events, and then had Eleanor and himself ferried ashore, where he handed her into the chaise and directed the boy to take them home to Dirty Mill.
The early dusk was finally drawing in when the cob, recognizing that it was nearing a place that was home for it as well as its passengers, broke into a spanking trot. Hoare had dreaded this moment. Although he knew that, immediately upon getting the news from Hoare, Mr. Clay had sent a detachment here, he still envisioned the place, naturally enough, as he had left it: cold, empty of all visible life save the cat Order, ransacked, inhabited by the corpses, or at least the ghosts, of the manservant Tom and the maid Agnes. ^
Instead, as the chaise drew up to the door Hoare had left ajar behind him, he found it open again indeed, but well-lit from behind. The windows on either side, too, were aglow. In the doorway stood his servant Whitelaw and the spectacled librarian McVitty.
The woman was smiling a welcome, and Hoare even thought to detect a similar smile on his silent manservant's wooden face. With a relieved sigh, he stepped to one side and let his wife precede him.
'Welcome back, ma'am, and sir!' McVitty said, speaking for both herself and Whitelaw.
In the warmth and light of the hallway, Hoare looked first at Eleanor with more than a little anxiety. Surely she would be remembering the last time she had seen this place. She would be recalling struggle, capture, being hauled away with their daughter. How would her natural feelings express themselves?
She blinked.
'Well, Bartholomew,' she said, 'the place is far more peaceful than it was when I left it, I must say. Good. And do I smell cinnamon? Even better. Will you give us fifteen minutes to refresh ourselves before tea, McVitty?'
With that, she preceded Hoare up the stairs and into their bedroom.
The cat Order was curled upon their bed, occupying its very middle as though entitled to the entire bed. This had been strictly forbidden the beast by Jenny; evidently it had decided to take advantage of its mistress's absence to break all bounds of propriety.
Hoare inspected the animal from a distance.
'Well, cat, you do make yourself at home,' he whispered. 'But this happens to be my bed, and my wife's, not yours.'
He reached for Order. The cat hissed at him, and dabbed with his paw. Resisting the impulse to swat the beast across the room, Hoare withdrew his own paw and licked off the blood.
'I don't really speak Cat very well,' he confessed.
'You don't speak anything very well, Bartholomew,' Eleanor said with a twinkle and a grin, and kissed him.
'It's just as well,' he whispered as soon as his mouth was free. 'I was half-expecting a scene.'
'A scene?'
'Yes. You should know, better than I, the obligatory scene in ladies' novels, in which the heroine's favorite pet pines and moans and starves when its mistress goes adrift.'
'I do know, Bartholomew,' she said, 'even though I seldom bother with that sort of three-volume trash, but I am surprised that you should know. I would have expected something more grave.'
'Like Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I suppose?'
'Or Gulliver. Far more subtle, much nearer your taste, I would suppose.
'But come,' she said. 'Let us breathe for ourselves a bit, before we go belowdecks for tea. I want my own dear tuffet again.'
She looked up into Hoare's face, and he looked down at hers.
'Never fear, Bartholomew, our Jenny will be back with us soon,' she said. 'She is a tough young person, and she will be wanting her Order in her arms.'
'I shall have her back.' Hoare's whisper was grim.
Later, she stirred in Hoare's arms.
'That was quite a mill, was it not, Bartholomew?'
'Eh?' he whispered sleepily.
'Sir Thomas and Goldthwait,' she said, 'just the other night. The frog and the weasel. Fibbed each other smartly, they did! No sense of style at all, of course, but after all, neither of them would have the wit to whip a top. But plenty of snuff… game chickens, both of'em.'
'What?' Hoare was now wide awake, and astonished. 'Where did you learn that cant, if you please, madam?'
'Bartholomew, Bartholomew,' she said. 'Remember, I grew up among brothers. One was a beast, another a beau sabreur. Don't you think I witnessed more mills than you could count, between them, and among their crowd?'
'Oh dear, oh dear,' whispered Hoare.
Later still, perhaps because of his assertive partridge of a wife, his next step came clear to Hoare. 'Goldthwait won't lie doggo for long,' he whispered to her. 'It isn't in him to do anything but attack. Remember, he knows himself to be all-powerful. God, if you will. And whenever did God need to defend Himself?
'Besides, his masters across the Channel will be pressing him to act. The loss of Frobisher will have hurt him with Fouche. He cannot afford that-not now.'
He looked down at his wife. She was asleep, curled into him like a solid brown cat, snoring ever so faintly. He would not awaken her when McVitty brought their tea.
The next morning, Hoare hoisted himself stiffly aboard the cob and took his thinking with him north across Blackheath and through Greenwich, to Royal Duke. There, he repeated to Mr. Clay, Taylor, and Leese the conclusion he had given Eleanor the night before.
'First, though,' he asked, 'could any of the ship's remaining people still be Goldthwait's?'
Clay shook his head. He looked almost insulted. Thoday's kind of people would be the most likely residual traitors, and Thoday, of course, was still upriver, hoping to put himself on Goldthwait's trace, so Hoare's question was useless in that informal division of Royal Dukes.
Sergeant Leese shook his lantern-jawed head. 'My lads be too countrified for that sort of work, sir. Goldthwait 'ud deem 'em too stupid for 'im.
'More fule 'e, sir. 'Oo was it put the idee in Thoday's 'ead about that there bollock knife? Gideon Yeovil, private, that's 'oo.'
Hoare had heard nothing of this. 'Tell me about it,' he said.
'Simple enough, sir, when you comes down to it. You know the knife I means, sir?'
Hoare nodded.
'Well, sir, Yeovil recognized it right off fer wot it was. 'E'd been by way of bein' a shepherd 'imself oncet, before 'e 'listed.
' ' 'T'ain't tellin' truth,' 'e sez. ' 'Tis old bollock-knife, it be, all rusty. Ain't no live shepherd's bollock-knife. We-uns keep 'em razor sharp, Sarge, or the cut goes bad an' beast dies. Been buried in sod fer years,' 'e says.
' 'E told Mr. Thoday out it musta belonged to one-a them shepherds what died in the big snow on Dartmoor in eighty-eight.'
'Makes sense, I suppose, Leese,' Hoare said, suspecting that the sergeant was quite ready to keep on praising his private's sharpness until it wore down.
'How about you, Taylor?' The big woman, quite unabashed by the scolding her captain had poured upon her only moments before, looked thoughtfully into space for a minute before replying.
'Once in a while, sir, I have had my doubts about Blassingame. Of course, he is not a familiar; Mr. Thoday should be speaking of him, and not I.'
Blassingame was Royal Duke's master prestidigitator, juggler, knife-thrower, and lock picker. As a known thief, then, he would be a natural suspect. But Taylor did not appear to have finished her remarks. Hoare waited.
'However, I learn from others that Blassingame has no love for Mr. Goldthwait, or indeed for any of the secretarial persons in Whitehall. It seems that he believes himself to have been inveigled by a group of the less savory young men of the Admiralty into burglarizing a house of ill fame. He was caught, gaoled, and nearly lost his right hand to a prison bully. I would deem him as safe as…' She paused.
