Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities (23 page)

Now! Hoare cried to himself. He whistled an ascending banshee note. In response, Stone raced forward to stand beside Hoare. He twirled his grapnel as though he were swinging a dipsey lead—
or a sling,
flashed through Hoare's mind. The three Inconceivables braced for the impact, grasping any shroud or timber within reach.

Stone let fly with his grapnel. Instead of catching in
Marie Claire
's rigging, it caught in the clothing of a second Frenchman, who jerked like a jigged salmon. Stone heaved at the grapnel line. The jigged man clutched at a shroud, missed, fell forward into the Channel. Stone's grapnel tore away.

Inconceivable
rammed
Marie Claire
just aft of her starboard main shrouds. Her bowsprit thrust across the schooner below her main boom before grinding to a near-halt.
Marie Claire
heeled heavily away. There was a crash below—perhaps, Hoare hoped, from Morrow's best yachting china. Carried along by the schooner's momentum,
Inconceivable
began to swing to starboard, pressing against
Marie Claire
and braying the jigged man between the two hulls like an ear of Indian corn. He squalled. One arm waved briefly in the narrow gap before he was drawn down into the welcoming water.

The blow into
Marie Claire
's midships must have caught another enemy wrong-footed, for he spun and went overboard on the side away from
Inconceivable.
The others—two were still on their feet—were nimbler. One chopped an axe into
Inconceivable
's forestay as it tangled in the schooner's main shrouds, and cut it apart just as Hoare clutched at the nearer of the paired shrouds.
Inconceivable
rebounded. Caught wrong-footed himself, Hoare felt his feet leave her. He dangled in
Marie Claire
's shrouds, first by one hand, then by both, when
Marie Claire
drifted away from his own precious pinnace, his first and only command.

Behind him,
Inconceivable
's jib came down with a run over Bold and Stone. There was another grinding sound. Even where he hung, Hoare knew the two craft had parted company.

By the time Hoare's sailors had struggled out from beneath the jib's hampering folds,
Marie Claire
and her involuntary stowaway were a cable or more off, steadied again on a course for Weymouth. She was as good as home free.

He did not dangle long. Two of Morrow's men hauled him out of the schooner's shrouds and dragged him to her little quarterdeck, where their master stood waiting.

Chapter XIII

“H
OW DID
did you get onto my traces, Mr. Hoare?” Morrow asked. “Take your time in replying, and rest your voice as often as you wish. The wind is still light, and we have several hours to while away before
Marie Claire
makes port. As for your amusing little jury-rigged row-galley…”

Morrow gestured toward Hoare's pinnace.
Inconceivable
lay motionless less than a cable away, a shadow in the dusk, her forerigging all ahoo where forestay and jib halliard had been cut, her high mainsail drooping unattended, the sweeps dangling from the raw holes Hoare and Stone had chopped into her tender sides. She looked a floating wreck. Hoare's heart went out to her. Meanwhile,
Marie Claire
's sails had filled, and she was under way again, ghosting toward Weymouth and leaving the smaller craft behind.

Moreau saw Hoare's expression. “Perhaps I'll return tomorrow, tow her in, and add her to my fleet. You just used her to kill my man Lecompte, after all. You are my debtor. What you Anglo-Saxons call ‘blood-geld,' eh?”

He smiled and cracked Hoare across the face with his open hand. Instinctively Hoare struggled to strike back, but the burly men holding his arms restrained him with ease.

“Be seated, pray,” Morrow said. He gestured to his men, and Hoare found himself flung onto the deck with stunning force.

“I repeat: How did you find out what I was doing?”

“I put two and two together, Mr. Morrow,” Hoare said.

Morrow leaned down and cracked him across the face again. This time, he used his closed fist.

“You mispronounce my name, Mr. Hoare,” he said. “My name is Moreau—baptized Jean Philippe Edouard Saint-Esprit Moreau.”

“A long name for the
métis
son of a fur trader, Monsieur Moreau.”

Crack
came the hand.

