silence, broken only by panting breath all around, the gentle wash of water in the bilge, and the smothered whimpers of the visitor upon which Hoare was perching. The perch, he now realized, was a woman. He could tell by its feel.
'Bert,' stroke oar said in a muffled voice. 'Where's Bert?'
Hoare was about to break the news to him that Bert had been lost overside, when the missing man hauled himself wearily up and in, over the wherry's square counter.
' 'Ere I be, Matthew, no thanks to you,' Bert gasped.
Thoday was breathing heavily. 'Well, sir, that's the second time this thing has come in handy.' In his hand, he held the falcon figurine from Mr. Ambler's rooms. Even in the dark, Hoare could tell it had drawn blood.
In the heat of battle, one of the wherry's sculls had been lost overside. Besides, the man Bert was in no condition to row, and Hoare frankly doubted that Thoday had ever learned how.
'We haven't reached Greenwich yet,' he whispered to the man Matthew. 'Move us along, if you please.'
'Wot, all by myself, after jest fightin' off a pirate crew? Take an oar yourself, mate.'
'Pipe down and row.'
The man began to complain bitterly.
'You hardly have a right to complain,' Hoare told Matthew between heaving breaths. 'Look here… you've gotten yourselves a prize out of this night's work.' He had quietly cleated to the scull's counter the pair-oar's painter, which its last occupant had brought aboard with him as any good waterman should.
'Come on, Bert, bear an 'and,' Matthew told his mate.
'Wot, wif only one oar?' Bert's voice was slurred. ' 'Ere then, you, budge over and gimme room.' Elbowing Thoday out of his way, Bert stuck the odd scull between the thole pins and took up Matthew's rhythm. They began to make a sidling headway through the fog, the captured pair-oar towing dismally in their wake.
With Thoday's help, Hoare busied himself with securing their captives, including the woman he had been using in lieu of a thwart. She seemed to be a young person. When she began to protest at being mishandled, in a whispered snarl he ordered her to pipe down if she knew what was good for her. The rasp he produced apparently cowed her, for she piped down and let herself be trussed.
Allowing for the state of the tide, Hoare judged, the wherry and their captive pirates might have drifted to within hailing distance of Royal Duke. He put his fingers in his mouth and uttered his deafening general-purpose whistle. As he did so, he saw, no more than a few fathoms to starboard, the loom of some vessel. It reached well above their heads, and the wherry was sweeping past her.
'Ahoy the boat!' came a voice from her deck. Hoare nudged Thoday.
'Identify me,' he whispered.
'Royal Duke,' Thoday called, thus announcing that they were carrying the yacht's commander.
'Ask 'em if they know her whereabouts.'
'D'ye know where she lies?'
Hoare could hear a mutter of consultation. Then, 'Two or three cables downstream. Atropos lies next below us, then Leopard, then your brig.'
Atropos. Twenty-two guns. Hornblower's sloop. A nothing perhaps, but vastly more powerful in comparison with his own command, just as her captain was vastly more powerful than a mere Commander Bartholomew Hoare. It would have been a pleasure to stop and pay a call on Hornblower, but it would have been neither right nor proper. Besides being a new father, Hornblower, he knew, was preparing his ship for sea and would have no time to waste on a casual midnight call from a subordinate officer, no matter how friendly he might be.
'What ship is that?' Thoday called to their guide, echoing his commander's whisper.
'Guerriere!' came the reply.
'Thank you, Guerriere!'
They rowed on past two more ghostly forms, before Hoare repeated his shrill whistle. He did so again, and then again, until, muffled perhaps by the fog, he heard a faint call in reply.
'Pull for the sound, men, pull for the sound,' he whispered.
Alongside the brig at last, Hoare saw all the others, including the dead attacker and the one Thoday had stunned with the falcon, hauled aboard in safety before he hauled himself through the low entry port. Once on deck, he could sort them all out. He ordered Mr. Clay-who, sensible man, had been long abed and appeared with his uniform coat hastily donned over his nightshirt-to see that Matthew and Bert the boatmen were suitably refreshed, then turned to his captives.
Now that Hoare could see them plain, out on an open deck, he realized that between them he and Thoday, with only minimal assistance from Matthew and none at all from Bert, had defeated four opponents. Five, if one counted the woman, though one should not, for she had been of no consequence in the affray. She alone was on her feet. He himself had pushed two opponents into the Thames, on or under which he presumed they remained. One, dead of the cut into his back, lay staring blankly up into the graying sky. The man Thoday had stunned had come to his senses, more or less, but still sprawled on the deck, muttering. The young woman stood facing Hoare, shivering with fear, cold, or a combination of the two. All hands were soaking wet.
'All right,' Hoare whispered to her. 'Which one of you is the leader of this crew?'
' 'Im,' said the woman from between her chattering teeth. She pointed at the stunned man, since he could not yet speak for himself.
'Well? Who is he? And, for that matter, who are you?'
'P-P-Poll, sir, if ye please. Floppin' Poll, they calls me.'
'And he?'
'Dickson, sir. Dick Dickson. ' 'E's scurf of a school o' water-flimps… I dabs it up wif'im.'
Thoday saw Hoare's blank expression. ''Beds with him,' she means, sir. He commands a fleet of river-going scroungers… petty pirates. He is new to me.'
'And how did Dick Dickson and you, and his other friends, come to take us on?' Hoare whispered.
'Dunno, sir. All I know is, Sol come to the lurk an' took Dick aside. I hollered, o' course. I 'eard 'im tell me Dick to get a crew togewer an' lay off Grinnage an' nobble any wherries wot come dahnstream. You was the first come by, sir, worse luck. The perisher, 'e din't tell us you wasn't no flats. Nah look wot ye done to me cove. I'll 'ave the lor on fez, I will.'
Hoare could not help admiring Floppin' Poll's reviving spirit, so he forbore to point out to her the illogic of calling the law on him, the gang's intended victim. Besides, she was turning blue. One of the female Royal Dukes, McVitty, the librarian with permanent spectacles, was loitering about, looking anxiously at her. He should think of her as a Royal Duchess, he supposed.
'Get her below, McVitty, will you, and turn her over to Tracy?' Tracy, surgeon's mate, had been a medical student at St. Bart's, but had married unfortunately and run off, as he thought, to sea.
'Aye, aye, sir. Come on, woman.' McVitty hoisted one of the other woman's arms over her shoulder and half- supported her to the yacht's fore hatch, where Hoare lost sight of them.
'Best to get this one down to Tracy, too, sir,' Mr. Clay advised. 'He's breathing peculiarly.'
'Make it so, Mr. Clay,' Hoare said. He went below to his pigeon-smelling cabin, and turned in. It had been a long, adventurous day.
Back aboard Royal Duke at last, weary and confused, Hoare lay long abed before he could compose himself for sleep. Sleeplessness was an unusual thing for Bartholomew Hoare; ever since his first lonely nights as a mid, he had dropped off as quickly as any other sailor. It was a skill necessary for survival, he thought as he stared up through the dark at the deck beams a foot above his nose. A sailor must learn early to take his sleep as he could find it, generally in all-too-short snatches, generally hungry, often wet. Compared with those days and with other ships, his state tonight was one of luxury.
He managed to put the late encounter behind him, and think back to the preceding day and those three damnable inquisitions, one after another.
Something, he thought, had been disturbing Sir Hugh deeply-something besides the grave matter that the massive man had described, something behind that which he had not wished to disclose. Something personal, perhaps. Certainly, Sir Hugh's state of health must be distressing him. But Hoare was too tired to think further, and fell asleep.
Upon awakening, he lay for a space, wandering idly across the meadows of his memory, stopping once in a
