Hoare and the matter of treason cbh-3

by Wilder Perkins

  Hoare found boarding all but complete. Convicts and their relatives, about to be parted, lined rail and dockside, howling their last farewells back and forth. Not all the howls were tragic: "Bring us back a parrot, Jem!" or "Take good care of Peggo wile I'm gone! Know wot I mean?"

  A chaise drew up to the entry port, followed by a substantial wagon. From the first, the three Frobishers and Sir Thomas's guards emerged. One of the latter hailed Sanditon, summoned a deck officer, and the transfer of Sir Thomas's traveling chattels began. His would not be a hardship case, Hoare observed.

  At last, the baronet himself embraced his ugly daughter and took the hand of his ugly son. He climbed slowly aboard the vessel that would be his home for the next hundred days or more.

  "Cast off forrard!"

  "Pick up the tow, there!"

  "Aye, aye, sir!"

  "Aloft there, the larboard watch, and loose sails! One hand there, stop in the tops and crosstrees to overhaul the gear. Leave the staysails fast.

  "Lay out there, four or five of you, and loose the headsails!

  "Here, you, lay down out of that; there's enough men out there to eat them sails!"

  And so it went, that old familiar, flexible ritual of getting underway from dockside, a blend between the fighting navy's sharp commands and the casual obscenity of a merchantman. As a transport, Sanditon had a foot in each camp. Transports were slovenly ships, and convict transports worse yet. For all his cravings for duty at sea, Hoare hardly envied Sir Thomas Frobisher the months ahead.

  The baronet had inveigled one of his servants into accompanying him, Hoare had noted, but not Dan'l O'Gock. Hoare could not imagine a solitary Inuit among those antipodean blackfellows.

  Now that Sanditon was out of easy hail from ashore, the crowd began to wander off. Before the young Frobishers could return to their chaise, Hoare stepped up to them and doffed his hat to the lady.

  "Will you take tea, sir?" he asked Martin Frobisher. The other looked at him astonished, while his sister sniffed and tossed her head.

  "Sir!"

  "Come on, Lyd," Martin said. "Hoare's tryin' to make amends, can't you see? Delighted, Hoare."

  Blassingame, it developed from Taylor's inquiry, was more fully acquainted with the Greenwich underworld than he had revealed. The next night, he asked leave for a run ashore, to bring together a cove or two that 'mought be able to bear an 'and under the circumstances, sir.' "

  Upon Blassingame's return, at four bells in the morning watch, a sprinkling of snow had begun to sift from the night sky. He was accompanied by an apparition. Or was it "apparitions"? For the moment, Hoare could not be sure.

  "Bubble and Squeak, sir," Hoare understood his man to say in introducing whatever it was.

  "What?" Hoare whispered.

  "Bubble and Squeak, sir. This-un be Bubble, this-un be Squeak."

  As if to demonstrate that two separate entities confronted Hoare, Bubble made to knuckle his forehead. There was, Hoare thought, something peculiar about his gesture. Squeak essayed a bob, and emitted an eponymous sound.

  Bubble was unquestionably the most hirsute man Hoare had ever seen. In the wintry gloom, nothing could be seen from behind the wild growth on his head but the dim glow of his eyes, the protrusion of a flat nose, and the gleam of a bashful grin. More hair thrust out of his rags, and below the chopped-off sleeves that covered his arms. Now Hoare could explain the oddity of the man's salute; he was devoid of hands.

  "Bubble were topman in Diligence, storeship, sir, when the Algerines took 'er in ninety-three," Blassingame explained. " 'E were ransomed, sir, 'e's tole me, but 'e's tried to escape in a skiff, an' they chopped off'is mauleys 'fore lettin' 'im loose."

  "Barstids," Bubble declared in a low placid, voice.

  "They put 'im up in 'ospital 'ere," Blassingame went on, "an' Squeak took up wif'im."

  "Squeak," said Squeak, a heap of miscellaneous rags enclosing what was surely a female being, and was clinging so closely to the handless man that Hoare could not tell where one ended and the other began.

  "They jumped ship a few years back, they did," Blassingame said, "an' settled down to the hat-out lay 'ereabouts, a-beggin' off the sailors in from across river, an' a-dossin' down in the tunnels underneaf the buildin's a-runnin' back up 'ill. Between 'em, sir, they knows them tunnels up an' down, back an' forth. 'Ole warren of'em there be, ye knows, sir."

