Hoare and the matter of treason

Chapter XI

I cannot be troubled with your petty complaints at this time, sir," said the smaller man. "I have more important matters on my mind, and so should you, if your interest in bringing this matter to a successful conclusion is as important to yourself as you have been claiming."

The host could not stifle a gasp of outrage.

"You do not dare, sir, to adopt that tone to me-not to me, above all."

"Spare me your bombast for the nonce, sir," the guest said. "You have yet to achieve your objective, and hence to deserve the homage you believe will become your due. You need my help; you know that.

"Now, here is what we must do. The females are safe, gagged, and secured, as I directed?"

"Bound, sir, seated at opposite ends of my own bedchamber. In reasonable comfort. And guarded."

"Bedchamber, eh? So you have… er… intentions with respect to one of them? Or both, perhaps?"

"Sir!"

"Pray step up and confirm that all is well. Oh, and while you are at it, make sure that the guard is firmly instructed to remain outside your bedroom door. Should the least hint reach my ears that either female has been interfered with, by anyone, the person or persons responsible will be subject to my extreme displeasure."

"After what your men told us about their behavior toward the woman Agnes, I am surprised at your sudden missishness."

"She was a servant. The females abovestairs are a different matter entirely."

Hoare found the house at 18, Gracechurch Street imposing enough-little less than a mansion. The steps up to the high door were wide and marble, and the balustrades wrought iron with polished brass rails. The windows were as dark as those he had left behind at Dirty Mill. Hoare knocked sharply. After a short, endless wait, a small port appeared in the door, a darker spot in the black, and a cold neutral voice said, "You brought support, I see. You were instructed to come alone, and warned of the consequences should you disobey. Good…"

"Wait!" Hoare's whisper was an agonizing rasp. "A hired guide, and no more. I lose myself in London. Please…"

The craven sound of his own pleading voice revolted him, but it must have satisfied the doorman. There was a further wait. Then, "Very good. A pleasure to see you again, sir." The voice was no longer cold, but cordial. With the grinding of a rusty key, the door was opened and held for Hoare to enter. The entryway being dark, Hoare could not make out the doorman's features, but the voice was familiar.

"This way, sir," it said. "We can begin to carry out our little piece of business more comfortably in our host's library." He opened the inner door, and the lamplight from within revealed his face. A small, lean, weary-looking man, he was Mr. John Goldthwait.

Without remarking on Hoare's startle, Mr. Goldthwait led him down a hall and past a graceful sweep of stairway, to a heavy walnut door, guarded by two persons. The one to larboard was Floppin' Poll, the dollymop who had taken part in the attack on the wherry bearing Hoare and Thoday down to Greenwich. The other, a swarthy man clad in a simple livery, must belong to the owner of the house. His shock of coarse black hair was unpowdered, his cheekbones prominent, his eyes slitted. He looked oddly familiar.

When the man gave him an unmistakable wink out of one of those slits of eyes, Hoare remembered. He had seen him on the box of a certain berlin, waiting at the door of Weymouth's St. Ninian's Church. He had identified him then as an Esquimau.

Mr. Goldthwait stopped at the door.

"Oh, I almost forgot," he said, looking up at Hoare with a winning smile. "The search. Pray raise both arms in the air." He produced a small, plain pistol.

"I believe I have seen that pistol before, sir," Hoare whispered. He had secreted it in his own little pinnace. In fact, come to think of it, he had not seen it since Nemesis had been searched and looted last summer, off Weymouth. Like his beautiful Kentucky rifle, it had flown.

"Perhaps you have, sir," Goldthwait said dismissively. "Never mind. I told you to raise your hands."

Hoare obeyed. Mr. Goldthwait ran his left hand swiftly along both sides of Hoare's body, pausing suggestively at the bulge at his crotch. Hoare could not restrain himself from flinching. Floppin' Poll snickered.

"Hmm," said the searcher. "Well-hung. And long deprived, I see." He continued the search down Hoare's legs.

"Very good, sir. And now…" He opened the walnut door. Upon sighting them, the library's occupant rose, as if reluctantly, from a Russia leather chair. One of three such chairs that surrounded three sides of a well-lit mahogany table, it was identical with the two in which Hoare and Mr. Goldthwait had sat, not so long ago, in the latter's apartments, and with the ruined one in the late Mr. Ambler's chambers. The fourth side of the table faced a warm, welcoming fire of clean cannel coal.

"Here we are, then," Mr. Goldthwait said. "You know Sir Thomas Frobisher, I believe. Our roy… er… eminent host." His voice was loaded with ironic laughter.

