So the Bunch of Grapes was a tidy if slightly battered place, well lit and smelling faintly of good ale. The only occupants Hoare could see were several groups of what looked like respectable workingmen and a small party of young sprigs.
The occupants all looked up when they saw an officer enter, then returned to talking—one quartet, quite openly, about last week’s raid of the revenue men on a well-traveled smuggler’s route. They seemed to think a rival gang had ratted on them.
“They better not start anything with us,” one said. “We’ll sort ’em out like we did last time.”
“Wasn’t us as done it,” said a tidy man at another table. “Must have been Ackerley’s boys stung ’em out.”
“They didn’t do no such thing,” said Jaggery, whom Hoare now sighted in a corner, accompanied by a very small, wan girl child with enormous black eyes that seemed to look him through and through. “I ’appen to know.”
The child caught the man’s attention with a yank on his sleeve. Upon sight of Hoare, his eyes went wide.
“An’ how the ’ell would you know, Mr. Jaggery? It’s not your line o’ trade,” the tidy man commented.
“Softly, softly, friends,” said a middle-aged man behind the bar. “There’s gentry present.” Though he wore a scar across his nose, he also wore a clean green cloth wrapped about his waist and a polite expression on his ruddy face. Jaggery sat back with a resigned look and glanced at his young companion.
“We haven’t seen you here for a bit, Mr. Hoare, sir,” the scar-nosed man said. “Have you been at sea, then?”
“Not really, Mr. Greenleaf,” Hoare whispered. “Just working for His Majesty and taking a bit of a journey now and then, in Serene.”
“So. She’s Serene these days, sir?”
“Not now. I turned her into Alert as soon as we got into harbor today.”
Several of the other guests laughed knowingly, but Jaggery’s little companion looked perplexed and dared to speak up. “What’s a lert, Da? A neel, like, or a sole?” she asked, to more laughter. She blushed and hung her smooth ash-blonde head.
“I’ll buy you a pint,” Hoare said to Jaggery, “if you’ll introduce me to your friend and give me some news.”
Jaggery hesitated, looking for a way out of this, then resigned himself to the broadside to come and looked heavenward.
“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” he said. “Two pints, then, Mr. Greenleaf.”
“And a glass of Madeira for…?” Hoare added.
“Me dorter Jenny,” Jaggery said.
“Just a minute, then.”
Greenleaf disappeared through a door behind the bar and returned with a black cobwebbed bottle. He took a corkscrew and bent to open it, holding it between his knees in the old-fashioned way. The cork came out with a soft pop, and the heady tropical fragrance of a superb Madeira replaced the homely scent of ale in the atmosphere of the Bunch of Grapes.
“I’ll change my mind,” Hoare whispered. “I’ll take Madeira, myself. That stuff smells like nectar.”
“She orter, Mr. ’Oare,” Greenleaf said as he poured the dark wine into two clean, coarse glasses. “She’s been layin’ there in the dark, in me back room, for nigh onto ten years, with ’er friends an’ relations.” He poured Jaggery’s pint. “There you are, Mr. ’Oare,” he said.
Hoare paid him and brought his purchases to the table where the old gunner and his daughter, Jenny, were waiting.
Ordinarily, Hoare would have described Janus Jaggery as an oily faced man as well as a two-faced one. Every time Hoare saw the man he was peering out from under his mop of greasy hair and whining through his gray-brown beard about the pain of his deformed left hand, his warped legs, and the buffets fate was forever dealing him. Here with his daughter, though, he certainly wore the better of his two faces. He now looked sly, but benign. Jenny Jaggery would be five or six years of age, Hoare guessed. In a threadbare frock that would have covered her twice, she was a wisp. But someone other than her father must have the care of her, for she and her frock were clean, though drab.
“’Ere’s to yer good health, Mr. ’Oare.” Jaggery took a deep draft of his ale and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
Hoare’s first sip of the Madeira told him that, like a fortunate butterfly, he was sipping nectar.
“Is the man really named ‘Ore,’ Pa?” Jenny asked.
