Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities (4 page)

“But first,” said Mrs. Graves, “I see Agnes hovering in the doorway. I believe she wants to tell me Mrs. Betts says the soles will be getting cold. We must not upset Mrs. Betts, so let us defer the demonstration until after our dinner. Will you, Mr. Hoare, be so kind as to escort me into the dining room while the doctor follows us and accompanies Miss Austen with Mr. Morrow?”

As his host rolled his chair into the adjoining dining room, Hoare overheard him murmur, “‘Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean…'”

Miss Austen spluttered and Hoare suppressed a grin, but he heard no reaction from Mr. Morrow.

“I was noting the appearance of Mr. Hoare and Mrs. Graves as they preceded us,” explained Dr. Graves in a normal voice. “Does not the contrast between their two figures remind you of the old nursery rhyme?”

“Of course. Ha ha,” Mr. Morrow said dutifully. There was something puzzling here, Hoare thought.

As they discussed the soles, Mrs. Graves, with occasional interjections by the subject, explained to Hoare that Mr. Morrow was the son of an English fur merchant who had settled in Montreal after the cession of Quebec by the French in '63, and thrived. Morrow senior had taken to wife the daughter of a Cree chief, which explained why the son looked as if he would be more at home beside a campfire in the North American wilderness than at the Graveses' board.

But Edward Morrow, the son, had preferred civilized over savage life and, upon inheriting his father's small fortune, had returned to the homeland of his forefathers. He now owned one of the lesser marble quarries on the Purbeck Downs behind Weymouth, had become a justice of the peace, and was hob-and-nob with Sir Thomas Frobisher.

Hoare heard this with polite attention, but he was far more interested in something else. He turned to his hostess.

“How, Mrs. Graves,” he asked once her husband had carved the roast, “did you learn to sling and to throw a stone with so deadly an aim?”

“Brothers, sir, brothers—and no mother,” she answered. “Three brothers: one big and wise beyond his years, one a bully, one a weakling. Gerald was an everlasting torment to little Jude and to me, until Jack taught me, at least, how to defend myself and poor Jude against him. Fortunately, my two hands are equally skilled; I can write well enough with both—simultaneously, as I will show you after dinner if you wish—as well as I can sling stones or throw them. Jack drilled me and drilled me until, one bad winter when Father was away and times were hard, I fed the family almost entirely with the game I brought home.”

Hoare saw that Mr. Morrow was at least as interested in Mrs. Graves's tale as he himself was but puzzled. Evidently Morrow had not heard the details of her exploit that afternoon. Hoare disclosed them.

“It was truly astonishing, sir,” he concluded. “I would not care to have our hostess as an enemy—not, at least, if she had a stone or two to hand.”

“Your tale would have impressed my mother's tribe,” Mr. Morrow told Mrs. Graves. “Any brave would have given much in trade for a wife who could defend herself the way you did. I am surprised, in fact, that you did not faint.”

“I am sure you flatter me, sir,” she replied in a voice that told Hoare, at least, that she was no such thing. “And, as to fainting, what earthly good would that have done? Except for Mr. Hoare's opportune arrival, it would have left me completely at the mercy of the two thieves, or ravishers, or whatever they were.

“You know me better, Mr. Morrow,” she concluded, and changed the subject to the safe, popular issue of Lord Nelson. Everyone knew the hero had left England's shores to comb the Atlantic in search of Villeneuve. Did Hoare believe the Admiral would succeed in catching his Frogs at last?

In reply, Hoare could only offer the usual banality—that once Nelson found his quarry, he would sink his teeth into him like a proper British bulldog and never let him go.

True enough, Hoare told himself, but the hero was wont to hare off after his enemy in the wrong direction, which often made his fleet slow to find his Frenchman. Once found, of course, the foe was doomed.

While carrying on this conversation with his hostess, Hoare could not help hearing snatches of an interchange between the other gentlemen. It had an odd, probing quality, one more suited in Hoare's opinion to political (or even personal) opponents.

“I have told you before, Morrow,” Dr. Graves concluded rather testily, “that I am a physician and a natural scientist, not a manufacturer. You must seek elsewhere—Mr. Hunter's establishment, perhaps, in Pall Mall. Under the circumstances, of course, I cannot recommend any of the Continental makers.”

