173536.fb2 Hoare and the matter of treason - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 6

Hoare and the matter of treason - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 6

Chapter VI

"Fire, Sir! Fire in our cellars!"

Roused from a happy dream in which, at last, he and his tribe were receiving their due, the heavy man grunted. Then, as the message sank into his torporous brain, he roared. Without more than shoving his tender flat feet into a pair of old slippers, he took the candle from beside his bed, rushed to the door, and unlocked it. The acrid smell of smoke affronted his nostrils.

"This way, sir! This way! I have the men forming a bucket brigade from the kitchen. The house is out of danger, I am sure. But oh, sir, I fear for your port!"

Thrusting past the heaving bucket brigade, the heavy man made his way into the smoke-filled cellar. There he halted in dismay.

"What, all my port-and my portrait, too!"

By the time Hoare and Thoday had returned across the river and through the nearly deserted London streets to the Golden Cross, it must have gone two o'clock. Hoare had arranged a separate room for his companion, on an upper floor. He would not be troubled, as he had on an earlier occasion, by the haunting strains of the pocket violin with which, he had learned, the other played himself to sleep.

The next morning, as agreed, they parted, Thoday to commence moling his way about the city's underside, while Hoare made the call on this John Goldthwait whom Sir Hugh Abercrombie was so strangely insistent he meet.

He must cudgel his memory before he recalled who Mr. Goldthwait was. At last, he remembered. A small, lean man with a weary face, he had been among the entourage of Admiral of the Fleet Prince William, Duke of Clarence, when that authentic Royal Duke had attended the trial of Arthur Gladden. If Sir Hugh saw fit to insist that Hoare attend him, Mr. Goldthwait's role on that occasion must have been something other than a mere courtier's. The one time they had met, he had spoken in a most kindly way of the role Hoare had played in the Vantage affair. In fact, Hoare thought, Mr. Goldthwait might well have put a good word in with Sir Hugh, and thus been instrumental in Hoare's miraculous advancement as far as the threshold of post rank.

When, after following several false trails, he finally came upon 11, Chancery Lane, his gentle raps with the knocker were without result. At last, a frowsy head stuck itself out the upstairs window of an adjoining house and informed him that he was wasting his hammering. Mr. Goldthwait was not in.

"I suppose that manservant of his has taken advantage of his master again and gone off to some boozing ken," the head volunteered.

Hoare ventured to ask the head if it would tell either Mr. Goldthwait or his manservant that Mr. Hoare of the navy had called, and it agreed to do so. Its owner then slammed the window down and left Hoare to do as he pleased. At a loss, Hoare decided he would take his discovery-or Thoday's, rather-to Sir Hugh Abercrombie. The admiral would surely be pleased.

His passage to Whitehall was a difficult one. After Hoare ended up in a warren of alleyways, a kindly passerby told him he had turned the wrong way upon leaving number 11. He should have turned left. Confused and frustrated, he retraced his steps, or at least attempted to do so. He must have taken a wrong turning again, for he found himself at length facing a dignified structure with a dome, which could only be St. Paul's. Far earlier in the day than it should, the sky had begun to darken, for it still wanted a good hour to noon. He suspected that one of the infamous London fogs was about to descend. A heavy wain almost crushed him against a wall, and its driver snarled at him in some unintelligible dialect. He was totally at sea, and he wished it true. He hated London.

He gave up, prepared to sacrifice his dignity, and hailed one of the many dirt-encrusted, starveling barefoot boy children who infested the streets hereabouts.

"Here, boy-do you know where the Admiralty is, in Whitehall?" he whispered.

"Admiralty, mister? Calls yerself a sailor-man, and can't find yer own way orne?" The child, wizened and wise, did nothing to hide a contemptuous sneer. " 'Course I does," he said.

"Sixpence to take me there," Hoare said.

The ragamuffin tossed his head.

"Shillin'," he said.

"Sixpence now, sixpence when we get there."

"Let's see yer blunt, mister sailor-man," said the boy, and would not budge until he had bitten the coin and tucked it into his cheek for safekeeping.

"Come orn," he said, and set off.

It took Hoare's child pilot a mere fifteen minutes to lead his bewildered customer into Whitehall. Hoare knew where he was now; he could even recognize the high door of the Admiralty, from which he had been turned away two evenings before.

"I can find my own way from here," he told the boy, and handed him the other half of his fare. The other grabbed it, bit it, and disappeared.

"Mr. Hoare, Mr. Hoare! Wait for me, sir! Please!" Hoare felt himself blanch with astonishment at that clear, exclamatory, unforgettable treble, but turned all the same, however reluctantly. The owner of the voice, the visible, audible spirit of Harry Prickett, was pelting toward him. Little Prickett, he knew, late midshipman in the late frigate Vantage, had gone up with her while leaving Spithead one beautiful morning the previous summer, in smoke and flame.

"Aren't you glad to see me, sir?" the lad asked, looking up into Hoare's face with some anxiety.

"Why, yes. Yes, lad, I am." Hoare squatted to view Mr. Prickett at eye level, and grasped him by the shoulders. "But I thought I never would, short of Davy Jones's locker. How… weren't you in Vantage, then?" The question was silly, of course; of three hundred twenty-seven Vantages, only twenty-four had been hauled from the water when the frigate had blown up in Hoare's own presence. He had pulled in most of them himself, since he had been less than a cable's-length distant from her in his own beloved little sloop when the catastrophe occurred. Most of the survivors had been badly burned or mangled, and none had ranked higher than quarter-gunner. Like the very Christ, this so-helpful very young gentleman must have risen by divine miracle from his death in the explosion.

"Oh, no, sir! I caught the mumps, sir, from another boy who was staying at the inn, and they put me ashore before she went to sea, and sent me home! You've had the mumps, sir, haven't you?"

Hoare, who could barely remember himself and his brother being put out into the barn and nursed from that distance for a week while they bulged, sweated, and felt generally sorry for themselves, said "yes."