“Mind yer manners, lass,” her father said. He tensed visibly where he sat, but seeing that Hoare was not about to knock him down or call his daughter out, eased back again and gulped down a draft. “An’ to what do we owe the pleasure of yer presence here with us, Your Honor?” he asked warily.
“The late Peregrine Kingsley. You sent him this.” Hoare held out the misspelled letter, keeping it firmly in hand and watching for Jaggery’s reaction.
Jaggery read it as Hoare held it before him, moving his lips as he read. Did he seem relieved?
“Aye, Yer Honor. I can’t deny it, seein’ as it’s got me own name on it in me own ’and.”
“Tell me what’s behind it.”
“Saw nothin’ wrong with pickin’ up a bit o’ blunt from the fancy Mr. Kingsley. The cove’s captain wouldn’t ’a’ been ’alf tore up to find ’is wife had been makin’ free with ’is lieutenant, would ’e, now?”
“He already knew, Jaggery.”
The gunner’s jaw dropped.
“And,” Hoare said, “you could have gotten yourself spending the rest of your life in Botany Bay for extortion. What would have happened to your wife and young Jenny then?”
“Ain’t got no wife. Slicer Kate sliced Meg’s gizzard two years ago, and she took sick of it and died. Got ’anged for it, too, Kate did, in Winchester, at ’Ampshire assizes. My Jenny’s a norphing, she is.
“Besides,” Jaggery went on, “the captain went and died on me, ’e did, the thoughtless bastard. And there ain’t no one will bother me now, now that other bastard Kingsley’s been put out of the way. So there, Mister Hoare.”
No connoisseur, Jenny had tossed off her Madeira in one gulp. Now she giggled, gave a small belch, let her eyelids drop, and fell asleep leaning against her father’s shoulder.
“There. Now see what ye’ve done,” Jaggery said reproachfully. He looked down at the child and laid his maimed hand on her glossy head.
“And what else was Kingsley about, Jaggery, that he should be afraid of the law as well as his lady’s husband? And you referred to ‘friends’ that he had lost and you had kept. What were you and he engaged in together?”
Jaggery shook his head and looked at Hoare out of wide, innocent-looking eyes. “Mr. Kingsley ’ad a way about ’im, Yer Honor. Much against me will, ’e persuaded me to take on some bits of nautical merchandise, like. Bits of ship chandlery. Scuttles, patent blocks, things like that, that might have gone adrift. Jom York’s a good friend of mine. Ye know Mr. York, Yer Honor?”
Since York had found Kingsley’s Marine uniform for Hoare, he could hardly deny it, nor, indeed, did he wish to. He nodded. “And Kingsley was no longer ‘friends’ with Jom York?”
“Never said that, Yer Honor, did I now? Mr. York’s an upright man, he is.…”
By calling him an “upright man,” Jaggery meant, Hoare knew, that York claimed membership in the notorious Thieves’ Guild, sworn to mutual confidence and trust. Hoare also knew that even though the outside world might be sure of its existence and its secret power, the Thieves’ Guild was a fraud, a figment, and a fairy tale. But if Jaggery thought that he, Hoare, believed in it, let him.
“I’m not satisfied, Jaggery,” Hoare said. “You’re hiding something. You may be in far more shoal water than you know. Spit it out.”
“As Gawd’s me witness, Yer Honor, ye know all me sins,” the man said. “Yer persecutin’ me, and it’s not right.”
Hoare knew well that Jaggery had more to spill but, without any clue about what it might be, was at a loss as to how to get it out of him. Try as he would, the old bo
atswain hid and dodged behind a barricade of reproachful words. Hoare was missing the key to his secret fortress.
“Keep your hands off the King’s property, man,” Hoare said at last. He rose from the table and gave the sleeping Jenny a pat of his own. “And start combing those sly brains of yours about your friend Kingsley and what he might have been up to, beyond having at his captain’s wife. I’ll have my eye on you, and I never sleep.”
He stopped on the way out to haggle with Greenleaf about buying his entire stock of Madeira. Hoare left the Bunch of Grapes the owner of six dozen, having promised payment in full once they should have been delivered to the Swallowed Anchor and he had tested a randomly selected bottle from the consignment.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Mr. Greenleaf,” he said, “but who’s to say that some land pirate might make a midnight switch?”