  Hoare had heard.

  "That barstid Ogle, what's took up with the toff from Town, 'e knows 'oles most as good as we does, sir," Bubble declared.

  " 'E means Goldthwait, I'm sure, sir," Blassingame said.

  "Then Goldthwait is hereabouts?"

  "Sure of it, sir."

  "Hmm," Hoare whispered. Like a snowman, a plan began to roll up and take shape in his mind.

  "We are expecting snow tomorrow, I hear," he said.

  "Or the next night, perhaps. Heavy at times, too," Mr. Clay said at his side.

  "That would make for considerable inconvenience to all hands, I think." Snow and its accompanying ice, indeed, posed many extraordinary hazards for vessels under sail, as Hoare himself remembered much too well from the winters he had spent, on station in Beetle, off Cape Sable, years ago.

  "No landsman, I'm sure, will be surprised if we take precautionary measures," he went on.

  With this, Hoare began to prepare his battle plan. He remembered.

  "You sailors use as many bells, it seems, as all the parishes of London put together," John Goldthwait had told him at that first meeting in Chancery Lane. He might consider himself not only omnipotent but omniscient as well. In fact, though, as Hoare knew from that one careless remark, beyond tidewater he was ignorant as any newborn babe. Admiralty official he might be, but he knew nothing of the sea and seamen's ways. "Keep close to my desk, and never go to sea, And I can be the ruler of the King's navee," Mr. Goldthwait might have caroled of a night. Liking the notion, Hoare promptly popped it into that little mental commonplace book of his. Its reappearance told him he had recovered from thirty-six hours on his feet.

  Goldthwait's eyes might be ignorant of the sea, but they would surely be as sharp as his mind. So: to those eyes and those of any of his people, Royal Duke must appear unbuttoned, relaxed and roistering over her captain's escape, with his wife, from Gracechurch Street. From the Greenwich Port Captain, then, Hoare obtained permission to tow Royal Duke into the dock.

  The memory of his first, horrible experience in command of Royal Duke in Portsmouth was vivid in Hoare's memory as he watched Mr. Clay and the seagoing clerks bring the brig handily in and make her fast, her larboard side next the pier, with doubled dock lines and springs leading forward from her quarter and aft from her bows.

  It was not until deep dusk of the following day that they rigged the awning, and it was not until then that Hoare revealed his plan and made certain additional preparations.

  After completing them, the party lay below for supper; they then left a few lucky comrades behind to roister noisily, took up their assigned positions on deck and overside in Hoare's pinnace and the green launch, and waited-in the knowledge that they might have to go through the whole rigmarole again, night after night, until the attack descended upon them. If that happened, Hoare had assured them, each Royal Duke would have his turn on roistering duty.

  At the entry port squatted Blassingame, who had mysteriously gone missing for two days after introducing Bubble and Squeak and who, as punishment, had been deprived of his roistering watch and placed on anchor watch of nights. From his slurred voice, however, his shipmates had comforted him with more than apples, for Hoare could hear him moaning an endless, tuneless, tipsy song. Hoare lodged himself with a stout hatchet under the starboard shrouds of Royal Duke's foremast, where he settled down, adjusted his lanky form to resemble a layabout keg as much as possible, and, his breath sweeping softly upstream on a steady easterly wind, made ready for another night of alert, snowbound idleness.

  It was the second night of roistering and waiting.
There was silence on deck; from below came only the cheerful sound of voices and an occasional burst of song. A faint light rose from the skylight amidships. Good. The roisterers were in full swing. The roistering, incredibly, sounded a trifle forced in Hoare's ears. It went to show, he thought sleepily, that at bottom the Royal Dukes were not true roaring seamen. The moon, just past full, was late in rising, and when it rose, it was quickly quenched by a thickening cloud layer. It began to snow, more thickly by the minute. Hoare sat against the coach-house, outboard of the awning, concealed in a loose boat cloak.

  Before very long, Hoare realized that he was seeing much more than he would have expected to see under these weather conditions. In fact, despite the snowfall, the brig's full length lay open to his sight, in an eerie rosy glow. He puzzled, then realized that the light derived from the huge mass of London's lamps and candles, reflected from the clouds. Well, so be it. There was nothing he could do about it; moreover, the canopy still cast a shadow.

