seen. Never mind, Hoare thought, the ones from Weymouth had been a scurvy lot. He had had to knock one of them off Sir Thomas's own doorstep. He could not believe the kinds of Londoner the man could attract would be any better. He let himself in.
At the library door, he looked at the aftermath of a tornado, a typhoon, or, more surely, of a tantrum. In what must be a limbo of bitterness, Sir Thomas was tramping back and forth about the wreckage of his cozy library, muttering disconsolately to himself.
Hoare's interruption into Sir Thomas's guarded castle broke into what was evidently the closing stage of a prolonged tantrum. Still purple in the face, the knight was striding back and forth through the tumble of his library, kicking at small windows of ivory counters and fulminating heavily over his property.
'Lost, broken, and stolen,' Hoare heard him say. 'My Russia leather chairs, scratched beyond repair. And who's to pay for my seventeen decks of cards from Brook's, at a guinea apiece, hey?'
Upon seeing Hoare, he spun with a goggling glare and a faltering attempt to bellow and bully.
'You! How dare you show your face here?'
Suspecting the knight was ready to spring upon him, Hoare put one of the defaced Russia leather chairs between them and leaned over its high back, returning stare for stare in silence, with a hard gray basilisk eye. Gradually, Sir Thomas's snarls abated into growls, and thence into mumbles. Finally, he dropped into the opposite chair and gaped silently back at his oppressor.
'Sir Thomas,' Hoare whispered, 'I must inform you that you are about to be taken to Whitehall, and thence the Tower, accused of high treason against the Crown, and tried.'
Here, he knew well, he was treading on air, for he had not the slightest notion of the treatment the authorities would actually accord a dubbed knight and a baronet of the realm under such circumstances. Indeed, he had no idea which of the many competing authorities he should select to receive such a person. Nor had he any authority in the case.
Sir Thomas's jaw dropped, then clamped tight as he leaned forward as if ready again to spring upon his tormentor.
'Treason, you say? Treason? I, a traitor?' His voice rose again, to the point where Hoare feared the outbreak of another tantrum. 'I, Thomas, rightful king of England, scion of the right line of Cerdic? You're mad!'
''Right line of Cerdic' or no, Sir Thomas,' Hoare whispered in reply. 'Consider. Even assuming the validity of your claim, can you imagine Edward Plantagenet betraying his kingdom to the French? Or King Alfred? Or Queen Elizabeth? Nonsense, man… As Sir Thomas, you have already pled guilty of treason. If you were indeed rightful king of England, an could even prove your… claim before both Houses of Parliament and be crowned King Thomas the First in the Abbey, what would happen next, eh?' 'I…'
'Off you'd go to the Tower, that's what. And off would go your head, just like King Charles's… and your son's head, and your daughter's, too, as far as I know.'
Even as Hoare declaimed, he knew he was speaking wild words into the wind. But, he knew, no rational ones he could summon would ever reach the squat man he was addressing.
'Think, Sir Thomas, think. Would you betray England- your England, if you will-to her enemies?'
Fustian, pure fustian. Stand aside, Garrick.
Sir Thomas slumped heavily into the ruined Russia leather, and began to talk. He needed no prompting from Hoare, who unobtrusively withdrew from his pocket the sheaf of paper slips he carried about with him for use with strangers, and began to take notes upon them. The head peach itself had ripened; it began to spill its juices into Hoare's ears, to the last drop. For the rest of the morning, Hoare only needed to listen to Sir Thomas gobble his indignant tale until it, too, came to its end. Long before then, Hoare had exhausted his slips; he had then gathered up a heap of foolscap from the desk, moved to the card table, and continued to write the knight-baronet's words down as they flowed.
It was the first time he had heard it from the man's own wide lipless mouth. Sir Thomas was the acknowledged senior of the ancient Frobisher clan, a clan that had, in the days of the Saxons, been acknowledged by the world as the inheritors of the right line of Cerdic, and the crown of Britain. Thereafter, for generation after generation, the usurping dynasts-Normans, Angevins, Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and now Hanoverians- had denied his forebears England's crown, throne, and war-cry.
