proper command there as soon as the Service permits.

  "And-oh! I quite forgot. I am sorry. Bartholomew, Tracy said I was to give you the news that his patient died. The man. He never recovered consciousness; 'a depressed fracture of the cranium,' he said. So there goes one of your sources of information. I would not care to be your prisoner, sir; they do
tend to die off while in your custody."

  "Damn." As Hoare drew on his breeches, he remembered, not for the first time, that his predecessor in Eleanor's affections had been an eminent physician and surgeon-much of his knowledge had rubbed off on his wife, as Hoare's own interests were evidently doing as well.

  How Eleanor had guessed, Hoare did not know, but he had indeed been sure that, with skilled interrogation by Thoday and himself, he could have persuaded the leader of the river pirates to disclose the identity of the man Floppin' Poll had named as "Sol." Now only the mort herself remained as a source.

  Floppin' Poll was of no help at all. Recovered from her disabling chill, she had recovered her spirits as well, and would not be coerced into more than describing the man "Sol."

  Moreover, her description was null. Sol could have been a masked Chinaman or a black Fijian, for all she knew. He was utterly featureless. Besides, as Hoare and Thoday agreed when they stepped aside out of the young woman's hearing, she was hardly the most intelligent or observant creature alive.

  "To tell the truth, sir, she's of no use to us as she sits," Thoday said. "I suggest that we have her followed and watched. More than likely, Sol will want to learn the outcome of the little adventure he arranged for us, and will find her to interrogate her. A competent watcher should be able to detect his approach, leave the woman, and follow him."

  "An excellent idea, Thoday. Have you a recommendation among your shipmates? A 'competent watcher'?"

  Hoare added hastily, "Other than yourself, of course."

  Slightly chagrined, Thoday thought for a moment, then nodded.