"Impossible," Davison declared. "Why, I only sent word to the boys' families night before last, as I said. My letters can hardly have reached any of them yet."
"As you say, sir. In any case, will you permit me to question some of your people? Mr. Steptoe, for example, and Millar, the coxswain? Mr. Galloway, the lieutenant of marines, too, if it's not too much trouble."
"Of course. I'll have Edwardes put all three of 'em at your disposal."
Davison raised his voice.
"Pass the word for Mr. Edwardes! Ask him to be so kind as to attend me for a moment!"
There, Hoare told himself bitterly, is an example of why he was debarred eternally from command at sea. He had no voice to raise.
Mr. Edwardes, a spry, white-haired man clearly double Captain Davison's age, appeared within moments. The captain introduced the two lieutenants and explained Hoare's needs.
"Perhaps, Mr. Edwardes, you would make space available for Mr. Hoare in the wardroom so that he can hold his interviews in private."
"Easily, sir. It still wants three hours before we dine. That would give you an hour for each interview, Mr. Hoare. Will that suffice?"
"It should be ample, sir," Hoare whispered.
With that and Davison's firmly expressed wishes for his mids' early, safe return, the two officers took their leave. As Hoare departed, he clearly heard Davison sigh and return to his paper slavery.
"You are welcome to dine with Hebe's officers, Mr. Hoare," Edwardes said.
"Thank you, sir," Hoare replied, "but another time perhaps. After your mids are home again, do you think? For now, there is not a moment to lose."
Mr. Galloway was at liberty just then, so he was the first to appear before Hoare. Hoare was enthroned at the end of the long wardroom table in the mess president's armchair. Galloway was a standard marine officer, his red face clashing with the scarlet of his coatee and the crimson of his officer's sash. As usual among marines, he had a rather stupid look.
"Seen you before, sir, I think," Galloway said.
"Oh?"
"Yes. In Barsack's fencing shop."
By this the lobster meant the salon d'escrime of Hoare's good friend and instructor the Vicomte Marc-Antoine de Chatillon de Barsac, emigre aristocrat. For his own part, Hoare could not have distinguished Mr. Galloway from any of the other lobsters who thronged the salon, but he smiled politely just the same.
"Of course," he whispered. "I remember you well. The saber's your weapon, as I recall." A safe bet; like cavalrymen, marines were notorious slashers.
Mr. Galloway preened, and his face turned a deeper red with pleasure. "Tell me how I can serve you, sir," he said.
Hoare now asked him to recount the search he and his men had made for their missing shipmates.
The narrative lacked both surprise and interest.
"The lads have disappeared from the face of the earth," Mr. Galloway concluded. "If they were still to be found, you may be sure my good men would have found 'em."
"I'm sure your confidence is justified," Hoare whispered smoothly, and released the marine to go about his normal affairs.
Millar, the coxswain, was-as far as Hoare could tell at present-the last to have seen the missing midshipmen. He had nothing to add to the simple tale he had told before. The lads had tumbled ashore from the liberty boat, larking and pushing each other about as usual, and shoved off directly into the town. "Merry as grigs, like I told the capting, sir." When queried about the bringer of the message, all Millar could tell Hoare was that it was a boy, a mudlark judging from his filthy state. He had darted up to the coxswain, thrust the note into his hand without a word, and disappeared. Millar thought it had been in the same direction the mids had taken, but he could not be sure.
Was it important? he asked anxiously. Since Hoare was sure it was not, he so informed Millar and let him go. To follow that trail would be futile, he suspected, but he must try.
Hoare had greater hopes of getting some enlightenment from the frigate's sole remaining young gentleman. Perhaps, he thought, little Steptoe had overheard his seniors laying their plans for their foul adolescent foray into the fleshpots of Portsmouth. Maybe more than that.
Having been a boy himself once, long long ago, Hoare could easily imagine that the three, being as thin in the pocket as mids always seemed to be-and most commissioned officers, too, he reminded himselfhad connived in a false kidnaping scheme. They would collect the ransoms themselves and, when they had squandered the gold on drinking and drabbing, would turn up on the Hard, waiting to be received by their anxious families and their outraged captain. Their misbegotten capers would have left them looking most distressed, a condition they would naturally attribute to their captors' mistreatment.
Hoare had no hard evidence of this sort of mischief, he admitted to himself. However, two points supported the notion. The first was the unusual pattern of misspelling that the message had displayed. While no expert, he felt confident that no scribe so illiterate as to write "uncel" and "posesin" would be able to master the far more complex words "receipt' and "instructions." He had trouble with "receipt" himself.