“Fur trader, m'sieur? My father was no fur trader. He would not have soiled his hands with trade. No, no. My father was Jean-François Benoît Philippe Louis Moreau, nephew of the archbishop and seigneur of Montmagny. His seigneurie stretched from the river south to St.-Magloire and east to St.-Damase des Aulnaies—many, many
arpents,
m'sieur. When
Monseigneur mon pére
died, I inherited half that land. It is still mine.

“And Lecompte whom you just murdered, and Dugas to whom I had to give the quietus after Madame Graves crippled him for you, and Fortier here grew up together with me,” he added proudly. “Almost as brothers. I even permit them to address me as ‘monsieur' instead of ‘monseigneur.' Only they had—have—that honor. Now, for the third time, tell me how you sniffed me out.”

Crack.

“I was in Weymouth in the first place,” Hoare whispered when his head cleared, “because of the infernal machine the Revenue picked up inland from there. Then I could not help but note your interest in Dr. Graves' avocation of clock-making.

“I was impressed, by the way, with the simple, clever reason you gave when you asked him to make up pieces of clockwork—‘for the
British
secret service,' quotha!”

He braced himself for another
crack.
When it did not come, he was bold enough to ask a question of his own.

“What led you to leave your estate, then?”

“Because I am métis, m'sieur, as you know very well. The peasant folk care nothing that a man has Indian blood. Why, Bessac here is a quarter Naskapi, and as proud of it as I am of being the son of a Cree chieftainess.

“But the
grands seigneurs
—ah, that is different. With them, blood's the thing! No, I was not received in the neighboring seigneurs' manors, and I must not pay court to their daughters.”

Morrow's—Moreau's—voice took on more than a trace of a French accent. “And when the English came! Ah, M'sieur Hoare, it was you English that made life intolerable for us! You scorn Holy Church; you have stolen our trade; you have debauched our women.”

Hoare barely contained himself. He had not “debauched” his dear, dead Antoinette; he had wooed and won her as a gentleman should.

“It was worse still,” Moreau went on, “when
Monseigneur mon pére
decided that since the English were here to stay, one of his sons—I, the younger—should be educated as an Englishman, and sent me to the English school in Québec. I need hardly tell you, English officer that you are, the beatings, the bullying—treatment no gentleman should have to endure. But
I
endured it,
m'sieur!
I learned to be as English as any milord! Why, even you thought me English, did you not?”

But nobody, Hoare told himself, had thought to teach the young Moreau the rhymes and nursery tales English children learned in the nursery. Hence Moreau's perplexity when Dr. Graves had recited his harmless trope about “Jack Sprat, who could eat no fat” as he took his guests in to dinner that first evening, when Hoare first met Eleanor Graves. It had been then that Hoare had begun to suspect that Edward Morrow was other than he presented himself to be.

And it had also been that evening, he realized, that he—Bartholomew Hoare—had already begun to fall in love with the wife of his host.

“I should have recognized your accent as soon as I heard you speak French,” Hoare said.

For the first time, Moreau looked startled. “French? When did you hear me speak French?”

“When you and your man—Bessac?—boarded me, thinking you had killed me, with my own rifle, at that,” Hoare said bitterly, and decided to press his luck further. “As you suggest, I, too, have been an English schoolboy. I assure you, sir, that a lad with a name like mine faces unusual problems, too. And yet, hating us English the way you do, you chose to come into our midst.” He paused inquiringly.

Upon learning that Hoare could not speak, many people concluded wrongly that he could not hear and talked with each other, or with him, as if he were a useful piece of furniture—a side table, perhaps, with a compote on it. Hoare sometimes found this attribute useful, if sometimes insulting, and encouraged it. He did so now, by remaining silent and trying to look like part of
Marie Claire
—a fife rail, perhaps, or a mop.

Moreau bit and, having bitten, swallowed the bait all the way down.

The year 1794, he told Hoare, was when representatives of the new French Republic made their way covertly to Canada. They found young Moreau, feeling as he did about the English, a ready recruit. Any cause that advocated the recapture of the lost New France was a cause for which he felt himself ready to die. This, and his perfect English, suited him to the role of undercover agent in England. So Jean Philippe Edouard Saint-Esprit Moreau became Edward Morrow, and off to England he went.

