Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities (5 page)

“Well, sir, only a month or two after we had met, as he was returning from the bedside of a patient on a night much like this, his chaise overturned and pinned him under it. By morning, he was paralyzed below the waist.

“As his recovery was prolonged as well as incomplete, several ladies of the neighborhood took it upon themselves to nurse him in turn. Miss Eleanor Swan, as she was then, was one of them. Her all-round competence evidently attracted the old gentleman sufficiently for him to ask her for her hand. They were married from St. Ninian's two years ago August.

“And that, sir, is the ‘happy issue out of all their afflictions' for which we should all pray of a Sunday,” he concluded.

“Can you conceive what Mrs. Graves' attackers might have been about?” Hoare asked.

Mr. Morrow shrugged elaborately, almost like a Frenchman. “I should suppose it was a chance encounter, sir,” he said, “and the two saw what they conceived to be an opportunity to rob a woman alone, and perhaps to ravish her. What else?

“Mrs. Graves is a woman of talent, as you saw this evening, but inclined, perhaps, to an unwomanly rashness of behavior. Dr. Graves should have forbidden her to go onto the beach without so much as a manservant to protect her.”

Privately, Hoare doubted Mrs. Graves would have been so pliant as to obey any strictures by another—even her husband—on her freedom of movement. But he did not express his doubts to Mr. Morrow.

“You journeyed to Weymouth in your own vessel,” Morrow said. “You are a yachtsman as well as a sailor, then?”

“Hardly a ‘yachtsman,' Mr. Morrow. And my ‘yacht' is a mere made-over pinnace with no pretensions except whatever name I choose for her from time to time.”

Morrow laughed. “Yes. I hear that in that respect she is as much of a chameleon as she is a pinnace.
Inevitable,
is she not?”

“Not today, sir. Today she is
Inconceivable.
”

Morrow laughed again. “Did you know I happen to be something of a yachtsman myself?” he said.

Hoare expressed silent surprise.

“Yes. I took it up back in the land of my birth, when I found it convenient to have my own transportation ready to hand for travel between Montreal and Quebec, and up and down the tributaries of the Saint Lawrence, in my fur trading. Now I keep a handy schooner,
Marie Claire,
here in Weymouth and take her out from time to time when so moved. Her crew are all Jerseymen, and exempt from the press, thanks to the protections Sir Thomas has procured for them.

“Perhaps we should match our craft one day soon. A few guineas on the race?”

“One day, with pleasure, sir,” Hoare said.

Upon this, the two parted for the night.

*   *   *

L
EAVING
D
R
. G
RAVES'S
borrowed breeches in the care of the landlord at the Dish of Sprats, Hoare set forth down the High Street in the dawn mist to embark for Portsmouth. The town was in great disarray, with heaps of neglected bricks, Portland stone, and lumber scattered throughout its narrow streets. The King's unheralded decision several years before to make Weymouth his preferred watering place may have thrown the townspeople into confusion but, determined to make the most of it, they had begun a frenzy of speculative building. But His Majesty had apparently dropped Weymouth from his increasingly confused mind, and much of the promising civic beautification had stopped in midproject.

An addicted snoop, Hoare wondered about Mrs. Graves's victim. It was a curious chance, he thought, that the dead man should have been the leader of the two. And who had known this to be the case? He could not remember.

He stopped, turned in his tracks, and climbed up the town hall steps. Common sense told him the town lockup would be in the hall's cellars; that would be the proper location for a dungeon, be it real or fictional. He found it there, guarded by a whiskery turnkey who was sleepily closing a barred door behind him.

“I'm a friend of Mrs. Graves,” Hoare told him. “I want to see the man who died attacking her.”

“Ye needn't whisper, sir,” the guard said, pointing over his shoulder. “Dead as King Charles, 'e be. 'E be right in there, layin' quiet as can be.”

Hoare pushed open the door. Below the rough, bloodstained bandage around its head, the face of the corpse was an ashen blue. No one had closed its staring eyes. There were traces of blood around its nostrils and a crust of dried foam around its lips.