"Then you won't have to worry, sir! Will you?"

"No, boy. But… what are you doing here in London?"

"I've been taken into a ship, sir! Papa brought me up himself, all the way from Canterbury! Wasn't it sad about Vantage! She was a smacker, wasn't she? Poor Mrs. Watt! She's left with six daughters, all alone!" He meant Mr. Prickett's friend, Vantage's clerk, who had been so helpful to Hoare, and whom he had delivered back aboard his ship just in time to share in the disaster. Watt's widow would be on the town now, of course.

"But let me introduce you to Papa! Papa! Look at what I've found! Here's Mr. Hoare! Oh, sorry, sir! Commander Hoare, I mean! Captain Hoare, I mean!"

The man who came up to them, as brisk as his son but far more stately, could only be a prosperous canon lawyer in a cathedral town. There was something episcopal about him; in fact, Hoare almost expected to see a bishop's apron shrouding the region between navel and knees. His forbidding black attire clashed with a bright, clever, humorous face.

The little mid was not shy with his papa, for he took his hand and drew him toward Hoare.

"Papa, it's Mr. Hoare! Remember? He's the officer who can't talk and he had me holloa for him!"

The two men exchanged greetings as equals.

"I am delighted, as well as astonished, to see your son alive, sir," Hoare said in all sincerity. He meant it, for the boy had radiated the cheerful confidence of a well-loved puppy. He still did. He had brains, too, and would go far in the navy.

"Not half as delighted as we were, sir," the father said. "I know, we have four more like him at home, but all of them are precious to me, and to Mrs. Prickett as well. You have children, Mr.-or should I say 'Commander' Hoare?"

"Captain Hoare, Papa!"

"Thank you, my boy," said the father easily. Hoare was pleased to see that, pompous though Mr. Prickett senior might appear, he was not too high in the instep to accept his child's correction willingly. Hoare explained that no, he was only recently married, but was hopeful. He forbore to mention his daughter by Antoinette, the daughter he had sought but never found, born in '84 and carried away by his late wife's people to dwell in the wilds of Quebec-if, indeed, she was still above-ground.

"Perhaps you'd like to serve with me in Royal Duke," Hoare whispered to Mr. Prickett. "She's small, and she doesn't go to sea often, but I can offer you a good education. We could use a handy young gentleman."

He could have bit his tongue. However appealing a safe berth of this kind might be to a master of clerical law like Prickett senior, the offer of a good education was no way to appeal to a seven-year-old boy.

For perhaps three seconds Mr. Prickett held his tongue. Then he looked up at Hoare with eyes filled with appeal.

"Oh, sir!" he said. "Must I? I mean, sir… here I am, midshipman six whole months now, but I've never been to sea! I want to go to sea so much, sir! Won't you let me go to sea? Captain Prothero's just offered me a berth in Impetuous! Papa is just now taking me to Deptford, where she lies! Can't I go with him instead? Please, sir?"

The lad had served Hoare well in the Vantage affair. He had become fond of the lad, his ebullience, his open face, his constant motion. It would have been a delight to help him mature into a seasoned sea officer. But, even in command of Royal Duke, he himself was as good as shorebound, as he had just let slip to Mr. Prickett, so how could he train the young gentleman to become a normal serving officer? Why, he would have to take his ship's latitude from the same spot every noon. And, as for longitude-that matter would be nugatory, since Royal Duke lay at Greenwich, the zero meridian. Hoare understood now how a father must feel when his favorite son leaves home to go to sea. It might be as close as he would ever get to knowing.

"Very good, Mr. Prickett. If Prothero's fool enough to want you aboard, he has a right to you."

The younger Mr. Prickett stifled a giggle.

Hoare had made his bow to the father and was about to part company, when the other forestalled him.

"Before we part, sir," he said, "may I beg you to take a dish of tea? To at least that extent, I am indebted to you. The Leaf lies just around the corner. It offers a fine Bohea."

Although he did not know Bohea from Yunnan, Hoare could hardly object. "With pleasure. But I am unaware of any debt you owe me, sir; if anything, the shoe is on the other foot. Your son was an invaluable aide. Had I had a dispatch to write on the subject of the Vantage affair, I should have mentioned him in them."

"Very kind of you, I'm sure," Mr. Prickett said. He took Hoare by the arm and, undisturbed by his son's perpetual motion about them both, escorted him to the Leaf.

When they had been seated and young Prickett's mouth stoppered with a large round sweetish bun, Hoare took the chance to ask for clarification.

"You informed me just now, sir, that me you are in my debt. As I said then, I know of no such thing. Elaborate, I pray." The attorney's stately quality appeared to prompt an equally stately mode of speech on Hoare's part.

"Had it not been for young Harry's attendance on you last summer," Mr. Prickett answered, "he would not have strayed into the inn yard and contracted the stable-boy's mumps. But for the mumps, he would have remained aboard Vantage when she sailed to join Lord Nelson, and would have been lost with her."

" 'The house that Jack built,' it seems to me, sir, if you will forgive me. My role in Harry's mumps was only casual. Rather than making a thank offering to me, would it not be appropriate to slaughter an ox before the altar of the Fates?"

As he spoke, Hoare realized he had just abandoned his synthetic stateliness of speech. Had he erred? No; the other nodded.

"You are perfectly correct, sir. Truth to tell, the reason I gave you was no more than a thin crust on top of a much juicier pie. I ask your forgiveness for the deception."

Mr. Prickett paused to await Hoare's reaction. Hoare took advantage of his own muteness, sat back and waited for the next disclosure.

"As it happens, Captain Hoare, I am an advocate in Admiralty law as well as a canon lawyer. Expertise in canon law alone, I found long ago, is no longer in demand sufficient to support a large and hopeful family. So now, while we reside not far from Canterbury and my related duties call for my regular presence in Lambeth, I actually spend at least as much time in Whitehall.

