Hoare and the Ffrog Prince (captain bartholomew hoare)

by Wilder Perkins

  Hoare and the Ffrog Prince

  ( Captain Bartholomew Hoare )

  Wilder Perkins

  Wilder Perkins

  Hoare and the Ffrog Prince

  "Someone has been here before us, I see."

  The challenged party did his best to sound casual, but his voice quavered and his belly rumbled audibly as he and his second looked down at the figure sprawled in the moonlit snow. The body's caped boat-cloak spread wide to display a peculiar naval uniform. Its hat, a gold-braided tricorne, lay beside one outflung hand.

  A stout, florid merchant of Portsmouth town, the challenged party had never been out before. Now, at sight of the sword blade protruding from the dead man's massive chest and the pool of frozen blood beneath its parted lips, he felt he would rather apologize, go home to bed, sleep till noon, and forget the whole thing.

  With a cheerful squeak of wheels in the snow, a chaise approached up the hill from town. Three cloaked figures alighted. "What have you gotten up to now, Golightly?" asked the shortest one. His breath smoked in the frosty air.

  "You must not speak to my principal, Mr. Derrick," said the merchant's second. "Besides, when we arrived, the man was lying right here, just the way he is now. What about him, Edwards?"

  The third of the trio from the chaise set down his surgeon's bag, stooped over the body, shook it. Ice crackled, and the body stirred in one piece like a fallen statue. The embedded blade vibrated slightly.

  "Dead, gentlemen. Quite dead."

  All five standing men removed their hats. The two seated high on the chaise followed suit; one crossed himself. "Wonder who he was."

  "Looks like a Frog to me," another said. "Still wears lace to his wrists."

  "Look here, Derrick," the merchant said, "I don't think it would be respectful to the dead man, whoever he is, to pursue our little disagreement any further. Will you accept my apology?"

  "Of course, my dear fellow. Let us blame overindulgence in the mayor's negus for that little lapse, shall we?" While patronizing, the challenger's voice was distinctly relieved.

  "Here now," he went on. "It's downhill all the way home. Climb in, all of you. We'll stir 'em up at The George and drink to our old friendship in a bowl of his punch."

  "But what about the body?"

  "Oh, we'll leave Farley here till the watch comes for it," Mason said airily. "He's an old seadog; he won't mind a bit of cold. Besides, a shilling will see him right. You, Farley!"

  The groom climbed stiffly from his perch and watched his master's chaise disappear down the slope into Portsmouth town, leaving him to keep warm as best he might in the growing dawn. "Hell," he said softly but distinctly.

  Admiral Sir George Hardcastle was as burdened as ever with the endless demands on his time as port admiral. Now, however, the demands were from the host of officers put on half pay when their ships were laid up at the signing of peace with Bonaparte at Amiens. In order to reach the admiral's private office in answer to his peremptory summons, Bartholomew Hoare must needs whisper his apologies while edging past post captains by the handful and lieutenants by the score. The poor penniless mids must shiver outside.

  For once, Hoare whispered to himself, the Fates had at least been perversely merciful to him. He had cursed those damned goddesses when a musket bullet from the frigate Eole had crushed his larynx at the Glorious First of June; his curses had been even more heartfelt when he had been beached forever because he could no longer speak above a horrid rasping whisper. But now, having held down the job of general dogsbody to the port admiral since '94, he had escaped the axe and could still enjoy the full pay of a lieutenant, RN. Slender the stipend might be, but his pocket was no lighter now than that of most of the half-pay captains past whom he was dodging. Moreover, he had mercifully hoarded the prize money gained at sea so long ago instead of squandering it like most of his shipmates.

  "The admiral has been awaiting you this half hour, Mr. Hoare," Patterson, the admiral's clerk, said reproachfully. "Go right in as soon as he has disposed of Captain Pottle." The clerk shook his grizzled head. "Poor Pottle, he hasn't a hope of a ship." Pottle had been a client of Earl Blake, but Blake had died, drunk and in debt, and Pottle's interest at the Board of Admiralty had died with him.

  The hapless Pottle emerged, looking hangdog, and Hoare slipped his lanky, silent self past him.

