Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities (19 page)

Hoare would not leave matters like this. He would not slink away. “I understand your concern, ma'am,” he whispered. “I cannot believe him to have been a conscious party to any un-English action. But the cipher which you saw on his worktable, bearing the signature ‘Jehu,' clearly ties him in some way to the late Lieutenant Kingsley, and Kingsley was less than an honorable man.”

He cleared his throat painfully.

“In fact, it now appears that Kingsley, whom I knew as a debauchee and nothing more, may have been far more than that. He may have been involved in a plot of some nature. Possibly someone made use of him, and also of Dr. Graves' talents under some pretext. It is my duty to find out if that is, indeed, the case. If it is, I will see the culprit or culprits brought to justice.”

By now, Mrs. Graves was also on her feet. This was no partridge; it was a kestrel that looked so fiercely up into Hoare's eyes.

“If you succeed in this mission of yours without sullying Simon's good name, well and good, sir. I shall be your debtor. But if you drag that name in the mud, you will have his widow to deal with. I shall be your enemy. Do not let me detain you. Good morning.”

Her voice broke. She collapsed onto her tuffet and buried her face in her hands.

“You have no right,” she sobbed. “No right. Kindly go away, Mr. Hoare, and leave me to my lonely grief.”

“Go away now, zur,” echoed Tom the manservant from the door. He watched with a stony face as Hoare sadly let himself out.

Chapter XI

S
HAMEFACED
, H
OARE
trudged a long mile north out of town, past Gloster Row and Royal Crescent. He paid his penny at the turnpike and plodded on up the steep slope to Mr. Morrow's comfortable house on the hill crest. At the doorway a saddled horse stood waiting, hip-shot, in the spring sun. He wished the beast had been in his charge, for the walk, nearly an hour long and all uphill, had left him sweating heavily, though not out of breath. He named himself to the manservant and was admitted. Mr. Morrow appeared after a short delay, booted and spurred. To him, Hoare stated his errand.

“Frankly, sir,” Morrow said, “I am at a stand as to your purpose here in Weymouth in the first place, let alone your curiosity about my affairs. Forgive my bluntness, but have you nothing better to do with your time than bother peaceable men who would prefer to be about their own business?”

“I am not troubling you out of idle curiosity, Mr. Morrow,” Hoare replied in the mildest whisper he could summon, “but on a matter of serious concern to the Navy.”

He sat expectant.

Morrow waited in vain for him to amplify what he had said. At last he said, “Well, then, Mr. Hoare, I see no harm in telling you I had asked Dr. Graves to determine whether the listening device with which he entertained us when first we met could be put to use in my quarry. It has long been known that stone with flaws or faults gives off a different sound when struck than clear, workable marble. It was my notion that with the doctor's device my men could make better selection of workplaces.”

“Then you are familiar with Dr. Graves' own workplace, sir?” Hoare asked.

“Moderately, sir.”

“Mrs. Graves tells me she saw some documents on her husband's worktable when she first came into the room … documents which she says were not present when she returned there the next morning.”

“Aha. So that is where the land lies, eh?” Mr. Morrow said in a bleak voice. “The widow accuses me of abstracting one of the good doctor's discoveries for purposes of my own. At least, I trust that to be the explanation, sir, and that the accusation does not originate with you. For I hope I may be sure, sir, that, as an officer and a gentleman, you do not insinuate…” He paused significantly.

“I doubt neither your word nor your honesty, Mr. Morrow.” At present, you prickly bastard, Hoare added to himself.

Morrow looked at him severely, as if to stare him down. “This interview is continuing longer than I had expected, sir,” he said. “If you will excuse me for a few seconds, I have an urgent message I must send to the quarry. Please to make yourself comfortable.”

Morrow was as good as his word, for he returned within minutes. “As a matter of fact,” Morrow went on more blandly, as if he had not interrupted himself, “I fear blame for Mrs. Graves' delusion may, indeed, lie in part at my door. For when I saw the distress under which she was laboring, I took the liberty of drawing a scruple of laudanum from the doctor's apothecary shelf and administering it to her. It produced some noticeable confusion in her mind.

