After exchanging a few more words in an undertone, Lestrade withdrew. Sir Hugh could now turn his attention to Hoare. He did not rise, for the simple act of coming to his feet would obviously have been hard for him. Now, Hoare understood why it had been necessary to devise that reinforced hanging chair in the late Captain Oglethorpe's cabin-now Hoare's own-aboard Royal Duke; Sir Hugh was vast.
'Stand up straight,' the admiral said. Hat under arm, Hoare came to attention and stood to be inspected, staring at the invisible horizon.
'You have a report for me. Hand it over.'
After receiving the papers over which Hoare had labored two nights ago, Sir Hugh steepled his hands and for several minutes examined his visitor in silence, his cold gray eyes nearly hidden in the pudding of his face. Finally, he spoke.
'So. Take a seat, sir. I have read the memoranda you drafted for Hardcastle. You're his deus ex machina, then. His Hercules. The man he uses to drag his chestnuts out of the fire. Good record at sea, respectable navy family, no voice. Pity about that.
You look as though you were otherwise fit for command. But the fleet's loss is the service's gain. Perhaps.
'Let me read these reports, however, so as not to try your voice with unnecessary questions. Be seated, if you please.'
Sir Hugh drew a long churchwarden pipe from a rack behind him, packed it carefully, and lit it. When the pipe was drawing to his satisfaction, he began to read, puffing thoughtfully at the pipe as he read and giving off thick clouds of smoke. Within a minute, the room was befogged; within three minutes, his reading ended.
Setting the most recent report down, Sir Hugh now fired a fifteen-minute barrage of questions at Hoare. He covered every aspect of the Vantage affair, and the events surrounding the Nine Stones Circle, whether or not Hoare had set it down. He inquired about Hoare's odd little yacht, about his bride, and about the child Jenny Jaggery. He reached back into Hoare's past, to the Amazon and Hebe affair and even to his previous marriage in Halifax. He seemed to know everything.
After each question, Sir Hugh waited patiently for Hoare's increasingly painful answer, but before his cloud of pungent verbal powder smoke drifted away, Hoare was sweating freely and his feeble whisper had drifted into mere mouthing.
'Very good,' Sir Hugh said at last. 'Or at least, good enough. Between you and Hardcastle, the two of you may have concocted a French farrago of lies, but at least you have enough brains to be consistent with each other.
'Now. Listen carefully. You are to repeat nothing said in this or any other conversation you and I may have, and subsequently shall neither make notes of them nor prepare any writings about them. Is that clearly understood?'
Sir Hugh accepted Hoare's nod and continued. 'Hardcastle will have told you a little about this office, and the activities I direct on their lordships' behalf. Those activities, of course, include your own, and those of the vessel you command.
'You have now cut off two tentacles of Bonaparte's secret service, but there are many others. Since you will have earned their extreme displeasure, you will need to walk with care henceforth. A word to the wise, sir.
'It is my task to seek out the remaining agents and destroy them, wherever they may be found, to turn them, or at least, if appropriate, to deceive them to His Majesty's advantage. It is also my task to manage the navy's own network of agents, but that is neither here nor there.'
For a full hour, Sir Hugh discoursed in his low thunder of a voice upon case after case, technique upon technique. From time to time a minion padded in to place a document before his master. Without interrupting the flow of his lecture, Sir Hugh would peruse it, pen a marginal comment, sometimes sign it, and return it to the minion. The latter would then pad out. Except for an occasional remark, from Sir Hugh and never from the minion, these encounters took place in silence. Between them, Sir Hugh's deep voice droned on, and on, and on.
Just as Hoare was about to raise a hand and plead for an interval of rest, Sir Hugh said, 'We now come to the immediate reason for your presence here. Hardcastle will have told you of the disappearance of certain documents of state at a time when this office had them in its charge. Their import is international and major. In the hands of the French, their misuse would be dire. They must be found. If possible, they must be recovered. If not, they must be destroyed.
'The other departments of His Majesty's government have not been notified of the loss. For them to learn of it would diminish the navy materially, to its cost and eventually to the disservice of the Crown.'
So far, the admiral had told Hoare no more than he had learned from Sir George Hardcastle-less, in fact. Now, however, Sir Hugh leaned forward in his heavy chair and peered through the remaining tobacco smoke at him.
'More than that. I did not inform Sir George of this, but one of my senior confidential clerks has also gone missing. The very man, in fact, who is charged with preserving documents of confidence, among which the missing papers were to be numbered. He has not been seen since Thursday week. His nonappearance was, in fact, the event that prompted us to take the inventory of the documents in his charge, and to discover the absence of the documents in the case.'
'Pray tell me about the man, sir.' These were Hoare's first words since Sir Hugh had commenced his narrative.
'He is Octavius Ambler by name. Forty-four years of age, but looks older. He has been in Admiralty service for twenty-eight years, rising from apprentice writer to his present position, separated by only two degrees from myself. An only child, he has never married but lived with his widowed mother in Lambeth until her death eighteen months ago.'
'His appearance, sir?'
'He is heavyset, fully fleshed, unhealthy of complexion. Much like myself, in fact…' Sir Hugh looked down at his own massive, soft form with obvious distaste, and went on.
'But not so excessively bulky. Unlike me, he gets about nimbly enough for a man in his sedentary position. I am ruddy; he is pallid. Old-fashioned as to his dress. Look here.'
The admiral turned, bent over his hampering belly and began to rummage through a drawer in the cabinet at his side. From where he sat, Hoare could see that the drawer was laid out with orderly labeled partitions of what might be veneer, enclosing space for files. An admirable arrangement, he thought, and one which he would see copied in Royal Duke's 'tweendecks.
'Here,' Sir Hugh said at last. 'We have likenesses made of all our principal staff, including myself. The man who makes them apprenticed under Mr. Rowlandson or Mr. Gillray-I disremember which. This is the one he made of Ambler.'
Hoare took the drawing Sir Hugh extended to him. His wiry hand and Sir Hugh's pudgy one nearly touched; with a sharp motion, the admiral snatched his paw out of danger.
Hoare examined the likeness, a silverpoint on durable hard gray paper that showed the subject's head and shoulders. As Sir Hugh had said, it also showed a full-lipped man in the worst of physical condition, heavy of jowls, petulant of expression, cleft-chinned, bewigged, and heavily pockmarked. Hoare believed the artist had tried to capture every little circular pit.
'May I see your own likeness, sir?' Hoare asked.
Sir Hugh bridled. 'Damn you, sir, you see the original before you. What need have you for my simulacrum? Taken a fancy to me?' His grin was quite hideous.
'By your leave, sir,' Hoare said firmly, 'I would like to compare the artist's view of you with my own.' He looked expectantly at his superior.
The admiral grumbled, but eventually returned to his orderly files.
'Here you are,' he said. This time, he did not hold out the likeness for Hoare to take from his hand but set it on the desk between them, where Hoare could reach it easily enough without bringing their two hands too close together for his admiral's comfort.
Hoare glanced between likeness and subject. Given the artist's training and the sitter's grossness of feature, he had feared that the silverpoint would be more or less of a caricature, but it was nothing of the kind. It was neither flattering nor cruel, but coolly objective. Sir Hugh had been depicted according to Oliver Cromwell's wish, warts and all. The drawing pointed out that the admiral had two of them altogether, one just beyond his left eye and the other beside the opposite nostril. Hitherto Hoare had observed neither, but there they were. Moreover, the artist had precisely captured Admiral Abercrombie's expression of cold, experienced power. He could have been a
