The older man nodded in understanding.
"Reasonable enough," he said. "But it might help your folk if I was to pass the word to mine to be easy-like on any pairs of strangers they might come across a-wanderin' the highways and byways hereabouts."
Hoare saw the merits of this offer and accepted it.
"I'll be off, then," Dunaway said. "Good luck to the both of ye."
Patches of ground fog drifted eastward across the moor surrounding the Nine Stones Circle, keeping station on each other as if they were a gleaming ghostly Great Armada on its way to defeat among the shoals off Zeeland. The full moon played hide-and-seek with the low clouds that paced them, now bringing the Stones Circle's nine menhirs into full dramatic view, now obscuring them in dank darkness.
Face blackened like those of the rest of his command, Sergeant Leese oozed from point to point, establishing that each pair of his party was in place. Hoare had disappeared into his own dark gorse bush at the foot of one megalith, where, at length, Leese joined him. Their wait began; time stopped.
The fog and the clouds above them continued to float down the wind, leaving the stones naked to the moonlight at one moment, shrouded in gray the next. Quite Gothick, Hoare thought; all the scene needed was the mournful shriek of an owl. And bats. The notion of the little flittering things reminded him of how easily his half-hysterical mocking had made a permanent enemy of Sir Thomas Frobisher.
Hoare's thought might have been a cue. Until now, the Circle had been quiet, the fog even muffling the faint ever-present background of animal chirps and rustling foliage. Now, the fog lifted briefly, and the animal noises ceased. Hoare realized that for some time he had been hearing, eastward toward Dorchester, the sounds of human movement.
Gradually, figures, mostly singletons but some in couples, began to appear out of the mist and slip into the ring of stones. Most appeared to be countrywomen, on the elderly side, but there was a scattering of farmerish men as well, some couples who might be petty tradesmen and their wives, a few younger pairs, and even two or three children. Most of the women carried baskets, some sheaves or garlands of late flowers.
When he was a lad, Hoare remembered, he and his family had unaccountably arrived early for the harvest festival at the village church in Cuckney, below the property Captain Joel Hoare had purchased not so long before. Seated between brother John and little Cassandra, the three of them guarded by father on the one side and mother on the other, Bartholomew had watched the Cuckney folk gather in their ones and twos, bearing their varied thank offerings. Just so were these worshipers assembling.
The sight of them disoriented Hoare. He had steeled himself for some ancient pagan rite, one that would culminate in another ritual killing; hence his having launched the landing party in the first place. The offerings of the rural folk who were gathering in the Nine Stones Circle tonight simply would not do. These people would be as misplaced at a Black Mass as so many nuns in a brothel. Had he misjudged what was to take place here tonight? Had he, then, made an utter fool of himself? From Leese's restless movement beside him, he sensed that the Sergeant, too, was uneasy.
Like those of a herd of startled deer, the heads of the scattered audience or congregation lifted and turned eastward. Hoare's own ears pricked. In the distance, he heard a strange wild, jangling rattle, then the strained bleat of a pipe and the rhythmic thump of muffled drums. As the players, still invisible, advanced, their music swelled. A reddish light flickered in the eastward distance.
The fog pounced again. One minute, Hoare could note each of his party's hiding places and see all of the attending worshipers in the Circle; the next, the surrounding Stones were again no more than hints of black against gray nothingness. The black began to take on ruddy overtones; the discordant music sounded louder and louder.
The fog lifted unevenly, as if it were the curtain of a provincial theater. The congregation drew apart; Hoare saw one anxious woman dart out and snatch her child from the path of the procession itself as it straggled into sight.
Out of the fog appeared two men carrying torches. As they approached, Hoare saw that the torches were oddly carved; they guttered in the light wind. Stripped to the waist, the bearers wore thick hairy breeches as if they were to be taken for satyrs. They, came on with slow, majestic steps and looked about them anxiously. Perhaps, Hoare thought, they were afraid their torches would blow out and leave them alone in the dark.
Six musicians, male and female, followed on their heels. The first pair of women shook lyre-shaped rattles and chanted as they came. The second pair, cheeks puffed out like those of wind cherubs on an antique chart, squalled desperately on double pipes that might have been taken off one of those Grecian vases. The last two whistled on panpipes.
