'No. He does not. He comes of ordinary folk-his father was a farrier, as I recall, and he has never married. No, Hoare, his prosperity is of his own making. In fact, that, I confess, begins to render me anxious about him.'
Sir Hugh knew when to pause for effect, and he used the pause to break the stem of his cheap clay churchwarden, toss it away, and fill its successor with coarse shag tobacco. Having lit it, he blew a thick blue puff into Hoare's face-not, it seemed to the victim, out of malice, but simply out of carelessness for his guest's comfort. Before continuing his discourse, he gave a loose, satisfied cough and spat copiously into a container on the floor at his side.
'I have good reason to believe, Hoare, that he gambles. Gambles with cards, playing with men of all classes, whether high or low. And is quite a consistent winner. Has been for some years. Took poor Fox, for example, for more pounds than any Whig cares to think about.
'Yet nary a whisper has come to my ears that he is a sharper or a flake. His opponents, even though they are generally losers, seldom accuse him of cheating, and those that have done so have never made their charges stick, or attempted to follow them up.'
'Is Mr. Goldthwait wont, by any chance,' Hoare whispered, 'to respond in the usual way to accusations of… ungentlemanly behavior? I mean, sir, that he may be so formidable a man to meet on the field of honor that… even the bravest prefer not to meet him.'
'Like yourself, Captain Hoare, eh?' Puff, puff. 'No, sir. If that were the case, do you not think that the headstrong young bucks about town would be forever calling him out, not so much to prove the man a sharp as to prove their own panache before their friends, and their mirrors? I expect that you, sir, are not unfamiliar with that sort of thing.'
Hoare nodded. Sir Hugh was in the right. Sober men chose to avoid open conflict with him; younger men, drunken ones, and fools not uncommonly sought either to issue a challenge or to provoke one. The pretext generally had to do with his name, but lately Hoare had learned to let stupid remarks of that kind slide off in ways that did not impugn either party's honor.
'There is more, sir,' the admiral said. 'I am a simple sailor and no man of accounts, more than is needed to have dealt well enough with navy recordkeeping when I commanded a ship of my own.'
Hoare found it impossible to conceive of this man mountain pacing the weather side of his own quarterdeck, but indeed it must at one time have been so.
'But,' the mountain continued, 'I cannot believe that the prosperity which you so shrewdly noted derives wholly from cards. There must be another source, and I dread what it may be.
'Look at this,' he said. 'The coded text came to our pigeon loft several days ago, directed to Mr. Goldthwait. Somehow, thank God, one of the idiots in my service misdirected it; otherwise, it would not have reached my eyes, or now yours. Only now has one of those idiots managed to decipher it. No thanks to them, by the way, but to your own wizard. Or 'witch,' perhaps I should say-that remarkable Taylor woman in Royal Duke. For, as you know, it was she that broke the code.'
Hoare took the paper that Sir Hugh placed on the desk within his reach.
'Acts: nine, one and two,' he read, silently.
'You know the reference, I'm sure,' Sir Hugh rumbled.
'I fear it escapes me, sir.'
' 'And Saul,' ' Sir Hugh recited, ' 'yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.' '
'Thank you, sir.' Hoare made his whisper sound as humble as he could.
'The cipher, and the content of the message it bears, have a most uncomfortable familiarity, don't ye think?' Sir Hugh asked.
'Indeed it does, sir,' Hoare said. 'It's an inflammatory text. It has much the same character as the messages Taylor unraveled from the documents of the late Captain Spurrier.'
'Precisely so. And, as you will remember, too, the ultimate source of those messages to Spurrier has never been determined. There is, Captain Hoare, every reason to believe that it is French-or at least French-connected. One of Bonaparte's men, Hoare. Who else could it be?'