Back at the Swallowed Anchor, Hoare found Mr. Watt fast asleep with his face in a copy of one of the enciphered messages to Ahab from Jehu. His candle had guttered out. Hoare picked the little man up in his arms and carried him up to the garret room he had been assigned by Mr. Hackins, the landlord.
Chapter VIII
IN THE morning, Hoare found Mr. Watt despondent. He must have crept back into Hoare’s sitting room at dawn or before, for a crust of bread and an empty teacup lay on the worktable. He had almost finished copying the last mysterious message.
“I have been unable, sir, to break the code—or rather the cipher,” he said. “It may be one of those in which the key is to be found in certain pages of a book owned by all parties to the secret. The Bible is commonly used for that purpose, as I am sure you know, and if you consider the biblical names of writer and addressee, it is likely that it has been so used here.
“Often the encipherer gives in the first group or two the chapters or pages to be used in deciphering; that each of the three messages commences with two series of numbers suggests that to be the case.
“If this is the case, Mr. Hoare, we are lost without a key to what pages of what edition are used and how. However, I propose to you that I take with me the fair copies I have made and work on them during Vantage’s passage south. I can inform you by fleet mail of any successes I have.
“But in all fairness, I must remind you that I lay no claim to expertise in the art of the cipher. There are men in Whitehall who spend their entire lives on the subject. I believe you should present these messages there.”
With this, Mr. Watt stood and prepared to take his leave. “Vantage is about to weigh anchor,” he said, “and I would not commit the crime of desertion, even if only inadvertently. She is, after all, only my second ship, and I still have my name to make.”
“I’ll put you aboard myself,” Hoare replied on an impulse.
Thereupon the two men betook themselves to Alert’s berth, where Hoare cast off and set sail to work down the Solent to Spithead. The little clerk’s efforts to bear a hand scarcely hindered Hoare at all.
Indeed, Vantage showed every sign of imminent departure. As Hoare brought Alert to under her lee, the frigate’s fresh new anchor cable was inching its way aboard to the “stamp and go” at the capstan and the squeal of the ship’s fiddler. Her access ladder had already been drawn up, so he had to use his boatswain’s pipe to signal the people on deck that it must be replaced if Captain Kent was to get his clerk back.
“Calm seas, and a prosperous voyage to you!” the envious Hoare said to Mr. Watt in his best whisper as he helped his passenger aboard. He would miss the clerk, and the exclamatory little Mr. Prickett as well.
Hoare said to himself that he owed it to Vantage to see her off to war, backed the yacht’s jib, and hove her to. Vantage’s anchor stock rose into the morning sun; her topsails thundered briefly and filled in their classic curve to take her out of the Spithead anchorage. She began to gather way in the light morning breeze, fair, gleaming, and virginal. Alert kept pace with her less than a cable length to leeward, on a parallel course. A light shower passed over the two vessels, and the sun broke through again.
Hoare heard a soft poof. Vantage’s wheel and her helmsman spun into the air in a fiery cloud, taking part of her main topsail yard with them, and plunged into the water between Vantage and Alert.
“Away, the fire party!” came faintly across the water. “Man hoses! Flood magazines!” Hoare swung his vessel’s tiller to leeward and hauled in fore- and mainsheets, bringing her hard on the wind so as to close the frigate.
A blaze of yellow-orange light dazzled him; a deep concussion shook the whole roadstead. Alert heeled heavily away from the burst, nearly set on her beam ends. A last, stupefying thunder and Vantage’s magazine went up, and she came apart.
Fighting through a hideous rain of wood, cordage, metal, and body parts, Hoare rammed Alert into a cable-wide circle of roiled, wreckage-filled water. The air through which he drove her reeked of burnt powder, as if he were sailing into a fleet action once again.
He reached down into the cluttered sea to grasp a reaching hand. The arm attached to it was, in turn, attached to nothing. He dropped it.
Here was a hat, floating upside down like a merry little boat. Here was part of what must have been Vantage’s maintop; a naked black man was clinging to it. As Hoare passed him a line and the cooked skin peeled off the hand that took it, he saw that the man was not black by nature. The barge’s low rail peeled more skin loosely from the man’s body as Hoare drew him aboard. He coughed up bloody water and died there, on Alert’s deck.
