When a watchful manservant ushered him into the Graves drawing room that evening after a long walk up the cobbled High Street, Hoare saw two other guests had preceded him. Mrs. Graves introduced him to the lady, naming her as a Miss Austen, a friend visiting from Bath. Like every properly schooled gentlewoman, Miss Austen sat her chair as if it were an instrument of torture, her long back well away from the support it offered the slovenly. Save for a pair of piercing, inquisitive dark eyes, her appearance was even less remarkable than Mrs. Graves's. Hoare made his leg and forgot her.
The gentleman was another matter. He was of his height, and heavier. He might be a seasoned thirty or a well-preserved fifty; Hoare could make no closer guess. His figure was foursquare. Above his ruddy lipless face and low forehead sprang long, coarse black hair, which he wore clubbed in the old style. The skin was drawn as tight over his broad cheekbones as it would have been over the knuckles of a clenched fist. But for the eyes, as gray as his own, Hoare could have mistaken him for one of the Red Indians he had seen in the streets of Halifax.
"Lieutenant Bartholomew Hoare… Mr. Edward Morrow," Dr. Graves said, nodding to each in turn. "I hardly know which of you takes precedence over the other, so I hope the affronted party will bear with the insult."
"Our host tells me you have visited the New World, sir," Morrow said.
"I have, indeed, sir," Hoare replied, "and I regret the parting of our two countries more than I can say."
"Why, our two countries are still one, Mr. Hoare; at least they were when I last heard from Montreal." He pronounced the town's name in the English manner.
"I beg pardon, sir; I had understood you to be American," Hoare said.
"And have the king's loyal subjects north of the Saint Lawrence no right, sir, to call themselves American? After all, some of us came to America before the Yankees did, while my mother's ancestors were already standing on their native shores to welcome the first European invaders. A welcome which, by the by, many of both peoples lived to regret."
Hoare felt his ears burn. He had meant no offense. Was this formidable-looking man intent upon a quarrel?
"Peace, Mr. Morrow, peace," Mrs. Graves said. Her putty-colored silken gown flattered neither her coloring nor her figure. Perched erect as she was, on a round, squat, cushiony hassock, she looked even more like a partridge than she had that afternoon. A partridge at home at the foot of her pear tree, Hoare thought, keeping her eggs warm.
"You are certainly the person present who is most entitled to the honor of being an American," she told Mr. Morrow, rising from her nest. She left no eggs behind her.
"Mr. Hoare," Dr. Graves said, "I have a request to make of you. Would you permit me to auscult your throat?"
"Aus…?" Hoare had never heard the word before.
"I beg pardon, sir. I detest the parading of professional arcana, as I fear so many of my calling are wont to do. Simply put, as I should have put it in the first place, I would like to listen to the noises your throat might produce when you try to speak. May I do so?"
Hoare could not endure the prurient prying with which some people approached his handicap, but Dr. Graves was his host and obviously a man of talent as well as years, and he felt obliged to agree. He said so.
"Good," Graves replied. He wheeled himself nimbly over to a mahogany stand at the far end of the room, selected two devices, and wheeled back.
"Now, sir. Perhaps you would be so kind as to loosen your kerchief and bend down? Or, on second thought, since Mrs. Graves has conveniently vacated her tuffet, you could take her place on it."
Hoare obediently cast off his neck cloth and sat on Mrs. Graves's tuffet. It was still warm from her posterior.
"Very good," Dr. Graves said. One of his two devices was an eighteen-inch tapered cylinder of polished leather with a flare at the smaller end. Mildly flexible, like a tanned bull's pizzle, it might almost have been one of the speaking trumpets used by serving officers of better voice than his own.
While his wife and Mr. Morrow watched, the doctor applied one end of the cylinder to the scarred spot over Hoare's distorted voice box and said, "Breathe, please."
Hoare breathed.
"Say, 'God save the King.' "
"God save the King," Hoare whispered.
"Now, sing it."
"But I can't sing," Hoare protested.
"Pretend that you can, sir."
Hoare tried. He produced a squawking sound that resembled the call of a corncrake, blushed, and shook his head.