"It is in the latter connection that I took advantage of the fortuitous meeting young Harry unwittingly arranged. In fact, I had already been requested to-ah-curry-acquaintance with you. I prefer to be forthright, however, whenever circumstances permit. I believe that to be the case now.

"To make a long story short, Captain Hoare, you are being considered for a post which might be more permanent and more to your advantage than the one you presently occupy, and I, with others, have been charged with examining you… informally, that is. May I proceed?"

"Of course, sir," Hoare whispered. "But if the interview is to be a long one, will your son be willing to sit still?"

"Long since, Mrs. Prickett and I taught all our young to be silent and invisible at table. Otherwise, neither she nor I would have retained our sanity. We are at table now, Harry, you understand?"

Mr. Prickett the younger nodded. His gob-stopper was long since gone, but the gob in question remained stopped, as if the child were the mute, and not the man.

Thereupon, the father subjected Hoare to a barrage of questions about himself, his brother in Melton Mowbray, his Hoares, and his father's politics (here, Hoare could say nothing, for Captain Joel was mumchance about his doings as a member of Parliament). This was Hoare's second such inquisition today, and it was becoming irritating. He determined to bear up.

As the advocate proceeded, he unabashedly disclosed considerable previous knowledge of Hoare's own affairs; thus, he knew of the source from which Hoare had derived his own capital: the prize money from his capture of a specie-laden American privateer in September '81, while he was the sole remaining officer in the brig Beetle. After the navy had bought in the prize and the Halifax prize agent had done his duty for a change, Hoare had become the richer by,?6,127 plus five shillings and eight pence. Shocked into good sense, the young man had promptly invested the amount in the Funds and left it at Barclays Bank to grow in peace. It had only been in '03 that he had dipped into capital in order to buy the neat little pinnace that now dawdled astern of Royal Duke.

All these things Mr. Prickett had known beforehand; about none of them had he a comment, save one, which bore upon Hoare's financial windfall.

"You, sir, profited by a legal technicality on that occasion, as I surely need not tell you. I venture to urge that the experience not lead you to seek out other technicalities by whose advantage you might hope to rise further. For you, that would be gambling. Leave that sort of thing to us lawyers."

With that cryptic caution, Mr. Prickett rose, gave his son permission to unstop his gob, brushed down his nonexistent apron, paid the reckoning, and ushered Hoare from the Leaf.

"A most enjoyable occasion," he said. "I look forward to continuing our acquaintance."

"Harry said you were taking him to join Prothero in Impetuous," Hoare responded. "If I'm not mistaken, she lies in Deptford just now. That's near Greenwich. You and he would be most welcome aboard Royal Duke at any time."

"Very kind, sir. It will be our pleasure. Come, Harry; we must be off."

"Sir Hugh will see you directly, Captain Hoare," the clerk Cratchit said. He looked amazed; evidently, his exalted master did not commonly stoop to receive mute commanders who merely "happened to be in the neighborhood and thought they would drop in for a chat."

Some half an hour later, when the admiral's scurry of messengers had ceased, his bass call summoned Hoare within. The room had not changed. Sir Hugh was still sitting, smoking, reading swiftly and dropping each page to the carpet as he finished it. A disorderly white drift of discards lay at his feet. Once, he coughed heavily. He did not look well. He stopped reading long enough to say, "Sit, sir. Well?"

In silent answer, Hoare handed him Titus Thoday's discovery. Sir Hugh leafed through the pages, just enough, Hoare suspected, to make sure they were all present or accounted for, tapped them together, and bellowed, "Cratchit!"

The mouse appeared, like a jack-in-the-box.

"Take this to Lord Manymead, to be forwarded to Lord Hovick at the Foreign Office. My compliments, and this office has no further need of these documents."

The mouse took the papers and scuttled off.

"Jumped up counter-clerk," the admiral said.

"Cratchit, sir?"

"No, you ass, Manymead. Went to India as a junior clerk under Clive, shook the pagoda tree, came home with his stolen millions. Now, just because he's seen fit to buy his way into government, he thinks he owns the whole of Whitehall and all that pertains thereunto. Including you, sir, and me."

Hoare believed he remembered Lord Manymead as being the father of one of the four midshipmen he had gathered up a year or so ago and returned to their ship, the light frigate Hebe. They had been kidnapped by a ramshackle gaggle of would-be Irish rebels. If it was the same portly peer-and there would hardly be two of them-he agreed with his admiral's opinion.

"Find Ambler?" the admiral asked.

"No, sir."

"Why not?"

"I think he's dead, sir. Thoday is visiting the city's dead-houses, and… I believe, some of the underworld haunts he seems to know so well."

"Hmph. What did Goldthwait have to say?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Nothing, Captain Hoare? Goldthwait never says 'nothing.'"

"I have yet to meet with Mr. Goldthwait, sir. When I called on him an hour or so ago, he was not in… nor were any of his servants."

"Nonsense, Hoare. Goldthwait never goes out-when he's in Town, that is-except to come here. And he's not here. What have you to say about that, sir?"

Did the admiral look worried? Did he fear that John Goldthwait, Esquire, had followed Octavius Ambler into the… Ewigkeit? Besides "gnadiges Fraulein," Ewigkeit was one of the few German words Hoare knew. He was not quite sure where he had learned it or what it meant, but for him it carried connotations of a wan, empty nothingness in which lost souls wandered. A special word for which he had never found an English equivalent, it seemed appropriate to this occasion.

To Vice-Admiral Sir Hugh Abercrombie, however, there was nothing Hoare could say, so he doused sail, hove to, and sat mute while the admiral hissed at him in a soft, spiteful roar. Sir Hugh must have had an unpleasant morning, and Hoare was there to receive the backlash. For Sir Hugh, Hoare knew, it would be like kicking the cat or breaking up poor Ambler's dinnerware; futile, yet strangely satisfying.

His ire assuaged at last, Sir Hugh bade Hoare go and try again for Goldthwait.

"And if you are unsuccessful in this simple task, I have been overestimating your modest competence. In that case, you are to return to your command and await further orders."