  "You have kept your superior officer waiting, Hoare, and not for the first time. I must remind you that any of those hungry idlers out there would leap at the chance of taking your place."

  The admiral's face was neither more nor less red than usual, so Hoare concluded that the remark was a mere matter of habit. He stood fast and waited.

  "The Duc de Provins is dead, Hoare. You know him, of course?"

  "Know of him, sir." As a Bourbon of the French blood royal, albeit an illegitimate one, Provins' place in the world was as far above Hoare's as Hoare's was above that of a sea urchin. But Hoare knew him by sight. The two nations, he remembered, always at odds if not at actual war, were wont to harbor each other's exiled monarchs and their courts, like so much dirty laundry taken in pawn. When Louis XVI had lost his useless head and the Dauphin been left to die of neglect, the new head of the family, Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, had established his yawn-filled powerless court at Hartwell Castle. Provins had soon wearied of his gross, kindly half-brother and moved to Portsmouth. Here he had taken full advantage of his nominal rank as admiral in His Most Christian Majesty's hypothetical fleet to throw his weight about in Royal Navy circles.

  Hoare had seen the duc several times in the salon d'escrime of his own instructor, the Vicomte Marc-Antoine de Chatillon de Barsac. His royal highness had visibly relished poking fun at these awkward Englishmen who thrust away so earnestly at each other with De Barsac's foils and sabres. But he had not been above taking up the occasional foil himself, and he had acquitted himself well enough.

  "Well," said Sir George, "a pair of cits went up to the common this morning to settle some petty matter of honor. Found His Grace there all by himself in the snow with a sword through his heart. There'll be hell to pay at the Foreign Office.

  "And hell to pay at the Admiralty, for that matter. I hope you didn't know it, Hoare, but he was in our pay, too. Kept us abreast of the politics of our opposite numbers in Napoleon's navy. Don't know how he managed to keep abreast himself, but there you are. You speak French, don't you, Hoare?"

  "Yes, sir." Indeed he did. Nearly twenty years ago, when he was second in Staghound, Hoare had left his beloved, gently born French-Canadian bride Antoinette ashore in Halifax, to die in childbirth without him. He had never seen his daughter; the infant's grandparents had swept her away before he returned. He had never even learned her name.

  "Well, I want you to keep a weather eye out on the matter, on the navy's behalf. I don't trust the mayor's men to get to the bottom of anything but a mug of Oh-Be-Joyful. They've taken up De Barsac. Seems our royal duke was sent to his Maker by one of the swords at the viscount's school. Can't see why they don't have barons and earls like civilized people. Anyhow, see to it, Hoare."

  Hoare heard these words with dismay. Before fleeing France in '93 just ahead of the guillotine, De Barsac had been an able frigate captain and an honorable enemy. Now, besides being Hoare's instructor, he was his friend. And with a sinking of the stomach, it came back to him that the taverns had been abuzz last night with the news that His Grace and the maitre had engaged in a snarling match upon the floor of the latter's own establishment.

  "They sounded like a pair of tomcats, if you ask me," Hoare's informant had said. "I half expected De Barsac to draw on the duke.
There would really have been the devil to pay then, and no pitch hot."

  "Aye aye, sir," he whispered to the admiral, and left.

  Hands thrust into the pockets of his heavy caped surtout, Hoare trudged up the road along which his late royal highness had preceded him. The watch would surely have lugged the body back down by now. They would not have dropped it at the town's charnel house, of course; the remains of a prince of the blood, since he had been French and therefore popish, would have been taken to the local Catholic church. In any case, Hoare had judged, the corporeal evidence would keep for awhile, while he knew the evidence at the scene of the crime would last only as long as the arctic weather.

  He found the spot easily enough. The pool of frozen blood glared up at him from yards away. The snow around it was overwritten by dozens of footprints; it would be far beyond Hoare's feeble tracking ability to determine how many men had been up here last night, let alone who they might have been and their business here. The marks of two sets of wheels lay not far off. The duelists' chaise explained one, of course, but how about the other?

  Aha! Hoare cried exultantly to himself before he remembered that the mayor's men would have used a cart to carry away the noble body. He turned and went back down the hill. He might as well find out if the dead duc had anything to tell him.