As he had been taught to do, and to avoid the appearance of eavesdropping, Hoare now transferred his attention to his right-hand companion. “Have you and Mrs. Graves been acquainted for long?” he asked.

“We were dowds together, in Bath,” Miss Austen said dismissively, “but she came off to Weymouth and left me in Bath, to dowd it in solitude.”

“In solitude, Jane? Nonsense,” Mrs. Graves interjected. “A solitude interrupted by—let me see—your mother, father, sister, and heaven knows how many nephews and nieces? Let us have no more appeals for sympathy.”

Miss Austen laughed a bit ruefully. For the balance of dinner she had nothing to say. The occasion being informal, the ladies did not leave the gentlemen but joined them over the Stilton and the nuts. When these had been defeated—“destroyed in detail, like so many Frenchmen and Spaniards,” Dr. Graves said—Mrs. Graves led Miss Austen and the gentlemen back into the drawing room, where Agnes had set out the tea tray. Dr. Graves delayed in the doorway a moment and drew Hoare aside, apparently to address him privately.

“My earlier levity about my own wife and her figure took you aback, I believe, Mr. Hoare. Let me reassure you. I recited that snatch of nursery rhyme on purpose. I must come to know Mr. Morrow's heart better, in the philosophical sense rather than the medical. My little test showed he lacks at least that sense of the ridiculous, the willingness to be amused at even his own follies, that Mrs. Graves and I—and you as well, I saw—share.

“As to Mrs. Graves, she is not only a formidable person. That you have already learned for yourself. She is a truly kind, loving, and tender soul, though she would heatedly deny she has a soul at all. She is truly my better half, and we love each other dearly.”

With that, Dr. Graves signed to Hoare to wheel him into the drawing room. When Mrs. Graves had served up the first dishes of tea from her tuffet, her husband doffed his own coat, the better to demonstrate Monsieur Laënnec's device, and invited his guests to follow suit.

Hoare noted a distinct difference in the sounds he heard in the other men's chests. The Canadian's heartbeat sounded like the man himself—sturdy, brisk, strong, deep. While the old doctor's heart was also steady and strong, he could hear in the background a soft, rustling, almost musical sound. Hoare said as much to Dr. Graves.

“Yes, Mr. Hoare,” the doctor said. “That is one of the few benefits of advancing age. One commences to make a soft music within one's self. It is generally a very private music, of course, so only a few besides the musician are privileged to eavesdrop upon it.”

“That is why I chose to stand aloof from this particular parlor game,” Mrs. Graves said. “I permit no one but Dr. Graves to listen to the sound of
my
heart. It belongs to him.”

“Mr. Hoare appears to have an excellent watch,” Mr. Morrow remarked after his turn with Dr. Graves's listener. “It ticks four times for every one of its owner's heartbeats.”

“From my experience, that would be about correct for a timepiece of high quality,” the doctor said.

When the Canadian went on to pose Dr. Graves several questions about how his instrument operated in circumstances that did not involve the human body, the doctor could not enlighten him. So he took out his own watch, set the device against it, and listened with a delighted smile.

“Thank you, sir,” he finally said as he handed the tube back to its owner. “Very enlightening. Very interesting. You never showed this to me before.” Mr. Morrow was so interested, in fact, Hoare thought, that he was repeating—all but word for word—a remark he had made before dinner.

“I never had occasion to show it you before, Mr. Morrow,” his host said gently.

Hoare reminded his hostess that she had offered to demonstrate her ability to write with either hand. She dimpled—the first time Hoare had seen her dimples (there was one at each corner of her mouth, like a parenthesis)—and had him replace the tea tray with a writing desk. From this she drew paper, ink, sand, and two pens—one from each wing of the bird. She began with her right hand.

“Begin your dictation, sir,” she ordered.

“‘When, in the course of human events…'” Hoare began, and continued reciting.

“Treason, sir, treason!” exclaimed Mr. Morrow as Mrs. Graves began to write down Mr. Jefferson's defiant message to His Majesty's government. She paid no attention to Mr. Morrow but changed hands almost without stopping and continued to write Hoare's words, cack-handed. Looking over her shoulder, Hoare could detect only the slightest difference in her tidy script. He did not complete his recitation but stopped at the point where the recital of wrongs began.

