Hoare and the Passed Master (captain bartholomew hoare) Read online

  Hoare and the Passed Master

  ( Captain Bartholomew Hoare )

  Wilder Perkins

  Wilder Perkins

  Hoare and the Passed Master

  "Halloooo!"

  The call did not come from the cart halted on the moonlit bridge just ahead of Bartholomew Hoare, but from beneath the bridge. There was a swinging golden light down there, a swinging golden light as if from a lantern. Hoare drew rein to listen. The call came again.

  Hoare had been looking forward to his own bed in his quarters at the Swallowed Anchor in Portsmouth, but a consuming curiosity had always been his bane.

  Below, a bulky figure held a lantern in one hand while holding up a naked body with the other by a sling passed below its armpits. The body's gray-white head hung at an unnatural angle, the huge wound in its throat grinning like an extra mouth.

  "Who is he?" Hoare whispered. He had lost the use of his vocal cords ten years ago and had whispered ever since.

  "Haven't the remotest idea, my good man." The fat man lugged the corpse up the slope below. "What difference does it make?"

  "Well, where are you taking him?"

  "Up to my cart, you ninny. You needn't whisper; he can't hear you. He's dead, you know. The bugger's heavy. Come along now; take his feet."

  Hoare obeyed orders, dismounted, and hitched his horse to the cart's starboard quarter. Clambering carefully down the bank, he picked up the corpse by its bare feet, holding them to either side of him like the handles of a wheelbarrow. At the handling, the body expelled a vile reek of corruption.

  "Mind his head, idiot! Can't you see it's as good as dropping off already without your tossing him about like that? I'm damned if I'll lose a perfectly good head just because you're not up to your job. No help, no pay."

  Light dawned-inside Hoare's own head at least.

  "You mistake my identity, sir," he whispered. "I am no resurrection man; I am a lieutenant in the Royal Navy as you could tell if you were to let your light shine upon me."

  The fat man did so. "Oh Lord," he said.

  "And I presume that you, sir," Hoare went on, "are a surgeon who has just acquired a body to anatomize."

  The fat man shrugged resignedly. "You have me out, sir. But while you decide how to dispose of me, would you mind…" He gestured with his lantern.

  By its fitful light Hoare inspected the body he was helping to carry.

  The victim had been middle-aged or even elderly. The body was stout and soft-the figure of a powerful man gone to seed. A tattoo across the chest, blurred with time, showed a man-o'-war under full sail and the motto "'Tis to glory we steer."

  This put another complexion on the affair. To connive in supplying a medico with a strange body to anatomize was one thing, but when the body was that of a fellow naval man, it was another.

  Hoare dropped the corpse's feet.

  "I cannot overlook this, sir. This is a British sailor."

  "Oh Lord," the fat man said again. "What shall I do, then?"

  "Carry on up the hill to begin with," Hoare said as he picked up the legs again. "Then we shall discuss the situation. Meanwhile, whom have I the honor of assisting?"

  "Dunworthy, sir," said the fat man. "Dr. Samuel Dunworthy, of Durley Street. By Bishops Waltham, you know."

  Bishops Waltham meant no more to Hoare than Durley Street did.

  "Physician and surgeon, sir," Dunworthy went on. As Hoare knew, physicians held themselves as gentry, fit to dine above the salt unlike mere surgeons, who were addressed as mister instead of doctor and fed in the servants' hall, if at all. As the nearly mute Hoare knew all too well, naval surgeons generally deserved no better.

  "Hoare," he whispered in reply.

  "There is no need to be insulting, sir," said Dr. Dunworthy over his shoulder. "I am as much a gentleman as you."

  "I referred to my name, sir, not your profession," Hoare said.

  "I do beg your pardon, sir," the doctor said. "Now, if you'll just give our friend here a heave… a one-a two-and a three! There we are."

  "Now, sir," Hoare said, "perhaps you will explain yourself." He backed off into the darkness and-just in case-groped his larboard horse pistol from its holster on the hack's saddle.

  Dr. Dunworthy sighed.