  The dead duc lay in informal state in a small chapel of Portsmouth's only popish place of worship, candles at his head and feet. The place was icy cold as Hoare saw from the state of the stoup of holy water at the chapel door. It would be too soon, of course, for the sorrowing relatives to have arrived from Hartwell; in fact, word of their loss could hardly have reached them. But Hoare was surprised at the absence of any members of the duc's local entourage. A solitary nun knelt at the tiny altar, praying, he supposed, for the soul of the departed.

  Except that someone had tied up the duc's jaw and withdrawn the murder weapon, the body must look the same as it had when the duelists stood over it; arms and legs akimbo, it stared glassily toward heaven. The blood had not been fully removed from its face. Below the old fashioned cuffs of Mechlin lace, the fingers were bare. The duc had chewed his fingernails, Hoare noted with mild distaste.

  The duc's hat lay on his belly just below the entry wound. It was a gold-braided, plumed admiral's hat, in the old fashioned tricorne shape affected by Lord Nelson in preference to today's fore-and-aft style. The contents of the victim's pockets lay beside their owner, with the murder weapon. The purse was all but empty as Hoare found when he inverted it over one hand; it contained only a few louis d'or. Hoare remembered that nobility seldom stooped to handling lucre, leaving that sort of thing to their underlings. There was a Breguet repeater watch-gold, of course. A fine lawn kerchief bore the duc's crest. That was all.

  Something was missing. What could it be?

  Hoare picked up the sword. About a third of the way toward the hilt the tip had been broken off, so there was no way he could tell if the point had been buttoned, shielded, or left with its original, lethal sharpness.

  In any case, Hoare told himself, it was moot, for the remaining stub was more than sharp enough, he thought, to pierce through the layers of the duc's clothing, through his skin and on between his ribs to the heart. As if in confirmation, most of the remaining blade bore bloodstains. The mayor's men had needed no particular deductive skill to trace the source of the weapon, for the inch-wide brass guard bore De Barsac's distinctive monogram. He knew it well. Now to question the dueling cits.

  Upon opening the chapel door to leave, Hoare found himself staring into a pair of huge, cold, violet eyes nearly a foot below his own. Their owner looked him up and down. An elderly, ugly maid hung at the person's heels.

  "Alors, m'sieur, qu'est-ce que vous faites ici?"

  "I might ask you the same, mademoiselle," Hoare whispered in the same tongue. "Permit me to present myself: Bartholomew Hoare, lieutenant de vaisseau, a votre service. I am here upon the orders of Admiral Sir George Hardcastle-" he stopped to take a breath "-to investigate the death of His Royal Highness the Duc de Provins. And you, mademoiselle?"

  "Madame la comtesse, if you please, monsieur. Iphegenie, Comtesse de Montrichard. You may tell your admiral there is nothing to investigate. It is well known throughout the town that De Barsac killed him."

  With that, the comtesse swept past him, followed by her dragon. She crossed herself perfunctorily before kneeling at the raised bier. He saw those violet eyes scan the objects beside the corpse as her lips moved. Her expression suggested to Hoare that she was not so much reciting prayers as conversing with the corpse.

  In no time she was on her feet again. "Never mind, Jeannette," she said as she shook off the dragon's offered arm. Then she turned to Hoare. "There, you see. He does not bleed, does he? You are my witness, monsieur; how fortunate it is for me that you were here to witness."

  Hoare's expression must have revealed his confusion.

  "Or perhaps you English do not believe the superstition that a body bleeds again in the presence of its murderer. Eh?" She looked challengingly up into Hoare's long face.

  "I fear I lack some piece of information, madame la comtesse, which you believe me to possess. Pray enlighten me."

  She snorted in an aristocratic way. "You did not know, then, that in our little French coterie at least I am supposed to have been the last person to see Provins alive? A fine ferret, indeed, that your Admiral Sir Hardcastle picked out to find the one who killed him."

  "And were you the last person to see him alive?"

  "No," she said flatly. "The last to leave him alive, perhaps, but not the last to see him. That privilege belonged to his killer, not to me. To the Vicomte de Barsac, if your lumps of mayor's men are correct."