“I was alarmed to learn later that the maid Agnes foolishly did the same thing, so doubling the dose and rendering the poor woman unconscious for some hours. Fortunately, the effect was transient, and she is none the worse for it—except for her confused conviction that I stole some of her husband's secrets. It may interest you to know Sir Thomas Frobisher is of my mind.”

With this, Mr. Morrow rose to his feet with a meaningful look. Hoare must needs follow suit.

“And now, sir,” the American said, “I must ask you to excuse me. As I said, there is a matter of considerable urgency at the quarry, to which I should be attending at this very moment.

“Let us not forget our engagement to match our yachts, Mr. Hoare,” he added at the door. “
Marie Claire
and her crew stand ready, at your convenience. See? There she lies.”

Mr. Morrow's voice was filled with pride. And justifiably so, Hoare thought. Schooner-rigged and half again the length of
Unimaginable, Marie Claire
gleamed as she lay at a mooring close inshore, easily visible from Morrow's hilltop house.

“Next time, sir,” Hoare said. “I'll need a hand or two aboard if my craft is to do herself justice.”

*   *   *

H
OARE MUST NOW
retrace his steps back into the town that lay displayed before him, its harbor twinkling in the sunlight. Sir Thomas Frobisher's dwelling would not have been out of place among the mansions of London's Mount Street. It must be staffed accordingly, for the big front door was opened by a bewigged footman in livery and pimples. Hoare named himself to the man, handed him his hat, and let himself be ushered into a large room to the left of the hallway, decorated in the latest French style. It was more than a trifle dusty.

Hoare had ample time to examine the mixed lot of ancestral portraits set on the walls to entertain the waiting visitor. The male Frobishers were almost uniformly froglike, the females weedy.

“Pat Sprat could eat no fat; her man could eat no lean…,” he hummed to himself, paraphrasing Dr. Graves's ditty about his wife and Hoare himself.

Hoare had reached a Frobisher in half-armor—at the Battle of Naseby? If so, on which side?—when Sir Thomas himself entered.

If anything, Hoare soon discovered, his host would be even less enlightening than Mr. Morrow had been. Could Morrow have sent a man with word of his likely advent?

Sir Thomas did not offer refreshment or even invite him to be seated. Instead, he stood in the doorway, managing despite his lower stature to look down his nose at him coldly. Hoare could think of nothing to do but to fall back on an equal formality.

“I am here, Sir Thomas, to inquire into the recent death of Dr. Simon Graves.”

“Eh? Speak up, man. I can't hear you.”

Hoare repeated himself as loudly as he could.

“Why?”

Hoare could feel his face reddening. “The Admiralty has reason to believe, sir—”

“What? Speak up, I told you.”

“You hear me well enough, sir, I believe. The Admiralty—”

“Has nothing to do with me. Nor I with the Admiralty.”

“Admiralty business, sir,” Hoare persisted. “On His Majesty's service. I require your written authorization to question the coroner who sat on Dr. Graves' death.”

“Is that all, fellow?” asked Sir Thomas in a voice that oozed contempt. “Then wait here. If you should need to call at my house again, the tradesmen's entrance is at the back.” He turned as if to leave the room.

Hoare rarely flew into a rage. When he did so, he turned white. Now, he barely restrained himself from seizing the baronet by the shoulder, in his own house. It would have been disastrous.

Instead, Hoare put his fingers to his mouth and blew a piercing blast into Sir Thomas's ear. It must have nearly deafened him, for he turned back to Hoare in a rage of his own. On his catching sight of the death that lay behind Hoare's face as it loomed over him, the rage turned into something approaching fear.

“The written authorization, Sir Thomas, if you please.
Now.
”

Frog-shaped the baronet might be, but he was no less valiant in defending his position. “I found you an offensive jackanapes, fellow, when first you pressed yourself upon my acquaintance by seducing Eleanor Graves into effecting an introduction to me. My opinion remains unchanged. The tradesmen's entrance next time, remember, or I'll have my men take a horsewhip to you.”

With this, Sir Thomas left the room, making a peculiar grinding noise. Hoare had read of people gnashing their teeth, but he had never before heard one actually do it. In the midst of his own fury, he was delighted at the sound.

