danger, I am sure. But oh, sir, I fear for your port!'
Thrusting past the heaving bucket brigade, the heavy man made his way into the smoke-filled cellar. There he halted in dismay.
'What, all my port-and my portrait, too!'
By the time Hoare and Thoday had returned across the river and through the nearly deserted London streets to the Golden Cross, it must have gone two o'clock. Hoare had arranged a separate room for his companion, on an upper floor. He would not be troubled, as he had on an earlier occasion, by the haunting strains of the pocket violin with which, he had learned, the other played himself to sleep.
The next morning, as agreed, they parted, Thoday to commence moling his way about the city's underside, while Hoare made the call on this John Goldthwait whom Sir Hugh Abercrombie was so strangely insistent he meet.
He must cudgel his memory before he recalled who Mr. Goldthwait was. At last, he remembered. A small, lean man with a weary face, he had been among the entourage of Admiral of the Fleet Prince William, Duke of Clarence, when that authentic Royal Duke had attended the trial of Arthur Gladden. If Sir Hugh saw fit to insist that Hoare attend him, Mr. Goldthwait's role on that occasion must have been something other than a mere courtier's. The one time they had met, he had spoken in a most kindly way of the role Hoare had played in the Vantage affair. In fact, Hoare thought, Mr. Goldthwait might well have put a good word in with Sir Hugh, and thus been instrumental in Hoare's miraculous advancement as far as the threshold of post rank.
When, after following several false trails, he finally came upon 11, Chancery Lane, his gentle raps with the knocker were without result. At last, a frowsy head stuck itself out the upstairs window of an adjoining house and informed him that he was wasting his hammering. Mr. Goldthwait was not in.
'I suppose that manservant of his has taken advantage of his master again and gone off to some boozing ken,' the head volunteered.
Hoare ventured to ask the head if it would tell either Mr. Goldthwait or his manservant that Mr. Hoare of the navy had called, and it agreed to do so. Its owner then slammed the window down and left Hoare to do as he pleased. At a loss, Hoare decided he would take his discovery-or Thoday's, rather-to Sir Hugh Abercrombie. The admiral would surely be pleased.
His passage to Whitehall was a difficult one. After Hoare ended up in a warren of alleyways, a kindly passerby told him he had turned the wrong way upon leaving number 11. He should have turned left. Confused and frustrated, he retraced his steps, or at least attempted to do so. He must have taken a wrong turning again, for he found himself at length facing a dignified structure with a dome, which could only be St. Paul's. Far earlier in the day than it should, the sky had begun to darken, for it still wanted a good hour to noon. He suspected that one of the infamous London fogs was about to descend. A heavy wain almost crushed him against a wall, and its driver snarled at him in some unintelligible dialect. He was totally at sea, and he wished it true. He hated London.
He gave up, prepared to sacrifice his dignity, and hailed one of the many dirt-encrusted, starveling barefoot boy children who infested the streets hereabouts.
'Here, boy-do you know where the Admiralty is, in Whitehall?' he whispered.
'Admiralty, mister? Calls yerself a sailor-man, and can't find yer own way orne?' The child, wizened and wise, did nothing to hide a contemptuous sneer. ' 'Course I does,' he said.
'Sixpence to take me there,' Hoare said.
The ragamuffin tossed his head.
'Shillin',' he said.
'Sixpence now, sixpence when we get there.'
'Let's see yer blunt, mister sailor-man,' said the boy, and would not budge until he had bitten the coin and tucked it into his cheek for safekeeping.
'Come orn,' he said, and set off.
It took Hoare's child pilot a mere fifteen minutes to lead his bewildered customer into Whitehall. Hoare knew where he was now; he could even recognize the high door of the Admiralty, from which he had been turned away two evenings before.
'I can find my own way from here,' he told the boy, and handed him the other half of his fare. The other grabbed it, bit it, and disappeared.