  "To start in medias res, sir, I found my cadaver under the bridge, just where the message told me it would be."

  "Do you still have the message?"

  Dr. Dunworthy handed Hoare a piece of crumpled paper. "I am engaged, sir, in certain original inquiries relating to the interconnection of various glands: the adrenal, pineal, thyroid, and salivary glands and the testicles, to be precise. I am in hopes of establishing a hitherto undiscovered connection between them, and of presenting my discovery before the Royal Academy. In fact, my preliminary lecture on the subject just the other night, here at Bishops Waltham, was well attended.

  "My studies involve anatomization of the human corpus. Mere animal substitutes such as sheep or pigs simply will not do. To this end I have made connection with several-er-suppliers of cadavers. As we both know, of course, this is unlawful. But the interests of science, I am convinced, must take…"

  "Please come to your point, doctor. It grows late."

  "Well then. I found the message under my front door just a few hours ago. It did not originate with any of my usual sources, for those are barely literate."

  "What do you usually do with the remains?"

  "Bury them, of course, sir, with a prayer. What else?"

  Hoare saw that it would take Dr. Dunworthy a long, long time to spin his yarn to its bitter end. He interrupted again.

  "How far are we from Darley Street?"

  "Durley Street, sir. By Bishops Waltham. A mere half hour's easy drive. The road forks to the left just ahead. Then we take another left, and our second right, and there we are."

  "Excellent." Hoare climbed into the seat beside Dunworthy. "It is too late now for me to make Portsmouth tonight. I shall accompany you there and prevail upon you to provide me with sustenance and a bed." He realized that, as he too often did, he was imitating the speech of his vis-a-vis in his own whisper. More than once he had been accused of mockery.

  "It will be a pleasure, sir." The doctor's voice was grudging. He slapped the reins on his pony's haunches. The animal woke with a start and began to plod forward. Hoare marked the route as they went; he knew he must return to the scene in daylight.

  "Give me the use of your glim," Hoare ordered, and the doctor complied. By its light he examined the message. In block letters, written on rather fine paper, the message was brief enough:

  "ive a corpus for you," it read, "if you come to the plaice marked on the map. Bring the usual."

  Hoare agreed with Dr. Dunworthy's observation; the brisk, clear hand was that of a literate person.

  "What's the usual?" he asked.

  "Five pounds, sir," the doctor replied in a whisper. "That's the going rate for a cadaver hereabouts. I heard the other night that it's half that in London-the law of supply and demand, I suppose."

  Dunworthy must have realized he had been copying Hoare's whisper. In a normal voice he went on: "I still have the sum by me, for there was no one to whom I might hand it. So I am ahead, I suppose, by one cadaver." The thought appeared to cheer him up.

  "Why do you whisper, sir? There's no need, as I told you."

  "An old war wound, if you must know," Hoare said.

  At the Glorious First of June '94, where he was first in Staghound, 38, a spent musketball had crushed his larynx, leaving him unable to speak above a painful croak. Since any deck officer must be able to hail the
main masthead in a full gale, Staghound's captain had regretfully put him ashore with a letter of high commendation.

  It was only this that had found the beached, despairing Hoare a place on the staff of the Port Admiral at Portsmouth. Since then, now forty-two, he had served as general dogsbody, running errands and taking on any project that a voiceless officer could reasonably accept. The life kept him out of the countryside where his family remained; he had found the stink of bilges and the scurry of rats preferable to the stink of hog manure and the scurry of chickens.

  But he had never before faced the problem of finding out who had killed a nameless sailorman.

  By journey's end Hoare had seen enough of Dunworthy despite the dark to realize that his dress was tidier than the average unsupervised male's and had concluded that the doctor employed a wife or other female to keep him in order. So it proved. Bearing a guttering candle which she shielded ineffectually with one hand, Mrs. Dunworthy opened the door for them. She was shaped much like her husband as Hoare could readily observe, since she was clad in an enveloping night-rail.