"Aye, aye, sir," Hoare replied.

This time, Mr. Goldthwait's manservant was within, informed Hoare that his master was at home to him, and admitted him to the apartments. The place was larger than it appeared from the outside. On seeing his host, Hoare recalled him instantly, for his intimate knowledge of Hoare himself, displayed at their only previous meeting, in Portsmouth's Navy Tavern, had engraved itself in his memory. Mr Goldthwait was a small, rust-colored, lean, undistinguished-looking man; his world-weary face reminded Hoare strongly of an engraved portrait he had once seen of one Francois Marie Arouet, Frederick the Great's pet philosophe, alias Voltaire. Come to think of it, there was something Frederician about him as well.

The gentleman must have a substantial income, above and beyond the emoluments due an Admiralty official of medium rank such as Mr. Goldthwait. The easy chairs on either side of the glowing grate were covered in the finest Russia leather, as were many of the books lined tidily upon the high shelves. Where there were no books, the walls displayed an occasional piece of art, of a mildly pornographic nature. Other than these, there was no sign that humankind comprised more than one sex. Altogether, the place glowed with walnut, mahogany, polished brass, and unobtrusive prosperity.

Over the mantelpiece was a long vacant space that must have borne an object of importance to Hoare's host-a painting, presumably, a panoramic landscape of some sort.

Mr. Goldthwait's sharp eye must have detected Hoare's casual interest.

"A cluster of muses hangs there," he explained. "I have had the thing carried off for a cleaning and for the opinion of an impartial connoisseur as to the artist. It leaves an ugly gap, I must confess."

Mr. Goldthwait now made himself most agreeable. Having shown Hoare to the chair on the other side of the grate from the one he obviously used himself, he offered port and biscuits with his own hand.

"Your very good health, Captain," he said with an affable smile, raising his own glass, "and my felicitations on your promotion and your marriage. "

Hoare made the appropriate appreciative noise, and waited.

Thereupon, while never dropping his show of cordiality, Mr. Goldthwait embarked on the same inquisition as Sir Hugh Abercrombie had applied to him not long before, demonstrating in doing so the same familiarity with Hoare's life as Sir Hugh and then Mr. Prickett had displayed, if not more. Before long, Hoare felt himself being pressed beyond endurance. As a result, perhaps, he had entwined his tale first in his adventures in and around the Nine Stones Circle, and then in the story of his accidental removal to the schooner Marie Claire.

"The two little craft-my own pinnace and Moreau's schooner-were all ahoo, sir, I must confess," he whispered.

"Ahoo, sir?" Goldthwait's look was blank.

"Awry, sir. Out of order. A piece of nautical lingo."

A grandfather's clock chimed in one corner; Hoare realized it was sounding seven bells. From the feel of his throat, he realized he had been gabbling-as much, at least, as a mute could gabble-and he fell silent.

As if to fill in an embarrassing silence, Mr. Goldthwait shook his head.

"You sailors use as many bells, it seems, as all the parishes of London put together," he said, and renewed his inquisition.

Hoare began to feel as if he were some exotic animal that had been subject unawares, all his life, to the unwinking scrutiny of too many invisible savants. He found the sensation somewhat disquieting and not at all pleasant. These intense examinations of his doings left him feeling uneasy between the shoulder blades.

At length, Goldthwait reverted to the present.

"So Ambler is dead," he said.

"Is he, sir?" Hoare asked. "I did not know that. In fact, one of my men is going about the… dead-houses of every likely parish this very day, in search of him."

"He must be dead," Goldthwait answered. "For over a week now, he has not been seen in his usual places. He is-he was-a sedentary man, and his movements were circumscribed. Across the bridge to the Admiralty every morning, the same chump chop in the same chophouse at noon, back across the bridge to Lambeth in the evening. A rump steak at the inn around the corner from his dwelling place, once a month to the whorehouse… excuse me, sir. The reference was inadvertent."

"Not at all, sir," Hoare whispered. "I am quite accustomed to inadvertencies of the kind. A peculiar name like my own attracts them, just as a pile of shit does flies."

With this, the interview wound down gracefully. Hoare paid his compliments and took his leave.

Mr. Goldthwait, he thought as he traced his way carefully back to the Golden Cross, had seemed remarkably knowledgeable, not only about Hoare's past life, but about Octavius Ambler's movements as well. Furthermore, the detail with which he had described Ambler's daily habits made no sense. And what had made him so certain he was dead? The matter needed thought.

Before returning to the Golden Cross, Hoare decided, he would go on to Threadneedle Street and call on Mr. Pickering. He hoped that Threadneedle Street was at the same end of London as Chancery Lane. This time, however, he would take no chances. He caught the eye of an urchin, to have him pilot him there. The child looked interchangeable with the first.

"Lorst again, mister sailor man?" The child's voice was pert, and familiar as well. Following him to Threadneedle Street, Hoare felt himself blush.

The establishment of Mr. Baker the mercer was graced by one of the newfangled bow windows, which offered more room to display his goods than the conventional flat window. Hoare paused outside the shop and negotiated with the ragamuffin to wait for him until he had finished his visit. Within, the hopeful face of the apprentice or clerk who hastened up to serve this prosperous-looking naval customer fell upon hearing Hoare's unprofitable inquiry. With a backward jerk of his head, he indicated a narrow stairway.

"Third floor," he said in a voice burdened with scorn. Up, up, and up Hoare climbed, until the stairway came to an end in front of a low garret door. On the door the tenant had nailed a little sign, neatly inscribed, which read:

TIMOTHY TICKERING

PORTRAITIST AND LIMNER

He knocked, waited, and knocked again. At last, he heard a shuffling sound from behind the door, and a faint infantile grizzling. For a truth, Timothy Pickering was a husband and father as well as a portraitist and limner.

"Who's there?" It was a woman's voice, and it sounded frightened. Hoare knew his whisper hopelessly incapable of making his needs known to the party on the other side of the door, and that one of his whistled signals would only alarm her. In any case, she would not know what any of the whistles meant. He resorted to one of the pre-printed slips that he carried about with him. He drew it out of his pocket.

