be able to bear an 'and under the circumstances, sir.' '
Upon Blassingame's return, at four bells in the morning watch, a sprinkling of snow had begun to sift from the night sky. He was accompanied by an apparition. Or was it 'apparitions'? For the moment, Hoare could not be sure.
'Bubble and Squeak, sir,' Hoare understood his man to say in introducing whatever it was.
'What?' Hoare whispered.
'Bubble and Squeak, sir. This-un be Bubble, this-un be Squeak.'
As if to demonstrate that two separate entities confronted Hoare, Bubble made to knuckle his forehead. There was, Hoare thought, something peculiar about his gesture. Squeak essayed a bob, and emitted an eponymous sound.
Bubble was unquestionably the most hirsute man Hoare had ever seen. In the wintry gloom, nothing could be seen from behind the wild growth on his head but the dim glow of his eyes, the protrusion of a flat nose, and the gleam of a bashful grin. More hair thrust out of his rags, and below the chopped-off sleeves that covered his arms. Now Hoare could explain the oddity of the man's salute; he was devoid of hands.
'Bubble were topman in Diligence, storeship, sir, when the Algerines took 'er in ninety-three,' Blassingame explained. ' 'E were ransomed, sir, 'e's tole me, but 'e's tried to escape in a skiff, an' they chopped off'is mauleys 'fore lettin' 'im loose.'
'Barstids,' Bubble declared in a low placid, voice.
'They put 'im up in 'ospital 'ere,' Blassingame went on, 'an' Squeak took up wif'im.'
'Squeak,' said Squeak, a heap of miscellaneous rags enclosing what was surely a female being, and was clinging so closely to the handless man that Hoare could not tell where one ended and the other began.
'They jumped ship a few years back, they did,' Blassingame said, 'an' settled down to the hat-out lay 'ereabouts, a-beggin' off the sailors in from across river, an' a-dossin' down in the tunnels underneaf the buildin's a-runnin' back up 'ill. Between 'em, sir, they knows them tunnels up an' down, back an' forth. 'Ole warren of'em there be, ye knows, sir.'
Hoare had heard.
'That barstid Ogle, what's took up with the toff from Town, 'e knows 'oles most as good as we does, sir,' Bubble declared.
' 'E means Goldthwait, I'm sure, sir,' Blassingame said.
'Then Goldthwait is hereabouts?'
'Sure of it, sir.'
'Hmm,' Hoare whispered. Like a snowman, a plan began to roll up and take shape in his mind.
'We are expecting snow tomorrow, I hear,' he said.
'Or the next night, perhaps. Heavy at times, too,' Mr. Clay said at his side.
'That would make for considerable inconvenience to all hands, I think.' Snow and its accompanying ice, indeed, posed many extraordinary hazards for vessels under sail, as Hoare himself remembered much too well from the winters he had spent, on station in Beetle, off Cape Sable, years ago.
'No landsman, I'm sure, will be surprised if we take precautionary measures,' he went on.
With this, Hoare began to prepare his battle plan. He remembered.
'You sailors use as many bells, it seems, as all the parishes of London put together,' John Goldthwait had told him at that first meeting in Chancery Lane. He might consider himself not only omnipotent but omniscient as well. In fact, though, as Hoare knew from that one careless remark, beyond tidewater he was ignorant as any newborn babe. Admiralty official he might be, but he knew nothing of the sea and seamen's ways. 'Keep close to my desk, and never go to sea, And I can be the ruler of the King's navee,' Mr. Goldthwait might have caroled of a night. Liking the notion, Hoare promptly popped it into that little mental commonplace book of his. Its reappearance told him he had recovered from thirty-six hours on his feet.
Goldthwait's eyes might be ignorant of the sea, but they would surely be as sharp as his mind. So: to those eyes and those of any of his people, Royal Duke must appear unbuttoned, relaxed and roistering over her captain's escape, with his wife, from Gracechurch Street. From the Greenwich Port Captain, then, Hoare obtained permission to tow Royal Duke into the dock.