As Hoare already knew from Dr. Graves, from his wife, and, indeed, from Moreau himself, Edward Morrow, with his manners and his money, had had no difficulty in establishing himself in Dorset society.

Moreau stopped in middiscourse to take flint and steel from his pocket and light the binnacle. His face bore a reminiscent expression.

“And Kingsley?” Hoare prompted.

“Kingsley?” Moreau paused, then smiled wryly and shrugged. “Ahhh, the light-minded lieutenant.” Moreau, he said, had met Peregrine Kingsley at a Portsmouth gambling house, long before that officer was seconded to
Vantage
and while he was still on half-pay. Moreau had seen Kingsley take certain liberties with the cards. On making inquiries of his own, Moreau had also learned that the lieutenant was intensely ambitious, unscrupulous, heavily in debt, and deeply involved with several women simultaneously, women of low degree and high. Whenever it became time to use him, Moreau knew he would have Kingsley in his pocket, ready to be used.

At about the same time, Moreau had discovered Dr. Simon Graves's inventive gifts and put them to use, leading the doctor to believe that in doing so he was advancing the Royal Navy's ability to locate its ships and unaware that, instead, he was helping Moreau to blow them up. Because he could not always communicate with the doctor directly, he had made him privy to the cipher that he himself had been given.

“A permutation cipher, Graves called it,” Moreau went on reminiscently. “A
temurah,
or some such word. Out of the Jewish Cabala, as I remember. It was fortunate that he, like…” He caught himself.

Of course. That explained to Hoare why Dr. Graves had a French Bible at hand when he was killed. Perhaps, too, it explained why Mr. Watt had failed to break the cipher; it had not been written in English but in French. But … what had Moreau stopped himself from saying?

“He, like…,” he had begun. Like whom, or what?

But, Moreau continued, when Dr. Graves had balked at making any more identical devices for him, he had seen the danger the physician posed. To ensure himself a more reliable supply, he had diverted one of the machines, in its English anker, to France—as he thought—to be copied in larger numbers and returned to him. This perfectly natural move had, so to speak, blown up the entire affair.

“It was an understandable mistake, Mr. Hoare, I think. As far as the smuggling gentry are concerned, barrels do not leave Britain—they and their precious contents come
into
your peculiar country.”

So the anker with the clockwork samples Dr. Graves had unknowingly made for the Continental watchmakers was on its way back inland when one of the smugglers had the notion of checking its contents. When they found that it held, not the brandy that their customers were expecting, but a confused mass of springs and gears, they must have discarded it.

“And Dr. and Mrs. Graves?” Hoare whispered.

“I needed more power over the cripple, if I were to control him as I must. I had yet to find an alternative source for my clockworks, so I still needed him alive to supply me. I sent Dugas—my good Dugas—with a local rough to take the woman while she was wandering foolish and alone along the beach at Portland Bill. I would not have harmed her, of course. I thought her an estimable lady, if fat. I would simply have sequestered her at my quarry or here aboard
Marie Claire,
and held her hostage against the doctor's continued service to me.

“I misjudged her. She was not gentle, but vicious. With her damned stones she wrecked poor Dugas' face and, with your meddling to help her, caused him to fall into the hands of the English. Even Frobisher … but there. Dugas knew too much to be left in enemy hands. He had to be silenced. I owe penance for that, and for the death of the honest doctor. He, too, was well-meaning—”

“Mais qu'est-ce que vous dîtes, monsieur?” came Fortier's appalled voice in Hoare's ear. Moreau fell silent for a moment.

“There,” he then said. “I've told you all this so you can meditate about it while you drown. Overboard with him. Now.”

Each of the men holding Hoare was well-muscled, and their grip was unbreakable for a man of Hoare's age and condition. He found himself swinging by his arms and legs between two pairs of powerful arms. Helped along by a light, disdainful push from Moreau, they tossed Hoare over
Marie Claire
's low rail. He barely had time to draw breath before he struck the water.