To Hoare's astonishment, the man blushed, albeit faintly.
'You did, sir. I am sorry if my improvisations disturbed you.
'Not at all. They were something of a lullaby, in fact. But where did you…'
Thoday smiled, reached into his coattails, and extracted a kit fiddle and its half-sized bow, the sort that dancing masters carried. Tucking the tiny instrument under his chin, he tuned it quickly and, tapping his foot, launched into a hornpipe. At the conclusion, Hoare heard clapping hands from across the room.
'Bravo!' cried a merchantlike man at a table on the far side of the room. His portly wife smiled at her husband.
'Makes you want to caper a bit, does it not, Sam?' she asked.
'Reminds me of happy days,' her husband replied.
'I shall be attending morning prayer at St. Ninian's,' Hoare told Thoday. 'If you'd care…'
'Thank you, sir, but no,' the gunner replied, as Hoare had known he would. 'I fear I do not subscribe to all the Thirty-nine Articles.'
'Nor do I. But after all, the proprieties must be observed by someone. And if not by His Majesty's officers, then by whom?' With that, Hoare donned his hat, examined himself in the mirror that stood just inside the inn door, and-satisfied that he looked as seemly as he could, given the features the Almighty had given him-walked through the brisk air up the gentle cobbled slope to the Graves residence.
Eleanor Graves awaited her escort, Agnes at her side.
'You put yourself to unnecessary trouble, Bartholomew,' Eleanor said when Hoare hove into sight. 'I could well have walked to church without your protection. After all, Mr. Moreau's gang is long since dispersed, and I stand in no danger.'
She forbore to say, Hoare noticed, that it was the activities of her late husband that had put her in danger when they first met, that those activities had ceased with Dr. Simon Graves's death, and that the danger had therefore disappeared. Hoare forbore to remind her. As far as he was concerned, the less reason she had to remember her dead husband and the manner of his going, the better.
'And how does Order behave herself this morning?' he asked as they walked back down the slope, followed by Agnes.
'As well as can be expected,' she replied, 'considering that Order is male. And, to answer your next question, his dam, Chaos, is also in good spirits, though as I felt her, she was unable to decide whether to attack my knitting or rest. And Jove was nodding. And I am quite well, as are Agnes-are you not, Agnes? — and my servant Tom. And the cook.'
'But you seem somewhat out of sorts this morning,' Hoare said.
'I am, Bartholomew, and you are indirectly the cause.'
'Please?'
'After you left my house yesterday evening,' she said, 'Sir Thomas Frobisher was kind enough to call, despite the lateness of the hour. He had the effrontery to accuse me of misjudgment, if not worse, for having received you in my house so soon after Simon's death, if at all. He had heard the neighbors speaking of it. He spoke, of course, he said, as one who must view himself as being in loco parentis.
' 'In loco parentis,' indeed! He knows perfectly well that both my parents are perfectly well, considering their age. He's nearer their age than mine. Furthermore, he maintained that I was imperiling my soul.'
She tossed her glossy brown head.
'My soul, for pity's sake! I have no more soul than the cat, Chaos! If I do, then where in my body it is located, pray tell me!'
Hoare remembered Dr. Graves's having confided to him that his wife doubted the existence of such things as souls.
'Furthermore,' she said severely, 'Sir Thomas reminded me that you are a married man.'
'Married? I am no such thing! Like you, I am widowed, but long since. I had thought you knew.'
'How should I have known, Bartholomew? You never saw fit to tell me. Shall you tell me now, as we walk?'
So Hoare told his companion how, when Beetle was on the North American station in the weary closing years of the American war, he and Antoinette LaPlace had fallen desperately in love and married, over the powerful objections of her devout family. How he had left her in Halifax early in '83, great with child, only to discover on his return after the peace that she had died in childbed. Her parents had swept up the babe, a daughter, and returned to disappear in the uplands of Quebec.
'So I have never even seen my daughter,' he concluded, 'but I dream of Antoinette very often.'
'Of course, you do.' Eleanor Graves pressed the arm she was holding. 'And perhaps that explains your feelings for the child Jenny, of whom you speak so fondly.'
'Fondly? Do I? Why, perhaps I do. Well… well, here we are, on our way to St. Ninian's,' he said, 'presumably for the betterment of our souls at Mr. Witherspoon's feet.'
'My soul, if any, is a poor neglected thing in sad need of betterment. However, Bartholomew, I accepted your offer to escort me to church because of the damned- excuse me-damned neighbors. I wish to show them where I stand. Busybodies all, and Sir Thomas the busiest body of them all. He should be busying his body about those poor dead Captains you told me of. I can well take care of my own reputation and my own entirely hypothetical soul.' She tossed her head again and snorted.
To himself, Hoare had long compared Eleanor Graves to a partridge, albeit a dauntless one. Now, with her snort, she resembled a moor pony, one like the beast he had seen her astride when, between them, they had put Edouard Moreau to death.
'Do you wish me to take Sir Thomas aside and reprove him?' he asked. He rather looked forward to the idea.
She stopped in midstreet and looked up at him. 'You shall do no such thing, Bartholomew. I am a tub that stands on its own bottom, as well you know. He and you are sufficiently at odds already. It would do you no good were you to spring to my defense and would put poor pompous Sir Thomas into harm's way. No. We shall attend matins in peace, as we planned, and all the world may stare.'
She tucked her arm in his; his heart leaped.
All the world stared, indeed, as the little party marched into St. Ninian's. The congregation's whispering made Hoare feel quite at home. Eleanor Graves was no person to hide herself. Chin high, her black-gloved hand resting lightly on the arm of her blue-and-gold escort, her progress followed by the staring faces of all Weymouth's best, she paraded up the aisle as if going up to dance.
The service having concluded and the Reverend Mr. Witherspoon duly congratulated on his endless sermon, the two left the porch of St. Ninian's only to come face-to-face with Sir Thomas Frobisher. No words passed between them, only stiff nods, though Hoare thought to hear the other breathe the word bats. Sir Thomas's footman opened the emblazoned door of his berlin, and he entered. As Hoare knew, he had all of four hundred yards' journey ahead of him.
Foursquare, high of cheekbones, with slanted eyes and a shock of unconventional coarse black hair, the knight's coachman had an oddly familiar look. Where had Hoare seen his like?
It came to him at last. During his station in Halifax, when he had courted his dear Antoinette, married her, and lost her, he had run across a family of wandering Esquimaux walrus hunters from the upper Labrador. Someone had told him that the first Sir Martin Frobisher, the famous one, had brought a family or two back with him to England, where they had become as much a nine days' wonder as would have been one of Dean Swift's Struldbrugs. Could this merry-looking manservant be one of their descendants?
Eleanor Graves's murmur returned Hoare to the autumn Sunday.
'The frog and the crane,' she said.
'Sir Thomas and myself?' Hoare asked.
'Or you and myself,' she said with a smile, and Hoare's heart leaped once again.
'You are no frog, my dear,' he whispered.
They walked on in companionable silence for a while, arm in arm, trailed at a discreet distance by the girl Agnes. Then Eleanor looked up at him.
'That was pleasant, Bartholomew. To make the congregation stare so! Oh! I must dress only in this horrid black, which I know does not become me. I must remain at home for years, receive only my relatives and Simon's-