"Very good," Dr. Graves said. He sat back in his wheeled chair. "Now I would like to presume on your kindness for another experiment," he added. He set the tube down and fitted the other device onto his own forehead by a soft leather strap, which Mrs. Graves tightened around his head. This object was a mirror. To Hoare, it resembled the mirrored inner surface of a slice from a hollow sphere, a concave mirror with a round hole in its center.
"Open your mouth, if you please, and lean forward. Very good."
Dr. Graves drew the device down over his head further, adjusting it so that Hoare could see an eye peering at him through the hole.
"Now sing. Do not trouble yourself with the words; just attempt to sing, 'Aaaah,' with your mouth open."
Hoare uttered another macabre squawk, and the doctor sat back in his chair.
"So… so. Very good," he said as Hoare coughed and coughed. "Or rather, not very good, I fear. You may replace your cravat, sir."
"Would you now tell me, sir, what this is all about?" asked Hoare as he complied.
"Well, sir, it was partly an inexcusable curiosity on my part and partly a hope that I might be able to help you recover at least part of your speaking voice. Enough, perhaps, for you to shout commands at sea. You see, I have a special interest in abnormalities of the singing and speaking voices."
Hoare drew a hopeful breath. It was the loss of his voice that had put him on the beach in the first place, for no deck officer can issue audible commands in a whisper. Its recovery could mean his return to sea, perhaps even to the post rank his affliction denied him. It was his dearest wish.
"Well, sir? Your verdict?"
"The vocal cords are, I fear, displaced in your case, in a manner that none of today's surgeons have the skill to repair. I had thought perhaps Monsieur Dupuytren… but no, probably not even he. Besides, Dupuytren is French and would hardly wish to offend his Emperor by releasing a talented officer to battle against his own Navy. Moreover, the cords" are badly atrophied. I am surprised that you do not have difficulty in swallowing. I am sorry."
"Thank you just the same, sir," Hoare whispered.
"It would have been a small return for your having saved Mrs. Graves' life today," the doctor said. He looked up at his wife and put his hand over hers, where it rested on his shoulder. He handed her the mirror and the tube.
"I am most interested in that tube, sir," Mr. Morrow said. "You have not shown it to me before. Will you demonstrate its use to me now?"
"Certainly. Its most common application is in listening to the beating of the heart. Monsieur La+Фnnec-an old friend but another Frenchman, I fear-invented the thing so he could diagnose diseases of the heart and lungs more precisely. Being an amateur of instrument making, as you know already, I have made some small improvements upon his invention. Let you try it, first upon me, and then upon Mr. Hoare, if we can oppress him once more. Then you in turn shall submit to the ordeal, if Mr. Hoare, too, is minded to try the tube."
"I should like it above all things," Hoare said.
"I shall be satisfied to watch," Mrs. Graves commented. Miss Austen concurred with a nod.
"But first," said Mrs. Graves, "I see Agnes hovering in the doorway. I believe she wants to tell me Mrs. Betts says the soles will be getting cold. We must not upset Mrs. Betts, so let us defer the demonstration until after our dinner. Will you, Mr. Hoare, be so kind as to escort me into the dining room while the doctor follows us and accompanies Miss Austen with Mr. Morrow?"
As his host rolled his chair into the adjoining dining room, Hoare overheard him murmur, " 'Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean…' "
Miss Austen spluttered and Hoare suppressed a grin, but he heard no reaction from Mr. Morrow.
"I was noting the appearance of Mr. Hoare and Mrs. Graves as they preceded us," explained Dr. Graves in a normal voice. "Does not the contrast between their two figures remind you of the old nursery rhyme?"
"Of course. Ha ha," Mr. Morrow said dutifully. There was something puzzling here, Hoare thought.
As they discussed the soles, Mrs. Graves, with occasional interjections by the subject, explained to Hoare that Mr. Morrow was the son of an English fur merchant who had settled in Montreal after the cession of Quebec by the French in '63, and thrived. Morrow senior had taken to wife the daughter of a Cree chief, which explained why the son looked as if he would be more at home beside a campfire in the North American wilderness than at the Graveses' board.
