"We're a French privateer, men," Taylor called out, relaying Hoare's whispered command, "loaded with captured bullion and brandy. Come take us, if you can!"
At the helm of the pinnace, Hoare sheered away, out of Royal Duke's wake, and undertook to show the woman how the peculiar little vessel worked to windward. The tender pointed well above the bigger midget's best, scorning Royal Duke's efforts to bring her under her lee.
"Broadside!" Clay bellowed to his Captain in lieu of actually firing. Hoare sneered; Alecto was well forward of her opponent's larboard bow, and Clay could never have trained his guns that far forward.
"Call 'Miss'!" Hoare ordered Taylor, and she did so. In the chill October wind, Hoare thought, and excited by the battle, the woman really looked quite attractive. He must beware.
Royal Duke wore, presented her starboard battery, and "fired." This time, Hoare decided, he must encourage the others.
"Signal 'one hit, larboard chains,' " he said, and made to go forward to the swivel for his turn to fire.
"Excuse me, sir," Taylor said. "What is that brig up to?"
Hoare was about to reprove her for a meaningless question about their own Royal Duke brig when he realized she was looking in the exactly opposite direction.
The stranger was Niobe, Hoare saw. As he had hoped, Francis Delancey had read between the lines of Hoare's signal back in Portsmouth and was standing out to do battle. She was half again the size of Hoare's little gem and would carry a broadside of eight-pounders, nine to a side. Her broadside, then, would throw several times what Royal Duke could deliver. But she was still only a Lieutenant's command, so Hoare could wish Delancey well.
"May we join the dance, girls?" came the hail from Niobe's quarterdeck. Hoare saw that her crew was lining her nearer side.
Since Niobe was newly put in service, Delancey's crew would be new to her and to one another, but Sir George Hardcastle would surely have seen to it that they were experienced hands all.
Hoare was about to welcome her to the exercise when he realized that Delancey's crew was jeering them.
"What ho, the Hoare's Delights!" came clear from her deck. "Ahoy, the Dustmen!"
Looking more closely, he saw Delancey himself on her quarterdeck, squatting under her spanker boom, mouth agape with laughter.
Hoare's temper was seldom far from the surface; now, he lost it.
"Signal 'Catch me if you can'!" he ordered.
Taylor relayed his words in a voice weighted with challenge. To Hoare, she sounded like one of those female Norse divinities that carried away the battle-dead-veeries? Barkalees? Yes, he must, indeed, take care.
With that, he began the dance. He pirouetted around Niobe like a midge around a bullock, leading her away from Royal Duke until the two brigs were lost to sight of each other in the gathering dusk, the pinnace forming the wide third point of an obtuse triangle. Then he swept up under Niobe's counter and past her. Handing the tiller to Taylor, he went forward to the swivel.
He raised one hand long enough to catch Taylor's attention.
"Steady as you go now, Taylor," he whispered futilely and grabbed hold of Alecto's forestay before he could go overboard. With his free hand, he aimed the swivel well over Delancey's head, less than a cable away. He backed off and pulled the lanyard of the flintlock. The piece went off beside his ear, leaving it a-ringing. Alecto would be Alecto no more, by God; from now on, she would be Nemesis forever.
The small cloud of powder smoke went off to leeward swiftly enough. Hoare heard Taylor cough. By God's good grace, his shot went precisely where he had wanted it to go-through Niobe's spanker, a foot above her Captain's head. Delancey, Hoare was delighted to see, had ducked so quickly as to lose his hat over the side.
Hoare waved his own, made his way aft to Nemesis's tiny cockpit. There he took over the helm and turned the little yacht about while Niobe disappeared in the gloaming. On his way back to Royal Duke, he managed to reach over the side and recover Delancey's hat from where it bobbed cheerfully in the Channel, upside down.
As Nemesis retraced her tracks, Hoare indulged himself in a happy waking dream. In the presence of an enraged Delancey, he was addressing Admiral Sir George Hardcastle.
"I truly regret having alarmed Mr. Delancey, sir," Hoare imagined himself saying, in the loud, clear voice he remembered so well. "I fear I mistook him for a Frenchman."
"How could you possibly have done that?" he had the imaginary Delancey bluster. "Did you not see my colors? You must have known you were firing on a King's ship."
