The portrait is finished, Mr.-er-Saul. Would you care to examine it before I hide it away until my new government is in place?"
"Indeed, Ahab, indeed."
"Here, then, sir. Come with me. Pray take two candles, while I bear the candelabra."
Saul's host led the way from the library to another room, larger but disused. He pointed toward the farther wall, and raised the candelabra above his head, the better to illumine the wide unframed canvas that leaned against a long black table, looking much like a devotional work above a Roman altar.
"My God," the visitor breathed.
A group pose in the style of a Dutch master of a century and a half past-Van Dyck, perhaps-the portrait presented eight men: the host, six others, and the visitor himself.
"What do you think of it?" its owner asked.
"I am appalled," said the visitor. "You must destroy it, now, before the authorities get wind of it."
"Destroy it, sir? Nonsense. It will be a treasure. Priceless.
Before very long, you will be able to admire it in surroundings more suited to its subjects."
"Destroy it, man. Destroy it, I say."
The host shook his head. "Never. You gave me your word, and you kept it. Now, you must still keep it. And remember, I have the power to compel your compliance."
"Madness," the guest responded. "Then until you can put it where you want, keep it safe, and out of sight. Give me your word, sir."
"You have it. We shall do so this very moment. Come take one end, while I take the other."
Together, the two men lugged the awkward canvas through a low service door and down a steep flight of stairs. The host bore the candelabra in one hand. By the time they reached another, locked door, both porters were puffing.
Setting down the candelabra and his end of the canvas, the host reached into a pocket and removed a bunch of keys. He selected one. When he had opened the door, he picked up his burden again and led his companion and the canvas inside. The walls of the chamber were flanked with bottles.
"Port, sir. Old port, Very old port. Some of it dates back to the second King Charles and the Portuguese treaty. Here, help me set it on end at the end of the cellar, and then I'll show you."
Titus Thoday appeared at Hoare's lonely candlelit table in the Golden Cross, at the point where his commander was carrying on a whispered conversation about soles with the hotelier. Monsieur Berrier had a pair of soles, but did not believe they should be separated. Left and right, Hoare supposed, like the new way of shoemaking in which the fabricator made pairs in mirror images. While he appreciated mine host's tender feelings, he did not see why he should be expected to cater to them, and he was saying as much. Thoday's arrival broke the impasse. Hoare ordered both soles grilled. He determined that the starboard-side sole would go to himself as the commissioned officer, while Thoday would have to be satisfied with the lesser, larboard-side one.
It was not every officer who would have stooped to dine with an enlisted man, nor was Hoare such a democrat as to dine with just any of his people. However, Titus Thoday was-Hoare chuckled to himself-a different kettle of fish. He was rated gunner's mate in Royal Duke, though gunnery was one of the few subjects in which Hoare had found him less than proficient. Just as Hoare had delegated the moment-to-moment seamanship in Royal Duke to Mr. Clay, he had rated Admiral Hardcastle's man Stone as mate's mate and instructed Thoday to treat Stone's advice as though it came from Hoare himself.
Thoday's nose was hawklike, his eyes an icy pale gray, his thin lips habitually compressed. He was respectably dressed from the yacht's unusual slop chest. He was, Hoare knew, the son of one of Sir John Fielding's best men. Sir John, the late "blind beak" of Bow Street, had been the virtual founder of London's only organization devoted to the actual control of crime. The son had taken after his father. An experienced investigator, cold, resourceful and sharp, he held himself in high esteem, and showed it. More than once his behavior toward Hoare had verged on condescension, but during the course of their collaboration in the Nine Stones affair, they had shaken down and learned to jog along well enough. Thoday had learned to keep his arrogance under hatches most of the time, while-most of the time-Hoare was able to treat him as a colleague rather than a minion.
Tonight, Thoday accepted as his due Hoare's invitation to be seated, and listened in attentive silence while Hoare whispered his story of Octavius Ambler, the missing confidential clerk, and the papers that had evidently gone missing with him. He concluded just as the two soles arrived. As he had planned, he decided that the larger sole was the starboard one, and had the waiter serve it to him with his share of the salad of cow-cumbers and lettuce that he had ordered to accompany them.
When the waiter had served Thoday as well and departed with a murmured "bon appetit," the gunner's mate made his first observations.
"From the general tone of your words, sir," he said when Hoare came to a stop at last, "I conclude that the Admiralty is less concerned about the man himself than they are about the manuscripts in his charge." He paused, inquiringly.
"A safe conclusion," Hoare replied.
"Then our first duty must be to recover them. If we should find the man himself, it is all the better, but he takes second place."