Hoare had seen enough men dead of enough causes to know this man had not been killed by the blow of Mrs. Graves's slung stone. He had been smothered.

Thoughtfully, Hoare left the morgue.

“Where is the man we captured with him?” he asked.

The turnkey shrugged. “Dunno, sir. Some men of the town watch took un off just a few minutes past.”

Leaving the town hall, Hoare retraced his steps. He arrived at
Inconceivable,
shoved her off, set sail, and set course for Portsmouth. The wind had backed into the east, and once again he could progress only with tack upon tack. He enlivened the trip by selecting a new name for his vessel from among the inventory in her bilges; she had left Portsmouth as
Inconceivable
but would return as
Insupportable.

It was then he discovered
Inconceivable
had been searched from stem to gudgeon. Hoare had installed a small armory in her forepeak. It included a one-pounder swivel or jingal, mountable into either of two sockets, one of which was set into her bows and the other dead aft; a Kentucky rifle; four pistols; a cavalry saber; a rapier; five grenades; several mantraps; a crossbow with twenty quarrels of various types; and powder and shot for the firearms. At considerable expense, Hoare had equipped the latter with the novel percussion caps.

And now his deadly Kentucky gun was gone.

Chapter III

B
ARTHOLOMEW
H
OARE'S
father, Joel Hoare, was of Viking stock. Joel brought that good name of his with him when he came south from the Orkneys as an orphan boy, and he had defended it successfully throughout his rise from ship's boy and through the hawsehole to master's mate, thence to post captain.

Both Hoare sons had defended that good name with fists and feet again and again while still in their nonage. Bartholomew's elder brother, John, had been badly injured in such an affray and still limped about the family property in Shropshire, debarred forever from the sea.

Even before Captain Hoare had negotiated his younger son a post as midshipman in
Centurion,
60, Bartholomew had run a jeering schoolmate through the thigh with a carving knife. Now, more than thirty years later, it was a foolhardy man who mocked that good name of Bartholomew Hoare's; though thus far he had avoided killing a single opponent, he wounded at will with pistol, épée, or saber.

As befitted the descendant of Vikings, Bartholomew was not only a warrior but also a masterly seaman. While still a midshipman, he had been the sole deck officer in the brig
Beetle
to survive the great tempest of September '81, when a rogue sea swept her quarterdeck clean. That night he led her surviving crew in club-hauling the brig off the roaring rocks of the Isles of Shoals.

Not only that; as young Hoare was working
Beetle
to Halifax under jury rig he had taken a small Yankee privateer by a ruse—her master had drained her crew into his English prizes—and he brought her into Halifax in modest triumph. The privateer had carried specie from one of her captures. Moreover, the navy had bought her up, bringing Hoare the entire quarterdeck's eighth of the proceeds, plus the one-thirty-second share due him as a midshipman—one of the four surviving warrant officers.

Thus, even before being commissioned lieutenant in 1783, Hoare had gained a solid reputation for competence both in the field of honor and at sea. He had also gained what, for a mere midshipman at the bottom of the navy's ladder of success, was a sizable fortune. That amount, £6,127/5/8, paid him by the Halifax prize master, was such a shock to young Hoare that, running counter to the behavior of the typical mid, he invested the entire sum in the Funds and left it at Barclays Bank to accrue in industrious idleness as its owner worked his way up the tedious ladder of promotion.

But the spent musket ball fired from
Eole
on the first of June '94 had put paid to his career at sea. Since any deck officer must be able to hail the main masthead in a full gale,
Staghound
's captain had regretfully put his first lieutenant ashore, silenced for life, with a letter of high commendation, endorsed by Lord Howe himself. Never since that black day had Bartholomew Hoare gone to sea in anyone's vessel but his own, unless as a silent, frustrated passenger.

By good fortune, Hoare also had influence among the mighty. Captain Joel Hoare, of course, as a member of Parliament, still carried weight with Their Lordships of the Admiralty, and his Uncle Claudius, brother of Bartholomew's late mother, had married Lady Jessica, eldest daughter of Geoffrey, third Baron Wheatley. It had needed both these connections and Lord Howe's precious letter to find the beached, despairing Hoare a place on the permanent staff of the Port Admiral at Portsmouth.