"Yes, indeed, Mr. Delancey. But I have also known one of His Majesty's ships to hoist French colors in order to amuse the enemy. Why should not a Frenchman do likewise to amuse me?"
In this dream, Hoare had no need to pause for breath but continued.
"For my maneuvers between Nemesis and Royal Duke so evidently amused you that your manners led me to assume that you could not be English. What else could you have been, then, but French? Or Brother Jonathan, perhaps?
"Oh, and by the way, Mr. Delancey," Hoare said in this waking dream, "you dropped your hat. Here it is."
Shaking himself back to reality, he returned to duty and the deck of Royal Duke.
Chapter XV
Under jib, main topsail, and spanker, Royal Duke eased past Portland Bill through the night, towing Nemesis faithfully behind her. When the ruins of Abbotsbury Abbey bore northeast, Clay brought her as close inshore as he dared and anchored. The wind had shifted to just north of west, sweeping the length of Chesil Beach.
Sergeant Leese mustered the landing party in the dark, for Hoare had ordered "darken ship." Except for Leese and Hoare himself, who wore their proper uniforms, they looked no better than a troupe of mountebanks in the varied pieces of landsmen's garb they had drawn from the yacht's capacious slop chest. As he had looked over Blackman's shoulder to watch him make his selection from among the garments, Hoare had felt he could be looking at a theatrical company's store of properties. He had even seen a hobbyhorse in it, a tawdry crown, and what could only be the scaly lower half of a mermaid. Surely no other slop chest in the Navy was so stocked.
Every member of the party bore some-sort of visible weapon in the form of a stout cudgel or staff, and Hoare was certain that other similar objects were hidden in their raiment. Green fondled her cleaver, a weapon with which, Leese warranted to Hoare, she could lop off both legs of an opponent in one wicked swipe. Once again, the sight of her made Hoare shudder. He himself carried a brace of horse pistols under his cloak and had tucked a sap into his belt.
The longboats lowered, one to a side, their passengers clambered aboard them without incident. With Royal Duke's low freeboard, it was no drop at all.
"Cast off." Stone's voice was echoed from the green boat to starboard.
"Good luck, Captain, and a happy return!" Clay called after them. Hoare waved an invisible arm. Invisible in the darkness, the gesture was no more futile, he thought, than trying to make his whisper heard over the wash.
"Ready all… row."
The red boat's oarsmen bent to their work. Astonishingly soon, Royal Duke had disappeared in the gloom, leaving the longboats to toss alone in line abreast, in what might as well be mid-Channel.
In minutes, however, Hoare could hear the slow, heavy breathing of the light three-foot surf as it ran along Chesil Beach ahead. A wave broke.
"The bar," Stone said conversationally. With these paltry seas, there would be no need, even with the green hands at the sweeps, to turn about and back the boat into the sand.
"Easy all; paddle."
Now Hoare could see the breakers curling on the beach. It would be half-tide. Once the landing party was ashore, the boats could readily withdraw.
"Now when I say, 'Row,' put yer backs inter it."
Stone waited for the surge of a seventh wave, then, "Row!"
A heave, and the longboat was under way again. Another, and it was surging forward. Another wave broke, its crest slopping over the side. Two more heavy
strokes, and they were clear in the backwash; another brought them scraping onto the beach. The starboard longboat pulled up beside them.
"Off ye go, men!" Stone said. He forgot himself and slapped Hoare on the back to urge him on. Over Hoare went with his half of the party, filling his boots with salt water as he plunged ahead with the others. Once above tidewater, he paused to empty the boots before he sought out the tall figure of Leese.
"This way," Hoare said, and gestured, knowing he could not expect to be heard over the breakers, low though they were. They left the beach behind and plowed up over small dunes covered with beach grass.
There was a roar of wings from a startled flock of shore-birds-snipe, perhaps, or whimbrels, from their whining protests-driven from their rest in the lagoon to starboard. Hoare felt his boots strike a firmer surface: the road, a mere pair of ruts in hardened shell and sand, leading eastward from Abbotsford toward Langston Abbas. It would be a mile and a touch from here to Abel Dunaway's barn. The party formed two straggling lines, one in each rut, with Hoare and Leese in the lead, shoved along gently by the lightening breeze. Once or twice, the moon, all but full, broke clear and showed a desolate landscape to their left, the lagoon and then the endless beach to the right, stretching on eternally.
