Hoare and the matter of treason cbh-3

by Wilder Perkins

  "I have a winning hand, sir," Hoare said, displaying his cards. It had been a close affair; Hoare's reserve had vanished. When, after an increasingly desperate search through his pockets, he had unearthed the ivory carving Lemuel Rabbett had bestowed upon him and offered it in play, it had taken ten minutes of his hardest haggling to gain its acceptance.

  "Your hand, sir, I do declare," Goldthwait said, laying down his own cards-facedown, as always when he had lost, "and your daughter. I believe the pot suffices to pay her ransom. I suppose you would like her returned to your sight, even if it be only a reprieve-"

  "If you please," Hoare interrupted.

  "— so, if you would be so kind, Sir Thomas, as to send one of your people for her…"

  The knight rose and went to the door, where he issued orders to an invisible person waiting on the other side. In moments, Jenny hurtled past him and into Hoare's arms, pale hair flying, uttering muffled sounds. Her mouth was bound across with a length of dark blue silk. She was followed by the familiar, lumbering, pantalooned figure of Mary Green, Royal Duke's former cook. The woman refused to meet Hoare's eyes. Hoare bent to remove his daughter's gag.

  "Ah, ah, ah, Captain! Not yet, sir!" came Goldthwait's warning voice. In his thin hand, Hoare's little pistol was out again, aimed this time at the child, so Hoare desisted. Jenny made an urgent gesture.

  "She needs to relieve herself, can't you tell?" Sir Thomas said in a disgusted voice. He took Jenny by the hand and led her to the commode, from which he withdrew the necessary article. He turned his back while she squatted.

  "Really, Mr. Goldthwait. Have you no sensibility whatsoever?" he said.

  "Not really, Sir Thomas." The man's expression, so consistently benign, appeared to crack a little. "I am little acquainted with the needs of children.

  "Sit down over there, child," he said, pointing at a cricket in the far corner of the room. Jenny looked appealingly at the helpless Hoare, then obeyed his nod. Green followed, whipped a lanyard out of her pocket, and secured Jenny's legs and arms to the little walnut footstool. She was not rough, but very firm. Jenny had more sense than to struggle. Before long, she nodded and was asleep. Green disappeared-to resume her guard over Eleanor, Hoare supposed. He and Mr. Goldthwait played on, under the increasingly restive eye of their host.

  A few hands later, the tension in the room rose to a quiet peak when Mr. Goldthwait declared a complicated hand, and reached for the pot.

  "Keep your hand where it is, sir," Sir Thomas said. "How do you find a winning hand in those cards?"

  "Why, there they are for any man to read," was the reply.

  Whether intentionally or inadvertently, Goldthwait had misread his cards.

  "Unless you can improve the cards you have shown us, sir, you have not won this hand," the knight said.

  Goldthwait shook his head. Hoare showed his hand and took the pot.

  "Pray do not do that again, sir." Sir Thomas's voice was icy.

  To his embarrassment, Hoare nearly committed the same gaffe two hands later, but caught himself before either of his companions noticed. Goldthwait must content himself with a sibilant "tsk, tsk."

  Shortly after the church had rung three o'clock, they were startled in midhand by an eruption of voices outside the door. Above her silken gag, Jenny's eyes popped open in alarm.

  "See what that's about, Frobisher, and silence it." Mr. Goldthwait's voice was curt, and Hoare noted that, for the first time, he omitted the honorific. Could he be tiring? Before Sir Thomas could obey, the door was flung open, and the Esquimau appeared, distraught.

  "Zur, zur!" he half shouted. "Three of them Lunnon blaggards got into yer brandy, an they be a-runnin'…"

  The racket was enough without his man's cry; Sir Thomas leapt from his seat and disappeared out the door, followed by Mr. Goldthwait.

  "Damn you, sir," Hoare heard the knight croak. "Have you no decency? Bad enough that you should persist in toying His outraged voice faded into the bowels of the house.

  Hoare was alone, with Jenny. Could he…? Well, if he were to wait until the dispute died down, only to pick up the charade where it had left off, he would be left still helpless, his womenfolk clutched between Goldthwait's mischievous paws. He might sweep Jenny away and elope out a window… but behind him, his Eleanor would remain trapped.

  Putting his finger to his lips with a speaking look at Jenny, he removed his shoes. He tiptoed over to the cricket on which his pinioned daughter was now bouncing up and down like an India-rubber ball, untied the silken gag and pocketed it. Then he cast off the lanyards.