“And what the hell do Their Lordships expect me to do with a lieutenant who cannot talk?” that officer had asked Hoare as he paced back and forth in front of the stricken lieutenant.

“Can ye speak French?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Read books of accounts?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hand, reef, and steer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hail the fore topgallant?”

“No, sir.”

So the Admiral had gone on, firing a question like a broadside every time he passed athwart Hoare's hawse, until Hoare sweated where he stood.

He had evidently passed muster, for the Admiral had him assigned as a general dogsbody, trotting about at the command of either the Commissioner (who commanded the Portsmouth shipyards) or the Admiral himself, as Port Admiral in command of the Navy vessels at the Yard and at Spithead just outside the harbor's mouth. In practice, Hoare spent most of his time slaving for the port's regulating captain—master of the press—and the local masters of the Navy Board, Ordnance Board, Victualling Board, and Transport Board. He ran errands and took on any project that a voiceless officer could reasonably accept. The life kept him out of the countryside where the Hoare family remained; he had found the stink of bilges and the scurry of rats preferable to the stink of cow shit and the scurry of chickens.

As well as becoming intimately familiar from below with the bizarre, cobwebbed workings of the so-called Silent Service, he must have been found useful. For, even though Sir Percy soon hoisted his flag in
Agamemnon
—at sea again at last, leaving the forlorn Hoare behind him on the beach—succeeding Port Admirals had kept him in place, to roll about wherever ordered, aging but gathering little moss. By now, he was forty-three.

Unlike many beached officers—and all too many seagoing ones as well—Hoare kept himself fit. He frequented the
salle d'armes
of Marc-Antoine de Chatillon de Barsac, French émigré and master of
escrime.
Here he worked diligently at perfecting his skill with every weapon that might come to hand, including many that would never see the field of honor, being unsuited to the hand of a gentleman. He also developed a strongly accented fluency in French.

Whenever duty permitted, he wandered England's entire south coast in his odd little yacht. This not only kept his hands and muscles tough from fisting her canvas and heaving on her abrasive hemp but also kept his seamanly skills well honed.

A year or two ago, he had used the guineas won at a lucky run in the Long Rooms to buy the little sloop. As he had vowed upon his being beached, that prize money he had won in
Beetle
remained intact against his all-too-certain retirement as a half-pay lieutenant.

Insupportable
had a cabin quite large enough to shelter him and his armory, an occasional guest, a week's supplies, a tiny galley stove, and certain equipment. For while she generally lay in the Inner Camber, just south of Portsmouth dockyard, or traveled about the coast on Hoare's whim, she occasionally carried her master on missions of significance. It was for this reason that Hoare had acquired his just-depleted armory.

Whatever
Insupportable
's name might be at a given time, Hoare almost always sailed her alone. He had rigged her oddly, with a leg-o'-mutton mainsail, its foot lashed from tack to clew onto a boom and its head reaching the considerable height of her pole mast, and a clubbed forestaysail. She could outpoint any of the clumsy ship's boats and wherries that plied Portsmouth Harbor and give any craft her length half an hour in the Sunday races.

To cut her leeway when working to windward, while retaining her ability to take the ground without damage, Hoare had shipped one of the new, controversial lead-weighted sliding keels. It made no difference to him or to her that the long case in which it nested when raised divided his cabin awkwardly, for it formed the base of a table set fore-and-aft between her two cushioned lockers.

It was near enough four bells of the afternoon watch before Hoare brought his little vessel into the Inner Camber.

*   *   *

N
OW, EASING HIS
way into her home harbor, he luffed up to check
Insupportable
's way, cleated a line, and tossed it ashore to a waiting docker. The man caught it with his one hand and dropped the bight in its end over a handy bollard. The two did the same with a stern line. After adding springs and trimming all dock lines to his own satisfaction, Hoare furled main- and forestaysail. He locked the hatch leading below and went ashore by the floating brow, leaving
Insupportable
to snooze lazily in the long shadows of the June evening.