But Edward Morrow, the son, had preferred civilized over savage life and, upon inheriting his father's small fortune, had returned to the homeland of his forefathers. He now owned one of the lesser marble quarries on the Purbeck Downs behind Weymouth, had become a justice of the peace, and was hob-and-nob with Sir Thomas Frobisher.
Hoare heard this with polite attention, but he was far more interested in something else. He turned to his hostess.
"How, Mrs. Graves," he asked once her husband had carved the roast, "did you learn to sling and to throw a stone with so deadly an aim?"
"Brothers, sir, brothers-and no mother," she answered. "Three brothers: one big and wise beyond his years, one a bully, one a weakling. Gerald was an everlasting torment to little Jude and to me, until Jack taught me, at least, how to defend myself and poor Jude against him. Fortunately, my two hands are equally skilled; I can write well enough with both- simultaneously, as I will show you after dinner if you wish- as well as I can sling stones or throw them. Jack drilled me and drilled me until, one bad winter when Father was away and times were hard, I fed the family almost entirely with the game I brought home."
Hoare saw that Mr. Morrow was at least as interested in Mrs. Graves's tale as he himself was but puzzled. Evidently Morrow had not heard the details of her exploit that afternoon. Hoare disclosed them.
"It was truly astonishing, sir," he concluded. "I would not care to have our hostess as an enemy-not, at least, if she had a stone or two to hand."
"Your tale would have impressed my mother's tribe," Mr. Morrow told Mrs. Graves. "Any brave would have given much in trade for a wife who could defend herself the way you did. I am surprised, in fact, that you did not faint."
"I am sure you flatter me, sir," she replied in a voice that told Hoare, at least, that she was no such thing. "And, as to fainting, what earthly good would that have done? Except for Mr. Hoare's opportune arrival, it would have left me completely at the mercy of the two thieves, or ravishers, or whatever they were.
"You know me better, Mr. Morrow," she concluded, and changed the subject to the safe, popular issue of Lord Nelson. Everyone knew the hero had left England's shores to comb the Atlantic in search of Villeneuve. Did Hoare believe the Admiral would succeed in catching his Frogs at last?
In reply, Hoare could only offer the usual banality-that once Nelson found his quarry, he would sink his teeth into him like a proper British bulldog and never let him go.
True enough, Hoare told himself, but the hero was wont to hare off after his enemy in the wrong direction, which often made his fleet slow to find his Frenchman. Once found, of course, the foe was doomed.
While carrying on this conversation with his hostess, Hoare could not help hearing snatches of an interchange between the other gentlemen. It had an odd, probing quality, one more suited in Hoare's opinion to political (or even personal) opponents.
"I have told you before, Morrow," Dr. Graves concluded rather testily, "that I am a physician and a natural scientist, not a manufacturer. You must seek elsewhere-Mr. Hunter's establishment, perhaps, in Pall Mall. Under the circumstances, of course, I cannot recommend any of the Continental makers."
As he had been taught to do, and to avoid the appearance of eavesdropping, Hoare now transferred his attention to his right-hand companion. "Have you and Mrs. Graves been acquainted for long?" he asked.
"We were dowds together, in Bath," Miss Austen said dismissively, "but she came off to Weymouth and left me in Bath, to dowd it in solitude."
"In solitude, Jane? Nonsense," Mrs. Graves inteijected. "A solitude interrupted by-let me see-your mother, father, sister, and heaven knows how many nephews and nieces? Let us have no more appeals for sympathy."
Miss Austen laughed a bit ruefully. For the balance of dinner she had nothing to say. The occasion being informal, the ladies did not leave the gentlemen but joined them over the Stilton and the nuts. When these had been defeated-"destroyed in detail, like so many Frenchmen and Spaniards," Dr. Graves said-Mrs. Graves led Miss Austen and the gentlemen back into the drawing room, where Agnes had set out the tea tray. Dr. Graves delayed in the doorway a moment and drew Hoare aside, apparently to address him privately.
"My earlier levity about my own wife and her figure took you aback, I believe, Mr. Hoare. Let me reassure you. I recited that snatch of nursery rhyme on purpose. I must come to know Mr. Morrow's heart better, in the philosophical sense rather than the medical. My little test showed he lacks at least that sense of the ridiculous, the willingness to be amused at even his own follies, that Mrs. Graves and I-and you as well, I saw-share.