Second, he was even more confident that a professional kidnapper would have demanded far more than two thousand two hundred fifty pounds for three well-connected young aristocrats-two thousand for the job lot. The ransom note smelled false. It could, in fact, have been concocted by a clever midshipman. In any case, as soon as he was through in Hebe for the time being, he must follow up this lead.
He summoned little Steptoe and sat him down beside him at the wardroom table.
Normally, Hoare thought, Steptoe would be a confident lad, as up to any challenge as the next and not over-impressed by authority. Today, however, he looked uneasy. Under Hoare's grave scrutiny, he twisted about in his seat, his eyes looking for anywhere to rest except the face of his interlocutor. In short, Steptoe looked guilty.
But of what? The conscience of every midshipman Hoare had ever known, including a certain Midshipman Bartholomew Hoare, had to be very accommodating if it were to handle its owner's manifold sins and wickednesses without distending until it burst, perished, and rotted in the young gentleman's soul, or wherever else mids stowed their consciences.
So Hoare played Mr. Steptoe as if he were a timid trout and Bartholomew Hoare a hungry poacher, first by inquiring about his present berth in Hebe and then about his family.
Hebe was the boy's first ship, so he was immensely proud of her. From his account, her hands were hearts of oak to a man, her captain one of Nature's noblemen, her officers gallant yet kind, his fellow-midshipmen good fellows all, up to all kinds of larks. As to his brief previous life, it had been unexceptional. He was the next-to-last of the large brood of Steptoes, his father an impecunious baronet and his mother a lady-in-waiting at Windsor. He missed his baby sister and his goat. But as a younger son many times over, "I've my way to make in the world," as he put it with a wisdom beyond his years.
Hoare returned the conversation to the matter of "larks." He was disappointed, though not surprised, to find that these were the ordinary sort of merry prank common on shipboard-greasing the soles of Harcourt's ("Lovey's") shoes so that on donning them the first thing he did was slip and fall on his arse; the time, when Steptoe had newly reported aboard, when he was sent hither and yon in search of the key to the keelson; other tricks old as Neptune but forever new. Not so much as a hint of a cabal to raise illicit money from the mids' elders. In desperation Hoare asked the question direct, only to see his victim first look shocked, then burst into a fit of the giggles.
"That would have been a lark!" Steptoe said when he had regained control of himself.
"Keep the idea to yourself, lad," Hoare said upon dismissing him to his duties. Himself, he had nothing more to do aboard Hebe just now, so he paid his respects to the quarterdeck and boarded Devastation for the short, hard beat in the teeth of the breeze into the Inner Camber where he kept her.
Immediately upon landing and securing his yacht, he returned to Admiralty House. Here he ran hard aground, into pandemonium.
Not only Delancey but Patterson as well, the admiral's private clerk, awaited him. Patterson was literally wringing his hands; Hoare was certain that, had not Delancey's pride precluded it, his hands too would have been wringing.
"There you are, Hoare!" Delancey's cry of accusation carried more than a hint of relief. "Where the hell have you been?"
"Right where you told me the admiral wanted me to go," Hoare whispered. "Aboard Hebe. Now, pray excuse me."
He left the others to wring their hands into rags if they so chose and dodged past them and up the stairs to the admiral's sanctum. It was here that he found the real pandemonium.
Sir George's marine sentry stood impassive, his bayoneted musket at the charge, his face flat and eyes to the front, under siege by several important-looking civilians. All were clad in the latest Bond Street fashion, all were shouting at the imperturbable lobster. Two of the noisy gentlemen were flourishing pieces of paper in the sentry's unblinking face. These personages, Hoare guessed immediately, were the missing mids' anxious friends and relations, come to demand their scions' immediate rescue.
Hoare eeled his way through the crowd, which after all numbered only three or four, and slipped into his admiral's private quarters.
"There you are, Hoare!"
Sir George's outcry was identical with the one his subordinate had uttered below. "Where the hell have you been?"
"Aboard Hebe, sir," Hoare whispered, glad for once that he could give only the soft answer that turneth away wrath. "I brought the ransom note back with me."
"Like hell you did, sir. The ransom notes are right here-and there are at least three of them, sir, I'll have you know, not just one. They're outside this very office being waved in the face of my poor marine. I'll tell you this, sir: if this hullabaloo isn't brought to a stop forthwith, I'll summon the guard detachment and have the whole bunch of 'em thrown into irons, Members of Parliament, peers of the realm, and all."