good grace, his shot went precisely where he had wanted it to go-through Niobe's spanker, a foot above her Captain's head. Delancey, Hoare was delighted to see, had ducked so quickly as to lose his hat over the side.
Hoare waved his own, made his way aft to Nemesis's tiny cockpit. There he took over the helm and turned the little yacht about while Niobe disappeared in the gloaming. On his way back to Royal Duke, he managed to reach over the side and recover Delancey's hat from where it bobbed cheerfully in the Channel, upside down.
As Nemesis retraced her tracks, Hoare indulged himself in a happy waking dream. In the presence of an enraged Delancey, he was addressing Admiral Sir George Hardcastle.
'I truly regret having alarmed Mr. Delancey, sir,' Hoare imagined himself saying, in the loud, clear voice he remembered so well. 'I fear I mistook him for a Frenchman.'
'How could you possibly have done that?' he had the imaginary Delancey bluster. 'Did you not see my colors? You must have known you were firing on a King's ship.'
'Yes, indeed, Mr. Delancey. But I have also known one of His Majesty's ships to hoist French colors in order to amuse the enemy. Why should not a Frenchman do likewise to amuse me?'
In this dream, Hoare had no need to pause for breath but continued.
'For my maneuvers between Nemesis and Royal Duke so evidently amused you that your manners led me to assume that you could not be English. What else could you have been, then, but French? Or Brother Jonathan, perhaps?
'Oh, and by the way, Mr. Delancey,' Hoare said in this waking dream, 'you dropped your hat. Here it is.'
Shaking himself back to reality, he returned to duty and the deck of Royal Duke.
Chapter XV
Under jib, main topsail, and spanker, Royal Duke eased past Portland Bill through the night, towing Nemesis faithfully behind her. When the ruins of Abbotsbury Abbey bore northeast, Clay brought her as close inshore as he dared and anchored. The wind had shifted to just north of west, sweeping the length of Chesil Beach.
Sergeant Leese mustered the landing party in the dark, for Hoare had ordered 'darken ship.' Except for Leese and Hoare himself, who wore their proper uniforms, they looked no better than a troupe of mountebanks in the varied pieces of landsmen's garb they had drawn from the yacht's capacious slop chest. As he had looked over Blackman's shoulder to watch him make his selection from among the garments, Hoare had felt he could be looking at a theatrical company's store of properties. He had even seen a hobbyhorse in it, a tawdry crown, and what could only be the scaly lower half of a mermaid. Surely no other slop chest in the Navy was so stocked.
Every member of the party bore some-sort of visible weapon in the form of a stout cudgel or staff, and Hoare was certain that other similar objects were hidden in their raiment. Green fondled her cleaver, a weapon with which, Leese warranted to Hoare, she could lop off both legs of an opponent in one wicked swipe. Once again, the sight of her made Hoare shudder. He himself carried a brace of horse pistols under his cloak and had tucked a sap into his belt.
The longboats lowered, one to a side, their passengers clambered aboard them without incident. With Royal Duke's low freeboard, it was no drop at all.
'Cast off.' Stone's voice was echoed from the green boat to starboard.
'Good luck, Captain, and a happy return!' Clay called after them. Hoare waved an invisible arm. Invisible in the darkness, the gesture was no more futile, he thought, than trying to make his whisper heard over the wash.
'Ready all… row.'
The red boat's oarsmen bent to their work. Astonishingly soon, Royal Duke had disappeared in the gloom, leaving the longboats to toss alone in line abreast, in what might as well be mid-Channel.
In minutes, however, Hoare could hear the slow, heavy breathing of the light three-foot surf as it ran along Chesil Beach ahead. A wave broke.
'The bar,' Stone said conversationally. With these paltry seas, there would be no need, even with the green hands at the sweeps, to turn about and back the boat into the sand.
'Easy all; paddle.'
Now Hoare could see the breakers curling on the beach. It would be half-tide. Once the landing party was ashore, the boats could readily withdraw.
'Now when I say, 'Row,' put yer backs inter it.'
Stone waited for the surge of a seventh wave, then, 'Row!'
A heave, and the longboat was under way again. Another, and it was surging forward. Another wave broke, its crest slopping over the side. Two more heavy strokes, and they were clear in the backwash; another brought them scraping onto the beach. The starboard longboat pulled up beside them.
'Off ye go, men!' Stone said. He forgot himself and slapped Hoare on the back to urge him on. Over Hoare went with his half of the party, filling his boots with salt water as he plunged ahead with the others. Once above tidewater, he paused to empty the boots before he sought out the tall figure of Leese.
'This way,' Hoare said, and gestured, knowing he could not expect to be heard over the breakers, low though they were. They left the beach behind and plowed up over small dunes covered with beach grass.
There was a roar of wings from a startled flock of shore-birds-snipe, perhaps, or whimbrels, from their whining protests-driven from their rest in the lagoon to starboard. Hoare felt his boots strike a firmer surface: the road, a mere pair of ruts in hardened shell and sand, leading eastward from Abbotsford toward Langston Abbas. It would be a mile and a touch from here to Abel Dunaway's barn. The party formed two straggling lines, one in each rut, with Hoare and Leese in the lead, shoved along gently by the lightening breeze. Once or twice, the moon, all but full, broke clear and showed a desolate landscape to their left, the lagoon and then the endless beach to the right, stretching on eternally.
'There'll be fog inland tomorrow night,' Leese said quietly. Their feet crunched on the shelly surface.
The barn should lie… Yes, there it was, black against black on the skyline. The building was dark, soundless, but that meant nothing. Any of Dunaway's people, if they were there, would not be men who would reveal their presence by lights, and the barn was still to leeward of Hoare's party, so that no roistering sounds would come their way. Signing the others to stop where they were, Hoare left his rut. He walked softly through the grassy sand until he was no more than forty yards from the barn. He uttered the corncrake rattle Dunaway had taught him, then stood fast to listen. Nothing was to be heard except a creak, creak, perhaps of a loose door swinging on its hinges. It was certainly neither a corncrake nor a man.
Hoare crouched to the ground and crept to the end of the building. There ought to be a door or two there. There it was, swinging idly, giving off its avian creaks, shutting darkness in and darkness out. Hoare crept within; still no sign of life. The scent of musty hay filled his nose. He smothered a sneeze. A runny nose and watering eyes were, he remembered from boyhood, two of those endless miseries of a rural life that had made him welcome the sea.
He left the barn, stood up, and walked out onto the road where his party could see him against the horizon, and gave them a beckoning signal. In no time, they surrounded him and trooped with him into the barn, where Leese struck a light.
'Take over, Sergeant,' Hoare whispered.
'Aye aye, sir.'
While Leese called the roll, Hoare looked about him in a more leisurely manner. The moldy hay was there for certain, in quantity. It lay loose in old stalls and in windrows along the walls. He let loose his stifled sneeze. By the flickering light of Leese's dark lantern, the barn seemed as huge as some Gothic cathedral and just as cold.
'Yer all 'ere, I'm pleased to see,' Leese said as he drew Dunaway's chart from beneath his forest-green jacket. 'I 'opes I'll see ye the same when we're back aboard.
'Now draw round me. You've seen thisyer map of the Captain's before, so I'll 'ave each of ye show me where yer supposed to lie up when ye make the Stones Circle. You first, Adams.'
One after another, the members of the party stepped up and pointed out their respective hiding places. Only two had to be corrected, to Leese's audible scorn.
'Now, you an' me, sir. You show me, if you please, sir.'
