The Frenchman must have fired a hundred rounds by now in this futile target practice. Surely, as Stone had said hours ago, they would have begun to run short of ammunition.
Apparently the French skipper had the same idea.
“Cease firing, Fortier,” came a quiet voice in French over the water. “You haven’t hit anything but the water and the wind in all this time.”
Hoare recognized the voice instantly. Edward Morrow was aboard, in command of his own yacht.
“Give me your pistols. You can load for the rest of us,” Morrow added. The other Frenchman whined.
Time passed, interminable minutes while the gap between the two vessels barely narrowed. If we don’t catch them soon, Hoare told himself, we’ll lose them in the dark.
“We’ll sweep up on ’em,” he whispered.
Stone blanched at the idea of standing erect under fire to work Inconceivable’s sweeps; Hoare suspected that Bold did as well, though he could not be sure, given the growing darkness and the coxswain’s natural hue.
“Jest as ye say, sir,” Bold said. “Odds are ye’ll lose one of the two of us though. There goes half yer boardin’ party.”
Hoare was silent, at a stand. At last he said, “Here’s what we’ll do.”
* * *
HOARE AND STONE ducked below to put Hoare’s plan into effect, leaving Bold at the tiller in the growing dusk.
A hammering and banging began below decks. Only seconds apart, the two amateur carpenters broke through Inconceivable’s thin strakes. The blades of her sweeps thrust out from these jury-rigged scuttles. Hoare doffed his uniform coat and laid it neatly on his cot; the two carpenters turned galley slaves and began to heave.
The firing from Marie Claire had fallen off as the darkness gathered. Now it redoubled, and the pistol flashes were near enough to reflect off Inconceivable’s sails.
“Mr. Hoare wants to know: are we showing a wake yet?” Stone grunted from below.
“Tell him ‘just,’ Jacob,” Bold replied in an undertone. “We might be makin’ half a knot. The chase, she might as well be swingin’ at anchor.”
“She’s put out sweeps of her own now, sir!” Bold called below after another minute.
“Mr. ’Oare says, ‘They can’t row and shoot at the same time, any’ow,’” Stone answered.
Now, Inconceivable’s taller mast began to tell, for somewhere above the lesser reach of Marie Claire’s main topsail, a breath stirred.
“She’s answerin‘ ’er helm again, sir,” Bold said.
“Good. Head about two points to windward of her, and we’ll bear down as soon as we come abreast. Meet her now. Dyce.”
Shortly, Inconceivable’s sweeps stopped and lifted, dripping audibly, into the quiet air. Then they withdrew into their crude ports. Hoare stuck his head out of the companionway and crawled into the cockpit, keeping low. He reached back, pulled his sweep out of the hatch, and handed it to Bold. Bold made the tiller fast, thrust the sweep into its socket dead aft, and began sculling, slowly and strongly. Under her own sweeps, Marie Claire seemed to make no headway. She would have rated double Inconceivable’s tonnage, so this could be no surprise to Morrow.
Hoare leaned down into the cabin and said in his loudest whisper, “Bring up the crossbow and the quarrels, Stone.”
“‘Quarrels,’ zur?”
“Arrows, Stone. They’re alongside the crossbow. They look like bolts.”
More rummaging sounds followed.
“Got ’em, zur.” Stone handed up the weapons and hoisted himself out of the cabin with a single thrust of his powerful shoulders, disdaining the ladder. “You orta been mannin’ that there oar, Loveable, not Mr. Hoare,” he said.
“I does what my orficers tell me to, Jacob.”
“You be a lazy bugger, that’s what you be,” Stone said. He hauled a grapnel up from below and began to splice it to the bitter end of a lanyard.
Under a steady, slow, harassing fire, Hoare and his crew blacked their faces and hands with soot from Inconceivable’s galley stove. Cradling the cocked crossbow in his arms and dragging the bag of quarrels behind him, Hoare crawled forward in the dusk, under cover of Inconceivable’s rail, into her very bows.
He had procured the crossbow only last year, when he happened to stop at an inn outside the ruins of Corfe Castle. The weapon had to be centuries old. Although he had bought it on a whim, he felt obliged to try it out. He had chosen a meadow outside Portsmouth, where he at least had had a chance to retrieve the bolts.
