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 Aldershot 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.
'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.
Leaving Dr. Graves'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