"As to Mrs. Graves, she is not only a formidable person. That you have already learned for yourself. She is a truly kind, loving, and tender soul, though she would heatedly deny she has a soul at all. She is truly my better half, and we love each other dearly."
With that, Dr. Graves signed to Hoare to wheel him into the drawing room. When Mrs. Graves had served up the first dishes of tea from her tuffet, her husband doffed his own coat, the better to demonstrate Monsieur La+Фnnec's device, and invited his guests to follow suit.
Hoare noted a distinct difference in the sounds he heard in the other men's chests. The Canadian's heartbeat sounded like the man himself-sturdy, brisk, strong, deep. While the old doctor's heart was also steady and strong, he could hear in the background a soft, rustling, almost musical sound. Hoare said as much to Dr. Graves.
"Yes, Mr. Hoare," the doctor said. "That is one of the few benefits of advancing age. One commences to make a soft music within one's self. It is generally a very private music, of course, so only a few besides the musician are privileged to eavesdrop upon it."
"That is why I chose to stand aloof from this particular parlor game," Mrs. Graves said. "I permit no one but Dr. Graves to listen to the sound of my heart. It belongs to him."
"Mr. Hoare appears to have an excellent watch," Mr. Morrow remarked after his turn with Dr. Graves's listener. "It ticks four times for every one of its owner's heartbeats."
"From my experience, that would be about correct for a timepiece of high quality," the doctor said.
When the Canadian went on to pose Dr. Graves several questions about how his instrument operated in circumstances that did not involve the human body, the doctor could not enlighten him. So he took out his own watch, set the device against it, and listened with a delighted smile.
"Thank you, sir," he finally said as he handed the tube back to its owner. "Very enlightening. Very interesting. You never showed this to me before." Mr. Morrow was so interested, in fact, Hoare thought, that he was repeating-all but word for word-a remark he had made before dinner.
"I never had occasion to show it you before, Mr. Morrow," his host said gently.
Hoare reminded his hostess that she had offered to demonstrate her ability to write with either hand. She dimpled-the first time Hoare had seen her dimples (there was one at each corner of her mouth, like a parenthesis)-and had him replace the tea tray with a writing desk. From this she drew paper, ink, sand, and two pens-one from each wing of the bird. She began with her right hand.
"Begin your dictation, sir," she ordered.
" 'When, in the course of human events…' " Hoare began, and continued reciting.
"Treason, sir, treason!" exclaimed Mr. Morrow as Mrs. Graves began to write down Mr. Jefferson's defiant message to His Majesty's government. She paid no attention to Mr. Morrow but changed hands almost without stopping and continued to write Hoare's words, cack-handed. Looking over her shoulder, Hoare could detect only the slightest difference in her tidy script. He did not complete his recitation but stopped at the point where the recital of wrongs began.
"Now observe, gentlemen," her husband said.
Mrs. Graves took out a second sheet of paper, positioned it beside the other, and continued to write. Both hands moved as one across the paper, somewhat more slowly, but still producing the same uniform strokes.
Finally, Mrs. Graves set her right hand at the left margin of its page and her left at its page's right margin and dashed off the following: " 'I could not love thee, dear, so much, lov'd I not honor more.' "
The lines under her left hand were a mirror image of those under her right.
"Useless, but amusing," Dr. Graves said with quiet pride, sitting back in his wheeled chair. "And a commendable sentiment."
Evidently Miss Austen had been using her long silence to compose a Remark. Now she cleared her throat for attention and began.
"This is a most interesting form of conversation," she said in a high, strained voice. "As with any meeting among relative strangers-I except yourself and me, my dear Eleanor-our talk has consisted mostly of casting agreeable literary flies at one another. If the prey responds with a reference to the same literary source, or with an otherwise appropriate trope, so much the better; the two are now happy to know that they are two members of the same social tribe. If the response is inappropriate, the caster of the fly must release his victim, not only unharmed but even appeased-by compliments, perhaps, which are as unpatronizing as possible.