"There'll be fog inland tomorrow night," Leese said quietly. Their feet crunched on the shelly surface.
The barn should lie… Yes, there it was, black against black on the skyline. The building was dark, soundless, but that meant nothing. Any of Dunaway's people, if they were there, would not be men who would reveal their presence by lights, and the barn was still to leeward of Hoare's party, so that no roistering sounds would come their way. Signing the others to stop where they were, Hoare left his rut. He walked softly through the grassy sand until he was no more than forty yards from the barn. He uttered the corncrake rattle Dunaway had taught him, then stood fast to listen. Nothing was to be heard except a creak, creak, perhaps of a loose door swinging on its hinges. It was certainly neither a corncrake nor a man.
Hoare crouched to the ground and crept to the end of the building. There ought to be a door or two there. There it was, swinging idly, giving off its avian creaks, shutting darkness in and darkness out. Hoare crept within; still no sign of life. The scent of musty hay filled his nose. He smothered a sneeze. A runny nose and watering eyes were, he remembered from boyhood, two of those endless miseries of a rural life that had made him welcome the sea.
He left the barn, stood up, and walked out onto the road where his party could see him against the horizon, and gave them a beckoning signal. In no time, they surrounded him and trooped with him into the barn, where Leese struck a light.
"Take over, Sergeant," Hoare whispered.
"Aye aye, sir."
While Leese called the roll, Hoare looked about him in a more leisurely manner. The moldy hay was there for certain, in quantity. It lay loose in old stalls and in windrows along the walls. He let loose his stifled sneeze. By the flickering light of Leese's dark lantern, the barn seemed as huge as some Gothic cathedral and just as cold.
"Yer all 'ere, I'm pleased to see," Leese said as he drew Dunaway's chart from beneath his forest-green jacket. "I 'opes I'll see ye the same when we're back aboard.
"Now draw round me. You've seen thisyer map of the Captain's before, so I'll 'ave each of ye show me where yer supposed to lie up when ye make the Stones Circle. You first, Adams."
One after another, the members of the party stepped up and pointed out their respective hiding places. Only two had to be corrected, to Leese's audible scorn.
"Now, you an' me, sir. You show me, if you please, sir."
Hoare obliged.
"Very good, sir." So saying, Leese folded the map and returned it to his bosom.
"Now, one more thing," he said. "In the morning, ye'll drift off in yer pairs. Not all at once, and not all the same way. Take yer time, for I won't 'ave yer gettin' to the Ring afore dusk. Some of yer-you two, Green and Adams, and you, Dwight an' Cattermole-you go right past the Circle, out of sight of it, an' lay up till dusk. The Captain an' I, we'll lay up 'ere an' twiddle our thumbs till dusk, an' then we'll up an' join ye at the Circle.
"Remember, lads, there's like to be all kinds of weird doin's among the enemy as they 'eave inter sight. Maybe you'll go over that part for us, Captain, sir?"
"As I told you last night, these people will be pretending they are members of a crazy heathen religion," Hoare began. "Or perhaps not pretending; it's hard to say. In any case, they're likely to play weird instruments and sing weird chants… and I expect the leader to stand at that big stone in the center of the Circle as if he were a priest and go. It's about then that you can expect me to give the signal for attack. Remember what the signal is?"
"Mm-ooooo-ooo-uh," someone said.
"No, ye idjit." Leese's voice crawled with disgust. "That's my signal when I wants yer to rally into the Circle at dusk. No, it's the Captain's whistle. You 'eard it when 'e took command, and last night, too."
"I shan't make the noise again now; it's too loud," Hoare said. "You'll remember it when you hear it. Now, make yourselves as comfortable as you can till morning. Be sensible about your rations, for they're the last you'll get till we're back aboard Royal Duke. Smoking lamp's out, and no talking any louder than my whisper."
He lowered his natural whisper. "That's all," he breathed. "Stand down, the landing party."
Hoare had not bedded down in forage since his early boyhood, and this straw was not of the best. His sleep-what there was of it-was fitful and disturbed by feverlike dreams and shortness of breath. In one dream, he was very small, being chased through a labyrinth by a woman with no face. She metamorphosed into Titus Thoday, bearing a switch. Hoare's feet, in turn, took wings, and he could outrun his pursuer with great bounds.