Like the bearers of the ithyphallic torches, the band of musicians was also naked to the waist, the men clad in the same hairy breeches and the women in long full skirts. The figures thus exposed were far from classic and looked very chilly. Hoare shivered in sympathy. A foggy Hallowe'en night was no proper time for an orgy.
With the torchbearers, the awkward orchestra now drew up in a double inward-facing line, as if taking its positions for some macabre fancy-dress contradance, and played on. One by one, the folk in the congregation drew near the altar and deposited their modest offerings around it and returned murmurously to the outskirts of the gathering.
Four small boys now came into sight, their treble voices raised in a meaningless song as they thumped away on little drums for all they were worth. Though they, too, were naked except for hairy buskins-perhaps, Hoare thought, they were supposed to be fauns-the brave noise they made and the exercise of beating the drums must keep them, at least, warm. And possibly the mere fact that they were engaged in mischief kept them in temper. In fact, like all boys so occupied, they kept glancing at one another and stifling snickers; Hoare heard them in his lair and nearly snickered himself. Whatever the reason, the imps were the only persons in the gathering who looked to be enjoying themselves at all.
A second pair of torchbearers followed them, ithyphallic torches in hand.
Into the circle of dolmens, behind the urchins, came a solitary squat figure in a viridian robe, carrying a T-shaped standard as he chanted and staring up, as he marched, at several small furry carcasses that dangled from its crossbar. It was Martin Frobisher, so soon-according to his father- to receive the traditional Frobisher knighthood. He looked bored, even embarrassed.
Hoare knew the two women, bearing a covered wicker cage between them, who were the next to enter from the night outside the Circle. One, quite flat-chested and broad of hips, he had last seen at the reception in Admiralty House. But he had heard her seagull voice in the crowd outside that same house the next night, after the assault on Admiral Hardcastle. It was Sir Thomas's daughter, Lydia, Martin's sister, and her face was that of a woman on the verge of hysterics. She was not singing now, not at all.
Her companion, also half-dressed like the other women in the procession, displayed to better satisfaction. Gleaming in the torchlight, Selene Prettyman's glossy black rope of hair swayed behind her; her firm ivory breasts swayed before. She wore an archaic proud, contemptuous smile, but her eyes roamed, taking in her surroundings as if in search of something. Hoare and his party, perhaps? The two women drew to one side, with their covered cage.
The first of the two men who brought the procession to a close was Captain Walter Spurrier. A heavy cloaklike garment concealed most of his frame. Hoare was certain he had seen it before. In one hand, Spurrier carried a single-edged, wide-bladed weapon, a short sword or falchion like a huntsman's that ended in a peculiar backward hook. Hoare had seen a similar weapon being wielded by a classical bronze hero; he could not remember which one.
The white-cloaked pouting man beside Spurrier, Hoare saw with dismay, was one who must already be quite familiar with processions, if not-Hoare hoped devoutly- of this sort. His left eye glared fixedly to his larboard side. In his good hand, Ernest, Duke of Cumberl
and, bore a footed dish. It was a krater, a bowl or chalice. It might be, Hoare thought, the very chalice Titus Thoday had included in his inventory of Spurrier's peculiar possessions. Hoare wondered what the Duke was making of this bucolic bacchanal.
Beside Hoare, Sergeant Leese startled. Yes, he, too, had been subjected to Cumberland's sneering inspection on board Royal Duke.
Spurrier and Cumberland reached the altar, Selene Prettyman and the Frobisher woman following on their heels, the wicker cage between them. With a final ragged bleat, jangle, and thump, the musicians fell silent.
So far, except for the time and the open-air venue, this could be Sunday morning service in Dorchester's Church of All Angels, and, except for the decorously exposed bosoms, the congregation could be the ton of the town.
Turning to face his flock, Spurrier raised his arms skyward.
"Let us invite and invoke our prepotent masters and mistresses," he intoned. A confused mumble followed. From it Hoare thought to hear names he was sure he had heard elsewhere: "Isis"… "Asmodeus"… "Ashtaroth." "Baal" was certainly familiar. Hadn't the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians or the Philistines sacrificed babies to Baal? For his part, Hoare hoped that Selene Prettyman and Lydia Frobisher were not lugging someone's missing child about in that covered container and that he was not about to witness a ritual infanticide.