"A comfortable game, is it not?"
"Yes," said Mr. Morrow flatly.
Hoare found himself hard put to it to relate the evening's conversation to Miss Austen's description of it. A dreadful silence descended on the group. The lady essayed a plaintive smile; she blushed in unattractive patches. Tears appeared at the corners of each eye, crept down each cheek, and dropped simultaneously into her lap.
The silence was blessedly broken by the appearance of the maid Agnes with a message for Mrs. Graves.
"From Sir Thomas, mum," Agnes said.
Breaking the seal, Mrs. Graves read, and the color, already scant, left her face.
"Sir Thomas informs me that one of my assailants has died without regaining consciousness," she said. She dropped the note on the floor before her. "So I have a man's death on these hands."
"In self-defense, ma'am," Hoare said.
Her husband nodded agreement; Mr. Morrow simply raised his eyebrows as if in surprise at her evident dismay.
"Oh, my dear!" Miss Austen cried, forgetting her disastrous disquisition and going to her hostess with arms outstretched.
"Do not pity me, Jane," Mrs. Graves commanded, sitting erect on her tuffet. "I will not be pitied."
Hoare saw it was time to take his leave, and Mr. Morrow offered to join him. Because of the lateness of the hour, the Canadian said, he, too, would be putting up at the Dish of Sprats instead of making his way home, four miles in the dark, up the steep declivity behind the town. They could share a borrowed lantern to light their way.
Once down the ramp leading from Dr. Graves's front door, Hoare turned once again to whisper another word of thanks to the couple silhouetted in the lamp-lit doorway.
"A remarkable couple, are they not?" Morrow said as they walked down the cobbled slope through a light mist.
"There must be more to their story than we heard tonight," Hoare agreed. "For instance, how does one account for the difference in their ages? What of the bullying brother? And what of the twin stepsons she mentioned to me this afternoon?
"Mind the gutter!" he added as loudly as he could, catching Morrow by the arm.
"Thank you, sir; I nearly misstepped," Morrow said. "As it happens, I can enlighten you, for I have known the Graveses since I settled nearby. Dr. Graves has been kind enough to lend me his gifts as the inventor of novel instruments from time to time.
"As to the difference in their ages, I gather you already knew the present Mrs. Graves is the good doctor's third wife. The two stepsons are not twins but both grown and gone, the one a captain on Sir Arthur Wellesley's staff, presently at Aldershot Barracks, the other at Bethlehem Hospital-an aspiring mad-doctor, mind you, not a patient. The twins to which you referred were born of Dr. Graves' second wife; they were stillborn, and their mother followed them into the grave within hours, I am told."
By now, the pair had arrived at the Dish of Sprats.
"Pray continue, Mr. Morrow," Hoare whispered, "while we share a nightcap at my expense."
"As to the difference in the ages of the two," Morrow said across a decanter of the inn's muddy port, "after burying his second wife, Dr. Graves apparently expected to die a bachelor. By the time I arrived in the neighborhood, he had become quite prosperous and was well-known in his profession. In fact, it was rumored a knighthood was in the offing, in recognition of his having cured one of the King's horrible sons of a severe stammer.
"Well, sir, only a month or two after we had met, as he was returning from the bedside of a patient on a night much like this, his chaise overturned and pinned him under it. By morning, he was paralyzed below the waist.
"As his recovery was prolonged as well as incomplete, several ladies of the neighborhood took it upon themselves to nurse him in turn. Miss Eleanor Swan, as she was then, was one of them. Her all-round competence evidently attracted the old gentleman sufficiently for him to ask her for her hand. They were married from St. Ninian's two years ago August.
"And that, sir, is the 'happy issue out of all their afflictions' for which we should all pray of a Sunday," he concluded.
"Can you conceive what Mrs. Graves' attackers might have been about?" Hoare asked.
Mr. Morrow shrugged elaborately, almost like a Frenchman. "I should suppose it was a chance encounter, sir," he said, "and the two saw what they conceived to be an opportunity to rob a woman alone, and perhaps to ravish her. What else?
"Mrs. Graves is a woman of talent, as you saw this evening, but inclined, perhaps, to an unwomanly rashness of behavior.