Hoare was awakened by a steady cold drip onto his neck from a persistent leak in the barn roof under which he had positioned himself when finding his own nest of hay in the dark. The leak had not only explored his neck intimately but also penetrated to his ill-packed satchel of hard bread and salt beef. The morning had brought intermittent showers with it; the slow journey inland would be a soggy one. He and Leese, unlike the others of the party, must stay out of casual observation until as late as possible, for they would find it difficult to explain their presence, wandering about the South Dorset countryside, afoot, in His Majesty's uniforms. Given the sad, weeping skies outside, Hoare regretted this not at all. He shifted position and left his friendly drip behind.
He nodded at Leese.
"Off ye go, then," the Sergeant said. "Green and Butcher, you first."
Leese and Hoare waited in the doorway until the first pair had plodded out of sight in the morning mist, then called for the next, and the next. Now Leese and Hoare were left alone.
Leese's green Marines knew their business, Hoare mused. They moved with quiet confidence, unlike the rest of Hoare's rattletrap crew. He said as much to Leese.
"Well, sir," Leese said, "we been together some years, and after all, this is our job. 'Tisn't like the rest of this lot- more clerk than seaman, all of'em. An' I've had a chance to whip 'em into shape. We've done exercises out in the country, an' in town, too, thanks to your good self, sir.
"Reckon that's why I won't mind at all scraggin' 'oever 'twas cut Baker's throat," he added after a pause. " 'E were one of ours, like.
"There's plenty of time now fer a kip, sir, if ye don't mind."
"Carry on, Leese," Hoare said. "I'll stand watch and knock you up about noontime."
Leese found a dry spot, pulled an armful of hay over himself, and within minutes was audibly asleep. Hoare squatted in the doorway of the barn to watch it rain.
The sky was visibly lighter, and the rain had eased up when Hoare heard the rattle of a corncrake behind the barn. He replied with a rattle of his own.
"I thought I might find ye here, Captain," Abel Dunaway said with a grin, appearing from around the corner of the barn.
> "Take a pew, Captain," Hoare whispered. "What brought you to that conclusion, pray?"
Behind him, Sergeant Leese stirred. Without looking, Hoare knew a pistol was aimed at Dunaway's middle.
In instinctive imitation of Hoare, Dunaway's reply was whispered at first.
"News from Dorchester, Captain." Then, in a normal voice, he added, "The town's half-full of madmen, I'm told. And madwomen with 'em, too. Most of 'em gentry. Even royalty, 'tis said."
Hoare remembered all too well Spurrier's warning upon leaving Royal Duke after that awful inspection.
"Stay away from the Nine Stones Circle, d'ye hear?" the hussar had told him. "If you should be found there at the wrong time, you'll get a welcome that might surprise you most unpleasantly."
The threat was dire enough. Worse still, Hoare was at a total loss to know what to do with Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, if he were to be caught tonight in the trap Hoare was about to set. As royalty himself, it would hardly do for Cumberland to be brought before some ecclesiastical court on a charge of witchcraft or Satan worship. And if a ritual murder were planned, as was Hoare's worst fear, he could not see Cumberland in the dock, charged as being at least an accomplice.
Hoare sighed and summoned up, as best he could, the pretense of good spirits.
"Oh, Leese, this gentleman is our host, Captain Abel Dunaway, of these parts."
Leese rose to his feet. "Pleased to meet ye, yer honor."
"I thought I'd bring ye along a spot of the needful," Dunaway said. "Bloaters and beer."
"Ahhhh," Hoare said. "Good."
Over stone bottles of that brew of the White Hart that Hoare had liked so well, a round loaf, and a pair of smoked herrings, the three reviewed the implications of Dunaway's tidings.
"Would ye want reinforcements, Captain?" Dunaway asked. Hoare could swear he sounded bashful.
Hoare's first thought was that with the numbers the smuggler could surely muster, he could be assured of capturing the whole group, whether the latter consisted of sincere members of Spurrier's cult-whatever it was-his political minions, or both. But then Hoare bethought himself of the confusion that would ensue. There would certainly be random collisions between Hoare's twosomes and Dunaway's people, with results no one could control. Once the encounter at the Stones Circle took place, the confusion could only peak. Hoare thanked Dunaway but declined, explaining his reasons.
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