'Yes?'
'Had I dared, I would have retained one of them, but Captain Spurrier's eyes were on them, and I have yet to pass muster with Blassingame.'
'I do not understand you,' Hoare said. 'Who is Blassingame, and why should you pass muster with him?'
'Beg pardon, sir. Mark Blassingame is sailmaker and prestidigitator-magician-in Royal Duke. Among other things, he teaches filching.'
'Good heavens,' Hoare whispered. He remembered the man now; he was the one who had been performing magic tricks before a group of shipmates in a corner of Royal Duke's working space.
'But what about the paper you wanted to filch?'
'I have seen Taylor-you remember Taylor at least, our student of codes and ciphers? — studying papers with the same texture and bearing the same distinctive writing pattern as the one I saw here just now. I am quite sure that the text was laid out in five-letter groups. I am therefore of the opinion, sir, that Captain Spurrier failed to conceal a ciphered message from our eyes. Moreover, sir, what was Captain Spurrier doing with a cope in his office?'
'A cope, Thoday? A clergyman's robe? Isn't that what a cope is?'
'Yes, sir. It was a cope he used to cover the materials on his desk. And a peculiar-looking cope it was, too.'
'In what way?' Hoare asked idly. He was half-asleep.
'The embroidered figures looked sacrilegious, sir, if I may sound so fanciful.'
Chapter IV
The Chaise's driver found the steep scarp leading down into Weymouth town a hard stretch to manage. At last, he had Hoare and Thoday disembark.
'I won't have you gentlemen's blood on my hands if she oversets,' he said. At the foot of the scarp, however, he let them back aboard, so they were able to enter Weymouth in dignity instead of dust.
The depressing piles of neglected construction materials that Hoare had noted in the streets last summer had merely grown more grass. It was questionable if the King in Kew, sane again now but still bewildered, would soon return to his favorite watering place. But Hoare knew where he was now, so he could direct the driver to the Dish of Sprats. There Hoare dismissed him, telling him to return early Monday.
Joseph Parker, proprietor of the Dish, recognized Hoare and seemed pleased to see him again. Parker evidently viewed him and Titus Thoday as men of equal standing, for Thoday's appearance greatly belied his station.
Nonetheless, Hoare surprised his host by calling for two rooms instead of sharing one with his companion. Hoare was ready to travel with Thoday and dine at the same table with him but drew the line at sleeping with an enlisted man when he need not.
Before leaving the Dish of Sprats, Hoare suggested to Thoday that he see what the folk in the town hall might have to contribute about the Nine Stones Circle affair. Hoare himself planned to call on Mrs. Eleanor Graves, then board the cutter Walpole for a glass of Captain Israel Popham's burgundy and some information.
At his own assignment, Thoday demurred. 'I think, sir, that we would be well advised to leave the world of clerks and countinghouses to Mr. Rabbett when he arrives. After all, that is the world of his calling, just as this district is more or less his geographic world. I have lines of my own that I might be better employed in following.'
Thoday did not choose to be more specific, but Hoare must agree with his observation about Rabbett, so he changed his order to Thoday accordingly. Moreover, Hoare knew that word of his return to Weymouth would reach Sir Thomas Frobisher's ears within minutes, if it had not already done so. The Knight-Baronet would have instructed every one of the town's functionaries to cast every possible impediment in Hoare's way. So he withdrew to prepare himself, by sluicing his head and combing his coarse hair, for his next piece of business: paying a call upon the woman who held his heart.
Eleanor Graves still wore the dull black of mourning for her murdered husband, Simon. It did not suit her sallow complexion, but then, Hoare admitted to himself, he had yet to see her becomingly clad. She received him in the drawing room of the house she had shared with her late husband, sitting on her customary round, resilient tuffet. As usual, she looked rather round and resilient herself Once again, Hoare was amazed at how dearly he had come to love her.
She was accompanied by a family of three ill-assorted cats. A strange rumble filled the room, as if the tumbrels of the Terror were passing in the cobbled street outside. The kitten, a glossy, tidy little black beast, was attacking the tuft at the end of its mother's tail. It resembled its mother not at all; the latter was large, awkward, and flustered and bore random growths of whitish fluff on her body and limbs. An enormous gray animal crouched beside Mrs. Graves, watching his family and giving off a benign thunderous purr. This, then, was the source of the tumbrel sound.
Hoare reached down a hand as he passed the gray beast. It stretched up its head to meet the hand; the tumbrels seemed to draw nigh as they bore pinioned royalty to a ghostly guillotine.
Mrs. Graves pointed at the kitten after allowing her hand to be kissed. 'Order,' she said. 'Out of Chaos.' She pointed at the mother. 'By Jove,' she said, indicating the monster.
'Jupiter tonans, as I can hear,' Hoare whispered.
'What happened to the rest of the litter?' he inquired.
'I cannot say,' she said. 'The dam, Chaos, would have no faintest idea. You might inquire of Order.
'But I must ask you how you do, Mr. Hoare, or, I should have said, Captain Hoare,' she added. 'And what brings you to Weymouth?'
'I do well enough, thank you,' he said. 'Once again, it is a crime that brings me.'
'Leaving your little yacht behind?'
'I came by land this time and left Alecto behind.'
'Now you have named the poor inoffensive thing after a Fury,' she said. 'Why, pray?'
'She has towed behind Royal Duke since I took command of the brig, dogging her trail as if she were one of the three dire sisters pursuing Orestes.'
'An unkindness to both vessels, it would seem to me. My felicitations on your advancement, just the same. My friend Miss Austen apprised me of it, though you did not condescend to do so. But there… How does little Jenny do?' she asked.
'The landlord's Susan is caring for her well enough, teaching her her manners and watching her diet,' Hoare said, 'but I am not in the child's good books just now… for I must now sleep aboard my command, as is required of all Masters and Commanders in the Service, and may no longer lodge at the Swallowed Anchor. So I am rarely there to see her to her bed and give her her nightly blessing. She is not amused.
'Also, I have placed her in a dame school, for it seems she has never been taught her letters. She objected very strongly, until I promised her a kitten if she learned to write… her alphabet. So just now, I imagine, she is sitting at the inn kitchen table, her little tongue stuck out, struggling bravely. I am told that she has now reached K; it may be so.'
'K stands for 'kitten,' I suppose. Hmmm,' Mrs. Graves said. 'I have sealed Order's fate, then.'
'Which one of the Fates deals with kittens?' Hoare asked.
Eleanor Graves put her head on one side thoughtfully. 'All three of them, I should say. But surely not Atropos in this matter, Mr. Hoare-'
'Bartholomew, please… Eleanor.'
'Very well. Bartholomew, then. For Atropos decides the time of one's death. And I cannot be Clotho, who spins the thread. Clotho must be Chaos, the creature's dam. I must then, must I not, be Lachesis, who measures the kitten's life? Well, I shall assume the role. Order is yours, then, to take to Miss Jenny when you believe your fosterling is ready.'
'I hope Order and her new mistress will come back to you soon afterward,' Hoare said.
