Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities (17 page)

“And Mr. Morrow kindly offered us his carriage,” Eleanor Graves interjected. “It is more commodious than our chaise. Then he offered to drive us, and how could we refuse?”

“So there you are, sir,” Morrow said.

Hoare accompanied his acquaintances to Mr. Morrow's carriage, escorting Miss Austen. As they walked, the lady explained that she had dragged the doctor and his wife to this morning's ceremony in order to have comfortable transportation at no cost to herself. Lady Caroline Gladden had been a childhood friend of her late mother, and a match between Miss Austen and Peter Gladden had once been mooted.

Hoare only pretended to listen, for he was trying to eavesdrop on the trio ahead of him. Their conversation mystified him. It sounded as if Morrow was pressing some action upon the doctor, for Hoare heard Dr. Graves say, in a voice that displayed more than a little irritation, “No, no, Morrow. No more than I could the last time you urged me. I can still do no such thing. I pray you, sir, oblige me and refrain from mentioning the subject again.”

In the absence of Mrs. Graves's girl Agnes, Hoare helped Morrow boost the doctor into the Canadian's carriage and hitched the wheeled chair to it. Hat in hand, he stood to watch his four acquaintances bowl away toward Bath. The chair followed along, looking like a jolly boat being towed behind a sixth-rate. He retrieved his horse and his saddlebags from the Mitre and set out on his own return journey to Portsmouth. He had barely exchanged a word with Eleanor Graves.

*   *   *

A
S THE COB
jogged easily along, Hoare chided himself for having chosen to come to Wells at all. The voyage had wasted four days. He had learned only that Kingsley had been a botfly of a man, ever looking for a place to light and bite. With women, he had been avid for their bodies; with men, his avidity had been for interest. He had been wont to bear gifts about in eternal hope of achieving one goal or the other.

Not an attractive man, to be sure, but still, what had Kingsley done to deserve being shot in the back of the head when he was already as good as sentenced to hang? Admiral Hardcastle had wondered aloud what important secrets that rake-hell lieutenant had owned that could have required his silencing. Hoare had as yet come no closer to an answer.

His mind turned and writhed like a cluster of earthworms, squirming and getting nowhere. He forced it into another channel, an intriguing one, but nothing that called for his formal involvement: the matter of Mrs. Graves and those two mysterious attackers. At Wells, she had made no reference to her adventure or to the death of one attacker at her hands, which had so clearly disturbed her at first.

Morrow had brought a peculiar little party to Bath and thence to Wells. Not the least peculiar was Morrow himself, with his insinuating approach to Mrs. Graves and the near-malice that he showed to Hoare. What had Morrow been pressing upon Dr. Graves so persistently that the doctor had needed to chide him?

Restless and dissatisfied with himself, Hoare decided to bait at Warminster, some eighteen miles on, change horses there, and continue to Portsmouth through the night.

*   *   *

T
HE NEW HACK
was a sorrel instead of a bay. Its home stable must have been in Winchester, if not Portsmouth itself, for it was quite ready to have its sleep interrupted. As it jogged along, Hoare found himself reexamining his earlier reveries. He felt as a master weaver must, trying to unravel an apprentice's botched work. There had to be a common thread in the case, or a repeated knot.

Captain Hay's murder? Kingsley's murder? He dozed and—dozing—dreamed. Something about Mrs. Graves, about the anker. Alternately waking and dozing, as he had taught himself to do during long, uneventful night watches at sea, he let the sorrel hack carry him homeward.

*   *   *

F
OUR DAYS LATER
, on arriving at the Victualling Office, Hoare found a letter lying on his flimsy desk. He remembered the hand from his evening in Weymouth with Dr. Graves and his lady. His heart gave a palpable thump. What was happening to him?

My dear Mr. Hoare [he read]:

Even though it can hardly concern you as a naval officer, I have been told that you are also a skilled investigator, so I make bold to inform you of my husband's death the night before last, and to beg your assistance, as a friend, in bringing his killer or killers to justice.