Hoare had found at once that the crossbow worked. In fact, it was surprisingly powerful. While his first shot went into the blue somewhere to the north of the tree at which he was aiming, his second, fired from a hundred yards, buried itself so deep in the trunk that he could not withdraw it. He would not have cared to be one of the steel-clad men-at-arms who had faced the thing, and he understood why crossbows had been outlawed by chivalry and Church alike.
He had also learned that the crossbow was extremely slow to load—slower, even, than his lost Kentucky rifle, which, in turn, had taken him twice as long as one of his pistols or a smooth-bore musket. To cock the bow, he would have to stand upright, press his foot into a combination stock and stirrup, and heave mightily on a steel lever. The notion of doing this under fire from Marie Claire—sporadic though it was—gave him a grue. And his accuracy would be laughable.
Sheltering behind Inconceivable’s jib, Hoare shouldered the awkward weapon, making sure that it cleared her forestay. By now, the chase was less than a hundred yards ahead, a few points off Inconceivable’s larboard bow. Hoare had ordered Bold to come up on her from windward, so as to take her wind with Inconceivable’s towering mainsail. He leveled the crossbow and waited for a target to show itself.
He did not have long to wait. The silence of Inconceivable’s pursuit would certainly have convinced the other vessel’s crew by now that she was without firearms—as, indeed, she was. By now, they were close enough to distinguish one from another, even in the dusk. Now he could see five of them, no fewer. Short of extreme heroism and the most extraordinary luck, any attempt at boarding her was doomed. And so, in all likelihood, was Bartholomew Hoare.
Two of Marie Claire’s crew were standing on her taffrail now, one reloading his pistols and the other taking aim. Hoare too took careful aim, held his breath, and squeezed the crossbow’s strange long trigger.
With a sharp, soft snap, the crossbow kicked back against Hoare’s shoulder. His target uttered a croaking cry, clutched at his leg, and fell backward against the helmsman, knocking him away from the schooner’s wheel. Marie Claire drifted gracefully into the negligible wind, athwart Inconceivable’s bows, where—had she been armed with cannon—she could have murdered Inconceivable with a raking fire.
Now! Hoare cried to himself. He whistled an ascending banshee note. In response, Stone raced forward to stand beside Hoare. He twirled his grapnel as though he were swinging a dipsey lead—or a sling, flashed through Hoare’s mind. The three Inconceivables braced for the impact, grasping any shroud or timber within reach.
Stone let fly with his grapnel. Instead of catching in Marie Claire’s rigging, it caught in the clothing of a second Frenchman, who jerked like a jigged salmon. Stone heaved at the grapnel line. The jigged man clutched at a shroud, missed, fell forward into the Channel. Stone’s grapnel tore away.
Inconceivable rammed Marie Claire just aft of her starboard main shrouds. Her bowsprit thrust across the schooner below her main boom before grinding to a near-halt. Marie Claire heeled heavily away. There was a crash below—perhaps, Hoare hoped, from Morrow’s best yachting china. Carried along by the schooner’s momentum, Inconceivable began to swing to starboard, pressing against Marie Claire and braying the jigged man between the two hulls like an ear of Indian corn. He squalled. One arm waved briefly in the narrow gap before he was drawn down into the welcoming water.
The blow into Marie Claire’s midships must have caught another enemy wrong-footed, for he spun an
d went overboard on the side away from Inconceivable. The others—two were still on their feet—were nimbler. One chopped an axe into Inconceivable’s forestay as it tangled in the schooner’s main shrouds, and cut it apart just as Hoare clutched at the nearer of the paired shrouds. Inconceivable rebounded. Caught wrong-footed himself, Hoare felt his feet leave her. He dangled in Marie Claire’s shrouds, first by one hand, then by both, when Marie Claire drifted away from his own precious pinnace, his first and only command.
Behind him, Inconceivable’s jib came down with a run over Bold and Stone. There was another grinding sound. Even where he hung, Hoare knew the two craft had parted company.
By the time Hoare’s sailors had struggled out from beneath the jib’s hampering folds, Marie Claire and her involuntary stowaway were a cable or more off, steadied again on a course for Weymouth. She was as good as home free.