"True. But-oh dear." Hoare reached into the inner pocket of his coat for Ambler's likeness. "I forgot. Here."
"Thank you, sir." Thoday's words were discreet, but as Hoare had feared he would, he spoke them in a tone of heavy reproach. Hoare felt himself blush, and hated himself for it. He reached for his goblet of hock, and decided to forestall the advice he knew he was about to receive.
"We should search his quarters, Thoday." Thoday closed his mouth. Hoare was quite certain the other felt misused at missing his chance.
"Tonight," he went on. "Pity, I had hoped to get an uninterrupted night's sleep."
"Now I suppose we must hunt up some local to direct us," Hoare muttered. The pair had just reached the southern end of the Westminster Bridge. Since the light rain had eased, there was some hope, he thought, of finding a guide to Chantry Street where Ambler had lodged.
"No need at all, sir," Thoday said. "Chantry Street will not have moved since I was last in the area."
Hoare had forgotten that his companion, having grown up in the streets of London, would certainly have explored the alien territory south of the Thames as well, from his boyhood on. With Hoare at his side, the gunner strode confidently ahead, taking a left here and a right there, until Hoare had utterly lost his bearings. Moreover, it was dark.
At one point, Hoare was sure he heard the scraping of something more substantial than a local rat. While hardly worried-between them, they should have no difficulty disposing of any team numbering less than four venturesome footpads- he made sure his sword was loose in its scabbard.
"I'm surprised, Thoday," he whispered, more than a little out of breath, "that you have not brought a weapon with you."
"But I have, sir." Thoday raised the elegant walking stick he carried. "A sword would have been out of keeping with my present civil dress, don't you think? So…"
With a discreet flourish, the gunner's mate gripped the head of his sturdy stick with one hand and drew from it a slim, gleaming blade, only a little shorter than one of the epees with which Hoare was in the habit of using for his own exercises in escrime. It was much sharper than an epee; Hoare envied its owner.
"Toledo, sir," Thoday said. "Given my father in ninety-six, by the mayor of that city, for services rendered." He gave no further explanation, but sheathed the deadly thing and strode on. Hoare forbore to inquire further, or to ask him to slow down. Not for the first time, he regretted that even his occasional morning bouts with Mr. Clay did not ensure his endurance over a mile of walking, at the rate Thoday chose to travel.
"Ah. Here we are, sir." Thoday stopped at the door of a tidy dwelling. A shadowy figure was leaning against it. The gunner's voice almost concealed what Hoare was sure was a degree of pride. If so, it was well deserved.
&nbs
p; "An' wot 'ud you be wantin', this time of night?" said the shadow in a rough voice. "Move along, you."
"You're guarding the Ambler premises?" Hoare whispered.
"An' wot 'ud you care, cully?"
Hoare threw back his boat cloak to display his uniform and the solitary epaulet that decorated his left shoulder.
"Commander Bartholomew Hoare, my man. Open the door, if you please."
"An' if I don't please, cully?"
"Then you will answer to Mr. Lestrade. Or to Sir Hugh Abercrombie, if you prefer."
Hoare did not know which name impressed the shadow the more. It made no difference, for he unlocked the door with a grind and, now revealed in the dim light of a lamp just within as a leathery man in quasi-uniform, turned obsequious.
"Never mind, Kinchin' Ned Weatherwax," Thoday said in his most patronizing voice. "I won't peach on you-not tonight."
"Jesus, Mr. Thoday," said Weatherwax. "Which I thought you'd gone to sea."
"Which I done, Weatherwax," Thoday said in the same vernacular. "Now, give us a glim up to Mr. Ambler's doss-down, there's a nifty cove."
Weatherwax, now embarrassingly eager to please, lit them up the stairs to the first-floor apartment. Hoare had been expecting the place to be noisome, but stairway and upstairs passageway were noticeably clean in appearance and odor. Stopping at a heavy door with two keyholes, the guard painstakingly inserted keys into both locks, and swung the door open. He lit the candles in several sconces before turning, doffing his cap, and standing bareheaded and upside down, expectant.
"That'll be all, Ned," Thoday said.
"Wot, no vail for me work?" Weatherwax whined.
"Yer job, Ned. No vails. Back to yer post, and close the door behind ye."
The guard's heavy steps clumped back down the stairs.