For mad reasons of his own, Sir Thomas vowed he would have it no more. He had commenced to assemble around him a band of true-believing, true-blooded followers sworn to his support. To a man, they were aristocrats, 'or at least armiger, sir,' Sir Thomas conceded, and paused to draw breath.
He now moved into territory unknown to his listener. Hoare began to pay closer attention. As the scheme unfolded, it reminded Hoare of the notorious Babington plot, in which callow young gentlemen, followers of Mary Queen of Scots, had conspired to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with their own choice of goddess. They had all been betrayed, tracked down, and beheaded. There was even a similarity on the matter of portraits, for one of the Babington plotters had arranged to have the joint forms of himself and the other key members of the scheme delineated, standing-or so, at least, Hoare had been told-before their royal victim's disembodied head.
Putting the concept into effect was a different matter entirely. It would involve assassinating Mr. Pitt; selected members of his cabinet, whom Sir Thomas named-Hoare noting that he did not include in this little list the name of the present First Lord; the poor demented king and all his sons, including, to Hoare's surprise, the malignant Ernest, Duke of Cumberland; and the highest-ranking admirals and generals of Britain's armed forces. Cumberland, Hoare thought, had behaved equivocally enough of late to deserve being held aside for possible use.
Most of the murderers, the knight declared, were to be drawn from among those young men of family who had committed themselves to the Frobisher cause. These individuals could be expected to have easy access to the most prominent persons on the list. As for the rest, Mr. Goldthwait offered his own ruffians as experienced assassins.
'How many murders were intended?' was Hoare's natural query.
'Executions, if you please, sir,' Sir Thomas replied in a testy voice. 'No malice was intended. But, in answer to your question, let me see…' He began to count.
'Thirty-two, more or less,' he said at last. 'Thirty-three, if you count Sir Hugh Abercrombie. He had to be eliminated earlier than we planned.'
'Why was that?'
'Goldthwait had come to believe Sir Hugh had begun to suspect him. He was no longer being made privy to state secrets. Then, too, you had popped up again, like a hateful jack-in-the-box.'
The knight now launched himself upon a discourse upon John Goldthwait, Esquire. Although the latter seldom traveled outside London, his Admiralty duties had called him into the entourage of William, Duke of Clarence and titular Admiral of the Fleet, when that authentic royal duke had chosen to attend the court-martial of Arthur Gladden on the charge of murdering Adam Hay, captain of the new frigate Vantage.
It had been then, of course, that Hoare and Goldthwait had first met. On the same occasion, the latter had also met Sir Thomas Frobisher and, as was his wont, wrung his inmost thoughts from him. Mr. Goldthwait had immediately recognized the potential the knight-baronet offered his cause.
Sir Thomas and his adherents, Goldthwait was convinced, could become a powerful factor in his own rise to power as the prime English agent of Fouche. That foxy-haired trimmer Joseph Fouche, 'Duke of Otranto' in Bonaparte's jury-rigged aristocracy of cut-throats and muffin-men, was now Bonaparte's master of intelligence. At least his experience was relevant to Sir Thomas's plot, for he had been among the revolutionaries who sent fat Louis and his silly wife to the guillotine.
Since Bonaparte had grabbed power, as Sir Thomas learned bit by bit, and had finally had confirmed from the man's own confident, smiling confession, Mr. Goldthwait had been in French pay. Ever since, he had been applying the growing power and the funds this gave him into achieving his self-imposed mission of becoming de facto ruler of the United Kingdom.
Upon handing his soul to Fouche, Goldthwait had become Bonaparte's principal man in London. When Bonaparte in turn raised the Tricolor over the Tower, Goldthwait knew he himself would become the secret keystone of the conqueror's regime.
King Thomas, re-establisher of the royal line of Frobisher, would become his pompous, powerless puppet, his crowned figurehead.
In combination, the plot cut straight to the objectives of both men: Sir Thomas's, to gain his family its