  "Then perhaps madame la comtesse would have the kindness to tell me about her last encounter with his late royal highness," Hoare whispered.

  "What, here?" she asked. "In this place, and in this frigid air? No indeed, monsieur. You may escort me to my lodgings if you will, such as they are, and interrogate me there."

  "It would be an honor, madame."

  She took his arm, summoned her dragon, and steered him down through the town's icy streets, to bring him up all standing before the staring guardian of The Three Suns' majestic door.

  The Three Suns bore the reputation of housing only Britain's highest and their very good friends when those friends were not such as to be announced to the world. Hoare's only previous visits there had been as a message-bearer from the port admiral to these personages. But after suppressing a raised eyebrow upon sighting him, the porter flung the door open with a flourish. He greeted madame la comtesse in execrable French, and added, "Good morning, Mr. 'Oare. And a fine, frosty morning it is, Mr. 'Oare."

  "Good morning, Pollard."

  Pollard's eyes and ears were always open wide, and his mouth as well, at least for those who paid him to open them and for those, like Hoare, of whom he walked in dread. To Pollard and his cronies Hoare was The Whispering Ferret.

  The comtesse and her abigail mounted the wide stair, leaving Hoare to follow. At the door to what must be her chambers she stood aside for the woman to unlock and open it. The salon within had been refurnished since '98 when Hoare had last seen it; chairs, sofas, and accessories, aglow in the low morning sun of winter, were all in the chaste Directoire style, fresh from Paris. The French government in exile, Hoare mused, might have its pockets to let, but its members still managed to eat cake.

  The comtesse let her woman relieve her of her heavy cloak. Beneath it she stood lightly clad as if for summer, in a pale, nearly transparent figured silk, tucked demurely just beneath her breasts. Hoare handed the dragon his own cloak and cocked hat. The comtesse seated herself, semi-reclining, on a chaise longue and gestured to Hoare to take a matching chair. She began without preamble.

  "As I said, I was the last person to see the late duc except for the person who killed him. You evidently did not know that, very conveniently, the Comte de Montrichard and I live apar
t. We do not-er- suit. Until his death, his royal highness occupied these premises. With me."

  Equally evidently, Hoare thought, the comtesse wanted him to understand this relationship without any doubt at all.

  "Why are you telling me these things, madame la comtesse?"

  "Because you asked, monsieur. And because I find your whisper intriguing. Why do you whisper, by-the-by?"

  "A French bullet, madame la comtesse," he whispered.

  "Je suis desolee," she said dismissively.

  "Will you tell me what took place between you and the duc yesterday evening?"

  "What leads you to believe it was yesterday evening, Monsieur 'Oare?"

  "I hardly know," Hoare admitted. He felt his face redden.

  "It was not yesterday evening, monsieur, but yesterday noon, after the morning post came from 'Artwell. He had withdrawn into his workroom to read it. It was when he emerged that he gave me my conge."

  "Tout court? Just like that?"

  "No. He was gentlemanly, I admit-and gentle." The comtesse winced; she looked away.

  "Tell me what he said, please," Hoare whispered.

  "I… he told me that his brother had ordered him to return to his duchesse, in 'Artwell. He must obey, of course; after all, Louis is the head of the family. So… that was that, monsieur." She shrugged expressively. "He bade me adieu, kissed my hand, and left."

  "No-ah-farewell gift?"

  "No. He merely said, and I think I remember his exact words, 'You will know soon the extent of my gratitude.' "

  "Do you know what he meant?"

  "No, monsieur."

  "And then?"

  "That was all. I intend, monsieur, to bring his murderer to justice. Provins may have given me my conge last night, but that was his good right as one of our royal family. He was kind to me and generous, and I respected him. We even took some of his long walks together."

  So the duc often took walks, sometimes with his mistress, sometimes not. She would have had nowhere to go now, save to a husband whom she detested and whom she could no longer support. Rejected and desperate, she could, Hoare thought, have appealed for a last promenade in the moonlit snow and, upon receiving her final dismissal, drawn the broken sword from beneath her cloak and dispatched her royal lover.