  "Don't look, Da," Jenny whispered, scrambling again for the commode and its chamber pot. "I can't wait."

  "I can't wait, either, child," Hoare whispered in answer. "I must get to your mother while the getting's good. Hide, girl, till I return."

  On his way out, he filched a look at his opponent's hand- and paused, astonished. Both were incomplete, the interruption having taken place before Sir Thomas had dealt either Mr. Goldthwait's final card or Hoare's own. Played out, Goldthwait's cards would have made for an interesting hand.

  Far more interesting-astonishing, in fact-was that each hand held the same card: the trey of clubs. Someone had been cheating. It could only have been Sir Thomas. But how? And why? And which player had the knight-baronet been attempting to help or to hinder?

  Thereupon, Hoare himself cheated. Vengefully, he threw both hands into the glowing grate, and followed them with the rest of the deck.

  There was no time for any more of this. He gave the air a resounding, encouraging kiss for the vanished Jenny's ears alone, and departed.

  Outside the frowsty library, the hallway was empty, as was the broad, elegant stairway. The hullabaloo came from behind the baize doors behind it. He tiptoed up the stairs, ears pricked to catch the sound of anyone returning from backstairs. Up the curving treads he went, remembering the trick he had learned as a lad on the way to and from his raids on the midnight buttery and keeping well to the wall so as to minimize any possible creaks. Across a shadowy windowed landing, up the second flight to a cross corridor. To his left, he saw nothing but deeper shadows; to the right, some distance down the corridor, candlelight streamed from an open door. He would go that way first.

  As he crept along, close to the side of the corridor with the candle-lit doorway, he realized that the sound of the turmoil below-stairs was now coming to him from ahead.

  And he was about to be discovered. Another person was approaching him from the direction of the affray, coming through the dimness at Hoare's own cautious crawl. Hoare stopped, as did the other. He brought forward a hand, and the stranger did likewise.

  The move broke Hoare's illusion. Once again, he had failed to recognize his own likeness, this time in a full-length mirror sited where the corridor made a dogleg. Who was he, then? he wondered fleetingly, and crept on.

  At the end of the corridor, he saw more candlelight, a banister, and a figure leaning over it, looking downward. So: the watch had let himself be distracted by the goings-on belowdecks.

  Softly, softly, Hoare crept on, past the open door. Thinking to hear movement within, he risked a peep but could see nothing more than part of a dimly lit bedchamber. He must not tarry.

  Sir Thomas's bullfrog roar sounded from below. On its heels came a screech of rage-Goldthwait's, Hoare hoped, as he crept, crept. And knelt, and grabbed the leaning watch by the heels, and tipped him over the banister into emptiness. He went with a little shriek of horror, crashed into the next flight below, and, as Hoare leaned over the rail in his turn to watch, tumbled onto the painted landing with a crack and lay still. Broke his bloody neck, Hoare hoped.

  But again, he must not tarry. The men below might have overheard the watch's stifled cry; if they had, they would be upon him any second. He retraced his steps to the lighted door, knelt down and crawled into the room. As he expected, his wife was within.

  The chair into which Eleanor Hoare had been bound might be comfortable, but whoe
ver had done the binding was a professional, and she was unable to welcome him with head and eyes. Her mouth, like Jenny's, had been bound, though in her case the silken gag was a proper widowy black. She smelled like a very small child who had been neglected.

  Hoare whipped out of his pocket the keen clasp knife he had procured in Halifax and kept on his person ever since, and cut his wife out of bondage.

  "Excuse me," she said in a whisper of outrage no louder than Hoare's. "I seem to have beshit myself."

  She rose stiffly from the chair, dropped her befouled undergarments, petticoats and all, and hastened to the washstand by the adjacent bed. She reached under it, pulled out the usual receptacle, and squatted over it, splashing audibly as she scrubbed.

  "Ahh," she said. She rose stiffly to kiss her rescuer.

  "There," she said with a mischievous smile. "Let Mary Green and Floppin' Poll wring' 'em out and put 'em on if they wish. I hope they do; that way, I get to shit on 'em both." Her language was not usually so earthy. She must be quite angry.

  "We must gather Jenny and be off," Hoare whispered as they left Sir Thomas's best guest bedroom and bore to starboard for the front stairs.