  From between two dockside buildings came the softest of rustles, from below Royal Duke's cutwater came the softest of splashes. As Hoare watched, a shadowy arm reached up, groped about, grasped Royal Duke's rail at the heads, and heaved up a shadowy figure. There was the tiny snap of someone's thumb against fingers; a second figure joined the first, a third, and then a fourth. One at a time, each shadow slipped over the coaming in the bows, beyond the rigged canopy. Hoare turned his eyes aft without budging his head; he would remain a keg until every invader was well into the bag. In ones and twos, more swarmed aboard, until Hoare counted a near dozen. Three carried glowing objects-slow match, most likely. Out of the corner of his eye, he clearly saw a figure standing below Royal Duke in the dock's trodden snow, face upraised in his direction, just as he had last seen it: Mr. Goldthwait. Just behind him stood another form. The man Ogle?

  "I shall break him!" came his enemy's enraged croak, "with a rod of iron! I shall dash him in pieces like a potter's vessel!"

  Crack! The first caller's feet went out from under him, and then another's. Hoare set fingers to lips and sounded his emergency whistle. Its shriek filled the air.

  "Now!" Bold cried from the fore crosstrees. He cast off the awning. From her post in the main top, Taylor followed suit. As the canvas fell flopping over the intruders, the roisterers swarmed up from the fore hatch and the lurkers overside from the boats. In an orderly circle, they began to work their way over the awning, belaying pins in hand, stomping and thumping anything that moved underneath as they went. Grunts of distress came from beneath the squirming awning. The pair on the snowy pier paused, alarmed perhaps.

  A cleaver appeared from below, ripped the canvas, and a familiar head broke out.

  "Welcome back aboard, Green," Leese said in a savage voice. He swatted the woman's cleaver away and batted his belaying pin into the side of her head. She dropped soundlessly.

  "Hammer that man!" came Mr. Clay's roar. A Royal Duke obeyed, and a boarder, escaping from under the awning, collapsed before he could scramble back overboard. The two men alongside turned now, as if to leave their beleaguered party to its fate. At Hoare's ear, a firepot sizzled, stank, and went out.

  Among the combatants, marlinespike at the ready, roved Dan'l O'Gock, Anglo-Inuit. Thrice, Hoare saw him pause over a head, examine it as if to assure himself that it belonged to a boarder, and then tap it sharply with the spike. Hoare remembered that, however much the people of his fathers craved animal blood, they were chary indeed of shedding that of humans.

  Having closed his trap on the boarders, Hoare found he could barely rise from his squat. He struggled, but managed only to drop his hatchet. He was forty-four, and far too stiff and chilled for battle. The pair below-Goldthwait and his underworld guide Ogle, if that were he-were on the move, and he must follow. For Goldthwait still held Hoare's Jenny. Hoare would see which man would be broken with Goldthwait's rod of iron.

  Lurching to his feet at last, he drew a belaying pin from the row in the pinrail at his knees, hurled it at the retreating pair. It skidded wildly, as he knew it would; he lacked the eye his womenfolk possessed. He stuck two more pins into his belt and clambered across Royal Duke's rail, to take up the chase, while the shouts of combat aboard his command now sounded somewhat more feeble behind his back. For a stunned second, he wondered what they should do with these people, but then decided to leave the question to Mr. Clay, whose bellowed battle orders still filled the snowy air.

  His quarry's double track, already filling with snow, led up the wide steps of Greenwich Palace. Knowing he was falling behind with every step, suppressing a growing sense of futility, he followed.

  Set into the left-hand valve of the formal bronze palace gate, a smaller doorway stood ajar, leaving a crack of uninformative blackness within. Hoare entered here, to stand in the silent dark, his eyes helpless, ears and nose a-prick. From his left, a cold, dank zephyr brought him a tantalizingly familiar smell. He could swear he associated it with Sir Thomas and Goldthwait. Yes, by Jove! Russia leather! He turned and commenced a blind march along the marble pavement.

  Within moments, he had no idea which way to go. He stood in the midst of blank, dank darkness. The darkness was not absolute; from some high clerestory, a faint glow of reflected city lights reached him, but he could make out nothing of his surroundings.

  Yank.

  Like a startled hare, Hoare leapt in place and dropped back to his feet, prepared to flee.