Here is a summary of the facts as I know them. On Tuesday night I had retired, leaving Dr. Graves to his correspondence. I was awakened by the sound of an explosion in the street outside; this was followed by a crashing noise below stairs. I took the candle which I keep at my bedside in case my husband required assistance and descended to the ground floor.

I found my husband in his study-workshop. He had fallen forward out of his chair. His head had struck the table before him, and the blow had cut open his forehead. He was quite dead—not from the blow, but from a bullet which had penetrated his chair and continued into his back.

I sent our manservant to Sir Thomas Frobisher posthaste with the news of Simon's death. He arrived within the hour, and was followed shortly by Mr. Morrow.

Both gentlemen are justices of the peace, so they will, of course, attempt to discover the murderer of my husband. However, I am less than confident than either their time or their inclinations will lead them to do so with the dedication the inquiry will certainly demand. For I am frankly not without suspicion that one of the two gentlemen—I have no notion of which—may not be devoid of self-interest in the matter.

When my husband died, he had evidently been engaged with a small, indecipherable document which I saw myself, beneath his hand. It is not now to be found. Neither Sir Thomas not Mr. Morrow could recall having seen such a paper. In fact, Sir Thomas suggested that the shock of finding my husband dead had left me subject to delusions.

I know myself, Mr. Hoare, and I know what I saw.

Dr. Graves was a kindly, gentle, and talented man. I will have his killer brought to justice, and I will not be denied. I would therefore deem it more than friendly of you if you were to come once again to the aid of your sorrowing friend and obedient servant,

Eleanor Graves

Chapter X

H
OARE ADMITTED
to himself that the devices that had produced the explosions in the fleet had probably been loaded in Portsmouth. But, he told himself now as he had told Sir George Hardcastle before, Mrs. Graves might, after all, be able to decipher the message that had defeated Mr. Watt. She had seen “a small, illegible document” on her husband's desk, and it had disappeared. Moreover, he reminded himself, the mysterious anker—the keg that had brought him to Lyme Regis—had come ashore on Portland Bill. Old Dee had told him so. Thus, his decision to point
Unimaginable
westward to Weymouth once again could have had nothing directly to do with the widow's appeal.

He had not seen the late doctor's house by daylight before. Standing in the early summer sunshine, it was a graceful brick structure, suited to the successful physician who had owned it. The door and ground-floor windows were draped with black and purple swags. So was the sorrowful maid Agnes, who ushered Hoare into the drawing room where Dr. Graves had demonstrated his listening device and where he had first raised and then destroyed Hoare's hopes of recovering his voice. Mrs. Graves already awaited him there, seated on her tuffet. This morning, in her glossy black weeds, she looked not like a partridge but like a rook or a small raven. Her expression, even more than Sir George Hardcastle's, was grim and merciless. His heart did not thump, but went out to her.

Mrs. Graves cut off Hoare's whispered condolences before he had properly begun them. “Thank you for coming in answer to my letter, Mr. Hoare,” she said. “I shall not take up your time with empty courtesies. Tell me, sir; what can I do to advance your inquiry?”

“Tell me in the fullest detail what happened on the night of Dr. Graves' death.”

“But I put everything into my letter, sir.”

Hoare shook his head. “No, Mrs. Graves. That would be impossible, even for a professional observer. For instance, you did not tell me the time of night that the shot awakened you. How was your husband dressed? How was his office lit? And so forth.”

He stopped to rest his whisper. “In fact,” he continued, “would it disturb you to reenact the event itself, at the place where it occurred?”

“If by ‘disturb' you mean ‘arouse painful memories,' Mr. Hoare, not in the least. My memories of my husband transcend place.”

She seemed to choke, recovered, and went on. “And I am not afraid of ghosts. Besides, I am sure that Simon's ghost, if there were such a thing, would be a gentle one … to me, at least. So let us proceed as you ask.” She rose from her tuffet and began to lead the way into the front hall.

“Do you wish us to commence in my bedroom,” she asked over her shoulder, “where, of course, the shot awakened me? Or will it be sufficient for me to begin at the foot of the stairs?”

Hoare felt strangely disturbed at the idea of seeing the lady's chamber. “We can begin here,” he whispered.