"You brought the portraits, Captain? Yes, of course. I see you did. I trust you enjoyed their perusal, and that they suffered no damage while in your possession."

"They are in the same condition, sir, as when I purchased them from the artist's wife," Hoare whispered. "Purchased them, I say, should you wish to pursue the manner of my acquiring them.

"Now, where are Mrs. Hoare and Miss Jenny? I wish… to have done with this business and begone."

"Tsk, tsk." Mr. Goldthwait made the sibilant little sound seem almost reproachful. "Oh, not so fast, sir." he said. "The matter is just a wee bit more complex than you appear to believe."

Hoare felt his heart grow cold.

"'Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?' " he murmured.

Mr. Goldthwait's eyes opened a trifle, only to that extent did he drop his armor of cordiality.

"I do not understand you, sir," he said.

"Oh, I believe you do, Mr. Goldthwait," Hoare whispered. For, upon the sight of the woman at the library door, the hard truth had dawned on him. The man before him was both the "Saul" mentioned in those ciphers that had puzzled him so deeply, and the "Sol" to whom Floppin' Poll had referred during her interrogation aboard Royal Duke.

Goldthwait shrugged. His smile returned.

"So be it, then," he said. "As I just said, the matter is more complex than you believe. As you shall learn shortly."

Out of the corner of his eye, Hoare kept Sir Thomas in view. What was the knight-baronet's part in this? How had Mr. Goldthwait come to arrange this matter in what must be Sir Thomas's townhouse, opened when he came up to Town to attend Parliament? Was the host looking more than a little displeased with the proceedings? His likeness was among the ones Hoare had brought as his womenfolks' ransom, so he must be involved in this affair-and not on the side of Britain. He could well be the "Ahab" of the ciphers. If so, it appeared from his demeanor tonight, he-though the owner of this house and therefore his host-was clearly the junior of the two kings used as code-name in the ciphers, and was discomfited with the rank.

"We shall become better acquainted, Captain, than we are now," Mr. Goldthwait said in that gratingly friendly way of his, "for we shall be working together for a long, long time. At least I hope so, for the sake of all parties involved. So perhaps Sir Thomas would be kind enough to offer us refreshment. Do take a seat."

Sir Thomas jumped, but rose awkwardly and went to a castered mahogany sideboard before a bank of neatly arrayed bookshelves, where he reached for decanter and glasses.

"I would find it distasteful to accept either Sir Thomas's directed hospitality or your own," Hoare said, without accepting the proffered chair. "I do not consider this a social occasion."

Mr. Goldthwait shrugged, and gave Sir Thomas an intimate wink. "Then it will be just you and I to enjoy your port, Sir Thomas," he said.

"I do not know you as a gentleman, sir," Hoare whispered, "nor do I wish to. And… while Sir Thomas and I have our differences, I am astonished to see a man of his station-a gentleman, beyond dispute-engaged in what I have begun to believe to be a matter of treason. Once again, be so kind as to bring my family to me, and we shall take ourselves off, leaving your bloody portraits behind."

Mr. Goldthwait seated himself and steepled his hands below his face. His voice remained affable.

"That is not the way I choose to proceed, sir," he said. "Your people shall be returned to you when you have won them… or earned them. The decision, like the power, is mine."

"I do not understand, sir."

"My meaning should be clear, Captain Hoare," Mr. Goldthwait said. "During the past year or so, you have put me to considerable trouble and inconvenience. First, you interfered in the work that Edward Morrow was doing for me, and caused his demise at a time when he was just getting into his professional stride as my aide. I did not have bombs planted in His… current… Majesty's ships out of mere pleasure, you know. I have responsibilities, and a mission."

Hoare realized that, unknowing, he had just taken a chair himself. So there went his posture of standing, defiant. Ah, well, there would be worse to come, if he was not mistaken. But what was this about "current" majesty? Oh, of course. The reference would be to the bee in Sir Thomas's bonnet. But Mr. Goldthwait was still cataloguing his shipful of grievances against Bartholomew Hoare.

"And then, there was that matter of HRH the Duke of Cumberland, the plan I had laid to bring him into alliance with me, and your breaking up of that plan. Unforgettable, sir, and difficult to forgive. I am sure that Sir Thomas will share my view of that matter."

Mr. Goldthwait glanced across at their host. If Hoare read the knight-baronet's expression properly, Sir Thomas was far from being at one with his colleague at this particular moment. After all, Hoare reminded himself, Mr. Goldthwait had seduced Walter Spurrier, the ringleader of the Nine Stone Circles plot, from allegiance to Sir Thomas to a similar fealty to John Goldthwait, Esquire-a mere gentleman, and a dubious one at that. That could hardly sit well with "Sir Tom."

