'Excuse me,' she said in a whisper of outrage no louder than Hoare's. 'I seem to have beshit myself.'
She rose stiffly from the chair, dropped her befouled undergarments, petticoats and all, and hastened to the washstand by the adjacent bed. She reached under it, pulled out the usual receptacle, and squatted over it, splashing audibly as she scrubbed.
'Ahh,' she said. She rose stiffly to kiss her rescuer.
'There,' she said with a mischievous smile. 'Let Mary Green and Floppin' Poll wring' 'em out and put 'em on if they wish. I hope they do; that way, I get to shit on 'em both.' Her language was not usually so earthy. She must be quite angry.
'We must gather Jenny and be off,' Hoare whispered as they left Sir Thomas's best guest bedroom and bore to starboard for the front stairs.
At the sound of voices raised still higher, in the hallway below them, they paused on the landing and peered over the banister, just as if they were the guard at the head of the back stairs. Or the occupants of a loge at the Haymarket. They could see clearly down into the well-lighted space. Like a riot between Montagues and Capulets, the civil war had burst out from behind the baize doors into the Frobisher family apartments, and the way to the front door, through which Mr. Goldthwait had passed him so many long hours ago, was blocked now by fighting figures.
'Hoare!' came an enraged squall. 'Goddamn you, Frobisher, you blundering frog-faced fool, where is the man? How could you have let him out of the room? What will Fouche have to say to you when he comes?'
If only Hoare had thought to open the front door before slipping up here, to simulate his flight. The shouter below them, he could see, was Mr. John Goldthwait, who had left his eternal smile elsewhere and was shouting at the knight-baronet from eighteen inches' distance. Sir Thomas was holding his own. Each man was backed by several followers, who appeared to have called a truce to their own mutual mangling so as to watch the masters slang each other.
'Oh, for my sling,' Eleanor breathed.
Goldthwait's next outcry was drowned in another of Sir Thomas's croaking roars and a smack. The knight had had enough, and had landed a wisty caster on the smaller man's cheek. Goldthwait went down. Round one to the gentry, Hoare said to himself, wildly. He almost imagined a voice offering five to three on the frog. Well and good, but the crowd still blocked the way downstairs and out. Goldthwait was on his feet again. Desperately, Hoare looked at Eleanor as if, in her eyes, he could find a way to freedom; calmly, she returned his look.
Behind them, a tiny clink sounded, and they spun toward the dark window in time to see Collis, Royal Duke's sweep and sneak, slide up the sash in dead silence and pocket a little jemmy. Lorimer the burglar has taught him well, Hoare told himself. He slipped within, an expert eel, and moved aside to permit the entry, one at a time, of Titus Thoday, Sergeant Leese, Sarah Taylor, and Jacob Stone, gunner's mate. Stone, Hoare could not help noticing, was wearing shoes-the first time Hoare had known him to do so.
'Parm me, sir,' Collis breathed, 'wile I shets thisyer winder. We daresn't want them folk belowdecks a-wakin' up from no draft blowin' down their necks, now does we?'
'Never mind that now, Collis,' Thoday whispered. And, to Hoare, 'Well met, sir.'
'Well met, indeed, Mr. Thoday,' Hoare whispered. 'You come just in time.'
'A deus ex machina, in fact,' his wife added.
'Now, let us collect Jenny and be off,' Hoare said.
'With respect, sir, there's no time for that. Look yonder.'
Below, the supine Goldthwait was staring up at them. Gloom or no gloom, their figures must be clearly visible.
'Get out of it, sir!' Leese cried, drawing his sword-bayonet with a hiss of steel. 'You an' yer lady can't 'elp 'ere. We'll hold 'em off!' Hoare knew the marine was right; it was Leese, not he, who was the hand-to-hand fighter. Besides, he was unaccountably weary. Below, the two factions had recombined and were clustering at the foot of the stairs. Hoare saw Goldthwait raise that handy little pistol, saw the black of its muzzle pointing at his eye, heard its 'pop,' felt the ball tear at his left ear.
Hoare gripped Thoday by the sleeve. 'Cut Jenny out, then, and bring her with you,' he whispered. 'She'll be hiding somewhere in the library downstairs. The room to larboard of the main door. Meet us at the Bow and Forest in Gracechurch Street.'
He took a vital second to shake each rescuer's hand, climbed out the still-open window, and drew Eleanor after him. As the two Hoares swarmed down the line up which the Royal Dukes had just swarmed, they heard above them the sound of battle rejoined.
Chapter XII
I'll not have it,' the leathery man snarled at his companion. 'The man's mine. Mine, I tell you, marked for my use and Joseph Fouche's, to help me bring the emperor to London and haul his triumphant chariot down to the Abbey. And I'll have the woman, too, before I'm through. Over and over again, before the dumb bastard's very eyes. Come along, you.' He yanked at the hand of the child dragging beside him.
'I want twenty men, twenty, d'ye hear? Hard men, men of their hands. Go find them. I'll be at the warehouse.
'Find them by noontime, or I'll cut out your gut and run you into the river at the end of it. Come on, you misbegotten wench, and you, too, you draggle-tailed drab, you. Bring the child with you, and don't let her out of your grips. If she escapes, you'll wish you'd never been born.'
Hoare set his empty plate and mug aside and sat back on the settle he had commandeered in the common room of the Bow and Forest. It was still early in the morning.
'O'Gock, zur,' the Esquimau said. 'Dan'l O'Gock, if it please yer worship. I be in Zur Tammas's service, or I were. Gamekeepers an' de like, mostly.'
Hoare looked questioningly into the friendly, swarthy, leathery, heavy-boned countenance of the man. He could be an elderly juvenile Grognard from across the Channel, or perhaps a misplaced muzhik from the Siberian steppes. Hoare knew him to be neither, of course.
'Very good, Dan'l O'Gock. But you asked to speak to me. Speak on, then, man.'
'I wants to say, zur, 'tis time we O'Gocks brook away from dem Frobishers and stood oop on our own.'
'Go on, O'Gock.'
Hoare could barely follow the man's dialect, a strange variation of heavy Dorset. But since there was no interpreter handy, he must do his best.
'Well, zur, w'en I were a lad I bin tole dat, long long ago, back in de ol' country, us 'uns was fisher-folk an' 'unters like, mostly. Zeemly us 'uns should be 'unters an' fisher-folk agin, zeein' it be in our blood. Us 'uns bean't 'oss-folk by natur' like youse folk be; no, zur.'
'And what about Sir Thomas?' Hoare asked.
' 'I'm, zur? W'y, 'e be moithered in de 'ead, 'e be, poor man. An' 'sides, w'ere 'e be a-goin', 'e won't be no 'elp to us O'Gocks, will 'e now?'
Hoare was not sure himself what was going to happen to Sir Thomas Frobisher, and he hardly knew how Dan'l O'Gock would know better. Perhaps, as the direct descendant of shamanistic savages, the man was privy to secret messages from the ether whose detection was long since lost to the civilized.
'What can I do for you, then?' he asked.
'W'y, zur, take me aboard yer brig, for now, an' let me show ye w'at kind o' zailor we'uns be. We be 'andy in zpecial boats, zur, like.'
'You would be, of course,' Hoare whispered. 'You are of Inuit stock, are you not?'
O'Gock goggled at him, almost like Sir Thomas.
'Why, yer worship, that I be, an' my people with me. But, beggin' yer parding, 'ow do ye be knowin' de name we 'uns use to name oursel's?'
Hoare explained briefly, then asked, 'How did you come to be carrying an Irish name, then?'
'Rackon 'twere best de folk could do with de name my great-great tole 'em, yer worship. We' uns don't name