  At the sound of voices raised still higher, in the hallway below them, they paused on the landing and peered over the banister, just as if they were the guard at the head of the back stairs. Or the occupants of a loge at the Haymarket. They could see clearly down into the well-lighted space. Like a riot between Montagues and Capulets, the civil war had burst out from behind the baize doors into the Frobisher family apartments, and the way to the front door, through which Mr. Goldthwait had passed him so many long hours ago, was blocked now by fighting figures.

  "Hoare!" came an enraged squall. "Goddamn you, Frobisher, you blundering frog-faced fool, where is the man? How could you have let him out of the room? What will Fouche have to say to you when he comes?"

  If only Hoare had thought to open the front door before slipping up here, to simulate his flight. The shouter below them, he could see, was Mr. John Goldthwait, who had left his eternal smile elsewhere and was shouting at the knight-baronet from eighteen inches' distance. Sir Thomas was holding his own. Each man was backed by several followers, who appeared to have called a truce to their own mutual mangling so as to watch the masters slang each other.

  "Oh, for my sling," Eleanor breathed.

  Goldthwait's next outcry was drowned in another of Sir Thomas's croaking roars and a smack. The knight had had enough, and had landed a wisty caster on the smaller man's cheek. Goldthwait went down. Round one to the gentry, Hoare said to himself, wildly. He almost imagined a voice offering five to three on the frog. Well and good, but the crowd still blocked the way downstairs and out. Goldthwait was on his feet again. Desperately, Hoare looked at Eleanor as if, in her eyes, he could find a way to freedom; calmly, she returned his look.

  Behind them, a tiny clink sounded, and they spun toward the dark window in time to see Collis, Royal Duke's sweep and sneak, slide up the sash in dead silence and pocket a little jemmy. Lorimer the burglar has taught him well, Hoare told himself. He slipped within, an expert eel, and moved aside to permit the entry, one at a time, of Titus Thoday, Sergeant Leese, Sarah Taylor, and Jacob Stone, gunner's mate. Stone, Hoare could not help noticing, was wearing shoes-the first time Hoare had known him to do so.

  "Parm me, sir," Collis breathed, "wile I shets thisyer winder. We daresn't want them folk belowdecks a-wakin' up from no draft blowin' down their necks, now does we?"

  "Never mind that now, Collis," Thoday whispered. And, to Hoare, "Well met, sir."

  "Well met, indeed, Mr. Thoday," Hoare whispered. "You come just in time."

  "A deus ex machina, in fact," his wife added.

  "Now, let us collect Jenny and be off," Hoare said.

  "With respect, sir, there's no time for that. Look yonder."

  Below, the supine Goldthwait was staring up at them. Gloom or no gloom, their figures must be clearly visible.

  "Get out of it, sir!" Leese cried, drawing his sword-bayonet with a hiss of steel. "You an' yer lady can't 'elp 'ere. We'll hold 'em off!" Hoare knew the marine was right; it was Leese, not he, who was the hand-to-hand fighter. Besides, he was unaccountably weary. Below, the two factions had recombined and were clustering at the foot of the stairs. Hoare saw Goldthwait raise that handy little pistol, saw the black of its muzzle pointing at his eye, heard its "pop," felt the ball tear at his left ear.

  Hoare gripped Thoday by the sleeve. "Cut Jenny out, then, and bring her with you," he whispered. "She'll be hiding somewhere in the library downstairs. The room to larboard of the main door. Meet us at the Bow and Forest in Gracechurch Street."

  He took a vital second to shake each rescuer's hand, climbed out the still-open window, and drew Eleanor after him. As the two Hoares swarmed down the line up which the Royal Dukes had just swarmed, they heard above them the sound of battle rejoined.

  Chapter XII

  I'll not have it," the leathery man snarled at his companion. "The man's mine. Mine, I tell you, marked for my use and Joseph Fouche's, to help me bring the emperor to London and haul his triumphant chariot down to the Abbey. And I'll have the woman, too, before I'm through. Over and over again, before the dumb bastard's very eyes. Come along, you." He yanked at the hand of the child dragging beside him.

  "I want twenty men, twenty, d'ye hear? Hard men, men of their hands. Go find them. I'll be at the warehouse.

  "Find them by noontime, or I'll cut out your gut and run you into the river at the end of it. Come on, you misbegotten wench, and you, too, you draggle-tailed drab, you. Bring the child with you, and don't let her out of your grips. If she escapes, you'll wish you'd never been born."