The question of the ciphers had troubled Hoare ever since he had encountered his first one, early in last year's inquiry into the blowing-up of Vantage and several sister ships. The texts were generally Biblical in tenor, if they were not actual quotations, and they used Biblical names for writer, recipient, and any third parties. The names were suggestive, like a nudge in the ribs, but-like nudges in the ribs-skirted specificity. The whole topic had been tantalizing; the ciphers could be read, but no one had succeeded in tracing them to their sources or identifying the owners of those nagging Biblical names. Each new accession-there had been three or four-plucked more sharply at Hoare's intellect.
Hoare had thought before of one possible source, one who, at least as far as he knew, had no connection with the French but had an odd, mad agenda of his own. He debated with himself, then decided to speak up.
'It could be Sir Thomas Frobisher, sir.'
'Who?'
'Sir Thomas Frobisher, baronet and knight, of Dorset. He is by way of being virtual master of the entire county, or at least so he believes, and many Dorset folk believe with him. Including Spurrier, the Satanist, who chopped off the heads of those captains not so long ago… and then had the effrontery to drown in his own vomit while my prisoner.'
'Never heard of 'em.' Sir Hugh's rumbled admission was rueful.
Hoare was taken aback. Until now, it had seemed to him that Sir Hugh Abercrombie, like Mr. John Goldthwait, was omniscient.
'Sir Thomas was Spurrier's master, you may recall, sir, at least in county affairs. What if anything he had to do with the atrocities in the South, I cannot say.'
'I had forgotten.' The admiral broke his churchwarden's stem with a sharp snap, as if to exorcise his rage at having been found wanting in knowledge. 'Go on about him, sir.'
Hoare obeyed. As he felt he must in order to be fair, he stressed the ill feeling that stood between him and Sir Thomas. He described what he perceived as its initial cause-how he, Bartholomew Hoare, had mocked the baronet on the evening of their first encounter with his description of how, instead of riding to hounds as any gentleman would, the Hoares, father and son, engaged in battery. This, as he had explained to Sir Thomas then and explained to Sir Hugh now, involved training bats to catch large insects and return them to their handlers.
'Like falconry, sir,' he explained. 'It was a foolish jape, sadly mistimed and fatally misdirected. The misstep did me no good, I am ashamed to say.' He paused and awaited his admiral's displeasure.
Instead, Sir Hugh, rearing back in his enormous chair, began to roar with laughter. That laughter was a daunting thing to hear. Deep and cataclysmic, it could have signaled the drowning of ancient Atlantis.
'Well, Hoare, that explains why you pricked up your ears so oddly the other day, when I mentioned falconry in connection with our man Ambler. At least, there's that little question answered for me. I had been wondering.
'But continue about this man Frobisher.' Once again, Sir Hugh's bass voice grew grave.
'The important thing about him, sir,' Hoare whispered, 'in this connection at least, is his absolute conviction… that he, and not our present Majesty, is the proper wearer of the English crown.'
'A peculiarity, to be sure,' the admiral said, 'but hardly a matter of gravity. After all, Bedlam is crawling with men who imagine themselves Jesus Christ. They can't all be; the Savior did not, as far as I know, claim to extend to His own person His miraculous ability to multiply the loaves and fishes. If He had, I should imagine, the matter would have preoccupied all Christian divines for centuries past, with an undoubtedly beneficial effect upon the souls of us all.'
'Indeed, sir. In the case of Sir Thomas's delusion, though, the trouble is that he has a certain odd attraction… which has made him, as I said a moment ago, the effective dictator of Dorset. Not only that, he has extended that strange magic… to the House of Parliament in which he sits. I have been told, by Sir George Hardcastle and Mrs. Selene Prettyman, among others-'
'What Prettyman says, I find, is generally to be taken as absolute fact,' Sir Hugh observed. Puff, puff.
'— that he has a number of adherents in Parliament who might better be described as devotees, if not worshipers. You would know more about that than I, sir.'
'I blush to say that I had overlooked that,' Sir Hugh said unblushingly, 'probably because his claim is so typical