"Permit me to present myself," it read: "Bartholomew Hoare, Lieutenant, Royal Navy. My deepest respects. That I am not speaking to you is not a matter of intentional discourtesy but is due to my inability to speak above a whisper."

Whipping out a pencil, he promoted himself to the proper rank, reminding himself as he did so that he must have a new set of slips printed, signed the paper with a flourish, and slipped it under the door. He coughed, and watched the slip disappear.

The door was opened by an anxious-looking woman in run-over slippers, with an infant on her hip. One of the pair gave off a strong odor.

"You bring bad news, I know it," the woman said. "Tell me. I shall be brave."

Behind her, the garret managed to appear both desolate and cluttered; there were no signs of an artist's paraphernalia. The artist must carry out his commissions in his subjects' homes or other places of business. The place was cold and damp, and smelled of old mold. A pot of something dreadful was simmering on a small charcoal stove in one corner, with a scrawny cat staring up at it, looking hopeful.

"I have no news, madam," Hoare whispered. "I have simply called to see Mr. Pickering. Is he within?" Since the entire Pickering dwelling was in plain sight, he asked the question only so as to be polite.

"No, sir. Oh, no. He has been away the entire morning, soliciting commissions. And trying to sell his hat. It's a fine hat; 'twas left him by his late brother… Indeed, he departed without even waiting for me to serve his breakfast. You see, I had to attend to poor little Beatrice…" Mrs. Pickering bounced her baby to show this alarming stranger whom she was referring to, and it began to grizzle again.

"But please come in, sir, and have a seat if you please." With her free hand, Mrs. Pickering brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. It flopped right back again.

"Thank you, but no, madam," Hoare said. "I may not tarry. Pray, when do you expect him to return?"

"Why, why…"At this, the infant's grizzling became a full-fledged roar, and Mrs. Pickering must interrupt herself and step aside to put it to a surprisingly firm breast. Hoare took advantage of the interruption to look about the garret.

At first, his glance slipped casually over the ill-made bed, the tilted lopsided table with its unwashed dishes, and the curtained corner behind which, he presumed, lay the family's wardrobe and primitive place of easement. Then it fixed on one wall, on which daylight fell less dimly than elsewhere in the apartment. There he saw an entire portrait gallery in pencil, the superbly candid, precise, unflattering likenesses that he already recognized as uniquely Pickering's work. One of the faces, of a stern middle-aged man of a naval aspect, was hauntingly familiar, but he could not at the moment attach a name to it. Drawn on separate pieces of paper, other faces surrounded it, faces which he knew but had never seen in the flesh-Queen Charlotte, the prince-and, to his astonishment, the vivid, tapered countenance of Mrs. Selene Prettyman. As a very close companion of the Duke of Cumberland, Mrs. Prettyman had been equivocally associated with the affair of the Nine Stones Circle. She was moving in odd company today, Hoare said to himself. Why was she there? Whom did she serve?

Duke Ernest's villainous face was there as well. And, from their heavy-lidded Hanoverian eyes, so were two others of the poor king's dismal litter of princely sons, though Hoare could not be sure, having met only Cumberland and Clarence. Kent, perhaps, York, Cambridge, or Sussex.

Suddenly, he recalled whose face had been puzzling him. It was his own. He had not seen himself before as others saw him, his morning view in the mirror being reversed, like all mirror images. This new view made him look disconcertingly strange. When on earth and where, he wondered, had Mr. Pickering made this secret sketch? A look at still another face, and he realized he was staring at a likeness of Titus Thoday.

On a sudden impulse, he turned to the nursing mother.

"Will you sell me these drawings, madam?" he asked.

"Why, I hardly-I-" Mrs. Pickering's eyes wandered swiftly about her home as if she hoped that her husband would appear, like some jinni, and give her the answer. Then the poverty in which she dwelt took charge.

"How much?" she asked in a voice that was suddenly hard.

"How much does Sir Hugh pay Mr. Pickering per likeness?" he whispered.

"Seven shillings sixpence apiece, sir. But Timothy sells his royalties for as much as half a pound."

Not often, I'll be bound, Hoare silently told himself. They aren't prettified enough to sell for more. But the Pickering family is obviously poor, poor.

"There are… let me see… seventeen of them," he whispered. "That would be… let me see… six pounds, seven shillings, and sixpence. I'll give you five pounds for the lot. Have you change for a ten-pound note?"

Her answer was what he had expected.

"Change for a ten-pound note?" Her voice was bitter. "This house doesn't see ten shillings from one week to the next."

"Well, well," Hoare said as if reluctantly. "Make it ten pounds even, then." He reached into the pocket in which he did not keep his communications and withdrew his purse. At this rate, he would soon need to draw more funds, either from the Admiralty's penny-pinchers or from his own resources. He found a ten-pound note and handed it to her. She received it in a trembling hand.

"Do you have nothing smaller, sir?" she asked as she watched Hoare detach his purchases from the garret wall. "No one in the neighborhood will believe we came by a ten-pound note honestly. Indeed, I never saw one before. How big it is! And we do need some food for our larder. We have a few other drawings, sir. Perhaps…?"

"Let's see them, then," Hoare said.

Still carrying the infant, Mrs. Pickering disappeared behind the curtain and came out with a small roll of sketches. "That's all we have, sir," she said.

Hoare did not stop to examine them but wrapped them around the others. He hauled out a fistful of small change and handed it to her.

"Oh, sir! Oh, oh, oh!" Mrs. Pickering cried, and burst into tears. As Hoare raced down the flights of stairs to the street where his ragamuffin guide waited, he heard her voice, fading with the distance, crying, "Oh, Beatrice, Beatrice! The heavens have opened, and rained down a full year's rent!"

