Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities (3 page)

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 Thomas,” 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

W
HEN 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.

“Open your mouth, if you please, and lean forward. Very good.”

Dr. Graves drew the device down over his head further, adjusting it so that Hoare could see an eye peering at him through the hole.

“Now sing. Do not trouble yourself with the words; just attempt to sing, ‘Aaaah,' with your mouth open.”

Hoare uttered another macabre squawk, and the doctor sat back in his chair.

“So … so. Very good,” he said as Hoare coughed and coughed. “Or rather,
not
very good, I fear. You may replace your cravat, sir.”

“Would you now tell me, sir, what this is all about?” asked Hoare as he complied.

“Well, sir, it was partly an inexcusable curiosity on my part and partly a hope that I might be able to help you recover at least part of your speaking voice. Enough, perhaps, for you to shout commands at sea. You see, I have a special interest in abnormalities of the singing and speaking voices.”

Hoare drew a hopeful breath. It was the loss of his voice that had put him on the beach in the first place, for no deck officer can issue audible commands in a whisper. Its recovery could mean his return to sea, perhaps even to the post rank his affliction denied him. It was his dearest wish.

“Well, sir? Your verdict?”

“The vocal cords are, I fear, displaced in your case, in a manner that none of today's surgeons have the skill to repair. I had thought perhaps Monsieur Dupuytren … but no, probably not even he. Besides, Dupuytren is French and would hardly wish to offend his Emperor by releasing a talented officer to battle against his own Navy. Moreover, the cords are badly atrophied. I am surprised that you do not have difficulty in swallowing. I am sorry.”

“Thank you just the same, sir,” Hoare whispered.

“It would have been a small return for your having saved Mrs. Graves' life today,” the doctor said. He looked up at his wife and put his hand over hers, where it rested on his shoulder. He handed her the mirror and the tube.

“I am most interested in that tube, sir,” Mr. Morrow said. “You have not shown it to me before. Will you demonstrate its use to me now?”

“Certainly. Its most common application is in listening to the beating of the heart. Monsieur Laënnec—an old friend but another Frenchman, I fear—invented the thing so he could diagnose diseases of the heart and lungs more precisely. Being an
amateur
of instrument making, as you know already, I have made some small improvements upon his invention. Let you try it, first upon me, and then upon Mr. Hoare, if we can oppress him once more. Then you in turn shall submit to the ordeal, if Mr. Hoare, too, is minded to try the tube.”

“I should like it above all things,” Hoare said.

“I shall be satisfied to watch,” Mrs. Graves commented. Miss Austen concurred with a nod.