Worse from the knight's viewpoint would be the certainty that Mr. Goldthwait's aim in inveigling Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, had been to get his participation in overthrowing the rest of the duke's own family, beginning with fat Farmer George himself and going on to Wales, Kent, Clarence, and the rest. All told, an unpalatable crew, but none quite as unsavory as Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. Since Sir Thomas had his own strong views on the subject of coronal legitimacy, conflict in the cabal was certain.

But Mr. Goldthwait was still expounding.

"In short, Captain Hoare, you are in a large though intangible debt to both Sir Thomas and myself. Matters of pride as well as pence are concerned. A debt principally to myself, of course-although, if I understand Sir Thomas correctly, he, too, has suffered indignity at your hands."

"Bats," Hoare thought he heard Sir Thomas mutter.

"Now, sir, I have the opportunity to indulge myself, for a pleasant interlude, in a bit of innocent merriment, at a modest expense of your own self-esteem. So I propose a pleasant evening at cards.

"You do play, sir?" Mr. Goldthwait assumed an expression of anxious hope. "Sir Thomas will stand arbiter for us, won't you, sir? Come, I'll take no denial."

This continued jovial tone of his sent a grue down Hoare's back. He hesitated, while Mr. Goldthwait watched him intently, unable to suppress a gleam of private glee. He was a cat, crouching over its prey in hopes that it would escape to be recaptured over and over again, until its heart finally gave out and it died, dishonored and besmeared.

Between them Sir Thomas Frobisher sat in a near squat, his protruding eyes switching between John Goldthwait and Bartholomew Hoare, back and forth, back and forth.

"I love to gamble, Captain Hoare," Mr. Goldthwait said, "especially when I can control the odds-as, of course, I do tonight. I always win, I must warn you. At the end of play, I am never, never out of pocket."

Now Hoare confronted Hobson's choice. In order to recover his Eleanor and his Jenny, he must take up John Goldthwait's challenge. In doing so, he would be violating his pledged word never to play again. True, he had given the word to himself alone, and no one else would know, but there it was. He would spend the rest of his life as a man who knew he had stripped himself of honor. He knew he would do it, of course.

He had done it before, and most casually, most lately when he had left Walter Spurrier in the forepeak of Royal Duke to drown alone in his own spew.

Hoare knew this would not be the last of it. Supposing he were to win back his wife over the cards, blackmail would almost certainly ensue, and worse. It was not Goldthwait's way, he was learning, to do away with his opponents entirely, but, cat-fashion, to use them, to turn them into his agents-in-place as well as his instruments of pleasure. Hoare would become the other's tool, a repeating infernal machine in fact, which lurked in the navy's viscera and exploded from time to time whenever John Goldthwait thought it would best serve his purposes. The prospect turned his empty stomach.

"I'll do it, sir," he whispered, even more softly than was his wont.

He heard a sigh, but in the library's darkness, relieved only by scattered tapers and the table lamp, he could not tell which man had produced it. Did it come from Mr. John Goldthwait, and if so, did it reveal relief or disappointment? Or was it from Sir Thomas Frobisher's wide lips, and if so, was it one of surprise at Hoare's boldness or of vengeful excitement at his impending downfall? Never mind. The die was cast-or rather, Hoare thought wryly, the cards were on the table.

Not yet.

"We'll ask Sir Thomas to furnish the cards, then," he said, and Mr. Goldthwait did not chide. "I'll have none of yours," he went on, "and I have none of my own, even supposing you fool enough to let me use them if I did."

For the first time, he now addressed Sir Thomas directly, deliberately loading his whisper with respect.

"Can you oblige us, Sir Thomas?"

"Yes," was the answer, tout court. Going to the sideboard, the knight-baronet pulled open a drawer and removed a small packet, wrapped and sealed.

"Simply as a precaution, Sir Thomas," Mr. Goldthwait said, "may I ask that you supply us with a fresh deck upon demand by either player? I'm certain you'll understand, Captain Hoare, and agree."

Hoare nodded.

Sir Thomas returned to the drawer and took out what was probably the balance of the packets.

"Pray tell me, Sir Thomas, the source of the cards you happen to have in such surprisingly ample supply," Hoare whispered.

"They are French in origin, sir." Sir Thomas's bass voice was courteous and quiet, but chilly. "I procure them, however, from Brooks, as you can see by the seal on each pack. They cost me a guinea apiece. Will that provide you with sufficient proof that they come honest to the table?"

