Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities Read online

  “‘Hoare,’ eh?” Sir Thomas said. “Well, sir, I’ll have you know I am a baronet—and a knight. Which of us takes precedence, eh? The … er … lady of the night or the hereditary knight? Eh?”

  Hoare knew from old this reaction to his name. It was predictable from old, and he had learned how to avert most of the hostilities that could otherwise follow. “You, of course, sir. Myself, I am merely Bartholomew Hoare—at your service, now, or anytime.” He accompanied his whisper with a cold, gray stare. He also made his leg to the man of superior station.

  “Frobisher is a famous name in history, Sir Thomas,” Hoare continued. “Have I the honor of addressing a descendant of Sir Martin Frobisher, discoverer of the famous bay of that name?”

  Sir Thomas’s equivocal look showed he was now of two minds about Bartholomew Hoare. On the one hand, Sir Thomas was pleased at the implied compliment to his ancestry; on the other hand, irritated at being addressed in such a strangely confidential whisper and suspicious that someone—surely not Mrs. Graves—was making game of him. Was he, head of the Frobishers, risking a challenge to his standing by being asked to meet a whispering man with an obscene name? Even when, in a few words, Mrs. Graves explained Hoare’s disability, the baronet’s air tilted only slightly toward the affable.

  “Yes, Mr.… er … Hoare,” he said. “While the name Frobisher goes back as far as the Conqueror and even beyond, my ancestor Sir Martin Frobisher was the first to bring it into prominence. A century later, of course, Charles II granted the baronetcy to the first Sir Charles, who was my fourth or fifth great-grandfather.

  “Since then, the family which I have the honor to head has been prominent in Dorset society. Indeed, the Frobishers are received at court as a matter of course, and each of the eldest Frobisher sons is knighted upon reaching his majority, also as a matter of course. So, you see, we are twice-a-knight men.”

  Hoare was about to burst into one of his silent laughs when he realized Sir Thomas was in deadly earnest, so he turned his laugh into a breath that he hoped indicated proper admiration.

  “As a matter of fact,” the knight-baronet went on in a nasal, patronizing voice, “I expect to attend the investiture of my only son—young Martin, you know—the next time he accompanies His Majesty to our little city. He is a captain in the Foot Guards, of course.”

  Guardee the young Frobisher might be, Hoare told himself, but he would remain undubbed for some time if his knighting must await the King’s return to Weymouth. These days the poor monarch, self-isolated in Kew for months at a time, seldom even came to London; he would hardly make his way back soon to his former favorite watering place.

  “Tell me … er … Hoare,” Sir Thomas said. “From whence does your family derive?”

  “They were Orkneymen originally, sir, and we still consider ourselves such, even though my father has bought a small property near Melton Mowbray.”

  “What say? Speak up, man.”

  “The Orkneys, sir.” To continue at top whisper Hoare had to strain his maimed throat. He felt himself being brought by the lee. The man must know that an attack on his handicap, unlike an attack on his name, was hard to deal with. Sir Thomas was being gratuitously offensive.

  “D’ye hunt, then,… er … Hoare?”

  “Not as a regular thing, Sir Thomas.”

  “Hmph.” Sir Thomas began to look about him for something more worth his attention than a disheveled junior naval officer with an obscene name who could not speak and who did not hunt.

  It was then that Hoare succumbed to temptation and reacted with a sally that was to cause him considerable subsequent grief.

  “Of course, sir, my father is MB of our neighborhood’s battery.”

  “Battery, sir? Battery? ‘MB’? What’s an MB, pray? And what has a battery to do with huntin’?”

  “You know about falconry, surely, Sir Thomas?”

  “Of course. Obsolete now, but a perfectly acceptable avocation for the nobility and gentry.”

  “Well, sir, we Hoares and our like-minded neighbors in the Northern Islands have trained bats to hunt game and retrieve it.”

  He paused, gasped, and continued.

  “We find that bats, being creatures that nurse their young, are far more intelligent, and more easily trained, than falcons of any species. (Gasp.) They are, in fact, as clever and responsive as the Skye terriers our fellow islanders to the south have taken up so avidly, or the herds of Shetland ponies our neighbors to the north employ to keep down the auk population.”

