Silently Hoare handed him the tell-tale dirk.
The celebration in Hebe's wardroom that night was understandably uproarious. Hoare had dropped the freed captives and the six Irishmen off in Portsmouth, but the boys, having met their relatives and reassured them that they were unharmed, had chosen to rejoin their ship for the occasion. Instead of dining alone in his cabin, Captain Davison too had accepted the wardroom's invitation to the impromptu banquet.
All the naval participants were present except Millar and the two anonymous lobsters, whom Mr. Edwardes had made sure were being properly feasted by their mates up forrard. The boy Mikey had flatly refused to enlist as a ship's boy.
'I be fisherman born, I be,' he had said, 'an' I'll be fisherman all me days, please yer honor.'
Hoare had had no trouble taking up a collection adequate to buy a friendless mudlark an apprenticeship aboard the best-run fishing smack between Plymouth and Dover, and Mikey Pollock was away. He bore with him young Harcourt's dirk.
'He deserves it if anyone does,' the mid had explained. 'The pater will replace it instanter.'
So the subject of the hardships of a fisherman's life had naturally come up during the meal.
'Your speaking of 'hardships,' Mr. Edwardes,' Hoare whispered, 'reminds me of something I saw happen back in '90 when I was second in Staghound. We were making a passage from Plymouth to Jamaica and had aboard a maiden lady, a relative of the admiral on that station-an auntie, or something of the sort.'
He paused for breath, and for effect. After waiting until he felt satisfied with his companions' urging to proceed, he did so.
'She'd never been to sea before, but she was a game'un, and she was never sick a single day. In fact she was on deck taking the air when the wind began to pipe up of a sudden as we all know it can in those waters.'
There were nods of agreement all around while Hoare drew breath once again. 'Well,' he went on, 'the officer of the watch called the watch on deck to take in royals and to'-gallants, and up they went. Now, we had a main- topman, Grobble was his name-Abel Grobble. A good seaman he was, handy aloft and tough enough to chew treenails for breakfast.
'Something must have come over him, taken with a bad herring for breakfast or something, for he lost his footing and down he came, sixty feet if it was an inch, and landed on Staghound's deck, like this-'
Bam! went Hoare's fist on the table. Every officer jumped, and their glasses with them. Hoare took breath.
'— right at the old lady's feet. Up he jumps, and he's about to swarm back up the ratlines when she stops him. ''Wait, young man!' she says. 'Aren't you hurt?'
''Who, me, ma'am?' says Grobble. 'No, ma'am. I'm a sailor, ma'am; us sailors be used to hard ships!''
There was a pause. Then Mr. Edwardes burst into laughter.
'I twig, Hoare! 'Hard ships,' by Jove… hardships! Har har har!'
The laughter grew and spread. Galloway saw fit to slap Hoare on the back; then, when his victim's face went white, realized what he had done and apologized in haste.
'Carried away, you know. 'Hardships,' indeed!'
The cheers died down at last, to be succeeded by Mr. Satterly's wellworn tale about two boatswain's mates in the old Savage. Under cover of Satterly's drone, Hoare leaned across the table to where the missing mids sat in a row, looking as innocent as the famous three monkeys.
They had gloried in telling the story of their incarceration and were generous in telling of their rescue but singularly reticent about their abduction in the first place. Hoare suspected they had been served gin laced with knock-out drops and, in a reversal of the usual process of impressment while drugged, hauled off while unconscious to the Devastation hulk. It would not be a tale that reflected well on any of them.
'D'ye know,' Hoare whispered to them, 'a most unsettling notion passed through my head during my investigation. It occurred to me that you young gentlemen might have contrived the whole thing, just to extract some more time at liberty at the expense of your anxious families.' Hoare gave a false laugh; that laugh had been described by an unnerved young lady as 'the least breath of scandal.'
The laugh did not unnerve the midshipmen, however, not for long. They looked at one another, first in dismay and then in genuine amusement. Harcourt's bark of laughter was both genuine and hearty, and was followed by his companions'. These three young men, Hoare observed, were not easily upset.
'The idea passed through our own heads, sir, as a matter of fact,' Harcourt said.
Behind his hang-dog look and inside his narrow, beak-nosed head, as any perceptive former boy could have seen, lay considerable, genuine pride.
'We werena aboot to hauld our Ancients up for more than a hundrred golden boys, though, sir,' said Buchanan. His breaking voice still held a heavy trace of the Highlands that had given him birth.
'But we decided the game wasn't worth the candle, sir,' he added.
'Why not?' Hoare's curiosity was innocent now, but genuine nonetheless.
'It would have made too good a stray to keep to ourselves, sir,' Dacres said. 'I'm the only one of us from a naval family, and I know.
Sooner or later one of us would have peached. And that would've meant our careers.'
'Not to speak of three very, very sore bottoms,' Hoare whispered.
'That, too, of course, sir,' Harcourt declared. 'But after all, we mids are used to hard-ships of that kind, you know.'