  "Me, sir. Bubble. They gone that-a-way. Come along, if ye pleases."

  A hand, certainly not Bubble's, took his. It was soft and gentle, yet surprisingly strong. He was in the clutches of the Struldbrug, Squeak.

  "I'll show that barstid Ogle 'oo knows theseyear tunnels," Bubble growled, " 'im or me. 'E'll be goin' parst the beer an' then a-takin' the spy-'ole, the eejit."

  The handless man's mention of "beer" left Hoare feeling more confused than ever, but, with no alternative to hand, he let himself be towed along in Squeak's wake. The "beer" question resolved itself in the next chamber, a vast one in which rested an amorphous looming construction, ebon in the cavernous space. Close to, it revealed itself a jury-rigged thing of green lath, held together by lengths of crape-the abandoned bier where the victor of Trafalgar had lain in state before being rowed upstream by Hoare's acquaintance Hornblower. Having heard of the other's struggles, Hoare knew he could never have managed the job, even if he had had the voice for it.

  "Shh, now," Bubble breathed into Hoare's ear. "They might justa took 'idin' inside. There be a bolt-'ole below 'er, an' that barstid Ogle mought knowa." Hoare drew a belaying pin from his waistband and followed the leader under a projection of the bier, into utter, Stygian gloom. Within, he heard scrabbling sounds, and hoped it was only Bubble, exploring the inner fastnesses.

  "They still be a'ead of us, ye know, sir," were Bubble's next words. "If yer game fer it, we can cotch up on 'em, most of the ways, any'ow, if we jes' eeeases oursel's through 'ere…"

  Hoare returned the belaying pin to its place and let Squeak take him in tow again, along passage after turning passage, until, having long since lost all sense of direction, his sense of time followed it in going adrift. Twice, they emerged into comparative light, once in what appeared to be a long-abandoned bedchamber of state, and again onto a long loggia. It was still snowing, and Hoare found the dim gray light all but dazzling.

  It was just as the three were about to duck into still another passageway-this one a good five feet high and cased in rusticated stone-that Squeak stumbled and fell, clutching an ankle in silent pain. Bubble, who had just opened the way for their entrance, turned, bent over the ankle, and held a muttered conversation with its owner. When he stood erect again, his concern was visible even through his wild growth of hair.

  "That's it for us, sir. Squeak can't walk, not t'rough these narrer ways."

  Hoare's heart dropped. Was he to be left here, then-where, he had no idea-not only blocked from recovering his Jenny, but even blocked from seeking his own selfish escap
e?

  "Look, sir. If ye 'ave a steady 'ead an' a good memory, I think I can tell yer the rest of the way to w'ere yer friend an' that barstid Ogle are laid up, most likely. This gate, mebbe ye'll even get there a'ead of 'em.

  "Are ye game for it?"

  When Hoare, having no choice, chose with a terse nod, Bubble commenced to subject him to a memory drill that far outdid the torment he had experienced as a mid, of learning where every line in a three-masted vessel was made fast, and under which circumstances. In the earlier drills, the boatswain had embedded each line into Hoare's person for emphasis; Bubble simply thumped him with the club of his heavy right arm every time he missed a turning.

  At last he declared himself satisfied. With a final shove, he propelled Hoare into the passage.

  "Scrag that barstid Ogle for me!" he called in his hoarse voice as Hoare, taking a deep breath as if preparing to dive deep, plunged into the last labyrinth.

  There was light at the end of the tunnel, a dull reddish light, partly obscured, once and then again, by what Hoare was certain from its motion could only be a stooped human figure. If he was right, it could only be an enemy-Goldthwait, or that barstid Ogle. Hoare remembered the last time he had been faced with the challenge of creeping up on an enemy to do him in; it had involved the hapless upstairs watch in Gracechurch Street. This situation differed, though, for his target was not so thoughtful as to be leaning over a rail, ready to be tipped overboard. Hoare debated, pulled off his soggy shoes, drew the clasp knife he had last drawn to release his Eleanor from bondage, unclasped it- softly, softly-tucked it between his teeth like a pirate in a melodrama, crawled up behind the target, leapt, drew, and sliced firmly across the other man's throat. He collapsed against Hoare with a hiss of escaping life blood, and a burst of foulness accompanied his death. It was not Goldthwait, so it must be Ogle.