The memory of his first, horrible experience in command of Royal Duke in Portsmouth was vivid in Hoare's memory as he watched Mr. Clay and the seagoing clerks bring the brig handily in and make her fast, her larboard side next the pier, with doubled dock lines and springs leading forward from her quarter and aft from her bows.
It was not until deep dusk of the following day that they rigged the awning, and it was not until then that Hoare revealed his plan and made certain additional preparations.
After completing them, the party lay below for supper; they then left a few lucky comrades behind to roister noisily, took up their assigned positions on deck and overside in Hoare's pinnace and the green launch, and waited- in the knowledge that they might have to go through the whole rigmarole again, night after night, until the attack descended upon them. If that happened, Hoare had assured them, each Royal Duke would have his turn on roistering duty.
At the entry port squatted Blassingame, who had mysteriously gone missing for two days after introducing Bubble and Squeak and who, as punishment, had been deprived of his roistering watch and placed on anchor watch of nights. From his slurred voice, however, his shipmates had comforted him with more than apples, for Hoare could hear him moaning an endless, tuneless, tipsy song. Hoare lodged himself with a stout hatchet under the starboard shrouds of Royal Duke's foremast, where he settled down, adjusted his lanky form to resemble a layabout keg as much as possible, and, his breath sweeping softly upstream on a steady easterly wind, made ready for another night of alert, snowbound idleness.
It was the second night of roistering and waiting. There was silence on deck; from below came only the cheerful sound of voices and an occasional burst of song. A faint light rose from the skylight amidships. Good. The roisterers were in full swing. The roistering, incredibly, sounded a trifle forced in Hoare's ears. It went to show, he thought sleepily, that at bottom the Royal Dukes were not true roaring seamen. The moon, just past full, was late in rising, and when it rose, it was quickly quenched by a thickening cloud layer. It began to snow, more thickly by the minute. Hoare sat against the coach-house, outboard of the awning, concealed in a loose boat cloak.
Before very long, Hoare realized that he was seeing much more than he would have expected to see under these weather conditions. In fact, despite the snowfall, the brig's full length lay open to his sight, in an eerie rosy glow. He puzzled, then realized that the light derived from the huge mass of London's lamps and candles, reflected from the clouds. Well, so be it. There was nothing he could do about it; moreover, the canopy still cast a shadow.
From between two dockside buildings came the softest of rustles, from below Royal Duke's cutwater came the softest of splashes. As Hoare watched, a shadowy arm reached up, groped about, grasped Royal Duke's rail at the heads, and heaved up a shadowy figure. There was the tiny snap of someone's thumb against fingers; a second figure joined the first, a third, and then a fourth. One at a time, each shadow slipped over the coaming in the bows, beyond the rigged canopy. Hoare turned his eyes aft without budging his head; he would remain a keg until every invader was well into the bag. In ones and twos, more swarmed aboard, until Hoare counted a near dozen. Three carried glowing objects-slow match, most likely. Out of the corner of his eye, he clearly saw a figure standing below Royal Duke in the dock's trodden snow, face upraised in his direction, just as he had last seen it: Mr. Goldthwait. Just behind him stood another form. The man Ogle?
'I shall break him!' came his enemy's enraged croak, 'with a rod of iron! I shall dash him in pieces like a potter's vessel!'
Crack! The first caller's feet went out from under him, and then another's. Hoare set fingers to lips and sounded his emergency whistle. Its shriek filled the air.
'Now!' Bold cried from the fore crosstrees. He cast off the awning. From her post in the main top, Taylor followed suit. As the canvas fell flopping over the intruders, the roisterers swarmed up from the fore hatch and the lurkers overside from the boats. In an orderly circle, they began to work their way over the awning, belaying pins in hand, stomping and thumping anything that moved underneath as they went. Grunts of distress came from beneath the squirming awning. The pair on the snowy pier paused, alarmed perhaps.
A cleaver appeared from below, ripped the canvas, and a familiar head broke out.
'Welcome back aboard, Green,' Leese said in a savage voice. He swatted the woman's cleaver away and