Hoare, of course, had never entered London's leading gambling shop, but he knew its reputation. Every gentleman did, more often than not to his own considerable cost. With respect to honesty in play, Brooks' famous scruples were as high as a vestal virgin's. He nodded acceptance.

"What game do you propose, sir?" he asked.

Mr. Goldthwait appeared to debate within himself. Whether he did so actually or in simulation as part of his game, Hoare could not guess.

"Piquet, I think," he said at last.

"Piquet, sir?" Hoare whispered.

"If you are familiar with it, of course," Mr. Goldthwait said in a kindly voice. "I would not wish to take advantage of a neophyte."

"I have played the game, sir."

"Then you remember the rules, I trust." Goldthwait proceeded to set forth his expectations, most of which were reasonable. To Hoare's secret pleasure, Sir Thomas objected to one of them. Irrespective of the personal animosity the knight-baronet might bear toward Hoare, he would serve impartially. Probably.

"And the stakes you propose, sir?" Hoare asked.

"Why, sir, the lives of your wife and daughter, of course," was the jovial reply.

"You hold them, I do not. What currency do you expect me to stake, then?"

"The likenesses, to be sure. Neither Sir Thomas nor I wish them to remain in your hands. Under certain circumstances, as I am certain you have become aware, they could be highly disruptive."

By now, Hoare was all but certain that the several unfamiliar likenesses in the portfolio included at least some of this pair's confederates. If so, Goldthwait was quite right, for Hoare-or his successor, if Hoare did not survive but the sketches did- would be able to catch enough of them to scotch their plot, whatever it was.

Just then he remembered Selene Prettyman's words about this man, back in Portsmouth, shortly before the denouement in the Nine Stones Circle.

"Do not play cards with Mr. Goldthwait, sir," she had said.

The odds did not favor him. Never mind: the stakes were too great. Play he must.

Mr. Goldthwait's smile was now both sweet and confident. "Mr. Pickering's creations are undamaged, I trust, and undiminished?"

"They are, sir."

"Word of a gentleman?"

Hoare did not dignify the question with so much as a glance of contempt.

"Well, then," Goldthwait said. "It is important to me that they not remain in your possession. I could take them from you now, of course, by force instead of in play, without recompense or return. But I choose otherwise.

"The likenesses of some of my people and Sir Thomas's as well are among them, as you will have astutely guessed. It would be most unreasonable of me to allow you to retain them in your possession; the identities must be privy to myself, and to Sir Thomas, of course."

At that, Sir Thomas uttered a croak of outrage. "Then it was you who destroyed the portrait I commissioned from Pickering at such great expense? You who burnt it, and my priceless port with it?"

From Sir Thomas's voice, Hoare could not tell whether it was the loss of his "portrait"-whatever it might portray-or the port that one of his guests was sipping with such evident enjoyment, that the knight-baronet missed the more deeply. Nor, at this juncture, did it seem important.

"Piffle," Goldthwait said.

"Well," the knight said in a surly voice, "thanks to you, sir, I must now pay the poor man for it, without having the pleasure of possessing it. You are in my debt for a hundred fifty guineas, sir."

A hundred fifty guineas, Hoare thought, would lift poor Pickering out of penury for good.

"When you come into your own, your… Sir Thomas," Goldthwait replied calmly, "neither of us will have to worry about a mere hundred fifty guineas.

"Speaking of guineas, Sir Thomas, I think that, as umpire, you are the only one of the three of us-friends-who is impartial enough to convert into nominal counters the prices of the various goods Captain Hoare and I bring to the table. More convenient than passing the goods themselves-or parts of them-across the board, don't you think? As well as being less messy? Certainly, none of the ton would stoop to soil his hands with anything so crass as silver, or paper, or flesh."

To this jibe, Hoare made no reposte. Under the circumstances, he felt himself hopelessly handicapped in any attempt to haggle with John Goldthwait, Esquire.

Sir Thomas went to the sideboard where he had stored the sealed decks of cards and withdrew a long rack of ivory counters, dyed in various jolly hues. He mumbled out their respective values, then, as he had been instructed, assigned values to Pickering's likenesses, counting out the markers in front of Hoare as he went and placing the sketches themselves tidily in a corner of one bookshelf. Hoare noted that the knight-baronet priced his own lineament, Goldthwait's, and those of several others considerably higher than the rest; Hoare's own, Thoday's, Selene Prettyman's would bring considerably less, while the double portrait of Mrs. Pickering and her Beatrice was a paltry affair.