Just as Hoare reached the foot of the stairs, a small hatless figure crashed into him and nearly sent him flying. Thrusting him out of his way, Timothy Pickering raced up the stairs down which Hoare had just come, shouting something about having sold poor David's hat.

Upon returning to the Golden Cross, full of self-praise for his generosity to the poor and deserving, Hoare found that Thoday had preceded him and was waiting in the private bar to make his report.

"I have made the rounds of the dead-houses, sir, as far as was needful," he told Hoare. "At the third, in Cripplegate, I found our man's body."

"Are you quite sure?" Hoare whispered.

"Quite, sir. I examined every portly corpse I saw, comparing its features with the likeness you provided me. It was, if I may say so, an experience I should not care to repeat."

Hoare could only sympathize. From time to time in his career as Sir George Hardcastle's investigative dogsbody, he had had his own occasions to inspect numbers of the dead, in conditions ranging from the still-warm to the nearly deliquescent. The sweet sickening stench of human corruption was unforgettable.

"The man I found had been dead for about a week," Thoday went on. "Since most of that time had been spent in the water, his more prominent features were missing, eaten by crabs or lobsters. But the pockmarks remained, and their pattern was identical to the one shown in the likeness of the missing man. Since, as you informed me, the artist manages to capture every salient detail of a subject's countenance, I satisfied myself that the corpse was indeed that of Mr. Ambler, and I felt no need to continue my search."

"So he was drowned, then," Hoare whispered.

"Not so, sir. He was felled by a gunshot-a pistol bullet, unless I miss my guess, fired from close enough that the explosion drove powder granules and parts of the man's clothing into the wound. I withdrew the ball and some fragments, which I have with me. Here."

From one pocket, Thoday removed a folded paper, which he unfolded and tendered to Hoare. Mentally if not physically, Hoare shrank back. None too faintly, Thoday's specimen bore the cloying odor Hoare hated.

"Never mind, Thoday. Wrap the thing up again, will you? In oilcloth, if you can find some. I'll take it to Sir Hugh in the morning, when I report to him on my meeting with Mr. John Goldthwait.

"But there is something else I must take up with you, Thoday." With this, Hoare recounted his morning's call at the establishment of Timothy Pickering, Esq.

"Here are some of the likenesses I bought from his wife." Reaching into his bulging pocket with a sense of relief that his uniform coat was now returned to a reasonable shape, Hoare produced the roll of drawings. He peeled off one after another without inspecting them, dumping them at random upon the table before him. Near the core, he slowed.

"Ah, here we are," he whispered in triumph at last, and handed the gunner's mate Pickering's drawing of him. "How do you explain this, Thoday?"

Thoday inspected the sketch without visible emotion.

"An excellent likeness, sir, I would say. Of course, I am looking at a reoriented image of myself, so to speak, since the familiar countenance I see in the mirror of a morning is, of course, in reverse."

"But how did Pickering come to take your likeness?"

"Why, at the behest of Sir Hugh Abercrombie, sir," Thoday replied. For the second time that day, Hoare felt the blood rush to his face. Of course. Sir Hugh's acquaintance with the Royal Dukes was close; in fact, he had probably chosen most of them himself. Hoare felt an utter fool. And in any case, why, he wondered, had he been looking forward to confounding Thoday?

"May I look at the rest of these, sir?" Thoday asked.

"Of course," Hoare whispered. "I haven't really inspected them myself… But let us take them upstairs to my quarters, where we can examine them in peace, without my host peering over our shoulders." For Berrier had just bustled up, to see if he or his cellar could be at their service. Hoare took the whole batch of drawings under one arm, while instructing Berrier to have a decanter of port for himself brought to his room.

"And for you, Thoday?"

"Porter, if you please, sir. I've acquired a taste for it."

Hoare nodded his assent to the proprietor, and then withdrew, Thoday at his heels.

Upstairs, the refreshments having arrived and their porter dismissed, they undertook to sort out the likenesses, setting visages either man recognized in one pile, unfamiliar faces in another, with the doubtful ones in between. None of the drawings bore names. Hoare counted thirty-nine of them in all.

Onto the first pile went one of Mrs. Pickering and the infant Beatrice, the only example of a rendering that included more than one head, Thoday's own portrait, and likenesses of several other Royal Dukes, including one of Sarah Taylor, master's mate, and Hoare's own.

In the middle of the heap, Hoare paused in astonishment. He heard a gulping noise from his companion; Thoday would hardly demean himself by gasping. Hoare stared into a froglike face.

"What can he be doing in this company?" Hoare knew perfectly well that Thoday would have no answer, but he could not forbear asking the question all the same.

"I have no notion, sir," Thoday replied as expected. "I think of the gentleman in association with Dorset and not London. It is unmistakably Sir Thomas, however. And he has nothing whatsoever to do with the Admiralty."

"Hardly," Hoare said. In fact, on the only occasion of their meeting, the knight-baronet and Sir George Hardcastle had nearly come to fisticuffs.

Hoare and Thoday leafed on.

"I know that one," Hoare whispered. "I saw him this very day."

"Indeed, sir?"

"John Goldthwait, Esquire, of Chancery Lane."

"Like the others, then," Thoday said. "I suppose them to be trials which the artist chose to save for his own records. Perhaps he hopes to find an engraver and earn a few shillings by hawking them to him."

"I wonder who has the finished works. In any case, so, Thoday, I hardly think the subjects would be pleased, do you? Look here."

Hoare held up the likeness of Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, whom they both had last seen marching in dudgeon from the tragicomic Halloween ceremony in the Nine Stones Circle. The scarred face reeked with royal pride, self-indulgence, and malice.

Among the unknowns were faces unfamiliar to either of them. By their attire, most of these were visibly aristocratic. Young and old, overwhelmingly male, their visages lacked sensibility. Among them, the assortment could have been models for each and every one of the seven deadly sins.

"We must keep these portraits safe, Thoday," Hoare whispered. "I think they are very important."

"I know just the place, sir," Thoday said. "Once we have brought them safe to Royal Duke, you can place the roll of them in the Herschel telescope."