Hoare could not doubt it. Plautus might have been written the whole ceremony into one of his broadest comedies. But from the intent expression of Captain Walter Spurrier, whatever deity he was addressing was a real one to him, and a dreadful one.
Spurrier turned to Selene Prettyman and Lydia Frobisher. From the wicker cage he withdrew-not a baby, Hoare was relieved to see, but a great black cock nearly the size of a turkey. Holding the struggling bird by the neck with one hand, Spurrier raised it in the direction of the moon in dedication, as though he were elevating the Host, intoning more gibberish as he did. He murmured an instruction to Ernest, Duke of Cumberland.
Cumberland appeared as if he devoutly wished himself elsewhere. These people, Hoare could tell already, were too simple for the Duke's tastes-and too sincere. So was the ceremony. But he was the son of a King, after all, and noblesse oblige. With his sound left hand, the Duke extended the chalice and set it on the ashlar.
Spurrier grunted, caught the cock's neck with his weapon's strange hook, twisted the bird onto the altar, and beheaded it with one clean backhand blow. The headless creature fluttered to the altar and, as any chicken will when its head is chopped off, staggered about the broad stone surface for several seconds, spattering its blood about before Spurrier caught it and held it over the chalice as firmly as he could. In the deathly silence of the Circle, the blood trickled audibly into the chalice.
Like acolytes, two of the faun-boys came up, looking pale. One bore a brass jar and the other a torch. After rendering an unseemly backward-facing obeisance with evident gusto, the lad with the jar emptied part of its contents into the chalice and part onto the headless cock. It was rum, as Hoare knew from its odor, and powerful rum at that.
Taking the torch from the second boy, Spurrier thrust it onto the rum-soaked flapping cock. A puff of bluish flame, and the pungent, acrid reek of burnt feathers drifted into Hoare's nose. He must struggle against a coughing spell. Spurrier resumed his unintelligible chant. "Gaah," said the Duke, and backed away with a disgusted look to join the two bare-breasted ladies.
Perhaps Spurrier sensed that his royal auditor was becoming discontented, for, using plain English now, he called into the darkness, "The sacrifice has been accepted. Draw nigh, ye worshipers, and receive your token of our sacrifice; then go ye hence, to foregather at the Hall of Feasting!"
With this, Spurrier plucked a branch of heather and dipped it into the mixture of cock's blood and rum that filled the chalice. Selene Prettyman took one of the Duke's arms and Lydia Frobisher the other and led him to the altar, where Spurrier stood ready to dash the branch across the three clenched faces.
The Duke shook himself free.
"That will be enough, Spurrier. Call this a rite?" he grated. "Why, it's the most farcical piece of fustian I've ever had to witness. You had the gall to bring me all the way from Plymouth for this? Compared to Dashwood and his crowd, you're a choirboy. And if you call this a 'pagan orgy,' you can call me an abbess. By the time I was fourteen, I'd seen more, and done more, than you could dream up in a hundred opium dreams. Be damned to you, indeed."
He spun to address Selene Prettyman.
"And as for you, madam, I shall have words with you at my later convenience."
The lady sank into the deepest of curtseys; the Frobisher woman followed suit with far less grace.
The Duke marched off into the dark in the direction from which he had come. The ladies lifted up their heavy skirts and followed. After an embarrassed pause, Spurrier resumed his summoning of the congregation.
In response, the common folk approached timidly to receive their aspersion, then drifted away as silently as they had arrived, leaving the celebrant to stand alone, facing his altar and his stinking headless bird as if rendering a closing prayer. Perhaps, Hoare thought, Spurrier would now dodge round to the entrance of the Stone Circle as if by magic, like the vicar at Sunday service, to greet his parting flock and be congratulated on his powerful sermon.
At Hoare's side, Leese stirred restlessly and gave his Commander an inquiring look. Call it off? he mouthed.
Hoare put out a hand and pressed it onto the Sergeant's shoulder. Wait, his gesture said.