“Very well. You asked me what time of the night it was. I can only estimate it, for while this clock under the stairs must have chimed, I fear I was too distracted to notice it. It rang four just as Sir Thomas entered, so I would judge that it was about three in the morning.”

Hoare nodded.

“As I believe I wrote in my letter,” she went on, “I was awakened by a shot. With it came the sound of something below me, falling. When my husband is working below stairs, I keep a candle burning, so that I will not need to grope about for flint and steel if an emergency should arise. I used the candle to light my way downstairs. I could see light coming into the hall from my husband's study-workshop.”

Mrs. Graves walked into the study, which lay diagonally across the hall from the drawing room. Hoare now saw it for the first time. It was a peculiar place, half-library, half-laboratory. On one side, low counters supported a variety of instruments and vessels that Hoare, at least, found quite daunting. He could recognize retorts, measuring glasses, microscopes. A handsome Herschel telescope stood in a corner in its glowing mahogany case, awaiting its departed master. He could not imagine the use of some of them; he found some oddly beautiful. They glittered in the sunlight like a small trove.

Set apart in one corner, under a high north-facing window, a table bore a multitude of clean, tiny instruments including what Hoare believed was a miniature lathe. A few possible products of this machine lay in clean white porcelain saucers—tiny gears and pinions that could only be portions of clockwork mechanisms. Several mounted magnifying glasses stood about. The center of the table was clear, as if to provide the experimenter with ample work space.

“Was it at this table that he did his experiments?” Hoare asked.

“No. The table is an addition of the last three months,” said Mrs. Graves. “My husband had taken to the study of Mr. Whitney's principle, as it might apply to watchmaking.”

“Mr. Whitney's principle?”

“An American by the name of Eli Whitney, Mr. Hoare. I know little about him, except for what Simon told me. He has apparently found a way of producing the locks of muskets in considerable volume, by somehow making components that are identical. I remember Simon saying that the man astonished a group of gunsmiths by assembling complete locks from several heaps of parts.

“To tell you the truth, I know no more than that.”

The other, literary half of the room looked more familiar to Hoare. The rows of filled bookshelves lifted all the way to the plain ceiling. The shelves, however, were unusual. Being unable to walk, let alone climb the usual rolling library steps, the doctor had devised a pair of endless chains, between which the bookshelves hung on gimbals so that they remained forever upright.

Apparently, the doctor could control these chains from his chair, so that he could make them present him with the shelf or shelves he needed at the moment. Hoare was tempted to try the mechanism himself, but now was hardly the time.

Between the two parts of the chamber were a low cot with gleaming brass handrails that the doctor could grip when moving from chair to bed and back, and his writing desk. Except for a magnifying glass and the usual writing materials, the surface of the desk was quite bare. The doctor's empty wheeled chair faced it, some three feet away. The floor between chair and desk bore marks of the doctor's lifeblood, and spots of blood marred the desk's top.

“I found Simon slumped forward in his wheeled chair,” Mrs. Graves went on. “His forehead had been thrown forward onto the desk. There were drops of blood from his forehead on his papers. I knew immediately that he was dead.

“But his death was not due to the wound in his forehead. As I had thought, the sound that awakened me was a shot. Someone standing in the back lane outside behind the house had taken aim at my husband as he sat at the table with his back to the open window and fired a single bullet at him. It penetrated his chair … here—you can see the hole it made—and continued into Simon's back. It was the shock of the bullet hitting him that drove his face into the table.

“I ran into the back hall and called out to waken the servants. Then I sat down on the floor beside my husband and took his poor head in my arms.”

“The message you mentioned?” Hoare prompted her.

“It was not in Simon's handwriting. As I remember it, the words were very even. Beside it was the paper on which Simon had been writing when he was killed, with a splash of ink where he had dropped his pen. But to tell the truth, Mr. Hoare, I barely noticed the arrangement of the desk at the time. My mind was elsewhere. When the servants entered, I sent our man Tom to Sir Thomas and Mr. Morrow with the news. The two arrived within minutes of each other.”