  The yawning wife furnished them an end of ham and a slice of yesterday's bread. After attending to his hack, Hoare took his share of the provisions, with his saddlebags, up to the garret room allotted him. It might have been the room of a Dunworthy son-grown and gone? dead? — for a forlorn cock-horse leaned in one corner and a basket of wooden building blocks rested in another.

  The bed was too short for Hoare's lanky frame, but no shorter than many of the hammocks and swinging cots of his nights at sea. Stripping off his outer garments, he wound himself into the musty blankets and lay sleepless.

  Question after question paraded through his mind, futilely seeking answers. He felt himself out of his depth. How had the dead man come to be under the willow in the dale, as Dunworthy had described the place? Could he have been killed by a resurrection man, or two of them as in the shocking recent case of Burke and Hare in Scotland?

  What had the dead man been? He could not have been a boatswain or a gunner, for the body was that of a man out of condition. A purser, then, or a master. And who had he been?

  Names, names…

  Hoare's own, of course, was that of his father, Joel Hoare, an Orkneyman of Viking stock. Bartholomew had defended that good name with fists and feet again and again before he was out of smallclothes. Even before Captain Hoare had wangled his son his warrant as midshipman in the brig Beetle, young Bartholomew had run a jeering schoolmate through the thigh with a carving knife. By now it was a foolhardy man who mocked the good name of Bartholomew Hoare; whether with pistol, v©pv©e, or saber he placed his blow where he chose, making his choice according to the offense. So far, he had always avoided killing his man.

  Hoare had been the sole officer of Beetle to survive the great September tempest in the last year of the American war, when a widow-maker sea had swept the others, to a man, from her quarterdeck. Not only that: as he was working the brig northeast to Halifax under jury rig, he had encountered a small Yankee privateer, taken her by a ruse, and brought her into Halifax in modest triumph. So Hoare had been well on his way to renown until that French bullet had as good as ended his career.

  Had Dunworthy done the deed himself? If not, who had? Above all, why had Hoare stopped at the bridge? At last he drifted into sleep.

  "Tell me what you make of what this man was when alive," Hoare whispered the next morning as he and Dunworthy faced each other in the cleanly surgery across the remains.

  "From the tattoos, he was surely a man of your calling as you have already concluded." With surprisingly gentle hands Dr. Dunworthy probed the body's soft belly. As if in protest it gave off a burst of foul-smelling gas; decomposition was noticeably under way.

  "Swollen liver. He probably drank too much port. A sad failing and one I fear I share." He straightened up with a grunt. "Come, Mr. Hoare. Let us make ourselves comfortable in my parlor while I present my conclusions about the man."

  Mrs. Dunworthy was well trained, for coffee, cheese, and biscuits awaited them. The two seated themselves on either side of the empty fireplace.

  "Well, sir, here is my opinion. The deceased was a man in his fifties, in reasonably good health but no longer fit. His coarse features suggest that he was of common stock. Would you not agree, Mr. Hoare, that he probably began at the bottom of your ladder and worked his way partway up it? I am not familiar with the gradations of rank in the Royal Navy, but he might have become-not quite a commissioned officer, but…"

  "A warrant officer," said Hoare. "A senior master's mate, probably, or even a master. When did he die?"

  "A little more than twelve hours ago, if that. Had we not moved the body about almost without interruption, we might have found it a less flexible burden." "Could he have killed himself?" Hoare asked. "Impossible, sir. Primo, why would a man strip himself naked before committing felo-de-se? Not in our climate. Secundo, I saw no blood under the bridge. He was bled dry; where did the blood go? Tertio, a person who turns the knife on himself always makes more than one cut. This cut was an admirably decisive one. No, sir; he did not destroy himself. Dear me, no." "How was he killed, then?"

  Dr. Dunworthy looked at Hoare with raised eyebrows.

  "The man was not drowned, he was not poisoned, and he was not bludgeoned. His throat was cut, sir, efficiently cut. Decisively, in both senses of the word. You may accept my opinion as certain."

  "Well, sir… " Hoare rose to his feet "… I must return to the place whence we came and search the area. I gather that you saw no sign of the man's clothing?"

  "No," the doctor said. "Nor anything else that might pertain to him. It was dark, you will recall."