Spurrier still brooded at the altar, cope and all. As Selene Prettyman returned into the ring of megaliths, he looked up, visibly hauling himself back to the mundane world from whatever bourne he had been sojourning in.
"What are you doing here now?" Spurrier asked. "You're supposed to be shepherding Cumberland back to Dorchester."
Spurrier sounded depressed, it seemed to Hoare, as well he might, considering that his ceremony had been a fiasco and that he had just lost one powerful backer.
"Don't worry, Spurrier," she said. "I gave him into the protection of the Frobisher children, who have him under their wings. I kissed him good-bye. Perhaps he'll linger at those odd quarters of yours. If so, you can make your excuses to him yourself."
"That's all very well. But you have no business here now," Spurrier said.
"You should know by now that I go where I choose to go," Selene Prettyman said briskly. "Now be about your own business, for if I'm not mistaken, your business is about to come to you." As she shrugged, her breasts bounced. Under other circumstances, Hoare thought, their motion would have been enticing.
"Very well," Spurrier said. "Keep out of my way, then, d'ye hear? Now then, let's be about it."
He bent, retrieved a torch, struck fire to it, and waved it in an unmistakable signal. There was a scuffle outside the Circle.
"Come along, you," came a hoarse voice from the dark. "Don't give us no trouble, now."
Two captives were half-hauled, half-carried into the torchlight, each gripped by a pair of hard-looking men. The prisoners were hoodwinked, their arms bound, their shoeless legs hobbled.
"Take off their hoods, you men. We'll start with the little one," Spurrier said.
Hoare suppressed a grunt of dismay. The prisoners were Hoare's own men, Rabbett and Thoday.
It must have long been obvious to Spurrier, Hoare could see now, that Hoare's two aides were on his trail. What, then, since they were lonely intruders into his territory, could have been simpler or more logical than to ensnare them and dispatch them like a brace of hares? By making them his true sacrifice, the one that the death of the cock had merely simulated, Spurrier would be accomplishing three things at once. He would clear his own trail, he would add to the Royal Navy's alarm and despondency, and, if his worship was genuine-a possibility that, after the proceedings just ended, Hoare could not dismiss- make a sacrifice to his deity or deities compared to which that of the big black cock was petty. Again Hoare pressed Leese's
shoulder. He must make ready to signal the rest of the hidden landing party.
The leather gags across their mouths kept the two captives from uttering more than half-smothered mumbles. But it was obvious that they could see and they could struggle, which they did as best they could. A blow to the belly doubled Rabbett up.
"Over here," Spurrier ordered. "Stretch him over the stone, now. No, you idiots, face up. There. Now hold him. Yes, just like that."
"Are you sure you want to go through with this, Spurrier?" Selene Prettyman asked in a cool voice.
"Be silent, woman."
Spurrier took a firm hold of the odd, impractical-looking knife once again, raised it into the foggy night air, and looked fixedly at the moon. Then he leaned over Rabbett.
At Hoare's piercing whistle, he froze.
Leese at his heels, Hoare threw himself across the few feet toward the altar. The rest of his party sprang from their hiding places and grappled with the guards. Dropping their prisoner, Rabbett's guards turned to defend themselves.
Spurrier leaped for the gap between two menhirs, the cope flying behind him, the drawknife in his hand. Hoare fell headlong over the clerk, reached out for Spurrier, clutched the fleeing foot, twisted, and began clawing up the other's leg. Spurrier dropped his weapon but gripped Hoare by the hair.
In no time, Hoare had both hands on Spurrier's leg and was almost within reach of his privities. Hoare would grip them as soon as he could and crush them in his fist till Spurrier surrendered.
"Take him from behind, woman!" Spurrier shouted.
Hoare looked over his shoulder. Selene Prettyman, raven hair flying as wild as any maenad's, lunged toward him, the hook of Spurrier's blade in her hand. She flipped it deftly end for end, catching hold of the hilt. Hoare winced and awaited the blow that would finish him. Instead, flinging herself full-length across Hoare's prone body, Selene Prettyman swung the flat of the weapon squarely into Spurrier's upturned face, and the man went sprawling.
Hoare and the headless Captains cbh-2 Page 19