Dr. Graves should have forbidden her to go onto the beach without so much as a manservant to protect her."
Privately, Hoare doubted Mrs. Graves would have been so pliant as to obey any strictures by another-even her husband-on her freedom of movement. But he did not express his doubts to Mr. Morrow.
"You journeyed to Weymouth in your own vessel," Morrow said. "You are a yachtsman as well as a sailor, then?"
"Hardly a 'yachtsman,' Mr. Morrow. And my 'yacht' is a mere made-over pinnace with no pretensions except whatever name I choose for her from time to time."
Morrow laughed. "Yes. I hear that in that respect she is as much of a chameleon as she is a pinnace. Inevitable, is she not?"
"Not today, sir. Today she is Inconceivable."
Morrow laughed again. "Did you know I happen to be something of a yachtsman myself?" he said.
Hoare expressed silent surprise.
"Yes. I took it up back in the land of my birth, when I found it convenient to have my own transportation ready to hand for travel between Montreal and Quebec, and up and down the tributaries of the Saint Lawrence, in my fur trading. Now I keep a handy schooner, Marie Claire, here in Weymouth and take her out from time to time when so moved. Her crew are all Jerseymen, and exempt from the press, thanks to the protections Sir Thomas has procured for them.
"Perhaps we should match our craft one day soon. A few guineas on the race?"
"One day, with pleasure, sir," Hoare said.
Upon this, the two parted for the night.
Leaving Dr. Graves's borrowed breeches in the care of the landlord at the Dish of Sprats, Hoare set forth down the High Street in the dawn mist to embark for Portsmouth. The town was in great disarray, with heaps of neglected bricks,
Portland stone, and lumber scattered throughout its narrow streets. The King's unheralded decision several years before to make Weymouth his preferred watering place may have thrown the townspeople into confusion but, determined to make the most of it, they had begun a frenzy of speculative building. But His Majesty had apparently dropped Weymouth from his increasingly confused mind, and much of the promising civic beautification had stopped in midproject.
An addicted snoop, Hoare wondered about Mrs. Graves's victim. It was a curious chance, he thought, that the dead man should have been the leader of the two. And who had known this to be the case? He could not remember.
He stopped, turned in his tracks, and climbed up the town hall steps. Common sense told him the town lockup would be in the hall's cellars; that would be the proper location for a dungeon, be it real or fictional. He found it there, guarded by a whiskery turnkey who was sleepily closing a barred door behind him.
"I'm a friend of Mrs. Graves," Hoare told him. "I want to see the man who died attacking her."
"Ye needn't whisper, sir," the guard said, pointing over his shoulder. "Dead as King Charles, 'e be. 'E be right in there, layin' quiet as can be."
Hoare pushed open the door. Below the rough, bloodstained bandage around its head, the face of the corpse was an ashen blue. No one had closed its staring eyes. There were traces of blood around its nostrils and a crust of dried foam around its lips.
Hoare had seen enough men dead of enough causes to know this man had not been killed by the blow of Mrs. Graves's slung stone. He had been smothered.
Thoughtfully, Hoare left the morgue.
"Where is the man we captured with him?" he asked.
The turnkey shrugged. "Dunno, sir. Some men of the town watch took un off just a few minutes past."
Leaving the town hall, Hoare retraced his steps. He arrived at Inconceivable, shoved her off, set sail, and set course for Portsmouth. The wind had backed into the east, and once again he could progress only with tack upon tack. He enlivened the trip by selecting a new name for his vessel from among the inventory in her bilges; she had left Portsmouth as Inconceivable but would return as Insupportable.
It was then he discovered Inconceivable had been searched from stem to gudgeon. Hoare had installed a small armory in her forepeak. It included a one-pounder swivel or jingal, mountable into either of two sockets, one of which was set into her bows and the other dead aft; a Kentucky rifle; four pistols; a cavalry saber; a rapier; five grenades; several mantraps; a crossbow with twenty quarrels of various types; and powder and shot for the firearms. At considerable expense, Hoare had equipped the latter with the novel percussion caps.
And now his deadly Kentucky gun was gone.