vanished. When, after an increasingly desperate search through his pockets, he had unearthed the ivory carving Lemuel Rabbett had bestowed upon him and offered it in play, it had taken ten minutes of his hardest haggling to gain its acceptance.
'Your hand, sir, I do declare,' Goldthwait said, laying down his own cards-facedown, as always when he had lost, 'and your daughter. I believe the pot suffices to pay her ransom. I suppose you would like her returned to your sight, even if it be only a reprieve-'
'If you please,' Hoare interrupted.
'— so, if you would be so kind, Sir Thomas, as to send one of your people for her…'
The knight rose and went to the door, where he issued orders to an invisible person waiting on the other side. In moments, Jenny hurtled past him and into Hoare's arms, pale hair flying, uttering muffled sounds. Her mouth was bound across with a length of dark blue silk. She was followed by the familiar, lumbering, pantalooned figure of Mary Green, Royal Duke's former cook. The woman refused to meet Hoare's eyes. Hoare bent to remove his daughter's gag.
'Ah, ah, ah, Captain! Not yet, sir!' came Goldthwait's warning voice. In his thin hand, Hoare's little pistol was out again, aimed this time at the child, so Hoare desisted. Jenny made an urgent gesture.
'She needs to relieve herself, can't you tell?' Sir Thomas said in a disgusted voice. He took Jenny by the hand and led her to the commode, from which he withdrew the necessary article. He turned his back while she squatted.
'Really, Mr. Goldthwait. Have you no sensibility whatsoever?' he said.
'Not really, Sir Thomas.' The man's expression, so consistently benign, appeared to crack a little. 'I am little acquainted with the needs of children.
'Sit down over there, child,' he said, pointing at a cricket in the far corner of the room. Jenny looked appealingly at the helpless Hoare, then obeyed his nod. Green followed, whipped a lanyard out of her pocket, and secured Jenny's legs and arms to the little walnut footstool. She was not rough, but very firm. Jenny had more sense than to struggle. Before long, she nodded and was asleep. Green disappeared-to resume her guard over Eleanor, Hoare supposed. He and Mr. Goldthwait played on, under the increasingly restive eye of their host.
A few hands later, the tension in the room rose to a quiet peak when Mr. Goldthwait declared a complicated hand, and reached for the pot.
'Keep your hand where it is, sir,' Sir Thomas said. 'How do you find a winning hand in those cards?'
'Why, there they are for any man to read,' was the reply.
Whether intentionally or inadvertently, Goldthwait had misread his cards.
'Unless you can improve the cards you have shown us, sir, you have not won this hand,' the knight said.
Goldthwait shook his head. Hoare showed his hand and took the pot.
'Pray do not do that again, sir.' Sir Thomas's voice was icy.
To his embarrassment, Hoare nearly committed the same gaffe two hands later, but caught himself before either of his companions noticed. Goldthwait must content himself with a sibilant 'tsk, tsk.'
Shortly after the church had rung three o'clock, they were startled in midhand by an eruption of voices outside the door. Above her silken gag, Jenny's eyes popped open in alarm.
'See what that's about, Frobisher, and silence it.' Mr. Goldthwait's voice was curt, and Hoare noted that, for the first time, he omitted the honorific. Could he be tiring? Before Sir Thomas could obey, the door was flung open, and the Esquimau appeared, distraught.
'Zur, zur!' he half shouted. 'Three of them Lunnon blaggards got into yer brandy, an they be a-runnin'…'
The racket was enough without his man's cry; Sir Thomas leapt from his seat and disappeared out the door, followed by Mr. Goldthwait.
'Damn you, sir,' Hoare heard the knight croak. 'Have you no decency? Bad enough that you should persist in toying His outraged voice faded into the bowels of the house.
Hoare was alone, with Jenny. Could he…? Well, if he were to wait until the dispute died down, only to pick up the charade where it had left off, he would be left still helpless, his womenfolk clutched between Goldthwait's mischievous paws. He might sweep Jenny away and elope out a window… but behind him, his Eleanor would remain trapped.
Putting his finger to his lips with a speaking look at Jenny, he removed his shoes. He tiptoed over to the cricket on which his pinioned daughter was now bouncing up and down like an India-rubber ball, untied the silken gag and pocketed it. Then he cast off the lanyards.
'Don't look, Da,' Jenny whispered, scrambling again for the commode and its chamber pot. 'I can't wait.'
'I can't wait, either, child,' Hoare whispered in answer. 'I must get to your mother while the getting's good. Hide, girl, till I return.'
On his way out, he filched a look at his opponent's hand- and paused, astonished. Both were incomplete, the interruption having taken place before Sir Thomas had dealt either Mr. Goldthwait's final card or Hoare's own. Played out, Goldthwait's cards would have made for an interesting hand.
Far more interesting-astonishing, in fact-was that each hand held the same card: the trey of clubs. Someone had been cheating. It could only have been Sir Thomas. But how? And why? And which player had the knight- baronet been attempting to help or to hinder?
Thereupon, Hoare himself cheated. Vengefully, he threw both hands into the glowing grate, and followed them with the rest of the deck.
There was no time for any more of this. He gave the air a resounding, encouraging kiss for the vanished Jenny's ears alone, and departed.
Outside the frowsty library, the hallway was empty, as was the broad, elegant stairway. The hullabaloo came from behind the baize doors behind it. He tiptoed up the stairs, ears pricked to catch the sound of anyone returning from backstairs. Up the curving treads he went, remembering the trick he had learned as a lad on the way to and from his raids on the midnight buttery and keeping well to the wall so as to minimize any possible creaks. Across a shadowy windowed landing, up the second flight to a cross corridor. To his left, he saw nothing but deeper shadows; to the right, some distance down the corridor, candlelight streamed from an open door. He would go that way first.
As he crept along, close to the side of the corridor with the candle-lit doorway, he realized that the sound of the turmoil below-stairs was now coming to him from ahead.
And he was about to be discovered. Another person was approaching him from the direction of the affray, coming through the dimness at Hoare's own cautious crawl. Hoare stopped, as did the other. He brought forward a hand, and the stranger did likewise.
The move broke Hoare's illusion. Once again, he had failed to recognize his own likeness, this time in a full- length mirror sited where the corridor made a dogleg. Who was he, then? he wondered fleetingly, and crept on.
At the end of the corridor, he saw more candlelight, a banister, and a figure leaning over it, looking downward. So: the watch had let himself be distracted by the goings-on belowdecks.
Softly, softly, Hoare crept on, past the open door. Thinking to hear movement within, he risked a peep but could see nothing more than part of a dimly lit bedchamber. He must not tarry.
Sir Thomas's bullfrog roar sounded from below. On its heels came a screech of rage-Goldthwait's, Hoare hoped, as he crept, crept. And knelt, and grabbed the leaning watch by the heels, and tipped him over the banister into emptiness. He went with a little shriek of horror, crashed into the next flight below, and, as Hoare leaned over the rail in his turn to watch, tumbled onto the painted landing with a crack and lay still. Broke his bloody neck, Hoare hoped.
But again, he must not tarry. The men below might have overheard the watch's stifled cry; if they had, they would be upon him any second. He retraced his steps to the lighted door, knelt down and crawled into the room. As he expected, his wife was within.
The chair into which Eleanor Hoare had been bound might be comfortable, but whoever had done the binding was a professional, and she was unable to welcome him with head and eyes. Her mouth, like Jenny's, had been bound, though in her case the silken gag was a proper widowy black. She smelled like a very small child who had been neglected.
Hoare whipped out of his pocket the keen clasp knife he had procured in Halifax and kept on his person ever since, and cut his wife out of bondage.