He did not dangle long. Two of Morrow’s men hauled him out of the schooner’s shrouds and dragged him to her little quarterdeck, where their master stood waiting.
Chapter XIII
“HOW DID did you get onto my traces, Mr. Hoare?” Morrow asked. “Take your time in replying, and rest your voice as often as you wish. The wind is still light, and we have several hours to while away before Marie Claire makes port. As for your amusing little jury-rigged row-galley…”
Morrow gestured toward Hoare’s pinnace. Inconceivable lay motionless less than a cable away, a shadow in the dusk, her forerigging all ahoo where forestay and jib halliard had been cut, her high mainsail drooping unattended, the sweeps dangling from the raw holes Hoare and Stone had chopped into her tender sides. She looked a floating wreck. Hoare’s heart went out to her. Meanwhile, Marie Claire’s sails had filled, and she was under way again, ghosting toward Weymouth and leaving the smaller craft behind.
Moreau saw Hoare’s expression. “Perhaps I’ll return tomorrow, tow her in, and add her to my fleet. You just used her to kill my man Lecompte, after all. You are my debtor. What you Anglo-Saxons call ‘blood-geld,’ eh?”
He smiled and cracked Hoare across the face with his open hand. Instinctively Hoare struggled to strike back, but the burly men holding his arms restrained him with ease.
“Be seated, pray,” Morrow said. He gestured to his men, and Hoare found himself flung onto the deck with stunning force.
“I repeat: How did you find out what I was doing?”
“I put two and two together, Mr. Morrow,” Hoare said.
Morrow leaned down and cracked him across the face again. This time, he used his closed fist.
“You mispronounce my name, Mr. Hoare,” he said. “My name is Moreau—baptized Jean Philippe Edouard Saint-Esprit Moreau.”
“A long name for the métis son of a fur trader, Monsieur Moreau.”
Crack came the hand.
“Fur trader, m’sieur? My father was no fur trader. He would not have soiled his hands with trade. No, no. My father was Jean-François Benoît Philippe Louis Moreau, nephew of the archbishop and seigneur of Montmagny. His seigneurie stretched from the river south to St.-Magloire and east to St.-Damase des Aulnaies—many, many arpents, m’sieur. When Monseigneur mon pére died, I inherited half that land. It is still mine.
“And Lecompte whom you just murdered, and Dugas to whom I had to give the quietus after Madame Graves crippled him for you, and Fortier here grew up together with me,” he added proudly. “Almost as brothers. I even permit them to address me as ‘monsieur’ instead of ‘monseigneur.’ Only they had—have—that honor. Now, for the third time, tell me how you sniffed me out.”
Crack.
“I was in Weymouth in the first place,” Hoare whispered when his head cleared, “because of the infernal machine the Revenue picked up inland from there. Then I could not help but note your interest in Dr. Graves’ avocation of clock-making.
“I was impressed, by the way, with the simple, clever reason you gave when you asked him to make up pieces of clockwork—‘for the British secret service,’ quotha!”
He braced himself for another crack. When it did not come, he was bold enough to ask a question of his own.
“What led you to leave your estate, then?”
“Because I am métis, m’sieur, as you know very well. The peasant folk care nothing that a man has Indian blood. Why, Bessac here is a quarter Naskapi, and as proud of it as I am of being the son of a Cree chieftainess.
“But the grands seigneurs—ah, that is different. With them, blood’s the thing! No, I was not received in the neighboring seigneurs’ manors, and I must not pay court to their daughters.”
Morrow’s—Moreau’s—voice took on more than a trace of a French accent. “And when the English came! Ah, M’sieur Hoare, it was you English that made life intolerable for us! You scorn Holy Church; you have stolen our trade; you have debauched our women.”
Hoare barely contained himself. He had not “debauched” his dear, dead Antoinette; he had wooed and won her as a gentleman should.
“It was worse still,” Moreau went on, “when Monseigneur mon pére decided that since the English were here to stay, one of his sons—I, the younger—should be educated as an Englishman, and sent me to the English school in Québec. I need hardly tell you, English officer that you are, the beatings, the bullying—treatment no gentleman should have to endure. But I endured it, m’sieur! I learned to be as English as any milord! Why, even you thought me English, did you not?”