  Hoare set his empty plate and mug aside and sat back on the settle he had commandeered in the common room of the Bow and Forest. It was still early in the morning.

  "O'Gock, zur," the Esquimau said. "Dan'l O'Gock, if it please yer worship. I be in Zur Tammas's service, or I were. Gamekeepers an' de like, mostly."

  Hoare looked questioningly into the friendly, swarthy, leathery, heavy-boned countenance of the man. He could be an elderly juvenile Grognard from across the Channel, or perhaps a misplaced muzhik from the Siberian steppes. Hoare knew him to be neither, of course.

  "Very good, Dan'l O'Gock. But you asked to speak to me. Speak on, then, man."

  "I wants to say, zur, 'tis time we O'Gocks brook away from dem Frobishers and stood oop on our own."

  "Go on, O'Gock."

  Hoare could barely follow the man's dialect, a strange variation of heavy Dorset. But since there was no interpreter handy, he must do his best.

  "Well, zur, w'en I were a lad I bin tole dat, long long ago, back in de ol' country, us 'uns was fisher-folk an' 'unters like, mostly. Zeemly us 'uns should be 'unters an' fisher-folk agin, zeein' it be in our blood. Us 'uns bean't 'oss-folk by natur' like youse folk be; no, zur."

  "And what about Sir Thomas?" Hoare asked.

  " 'I'm, zur? W'y, 'e be moithered in de 'ead, 'e be, poor man. An' 'sides, w'ere 'e be a-goin', 'e won't be no 'elp to us O'Gocks, will 'e now?"

  Hoare was not sure himself what was going to happen to Sir Thomas Frobisher, and he hardly knew how Dan'l O'Gock would know better. Perhaps, as the direct descendant of shamanistic savages, the man was privy to secret messages from the ether whose detection was long since lost to the civilized.

  "What can I do for you, then?" he asked.

  "W'y, zur, take me aboard yer brig, for now, an' let me show ye w'at kind o' zailor we'uns be. We be 'andy in zpecial boats, zur, like."

  "You would be, of course," Hoare whispered. "You are of Inuit stock, are you not?"

  O'Gock goggled at him, almost like Sir Thomas.

  "Why, yer worship, that I be, an' my people with me. But, beggin' yer parding, 'ow do ye be knowin' de name we 'uns use to name oursel's?"

  Hoare explained briefly, then asked, "How did you come to be carrying an Irish name, then?"

  "Rackon 'twe
re best de folk could do with de name my great-great tole 'em, yer worship. We' uns don't name our families, ye'll remember. Tale goes, my great-great were named 'Okkak' or like. So de udders, dey done best dey could gettin' roun' de name, zeemly."

  "Well enough. Now. As far as small craft are concerned, O'Gock, that's easily said, and easily done. Tell Stone… you know Stone?"

  "Aye, zur. De barefoot man."

  "Yes. Tell Stone I want you taken downstream to Royal Duke. Tell him what you'll need in the matter of a boat, or, at least, materials to build one of your own. Go now, please. I have much to do, and there is not a moment to be lost."

  "Aye, zur thanky, zur."

  Dan'l O'Gock knuckled his forehead below his heavy shag of coarse black hair, and was gone. If only, Hoare thought, all their needs, including his own, could be met with equal ease.

  Hoare had gone through the previous night with no sleep at all, being preoccupied with chasing to London from Greenwich and then trying to cope with his womenfolks' captors. So he had slept the clock around one time and a half, and then made absentminded sleepy love with his absent minded sleepy wife. In today's dawning, he had dressed and come below, ravenous, to deal with the matters stemming from the events of the last night but one. After putting a tidier plaster over the nick in her husband's left ear, Eleanor had gone about her own affairs-to replace the undergarments she had left behind in the fracas at 18, Gracechurch Street, if Hoare had understood her mission properly in his half doze. Since Sarah Taylor accompanied her, she would not be at personal risk, but, by the same token, the two women could not go far toward rescuing his Jenny for him.

  For, on his rejoining the exhausted Hoare at the inn early the day before-or was it two days? — Titus Thoday's face had been somber.

  "We could not find her, sir," he said. "We ransacked the entire place. We even had Sir Thomas's assistance in pointing out several nooks and crannies that even I would have had trouble in finding without him. I must conclude, sir, that Goldthwait took Miss Jenny with him when he and his people absconded from Sir Thomas's house.