“Now observe, gentlemen,” her husband said.

Mrs. Graves took out a second sheet of paper, positioned it beside the other, and continued to write. Both hands moved as one across the paper, somewhat more slowly, but still producing the same uniform strokes.

Finally, Mrs. Graves set her right hand at the left margin of its page and her left at its page's right margin and dashed off the following: “‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, lov'd I not honor more.'”

The lines under her left hand were a mirror image of those under her right.

“Useless, but amusing,” Dr. Graves said with quiet pride, sitting back in his wheeled chair. “And a commendable sentiment.”

Evidently Miss Austen had been using her long silence to compose a Remark. Now she cleared her throat for attention and began.

“This is a most interesting form of conversation,” she said in a high, strained voice. “As with any meeting among relative strangers—I except yourself and me, my dear Eleanor—our talk has consisted mostly of casting agreeable literary flies at one another. If the prey responds with a reference to the same literary source, or with an otherwise appropriate trope, so much the better; the two are now happy to know that they are two members of the same social tribe. If the response is inappropriate, the caster of the fly must release his victim, not only unharmed but even appeased—by compliments, perhaps, which are as unpatronizing as possible.

“A comfortable game, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Morrow flatly.

Hoare found himself hard put to it to relate the evening's conversation to Miss Austen's description of it. A dreadful silence descended on the group. The lady essayed a plaintive smile; she blushed in unattractive patches. Tears appeared at the corners of each eye, crept down each cheek, and dropped simultaneously into her lap.

The silence was blessedly broken by the appearance of the maid Agnes with a message for Mrs. Graves.

“From Sir Thomas, mum,” Agnes said.

Breaking the seal, Mrs. Graves read, and the color, already scant, left her face.

“Sir Thomas informs me that one of my assailants has died without regaining consciousness,” she said. She dropped the note on the floor before her. “So I have a man's death on these hands.”

“In self-defense, ma'am,” Hoare said.

Her husband nodded agreement; Mr. Morrow simply raised his eyebrows as if in surprise at her evident dismay.

“Oh, my dear!” Miss Austen cried, forgetting her disastrous disquisition and going to her hostess with arms outstretched.

“Do not pity me, Jane,” Mrs. Graves commanded, sitting erect on her tuffet. “I will not be pitied.”

Hoare saw it was time to take his leave, and Mr. Morrow offered to join him. Because of the lateness of the hour, the Canadian said, he, too, would be putting up at the Dish of Sprats instead of making his way home, four miles in the dark, up the steep declivity behind the town. They could share a borrowed lantern to light their way.

Once down the ramp leading from Dr. Graves's front door, Hoare turned once again to whisper another word of thanks to the couple silhouetted in the lamp-lit doorway.

“A remarkable couple, are they not?” Morrow said as they walked down the cobbled slope through a light mist.

“There must be more to their story than we heard tonight,” Hoare agreed. “For instance, how does one account for the difference in their ages? What of the bullying brother? And what of the twin stepsons she mentioned to me this afternoon?

“Mind the gutter!” he added as loudly as he could, catching Morrow by the arm.

“Thank you, sir; I nearly misstepped,” Morrow said. “As it happens, I can enlighten you, for I have known the Graveses since I settled nearby. Dr. Graves has been kind enough to lend me his gifts as the inventor of novel instruments from time to time.

“As to the difference in their ages, I gather you already knew the present Mrs. Graves is the good doctor's third wife. The two stepsons are not twins but both grown and gone, the one a captain on Sir Arthur Wellesley's staff, presently at Alder-shot Barracks, the other at Bethlehem Hospital—an aspiring mad-doctor, mind you, not a patient. The twins to which you referred were born of Dr. Graves' second wife; they were stillborn, and their mother followed them into the grave within hours, I am told.”

By now, the pair had arrived at the Dish of Sprats.

“Pray continue, Mr. Morrow,” Hoare whispered, “while we share a nightcap at my expense.”

“As to the difference in the ages of the two,” Morrow said across a decanter of the inn's muddy port, “after burying his second wife, Dr. Graves apparently expected to die a bachelor. By the time I arrived in the neighborhood, he had become quite prosperous and was well-known in his profession. In fact, it was rumored a knighthood was in the offing, in recognition of his having cured one of the King's horrible sons of a severe stammer.