Hoare now had another opportunity—long, long—to catch his breath, recover his temper, and further his acquaintance with the baronet's ancestors. He had now gotten as far as a flat-chested maiden of twenty, done in the style of Mr. Gainsborough, when a footman entered. He was not the same footman who had ushered Hoare into the ancestral gallery, for his pimples were pink instead of purple and were located elsewhere on his face.

“'Ere,” he said, and thrust a sealed paper at Hoare, then turned to leave the room. “This way,” he added over his shoulder.

Hoare followed him, opening the envelope as he went. This at least would serve.

The footman's livery was threadbare and much too big, Hoare noticed with secret glee. At the door, the man pointed to the left, toward the town hall.

“That way,” he said, and gave Hoare a little shove. Hoare's blow to the footman's belly carried his pent-up wrath with it and knocked him back through the open doorway.

Hoare marched down the street, seething. He had been twice a fool, he told himself. Despite Mrs. Graves's warning, he had totally failed to foresee how Sir Thomas would react to the invasion of his manor. The baronet must have had advance warning of his coming and his purpose and had already worked up an impromptu strategy for putting Hoare in his place. In that, at least, the man had failed.

For his own part, Hoare knew, he had been wholly unprepared for the baronet's attack on him through his handicap. As it was, he was lucky even to have gotten the scrap of paper. With it, of course, he had gotten Sir Thomas's enmity.

And most unforgivably, he had deeply offended Mrs. Graves without justification or reason.

Hoare would not have put it past Sir Thomas's flunky to have misdirected him out of excess malice borrowed from his master, so he was relieved to find a decrepit half-timbered cottage within a stone's throw of the town hall, with a sign over its door:

J
OSIAH
O
LNEY

S
URGEON AND
A
POTHECARY

W
ENS
R
EMOVED

While Sir Thomas had, of course, sat behind Olney as the coroner presided at the inquest on his colleague's murder—the jury had, as instructed, brought in a verdict of “murder by person or persons unknown”—it was Olney to whom he must turn for professional information about the killing.

Hoare more than half-expected that Sir Thomas had kept him waiting not only from simple ill will but also so he could send word ahead to the coroner to make himself scarce. But there Mr. Olney was, seated in a cobwebby nook and rotting quietly. He rose to greet his visitor, hastily brushing the snuff from his waistcoat. Hoare could read his thought:
Could this be a patient? One, perhaps, with money?

Mr. Olney, Hoare suspected, was a former naval surgeon. At least, while respectable enough to have been made medical examiner for the Weymouth Assizes, he was not the professional peer of the late Dr. Simon Graves, physician, artificer, correspondent with Laënnec and Dupuytren. Nonetheless, he showed himself willing to help Hoare as best he could. Hoare did not even have to show Sir Thomas's paper. He had, then, made a new enemy for no reason.

“I am calling on you, sir,” Hoare whispered, “to inquire into the circumstances of Dr. Graves' death.”

Olney was manifestly disappointed to learn that Hoare was not a patient, but he obliged. He summarized the inquest on Dr. Graves; there were no surprises here. The surgeon was unaware of any particular efforts on the authorities' part to track down his colleague's killer. Certainly Sir Thomas had issued no orders to anyone concerning the murder.

Was Sir Thomas too self-important to have been bothered? The baronet had seemed to be a good friend of Dr. Graves and his wife. Why had he done nothing to track down the physician's murderer? Why, in fact, had he taken such an intense instant dislike to Hoare? Hoare feared that his impatient jape about bats, when they were first introduced, lay at the root of the matter.

“But forgive me, sir,” Olney was saying. “I altogether failed to offer you a drop. I usually take a bit of port at about this time of day. Will you join me in a drop?”

At Hoare's nod, Olney reached up and opened a cabinet from which he drew a decanter and two glasses. Apparently observing that one of them was dusty, he wiped it out with a large polka-dot kerchief, and began to pour.

“Was there an autopsy, sir?” Hoare asked.

“Why, shame on me,” Olney said, and spilled some of the muddy wine on his desk.

“Bless my soul, I clean forgot, I did. Of course I did. I made an autopsy on my poor colleague. I knew he would have wanted me to. Shall I tell you about it?”