Hoare drew another raw, pulpy thing inboard instinctively but then cast it overboard again like a trash fish. Alert’s deck had small enough space for the living; she would have no more room for the dead.
He heard someone croaking, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus,” and realized that the cry had been going on for some time. From the raw agony in his throat he knew that the voice had been his.
Hoare pulled in twelve more, plus the roasted man, before he was joined first by the few nearby harbor fishermen and then—too late to save anything but the dead—by a flotilla of ships’ boats that had pulled double-banked out of the anchorage to save life. Of Vantage’s company, 327 souls in all, the other rescuers recovered only another 9.
Returning, heavy-laden, to Portsmouth, Hoare unloaded his castaways on the Hard, where a crowd of the curious and the anxious waited to succor the living and bewail the lost. When the other boats had all returned, the harried officer who had taken charge told Hoare that he had counted twenty-four survivors all told. Most were topmen who had been thrown clear, most of them frightfully burned, broken, or both. Of Vantage’s afterguard Hoare heard no names he knew.
Within the hour, Patterson, Sir George Hardcastle’s secretary, called at the Swallowed Anchor Inn. He brought Sir George’s compliments, and would Mr. Hoare kindly attend on him without delay?
The Admiral’s pet rabbit had been warned, for he opened Sir George’s inner door the moment Hoare presented himself.
“I had not expected to request your attendance again so soon, Mr. Hoare,” the Admiral said, looking up from a disordered mass of papers. His face, usually impassive, was filled with weariness and sorrow.
“I trust you have made some progress with the matter we discussed at our last meeting?”
“No, sir, I have not, I regret to state,” Hoare said. “Mr. Watt received orders to return aboard Vantage before he had any success. He left the enciphered messages with me, which was fortunate in the circumstances, given this morning’s disaster.”
“Indeed. God rest his soul, and those of his shipmates. It is about that incident that I wish to talk with you. Go away, Patterson, and close the door after you. Come back in ten minutes.”
When Patterson had closed the door firmly and resentfully behind him, the Admiral continued.
“What I am about to reveal to you, sir, must not leave these four walls. You know, of course, of the loss of Scipio. Your recent visit to Weymouth had to do with that. But are you aware that that, and th
e explosion in Vantage, are only two out of several similar events?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. The matter is most secret. If news of it were to get abroad in the Fleet, I shudder to think of the consequences. Spithead and the Nore would be nothing in comparison.
“On 2 June the schooner Mischief, 18, blew apart in the middle of the Channel Fleet. She had just made her number to Vengeance, 84, flag, having newly joined from this station. Megara, 32, also out of Portsmouth, is four weeks late in reporting to Calder in the Bay of Biscay.”
“This is dire news indeed, sir,” Hoare whispered.
“Moreover,” the Admiral said, “news has just reached me from Their Lordships that Oglethorpe of the Royal Duke has died. It is no surprise. He was seventy-six, after all, had just lost his wife, and could scarcely walk. You knew of Oglethorpe?”
Hoare shook his head. He was in puzzlement. What had the dead Oglethorpe to do with him, or he with Oglethorpe? Perhaps he was to replace the late captain? Hardly. A lieutenant did not step directly into the shoes of a post captain unless the latter fell in battle.
“No, sir.”
“Or of Royal Duke, perhaps?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Then that secret, at least, has held. Royal Duke’s an Admiralty yacht—mounts six … never mind. She bears an exalted name, even more exalted than Inconceivable, perhaps, or Insupportable, or Alert. Oh, yes. Young Gladden, who keeps sniffing after my poor fat Felicia like a hound after a bitch in heat, has told me about the ghost fleet you keep hidden. So have others. Oglethorpe and his command serve—served, I should say—under Admiral Abercrombie.”
Hoare knew, at least, of Sir Hugh Abercrombie, KB, Vice Admiral of the White. Sir Hugh held no seagoing command, and Hoare had no idea of his role in the Navy. He had the impression that he held office in the Admiralty. In any case, Sir George did not seem ready to enlighten him.
Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities Page 11