Chapter VIII
In the morning, Hoare found Mr. Watt despondent. He must have crept back into Hoare's sitting room at dawn or before, for a crust of bread and an empty teacup lay on the worktable. He had almost finished copying the last mysterious message.
'I have been unable, sir, to break the code-or rather the cipher,' he said. 'It may be one of those in which the key is to be found in certain pages of a book owned by all parties to the secret. The Bible is commonly used for that purpose, as I am sure you know, and if you consider the biblical names of writer and addressee, it is likely that it has been so used here.
'Often the encipherer gives in the first group or two the chapters or pages to be used in deciphering; that each of the three messages commences with two series of numbers suggests that to be the case.
'If this is the case, Mr. Hoare, we are lost without a key to what pages of what edition are used and how. However, I propose to you that I take with me the fair copies I have made and work on them during Vantages passage south. I can inform you by fleet mail of any successes I have.
'But in all fairness, I must remind you that I lay no claim to expertise in the art of the cipher. There are men in Whitehall who spend their entire lives on the subject. I believe you should present these messages there.'
With this, Mr. Watt stood and prepared to take his leave. 'Vantage is about to weigh anchor,' he said, 'and I would not commit the crime of desertion, even if only inadvertently. She is, after all, only my second ship, and I still have my name to make.'
'I'll put you aboard myself,' Hoare replied on an impulse.
Thereupon the two men betook themselves to Alert's berth, where Hoare cast off and set sail to work down the Solent to Spithead. The little clerk's efforts to bear a hand scarcely hindered Hoare at all.
Indeed, Vantage showed every sign of imminent departure. As Hoare brought Alert to under her lee, the frigate's fresh new anchor cable was inching its way aboard to the 'stamp and go' at the capstan and the squeal of the ship's fiddler. Her access ladder had already been drawn up, so he had to use his boatswain's pipe to signal the people on deck that it must be replaced if Captain Kent was to get his clerk back.
'Calm seas, and a prosperous voyage to you!' the envious Hoare said to Mr. Watt in his best whisper as he helped his passenger aboard. He would miss the clerk, and the exclamatory little Mr. Prickett as well.
Hoare said to himself that he owed it to Vantage to see her off to war, backed the yacht's jib, and hove her to. Vantage's anchor stock rose into the morning sun; her topsails thundered briefly and filled in their classic curve to take her out of the Spithead anchorage. She began to gather way in the light morning breeze, fair, gleaming, and virginal. Alert kept pace with her less than a cable length to leeward, on a parallel course. A light shower passed over the two vessels, and the sun broke through again.
Hoare heard a soft poof. Vantages wheel and her helmsman spun into the air in a fiery cloud, taking part of her main topsail yard with them, and plunged into the water between Vantage and Alert.
'Away, the fire party!' came faintly across the water. 'Man hoses! Flood magazines!' Hoare swung his vessel's tiller to leeward and hauled in fore and mainsheets, bringing her hard on the wind so as to close the frigate.
A blaze of yellow-orange light dazzled him; a deep concussion shook the whole roadstead. Alert heeled heavily away from the burst, nearly set on her beam ends. A last, stupefying thunder and Vantage's magazine went up, and she came apart.
Fighting through a hideous rain of wood, cordage, metal, and body parts, Hoare rammed Alert into a cable- wide circle of roiled, wreckage-filled water. The air through which he drove her reeked of burnt powder, as if he were sailing into a fleet action once again.
He reached down into the cluttered sea to grasp a reaching hand. The arm attached to it was, in turn, attached to nothing. He dropped it.
Here was a hat, floating upside down like a merry little boat. Here was part of what must have been Vantage's maintop; a naked black man was clinging to it. As Hoare passed him a line and the cooked skin peeled off the hand that took it, he saw that the man was not black by nature. The barge's low rail peeled more skin loosely from the man's body as Hoare drew him aboard. He coughed up bloody water and died there, on Alert's deck.
Hoare drew another raw, pulpy thing inboard instinctively but then cast it overboard again like a trash fish. Alert's deck had small enough space for the living; she would have no more room for the dead.
He heard someone croaking, 'Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus,' and realized that the cry had been going on for some time. From the raw agony in his throat he knew that the voice had been his.
Hoare pulled in twelve more, plus the roasted man, before he was joined first by the few nearby harbor fishermen and then-too late to save anything but the dead-by a flotilla of ships' boats that had pulled
double-banked out of the anchorage to save life. Of Vantage's company, 327 souls in all, the other rescuers recovered only another 9.
Returning, heavy-laden, to Portsmouth, Hoare unloaded his castaways on the Hard, where a crowd of the curious and the anxious waited to succor the living and bewail the lost. When the other boats had all returned, the harried officer who had taken charge told Hoare that he had counted twenty-four survivors all told. Most were topmen who had been thrown clear, most of them frightfully burned, broken, or both. Of Vantage's afterguard Hoare heard no names he knew.
Within the hour, Patterson, Sir George Hardcastle's secretary, called at the Swallowed Anchor Inn. He brought Sir George's compliments, and would Mr. Hoare kindly attend on him without delay?
The Admiral's pet rabbit had been warned, for he opened Sir George's inner door the moment Hoare presented himself.
'I had not expected to request your attendance again so soon, Mr. Hoare,' the Admiral said, looking up from a disordered mass of papers. His face, usually impassive, was filled with weariness and sorrow.
'I trust you have made some progress with the matter we discussed at our last meeting?'
'No, sir, I have not, I regret to state,' Hoare said. 'Mr. Watt received orders to return aboard Vantage before he had any success. He left the enciphered messages with me, which was fortunate in the circumstances, given this morning's disaster.'
'Indeed. God rest his soul, and those of his shipmates. It is about that incident that I wish to talk with you. Go away, Patterson, and close the door after you. Come back in ten minutes.'
When Patterson had closed the door firmly and resentfully behind him, the Admiral continued.
'What I am about to reveal to you, sir, must not leave these four walls. You know, of course, of the loss of Scipio. Your recent visit to Weymouth had to do with that. But are you aware that that, and the explosion in Vantage, are only two out of several similar events?'
'No, sir.'
'Good. The matter is most secret. If news of it were to get abroad in the Fleet, I shudder to think of the consequences. Spithead and the Nore would be nothing in comparison.
'On 2 June the schooner Mischief, 18, blew apart in the middle of the Channel Fleet. She had just made her number to Vengeance, 84, flag, having newly joined from this station. Megara, 32, also out of Portsmouth, is four weeks late in reporting to Calder in the Bay of Biscay.'
'This is dire news indeed, sir,' Hoare whispered.
'Moreover,' the Admiral said, 'news has just reached me from Their Lordships that Oglethorpe of the Royal Duke has died. It is no surprise. He was seventy-six, after all, had just lost his wife, and could scarcely walk. You knew of Oglethorpe?'
Hoare shook his head. He was in puzzlement. What had the dead Oglethorpe to do with him, or he with Oglethorpe? Perhaps he was to replace the late captain? Hardly. A lieutenant did not step directly into the shoes of a post captain unless the latter fell in battle.
'No, sir.'
'Or of Royal Duke, perhaps?'
'No, sir.'
'Good. Then that secret, at least, has held. Royal Duke's an Admiralty yacht-mounts six… never mind. She bears an exalted name, even more exalted than Inconceivable, perhaps, or Insupportable, or Alert. Oh, yes. Young