"An excellent thought, Thoday." The Herschel telescope was a huge thing in gleaming brass, mounted on a teakwood tripod, that lurked at the forrard end of the yacht's tweendecks. It was an acquisition of Hoare's predecessor in command of Royal Duke, who had been a devoted astronomer as well as a master of the intelligence trade. As far as Hoare knew, no one ever even looked through it. He found himself slightly surprised at what, for Thoday, was a flight of fancy. As a rule, he was a sobersided man.

"But where shall we stow it until we return to Greenwich?" he asked, in part to see whether the gunner would come out with something equally bizarre.

"Under your mattress, sir, of course."

So Hoare, the least bit disappointed at his aide's failure to weigh in with a further fancy, put it where he was told.

The next morning, the admiral heard Hoare's report impassively. As usual, his enormous form was so wreathed in tobacco smoke that he resembled a bull walrus on a foggy floe. The atmosphere was so thick that Hoare could barely restrain his coughs. The admiral did not trouble to do so. From time to time, the ferret Lestrade slid sinuously through the door, deposited a document, and waited for his master's instructions before winding away again. Since Portsmouth's criminal class knew Hoare himself as the Whispering Ferret, Hoare felt some kinship for the man, but little liking.

"So you have determined that Ambler is dead, eh?" Sir Hugh growled, and wheezed.

"My man Thoday did, sir," Hoare replied, and explained how.

"Never mind the details," the other said. "At the inquest- which, at the rate unexplained deaths are occurring in this city, will take place some time after 1815-the jury will bring in the usual: 'Murder, by person or persons unknown.' The man's gone, and that's all there is to it. There are dozens ready to replace him."

So much for the late Mr. Ambler, Hoare thought. He presented Mr. Goldthwait's opinion of Ambler's established habits, and remarked on the dead man's apparent prosperity.

"And Mr. Goldthwait, Hoare?" came Sir Hugh's rumble. "What did ye make of Mr. Goldthwait, once ye found him?"

Hoare's reply was ready. "He knows too much about me. If he knows so much about me… does it not follow that he knows as much about others, not necessarily to their good?"

"Of course, he does," Sir Hugh said. "It's his job, or part of it. If you suspect Goldthwait on that account, you may as well suspect me."

"About yourself, sir, for example?" Hoare ventured to add.

"Me life is an open book, sir," Sir Hugh replied, not rising to the bait. "But, being of no interest to any save myself and my family, it is a book generally closed to outsiders." Rebuffed, Hoare returned to his appraisal of John Goldthwait.

"He seems remarkably prosperous, too, sir. Has he independent means?"

"No. He does not. He comes of ordinary folk-his father was a farrier, as I recall, and he has never married. No, Hoare, his prosperity is of his own making. In fact, that, I confess, begins to render me anxious about him."

Sir Hugh knew when to pause for effect, and he used the pause to break the stem of his cheap clay churchwarden, toss it away, and fill its successor with coarse shag tobacco. Having lit it, he blew a thick blue puff into Hoare's face-not, it seemed to the victim, out of malice, but simply out of carelessness for his guest's comfort. Before continuing his discourse, he gave a loose, satisfied cough and spat copiously into a container on the floor at his side.

"I have good reason to believe, Hoare, that he gambles. Gambles with cards, playing with men of all classes, whether high or low. And is quite a consistent winner. Has been for some years. Took poor Fox, for example, for more pounds than any Whig cares to think about.

"Yet nary a whisper has come to my ears that he is a sharper or a flake. His opponents, even though they are generally losers, seldom accuse him of cheating, and those that have done so have never made their charges stick, or attempted to follow them up."

"Is Mr. Goldthwait wont, by any chance," Hoare whispered, "to respond in the usual way to accusations of… ungentlemanly behavior? I mean, sir, that he may be so formidable a man to meet on the field of honor that… even the bravest prefer not to meet him."

"Like yourself, Captain Hoare, eh?" Puff, puff. "No, sir. If that were the case, do you not think that the headstrong young bucks about town would be forever calling him out, not so much to prove the man a sharp as to prove their own panache before their friends, and their mirrors? I expect that you, sir, are not unfamiliar with that sort of thing."

Hoare nodded. Sir Hugh was in the right. Sober men chose to avoid open conflict with him; younger men, drunken ones, and fools not uncommonly sought either to issue a challenge or to provoke one. The pretext generally had to do with his name, but lately Hoare had learned to let stupid remarks of that kind slide off in ways that did not impugn either party's honor.

"There is more, sir," the admiral said. "I am a simple sailor and no man of accounts, more than is needed to have dealt well enough with navy recordkeeping when I commanded a ship of my own."

Hoare found it impossible to conceive of this man mountain pacing the weather side of his own quarterdeck, but indeed it must at one time have been so.

"But," the mountain continued, "I cannot believe that the prosperity which you so shrewdly noted derives wholly from cards. There must be another source, and I dread what it may be.

"Look at this," he said. "The coded text came to our pigeon loft several days ago, directed to Mr. Goldthwait. Somehow, thank God, one of the idiots in my service misdirected it; otherwise, it would not have reached my eyes, or now yours. Only now has one of those idiots managed to decipher it. No thanks to them, by the way, but to your own wizard. Or 'witch,' perhaps I should say-that remarkable Taylor woman in Royal Duke. For, as you know, it was she that broke the code."

Hoare took the paper that Sir Hugh placed on the desk within his reach.

"Acts: nine, one and two," he read, silently.

"You know the reference, I'm sure," Sir Hugh rumbled.

"I fear it escapes me, sir."

" 'And Saul,' " Sir Hugh recited, " 'yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.' "

"Thank you, sir." Hoare made his whisper sound as humble as he could.

"The cipher, and the content of the message it bears, have a most uncomfortable familiarity, don't ye think?" Sir Hugh asked.

"Indeed it does, sir," Hoare said. "It's an inflammatory text. It has much the same character as the messages Taylor unraveled from the documents of the late Captain Spurrier."