But nobody, Hoare told himself, had thought to teach the young Moreau the rhymes and nursery tales English children learned in the nursery. Hence Moreau’s perplexity when Dr. Graves had recited his harmless trope about “Jack Sprat, who could eat no fat” as he took his guests in to dinner that first evening, when Hoare first met Eleanor Graves. It had been then that Hoare had begun to suspect that Edward Morrow was other than he presented himself to be.
And it had also been that evening, he realized, that he—Bartholomew Hoare—had already begun to fall in love with the wife of his host.
“I should have recognized your accent as soon as I heard you speak French,” Hoare said.
For the first time, Moreau looked startled. “French? When did you hear me speak French?”
“When you and your man—Bessac?—boarded me, thinking you had killed me, with my own rifle, at that,” Hoare said bitterly, and decided to press his luck further. “As you suggest, I, too, have been an English schoolboy. I assure you, sir, that a lad with a name like mine faces unusual problems, too. And yet, hating us English the way you do, you chose to come into our midst.” He paused inquiringly.
Upon learning that Hoare could not speak, many people concluded wrongly that he could not hear and talked with each other, or with him, as if he were a useful piece of furniture—a side table, perhaps, with a compote on it. Hoare sometimes found this attribute useful, if sometimes insulting, and encouraged it. He did so now, by remaining silent and trying to look like part of Marie Claire—a fife rail, perhaps, or a mop.
Moreau bit and, having bitten, swallowed the bait all the way down.
The year 1794, he told Hoare, was when representatives of the new French Republic made their way covertly to Canada. They found young Moreau, feeling as he did about the English, a ready recruit. Any cause that advocated the recapture of the lost New France was a cause for which he felt himself ready to die. This, and his perfect English, suited him to the role of undercover agent in England. So Jean Philippe Edouard Saint-Esprit Moreau became Edward Morrow, and off to England he went.
As Hoare already knew from Dr. Graves, from his wife, and, indeed, from Moreau himself, Edward Morrow, with his manners and his money, had had no difficulty in establishing himself in Dorset society.
Moreau stopped in middiscourse to take flint and steel from his pocket and light the binnacle. His face bore a reminiscent expression.
“And Kingsley?” Hoare prompted.
“Kingsley?” Moreau paused, then smiled wryly and shrugged. “Ahhh, the light-minded lieutenant.” Mo
reau, he said, had met Peregrine Kingsley at a Portsmouth gambling house, long before that officer was seconded to Vantage and while he was still on half-pay. Moreau had seen Kingsley take certain liberties with the cards. On making inquiries of his own, Moreau had also learned that the lieutenant was intensely ambitious, unscrupulous, heavily in debt, and deeply involved with several women simultaneously, women of low degree and high. Whenever it became time to use him, Moreau knew he would have Kingsley in his pocket, ready to be used.
At about the same time, Moreau had discovered Dr. Simon Graves’s inventive gifts and put them to use, leading the doctor to believe that in doing so he was advancing the Royal Navy’s ability to locate its ships and unaware that, instead, he was helping Moreau to blow them up. Because he could not always communicate with the doctor directly, he had made him privy to the cipher that he himself had been given.
“A permutation cipher, Graves called it,” Moreau went on reminiscently. “A temurah, or some such word. Out of the Jewish Cabala, as I remember. It was fortunate that he, like…” He caught himself.
Of course. That explained to Hoare why Dr. Graves had a French Bible at hand when he was killed. Perhaps, too, it explained why Mr. Watt had failed to break the cipher; it had not been written in English but in French. But … what had Moreau stopped himself from saying?
“He, like…,” he had begun. Like whom, or what?
But, Moreau continued, when Dr. Graves had balked at making any more identical devices for him, he had seen the danger the physician posed. To ensure himself a more reliable supply, he had diverted one of the machines, in its English anker, to France—as he thought—to be copied in larger numbers and returned to him. This perfectly natural move had, so to speak, blown up the entire affair.
“It was an understandable mistake, Mr. Hoare, I think. As far as the smuggling gentry are concerned, barrels do not leave Britain—they and their precious contents come into your peculiar country.”
Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities Page 17