  Pause; gasp.

  “We fly our nimble little fellows in the dusk, of course. It makes for very good sport. My father, having made himself a skilled flederman, was appointed Master of Battery for our little neighborhood hunt. Hence the ‘MB.’

  “Should you find yourself in Leicestershire, sir, I believe he could promise you an excellent evening in the field.”

  Hoare heard a smothered sound from Mrs. Graves. He also saw that, while he might not have gained the knight-baronet’s respect, he had at least captured his interest.

  “What d’ye hunt with ’em, then?” Sir Thomas asked in a reluctant croaking voice.

  “Flies, sir. We feed them to our frogs.”

  By good fortune, Sir Thomas’s reaction was cut short; Dr. Simon Graves wheeled himself into the Strangers’ Room.

  Dr. Graves looked to be in his late sixties; later, Hoare was to learn he was seventy-four. At one time, he would have matched Hoare’s height and build, but now he was confined to a peculiar light chair of wicker, bamboo, and ash. The toroidal supplementary wheel outboard of each primary wheel made a continuous handle by which the doctor could roll himself about with his still-powerful arms. Hoare had seen crude, heavy versions of similar invalid’s chairs, but this one, light yet obviously strong, was a work of art.

  The doctor’s wife introduced the two and went on to describe to her husband and the knight her afternoon’s affray on the beach. She belittled her own role and exaggerated Hoare’s—but not too effusively—and concluded, “So that is how Lieutenant Hoare and I became acquainted and why he is here. I am most grateful to him, my dear.”

  “As am I,” the doctor said in a surprisingly powerful baritone. Hoare thought he could remember what his own voice had sounded like before the Glorious First of June; he thought it had been much the same.

  Sir Thomas would allow Dr. Graves to say no more. “But you mean to say there are two rascals tied up aboard your yacht … er … Hoare?

  “Why,” he added, “I must have ’em taken in charge immediately. I’ll have her boarded and relieve you of ’em. Where does she lie?”

  Hoare told him and granted permission for Sir Thomas’s men to board Inconceivable and remove her cocooned cargo.

  “And what’s her name, sir?”

  “Inconceivable, sir.”

  “What? Are you attempting to gammon me, sir?” Sir Thomas’s eyes opened wide.

  Hoare shook his head emphatically. He had been here before and knew his lines.

  “No, indeed, Sir Thomas. I also call her Insupportable, or Molly J, or Dryad, or Serene, or Unspeakable. I change her name according to my mood of the moment. I keep several trail boards below and face the spares into the bilges for a cabin sole.”

  He paused to breathe.

  “It makes no difference to her; she answers to none of them. She just answers her helm, and very well, too, at that.”

  Sir Thomas decided not to take umbrage after all, but his laugh—unlike those of Dr. and Mrs. Graves—sounded more than a trifle forced. “Very good, sir, very good! That way, you can bemuse Boney. But what brings you down-Channel in these difficult times?” Those goggling eyes suddenly turned shrewd.

  Speaking slowly to conserve his whisper, Hoare explained no more than his need to consult old Dee.

  “Of course; the psammeophile,” Dr. Graves said. “We know him well.”

  “‘Psammeophile,’ sir?” Sir Thomas asked.

  “A Greek neologism of my own, Sir T
homas,” the doctor said. “A lover of sand.”

  Sir Thomas returned his attention to Hoare. “May I inquire the nature of your present duties … er … Hoare?”

  “They are miscellaneous, sir. I am at the beck and call of Sir George Hardcastle, Port Admiral at Portsmouth; my visit to Lyme was in connection with one of them.” Without saying so, Hoare did his best to indicate that this was as much as he wanted to say about his mission. He must have succeeded, for Sir Thomas turned to Mrs. Graves.

  “But, Eleanor, what could have persuaded you outdoors in such weather, and what could have brought your attackers out on your trail?”

  Mrs. Graves disregarded the first part of Sir Thomas’s question and suggested that the second part would best be answered by the culprits themselves. Then Smith, the steward, appeared at the door to announce that her Agnes had arrived in the chaise and was waiting for her in the kitchen with a valise of dry clothing, so she excused herself and withdrew.