  "You will hear from me. Meanwhile, you must not begin your dissection."

  "Not even the salivary glands, sir?" Dr. Dunworthy's voice was piteous.

  "Not even the salivary glands, doctor." Hoare suspected that the salivary glands were to be found in the head, and he might want that head for identification.

  "Furthermore, sir, I regret to tell you that you must keep the body intact for another twenty-four hours," he told Dunworthy.

  The doctor looked at him in dismay. "In summer, sir? Surely you realize that…"

  "I understand your concern, doctor. Nevertheless, I insist. Also, if you cut into your cadaver in any way that obscures its identification, I shall not answer for the consequences. Furthermore," Hoare added, "you are not to leave the neighborhood."

  "I had no intention of doing so, sir. I seldom travel even as far as Southampton. But why do you put this prohibition upon me? And how am I presently circumstanced with respect to the law?"

  "If you refer to your having acquired a human body for the purpose of anatomizing, doctor, it is of no consequence to me. I find the law in this respect ridiculous. How else is your profession to increase its pitiful store of knowledge about its patients? My concern is about an apparent officer of the Royal Navy who must now be marked down as 'discharged, dead.' "

  Dr. Dunworthy looked greatly relieved.

  "But," Hoare went on, "if you refer to the question of how the man came by his death, you will understand that you are under suspicion. I must remind you, sir, that by your own admission, you bought a body. Moreover, this man was murdered, and you might have murdered him."

  "Oh Lord," said the fat man. "Am I under arrest, then?"

  "I have no authority to arrest a civilian, sir, but you would be wise to follow my advice."

  Hoare turned and left his host hanging-so to speak-on his doorstep. Inside himself he dithered. He knew nothing about how such men as London's Row Street Runners proceeded.

  *

  Hoare readily found his way back to Bishops Waltham and the bridge over the Hamble stream. Three early-rising urchins squatted on the near bank. One was just fishing out a soggy blue garment, another flourished an unmistakable uniform hat.

  Hoare put two fingers to his mouth, emitted an ear-splitting whistle, and put spurs to his hack. The urchins shrieked,
dropped their booty, and fled.

  Hoare dismounted. As he had hoped, the blue object was a naval uniform coat, heavily stained across its breast. It was much like the one he himself was wearing except for a smaller number of buttons — a distinction that only an accustomed eye would notice. The dead man had indeed been a warrant officer and not a King's commissioned officer like Hoare. There was still a purse in the coat; it was a peculiar, wrinkled, leathery object, and it was empty. Reenter the doctor's resurrection man, Hoare decided.

  As the doctor had warned, there was no blood to be seen in the vicinity, even though the man must have drenched his surroundings within seconds. He must have been killed elsewhere, stripped, and brought here; the rest of his garments must have been left behind or floated down the Hamble.

  The soil was indented by several sets of human footprints, too confused for Hoare to determine what kind of activity had transpired. One set must be Dunworthy's. Dunworthy might be fat, but he was strong-strong enough to have killed the corpus himself, since he had been lugging it up the slope alone. The doctor had to be Hoare's principal suspect-at present, indeed, his only one. Whose, then, were the other footprints?

  Or perhaps the doctor was a wily man; perhaps he had paid off his supplier in the usual way and simply pretended to Hoare that he had not. But why, then, would he have called for help in the first place?

  And Dunworthy, in Hoare's opinion at least, was not murderously inclined. Medicos might well kill as many of their patients as they saved with their debilitating purges and bleedings, but they did not generally do so on purpose. For the most part they were a humane though cynical tribe.

  Then, Hoare said to himself, the killer had been the resurrection man he purported to be. But if so, why had he decamped without collecting his pay? Or-considering the tangle of tracks-were there two of them?

  When Hoare had been a pipsqueak mid, literally learning his ropes, one elderly bosun used to rejoice in dumping tangles of marline before him and his mates. The last snotty to unravel his tangle got it across his arse, knots and all. It had seemed to Hoare as though each of his tangles had only one end, so it was always his bottom that got beat. Hoare felt that way again.