"Precisely so. And, as you will remember, too, the ultimate source of those messages to Spurrier has never been determined. There is, Captain Hoare, every reason to believe that it is French-or at least French-connected. One of Bonaparte's men, Hoare. Who else could it be?"

The question of the ciphers had troubled Hoare ever since he had encountered his first one, early in last year's inquiry into the blowing-up of Vantage and several sister ships. The texts were generally Biblical in tenor, if they were not actual quotations, and they used Biblical names for writer, recipient, and any third parties. The names were suggestive, like a nudge in the ribs, but-like nudges in the ribs-skirted specificity. The whole topic had been tantalizing; the ciphers could be read, but no one had succeeded in tracing them to their sources or identifying the owners of those nagging Biblical names. Each new accession-there had been three or four-plucked more sharply at Hoare's intellect.

Hoare had thought before of one possible source, one who, at least as far as he knew, had no connection with the French but had an odd, mad agenda of his own. He debated with himself, then decided to speak up.

"It could be Sir Thomas Frobisher, sir."

"Who?"

"Sir Thomas Frobisher, baronet and knight, of Dorset. He is by way of being virtual master of the entire county, or at least so he believes, and many Dorset folk believe with him. Including Spurrier, the Satanist, who chopped off the heads of those captains not so long ago… and then had the effrontery to drown in his own vomit while my prisoner."

"Never heard of 'em." Sir Hugh's rumbled admission was rueful.

Hoare was taken aback. Until now, it had seemed to him that Sir Hugh Abercrombie, like Mr. John Goldthwait, was omniscient.

"Sir Thomas was Spurrier's master, you may recall, sir, at least in county affairs. What if anything he had to do with the atrocities in the South, I cannot say."

"I had forgotten." The admiral broke his churchwarden's stem with a sharp snap, as if to exorcise his rage at having been found wanting in knowledge. "Go on about him, sir."

Hoare obeyed. As he felt he must in order to be fair, he stressed the ill feeling that stood between him and Sir Thomas. He described what he perceived as its initial cause-how he, Bartholomew Hoare, had mocked the baronet on the evening of their first encounter with his description of how, instead of riding to hounds as any gentleman would, the Hoares, father and son, engaged in battery. This, as he had explained to Sir Thomas then and explained to Sir Hugh now, involved training bats to catch large insects and return them to their handlers.

"Like falconry, sir," he explained. "It was a foolish jape, sadly mistimed and fatally misdirected. The misstep did me no good, I am ashamed to say." He paused and awaited his admiral's displeasure.

Instead, Sir Hugh, rearing back in his enormous chair, began to roar with laughter. That laughter was a daunting thing to hear. Deep and cataclysmic, it could have signaled the drowning of ancient Atlantis.

"Well, Hoare, that explains why you pricked up your ears so oddly the other day, when I mentioned falconry in connection with our man Ambler. At least, there's that little question answered for me. I had been wondering.

"But continue about this man Frobisher." Once again, Sir Hugh's bass voice grew grave.

"The important thing about him, sir," Hoare whispered, "in this connection at least, is his absolute conviction… that he, and not our present Majesty, is the proper wearer of the English crown."

"A peculiarity, to be sure," the admiral said, "but hardly a matter of gravity. After all, Bedlam is crawling with men who imagine themselves Jesus Christ. They can't all be; the Savior did not, as far as I know, claim to extend to His own person His miraculous ability to multiply the loaves and fishes. If He had, I should imagine, the matter would have preoccupied all Christian divines for centuries past, with an undoubtedly beneficial effect upon the souls of us all."

"Indeed, sir. In the case of Sir Thomas's delusion, though, the trouble is that he has a certain odd attraction… which has made him, as I said a moment ago, the effective dictator of Dorset. Not only that, he has extended that strange magic… to the House of Parliament in which he sits. I have been told, by Sir George Hardcastle and Mrs. Selene Prettyman, among others-"

"What Prettyman says, I find, is generally to be taken as absolute fact," Sir Hugh observed. Puff, puff.

"— that he has a number of adherents in Parliament who might better be described as devotees, if not worshipers. You would know more about that than I, sir."

"I blush to say that I had overlooked that," Sir Hugh said unblushingly, "probably because his claim is so typical of that sort of madness. Besides all those miraculous Jesuses, I know of a round dozen King Charleses, divided equally between father and son. As I remember now, he is an uncommon good political man, well able, as you observe, to get his own way.

"If I may leap to the conclusion to which I believe you are about to come, you suspect of Sir Thomas Frobisher what I have commenced to suspect of John Goldthwait-that he has entered into a conspiracy with the French."

"Exactly, sir. If Bonaparte should overlook an opportunity to put a spoke in Britain's wheel by fomenting an insurrection against the Crown, it would hardly be the first time. And… if the possibility did not occur to him, there is always Fouche."

"Ah, yes. That son of a bitch, that ugly little bum-worm…"

For some minutes, Admiral Abercrombie continued to string out maledictions about his opposite number on the far side of the Channel, as if he were signal midshipman in a flagship, running up orders to the Fleet. Interrupting himself only with agitated puffs at his pipe, he came to anchor only when he swallowed smoke the wrong way, gagged, and in a whisper no stronger than Hoare's, ordered the latter to pound his back. Hoare obeyed.

"I do not like Goldthwait, Hoare," the admiral gasped at last. "I never have. But you are quite right. Nothing gets past that… never mind. So we have two suspects, of which Frobisher is one and Goldthwait himself the other."

"Against neither of whom, sir, do we have proof sufficient to take action," Hoare whispered.

"We, sir-no, you, sir-must find that proof. Or satisfy us both that each of us has let his imagination run riot. I was becoming anxious enough with only Goldthwait on my hands; now you have doubled my anxiety. Go forth, young man, before I suffer an apoplexy. Do your duty; there is not a moment to be lost. You may count on my support-within reason. As you go out, pray send Lestrade in. Good day."