'Mr. Hoare, Mr. Hoare! Wait for me, sir! Please!' Hoare felt himself blanch with astonishment at that clear, exclamatory, unforgettable treble, but turned all the same, however reluctantly. The owner of the voice, the visible, audible spirit of Harry Prickett, was pelting toward him. Little Prickett, he knew, late midshipman in the late frigate Vantage, had gone up with her while leaving Spithead one beautiful morning the previous summer, in smoke and flame.
'Aren't you glad to see me, sir?' the lad asked, looking up into Hoare's face with some anxiety.
'Why, yes. Yes, lad, I am.' Hoare squatted to view Mr. Prickett at eye level, and grasped him by the shoulders. 'But I thought I never would, short of Davy Jones's locker. How… weren't you in Vantage, then?' The question was silly, of course; of three hundred twenty-seven Vantages, only twenty-four had been hauled from the water when the frigate had blown up in Hoare's own presence. He had pulled in most of them himself, since he had been less than a cable's-length distant from her in his own beloved little sloop when the catastrophe occurred. Most of the survivors had been badly burned or mangled, and none had ranked higher than quarter-gunner. Like the very Christ, this so-helpful very young gentleman must have risen by divine miracle from his death in the explosion.
'Oh, no, sir! I caught the mumps, sir, from another boy who was staying at the inn, and they put me ashore before she went to sea, and sent me home! You've had the mumps, sir, haven't you?'
Hoare, who could barely remember himself and his brother being put out into the barn and nursed from that distance for a week while they bulged, sweated, and felt generally sorry for themselves, said 'yes.'
'Then you won't have to worry, sir! Will you?'
'No, boy. But… what are you doing here in London?'
'I've been taken into a ship, sir! Papa brought me up himself, all the way from Canterbury! Wasn't it sad about Vantage! She was a smacker, wasn't she? Poor Mrs. Watt! She's left with six daughters, all alone!' He meant Mr. Prickett's friend, Vantage's clerk, who had been so helpful to Hoare, and whom he had delivered back aboard his ship just in time to share in the disaster. Watt's widow would be on the town now, of course.
'But let me introduce you to Papa! Papa! Look at what I've found! Here's Mr. Hoare! Oh, sorry, sir! Commander Hoare, I mean! Captain Hoare, I mean!'
The man who came up to them, as brisk as his son but far more stately, could only be a prosperous canon lawyer in a cathedral town. There was something episcopal about him; in fact, Hoare almost expected to see a bishop's apron shrouding the region between navel and knees. His forbidding black attire clashed with a bright, clever, humorous face.
The little mid was not shy with his papa, for he took his hand and drew him toward Hoare.
'Papa, it's Mr. Hoare! Remember? He's the officer who can't talk and he had me holloa for him!'
The two men exchanged greetings as equals.
'I am delighted, as well as astonished, to see your son alive, sir,' Hoare said in all sincerity. He meant it, for the boy had radiated the cheerful confidence of a well-loved puppy. He still did. He had brains, too, and would go far in the navy.
'Not half as delighted as we were, sir,' the father said. 'I know, we have four more like him at home, but all of them are precious to me, and to Mrs. Prickett as well. You have children, Mr.-or should I say 'Commander' Hoare?'
'Captain Hoare, Papa!'
'Thank you, my boy,' said the father easily. Hoare was pleased to see that, pompous though Mr. Prickett senior might appear, he was not too high in the instep to accept his child's correction willingly. Hoare explained that no, he was only recently married, but was hopeful. He forbore to mention his daughter by Antoinette, the daughter he had sought but never found, born in '84 and carried away by his late wife's people to dwell in the wilds of Quebec-if, indeed, she was still above-ground.
'Perhaps you'd like to serve with me in Royal Duke,' Hoare whispered to Mr. Prickett. 'She's small, and she doesn't go to sea often, but I can offer you a good education. We could use a handy young gentleman.'
He could have bit his tongue. However appealing a safe berth of this kind might be to a master of clerical law