The room, one of several en suite, was clean, and its occupant had spent freely on its furnishings. Tonight, it was in great disarray. Every drawer in the sideboard had been pulled out and its contents dumped helter-skelter across the waxed and carpeted floor. A heavy chair stood upside down in the middle of the mess, its Russia leather upholstery ripped apart and the stuffing lying about like the remains of a sheep shearing. Several of the framed paintings on the walls had been pulled down, while others hung askew. To Hoare's mind, the searcher- Lestrade in all likelihood-had applied the proverbial fine-tooth comb to his task of ransacking.
Titus Thoday, however, seemed less impressed. He cast a casual eye over the hurrah's-nest in the middle of the room and, lighting a candle at one of the sconces, walked into the bedroom that lay beyond. Hoare followed him.
The bedroom could have been that of a prosperous professional. But the four-poster bed's comfortable quilts, curtains, and blankets had been pulled down and discarded in the corners of the room, the bedside convenience overturned and the chamber pot lying forlorn and empty beside its owner's bed. The armoire and cupboards were likewise turned out. Someone had humped his way under the bed-not, Hoare supposed, in search of the statutory monsters. Thoday shrugged, left the bedroom as it was, and proceeded to the small kitchen via the parlor.
The kitchen looked like a china shop after the bull had left. Someone-Sir Hugh's superlative searcher Lestrade, presumably, if not his predecessor-had shattered every breakable object in the room. Slivers of glass had embedded themselves in the woodwork. In spots, the perpetrator had stamped the shards of Mr. Ambler's chinaware into the flooring; on the wide boards his footprints stood out sharply as if the man had walked through a field of gritty snow.
"Somebody found he could no longer suppress his rage," Thoday said musingly. "I believe he failed to find the papers he had come to find.
"No food," he added. Indeed, the larder was empty.
"He dined out, I suppose," Hoare observed sagely.
"Odd, don't you think, sir?" Thoday said. "Not in keeping with the man's description."
"Not at all," said Hoare, without any notion of what his man was referring to.
Thoday had kept Ambler's likeness. Now he withdrew it and looked at it again, searchingly, in the candlelight.
"Would you repeat for me the description Sir Hugh gave you of the man's habits and personality?" he asked. Hoare obliged.
"Yes," Thoday said. "I thought I…" He returned to the drawing room, where he began sorting through the heap of Ambler's belongings.
"Yes," he said again. His lean face was impassive, but his voice oozed triumph. He held a figurine in his hand. A well-made bronze, after the Italian quattrocento style, it depicted a falcon, its hood opened to leave the eyes clear, glaring at the intruders over its prey, a lifelike hare. It would have stood a good eighteen inches high-life size, more or less, Hoare guessed. He had seen a similar figurine before, somewhere in the Med, in ninety-one or thereabouts-in Malta, if memory served him correctly.
"Hmm," Thoday said. He inverted the figure. With a fleam withdrawn from a sheath in the skirt of his sober coat, he pried the base from the bronze and peered into the deep cavity it disclosed. With some effort, he extracted a tightly rolled cylinder, which he placed on the kitchen table and unrolled with care. It crinkled as he did so.
Thoday's discovery comprised four closely written pages of calligraphy on fine linen, headed by an engraved coat of arms unfamiliar to Hoare and ending with several impressive signatures and two seals. The language was nothing Hoare could read; looking at Thoday, he knew that the gunner's mate, too, was baffled. Even more triumphant, nonetheless.
"The missing papers, I believe, sir," he said, handing them to Hoare. His face, normally pallid, was slightly flushed, as if with pride. "I regret to admit I cannot read the language in which they are written, but from the coat of arms, I would judge it to be Swedish."
"I believe you are right," Hoare whispered. "Perhaps it's as well that neither of us knows Swedish. It will be a relief to the government to know that we, at least, are not privy to this particular secret, whatever it may be."
"It is irksome," Thoday declared, "to have to admit one's ignorance of such a simple thing as the Swedish language."
"Well done, Thoday, just the same," Hoare said. "Now it only remains to find Mr. Octavius Ambler." He began to blow out the candles.
"That is of lesser importance, I have been given to understand," said Thoday. "May I suggest, sir, that you instruct me to put to use my familiarity with the London underworld to see what I can do in that direction, while you return the papers to their proper place?"
"An excellent idea, Thoday. Make it so," Hoare whispered as they descended the stairs. "Again, well done. But I have an admission to make. I am a thief."
"Sir?" As Hoare had hoped he would, Thoday sounded puzzled.
"I don't think Mr. Ambler, or his heirs, if he has any, will be in any position to object to my having abstracted a little memento of our mission here."
He handed his companion the bronzen image of the hawk. He was glad to be shut of it-it was quite heavy and very cumbersome.
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 earli
er 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.
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