  Sir Thomas, in his turn, made his apologies to Dr. Graves, but not to Hoare, and departed to send a file of capable men to unload Inconceivable’s passengers, leaving the other two gentlemen to entertain each other at the fireside.

  “I observe you have suffered an injury to your larynx, Mr. Hoare,” the doctor said. “There must be a story attached to that. Would you enlighten me?”

  As briefly and modestly as he could without seeming secretive, Hoare described how a spent musket ball had crushed his larynx, leaving him unable to speak above the hoarse whisper he was using.

  Hoare went on at Dr. Graves’s request to show the aids he had developed for communicating when his whisper could not be heard. His Roman tablet went unremarked, but then he withdrew from his pocket a silver boatswain’s pipe hanging from a black silk ribbon like a quizzing glass and began to play for the doctor a few of the shrill calls he used when making his wishes known to those persons—servants and other subordinates—whom he had trained. He went on to a seductive whistled rendition of “Come into the Garden, Maud,” which was self-explanatory. He concluded with the earsplitting whistle through his fingers that he had developed as an emergency cry. When this brought Mr. Smith to the door in alarm, the doctor shook his head and laughed softly.

  “Ingenious,” he said. “Dr. Franklin would have admired your solutions.”

  “You knew Dr. Franklin, sir?”

  “Yes, indeed. In fact, we corresponded from time to time. His loss to our kingdom when the Americans won their independence was not the least we have suffered through His Majesty’s mulishness. I often wonder if the King’s madness was not already at work in ’76.”

  Hoare could only agree. “I met many rebels during that sad, fratricidal war,” he said, “and came to respect not a few on both sides.”

  He did not add that his sweet French-Canadian bride from Montreal had died in childbirth while he was at sea in ’82, over twenty years ago, leaving an infant daughter in Halifax whom he had never seen. Antoinette’s family, ever resentful of their daughter’s marriage to an anglais, had snatched the babe back up the Saint Lawrence, out of her father’s reach.

  “If you would care to meet another American, sir,” the doctor said, “Mrs. Graves and I have engaged Mr. Edward Morrow to dine this evening. If you do not plan to attempt a return to Portsmouth tonight, we would welcome your presence, too, at our board.”

  Hoare had begun to protest that he was not clothed for dining in company when Sir Thomas returned to the Strangers’ Room, frowning. His men had stuffed one of Mrs. Graves’s assailants into the lockup in the cellars of the town hall, with two drunks and a poacher. The other—apparently the leader—was still senseless. Sir Thomas’s men had untied him and locked him into a separate cell until he awoke or died.

  Sir Thomas refused Dr. Graves’s offer to attend the man. “You would find it difficult to negotiate the narrow stairs down to the lockup,” he said. “Besides, Mr. Olney, the surgeon, is medical examiner for the town, as you know. He would take it quite amiss if he were to feel himself overlooked. I know you will understand, sir.”

  Accepting this small rebuff, the doctor returned to the matter of Hoare’s evening dress. “You and I are much of a size,” he observed. “Mrs. Graves, I am certain,” he said, “would not object to your appearing at her table in a pair of my breeches. I shall send a pair to you at the Dish of Sprats immediately upon my return home.”

  On Dr. Graves’s suggestion, Hoare then instructed one of the Club’s servants to take a room there on his behalf.

  By now Mrs. Graves had changed into dry clothing and rejoined the others. On her husband’s behalf, she refused Hoare’s offer to lift the doctor into the waiting chaise. It was clearly a matter of family pride: a Graves needed no stranger’s help. So Hoare watched as she and the maid Agnes formed a seat with their crossed hands, slipped them under the doctor, and flung him into the air. He gripped two handles on the chaise with his powerful old arms and swung himself into its seat. He reached down and drew his wife up beside him.

  The maid Agnes attached the wheeled chair behind the chaise by an ingenious metal latch and reached up to her master. The doctor drew her, too, into the chaise and clucked to the cob between its shafts; the chaise and the chair trundled off in the light rain. Hoare was oddly sorry to see it go, glad to know he would be seeing the Graves couple again.

  Chapter II

  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.