"And now, Sir Tom, to set values on my stakes."

For this task, Sir Thomas deliberated at greater length. At last he returned to his treasure chest and took out another set of ivory markers, these cut into various suggestive shapes. After deliberating still further, he laid a small stack of high-value markers in front of Mr. Goldthwait.

"For the girl," he said.

Over his last evaluation, he procrastinated still longer. As Hoare knew well, Sir Thomas's feelings toward Eleanor were complex, and this showed. At last, he counted out markers in an amount that, as best Hoare could judge, was three or four times the value he had attributed to little Jenny. These, too, he placed in front of his associate.

"There," he said. The two piles, Hoare's and Goldthwait's, were quite unequal, and Hoare commented accordingly.

"Of course, Captain Hoare," was the reply. "After all, you hold only pieces of paper with markings drawn upon them. I, on the other hand, hold specimens of flesh and blood which, I believe, you treasure."

Since there was nothing Hoare could do, he did it. The charade must be played out, and on terms over which he had no control.

Each man placed a chip in the center of the table. Sir Thomas broke the seal on the first deck, shuffled the cards swiftly, and gave the deck to each player for him to cut. Goldthwait did so; Hoare shook his head and rapped the deck with his knuckles instead.

"A Yankee custom," he whispered in response to the puzzled looks of the other two.

Sir Thomas tossed a card in front of each player. Goldthwait's was the four of hearts, while Hoare's was the nine of hearts. Sir Thomas retrieved the cards and buried them in the pack.

"Pray deal, Sir Thomas," Mr. Goldthwait said.

In answer, Sir Thomas swiftly dealt three cards to each player, beginning with Hoare-the first two facing down, the third exposed. Goldthwait had the six of hearts, Hoare the five of the same suit.

"Your bet, sir," came Sir Thomas's voice.

Goldthwait tossed a low-value chip into the center of the table, and Hoare followed suit.

When each player had four cards face-up before him, Goldthwait had a king showing, while Hoare's highest card was a seven. Sir Thomas dealt the last card to each, facedown.

"You have the high card, Mr. Goldthwait. Bet your hand, sir," he said.

Goldthwait bet three small chips, and Hoare raised the bet. Goldthwait matched it.

"Declare your hand, Captain," Sir Thomas said.

Hoare complied, disclosing his winning hand. With that, Goldthwait gave a nod and gathered his cards, and the two passed them to the dealer. Hoare drew in his meager winnings.

So the night wore on, hand after hand after hand. Sometimes Hoare had a run of luck, sometimes Mr. Goldthwait. There was little talk, save Sir Thomas's flat, guttural declarations as the cards appeared. Arbitrarily, one or the other player might call for a fresh deck; the knight-baronet promptly complied. Once and only once, when Mr. Goldthwait echoed Hoare's demand before cards were dealt, did Hoare hear a muffled batrachian snort.

Another time, before Sir Thomas could deal the first card, Hoare intervened.

"Burn it," he whispered. Sir Thomas made to set it aside.

"No, sir," Hoare said. "Burn it, if you would be so kind." He felt in dire need of any petty victory he could achieve.

In a corner of the paneled room, a high clock ticked away the seconds, solemn and disregarded. Outside, over the sleeping city, the bells of a neighboring church tolled each hour. Each hour, unbidden, one of Sir Thomas's shabbier servants entered silently and replenished the fire before making sure his master and his guests were properly supplied with wine. By request, Hoare received coffee instead; although he was sparing in its use, he found his nerves drawing ever more tightly as the night wore on. Tonight, this was all to the good as far as he was concerned, for his vis-a-vis seemed tireless. Goldthwait smiled, bet, smiled, folded, smiled, won.

"I'll smile, and smile, and be a villain," Hoare recited to himself from some source that escaped him for the moment.

During one of their moves from labor to refreshment, Mr. Goldthwait appeared even more at ease than usual. Perhaps, Hoare thought, it was because he had just won several interesting drawings.

"I suppose you have noticed these chairs, Captain Hoare," he said.

Hoare nodded.

"They are in the nature of an award, or decoration. They are the same as those in my possession, which you may also recall. There are others."

Hoare remembered one other, which had lain, overset and ripped apart, in Mr. Ambler's lodgings.

"If you do well for me, you may become entitled to one," Mr. Goldthwait said.

"I should prefer to decline the privilege," Hoare whispered.

"Suit yourself, sir. Come to play."

"I have a winning hand, sir," Hoare said, displaying his cards. It had been a close affair; Hoare's reserve had 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.

"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.