while to browse off some pleasant morsel, and overlooking the weeds for now. He had begun to share his meadow with Eleanor, only to find that she had a similar meadow of her own, to which she was making him, too, welcome.
He paused in mid-browse, upon realizing that there was someone else in his cabin. When he opened his bleary eyes, they hit upon the face of Eleanor herself, regarding him with her usual serenity from within the depths of Sir Hugh's enormous swinging chair. He sat up too suddenly and struck his head a stunning blow on the deckhead. She was supposed to be safely tucked away with her father, well north of London. Yet here she was.
'I had… thought you in Great Dunmow, visiting your papa,' he said as soon as he could speak coherently.
'As you can see, I am not,' she answered. 'I am sorry to have startled you. Does your head hurt?'
'Not much,' he said, sitting up and rubbing it. 'I am truly delighted to see you.' Indeed, he was. Every day since they first met on the shingle of Portland Bill, he had become fonder of her.
'What moved you to change your mind and join me here?' he asked.
'Well, it was you yourself, for one thing,' she said. 'As time goes by, I grow fonder of you. I don't understand why.
'There was another reason,' she said, somewhat later. 'More than one, in fact. It seems that I have become accustomed to my independence-at least, from my father and my brothers. Jack, my childhood protector, is long gone to Pondicherry, where he is making his fortune a-shaking the pagoda tree like that Lord Manymead you tell me about. In his absence, Gerald rules the roost, our father included. He is more the bully than ever. And poor Jude- well, he always was a scrub, I fear.
'No, I prefer my own household, my own little ward, my own people. And my own husband, thank you very much, sir. ' She nuzzled his shoulder where it joined his neck. 'Now, tell me your tale. What dragons have you slain lately, for king and country?'
Hoare gave her a drastically curtailed precis.
'You seem to have learned a great deal, Bartholomew, while on the North America station,' she said. Her voice was slightly acid. 'In addition, of course, to getting married. This 'burling' you described, for instance. Why, I should not be surprised to learn that you learned gambling as well as the other naughty habits-those I enjoy so much.'
Hoare startled and gulped. His past, in fact, held a secret that, while it would not be held disgraceful in the eyes of the world, he preferred to keep to himself. Stationed in Halifax as second in a sloop during the closing days of the fratricidal American war, he had taken up cards. He had been almost as lucky at the table as he had been earlier in the rebellion, when he had snatched up a small fortune in prize money while still a mere midshipman.
However, his shame derived from neither the gambling itself nor his good fortune in it. The shame was that, wrongly accused of cheating by a spirited young French-Canadian seigneur who had lost heavily to him at a card game, honor had compelled him to call the man out. Georges-Louis Honore Laplace was an inexperienced stripling, though a creditable shot like most of his fellow countrymen, but Hoare had already been out almost as many times as he had years. In the ensuing encounter, he had missed his aim, which was to inflict a mere gentle chastisement, and had severely wounded his opponent.
During his long convalescence, young Laplace was attended by his slender younger sister Antoinette. Once, when duty allowed him ashore, young Bartholomew had visited his victim's sickbed below the Citadel, met the sister, and lost his heart to her.
Hoare's eloquence-for ten years of normal speech still remained to him-had persuaded her. He had even been willing to be married in the small Roman church that served the French colony. But the fact that he could not convert and still keep his precious commission had caused an estrangement to arise between his bride's people and himself. This must have weighed, he always thought, in their decision to return to the wilds of Quebec. They took with them the daughter Antoinette had died in bearing him. All of this-the birth, Antoinette's death, the family's return to Canada, had taken place while Hoare was at sea in Beetle, helping to wind up the fratricidal American war. He had never seen their child-Leticie, the name the sour-faced cure had shown him in the baptismal register upon his return to Halifax. He had never even learned whether or not she bore her father's family name, and he was of two minds on the subject. He did not wish her to be nameless; yet on the other hand, if the girl should grow up to move in Anglophone circles, his own name would carry invidious connotations.
He was irrational on the topic, he knew, but Hoare blamed Antoinette's death on the good fortune he had experienced in play with her brother, which had resulted in his challenge. He had therefore sworn solemnly that never again would he touch a card. He had kept his pledged word.
But Eleanor was still speaking, more or less into his ear.
'Besides, Bartholomew,' she said, 'there is another reason for my descent upon you. There were strangers in Great Dunmow, watchful strangers, watching me. I did not trust them.
Now, if you compare it with Little Dunmow, Great Dunmow may be a metropolis, but it holds no more than a hundred folk, young and old, and, were something untoward to take place, I would find myself without protection. So I up and came down to Greenwich.'
'Leaving our household behind, madam?' Hoare whispered. 'That makes little sense.'
'No, my dear. I brought the entire household along-Tom, Agnes, Jenny, Order the cat, Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all. It required the hiring of a wain.'
'I should imagine so,' he said. 'If we are to continue junketing about England like so many gypsies, we must betake ourselves to a wainwright and have a vehicle built to our order, from the keel up.'
'And you shall give it a new name for every voyage, the way you did Devastation, or whatever your pinnace was last named, before you decided to settle on a consistent name for her.'
'Nemesis.' Hoare's voice was absent. 'But tell me more about these strangers.'
'I have little more to tell you,' she answered. 'In a metropolis like Great Dunmow, strangers stand out, especially when they loiter about without any visible reason for doing so. They were townsmen, it seemed, shifty, and not overly strict about leaving the possessions of others alone. As I said, I did not like them or the oh-so-subtle watch they kept on me, so I came here.'
'And where did you leave your wainful of family?'
'Oh, as to that, dear Jane's cousin Augustine-imagine, Bartholomew, the foolishness of his father, John Austen, naming one of his sons Augustine-has gone off with his people to Jamaica on some business of his wife's family, and his house was to let. It is the other side of Blackheath, not more than half an hour's drive from the quay opposite Royal Duke. Very suitable it is, too. You shall see it and take proper command there as soon as the Service permits.
'And-oh! I quite forgot. I am sorry. Bartholomew, Tracy said I was to give you the news that his patient died. The man. He never recovered consciousness; 'a depressed fracture of the cranium,' he said. So there goes one of your sources of information. I would not care to be your prisoner, sir; they do tend to die off while in your custody.'
'Damn.' As Hoare drew on his breeches, he remembered, not for the first time, that his predecessor in Eleanor's affections had been an eminent physician and surgeon-much of his knowledge had rubbed off on his wife, as Hoare's own interests were evidently doing as well.
How Eleanor had guessed, Hoare did not know, but he had indeed been sure that, with skilled interrogation by Thoday and himself, he could have persuaded the leader of the river pirates to disclose the identity of the man Floppin' Poll had named as 'Sol.' Now only the mort herself remained as a source.
Floppin' Poll was of no help at all. Recovered from her disabling chill, she had recovered her spirits as well, and would not be coerced into more than describing the man 'Sol.'
Moreover, her description was null. Sol could have been a masked Chinaman or a black Fijian, for all she knew. He was utterly featureless. Besides, as Hoare and Thoday agreed when they stepped aside out of the young woman's hearing, she was hardly the most intelligent or observant creature alive.
'To tell the truth, sir, she's of no use to us as she sits,' Thoday said. 'I suggest that we have her followed and watched. More than likely, Sol will want to learn the outcome of the little adventure he arranged for us, and will find her to interrogate her. A competent watcher should be able to detect his approach, leave the woman, and follow him.'
'An excellent idea, Thoday. Have you a recommendation among your shipmates? A 'competent
